THE OPENING.
Four years into working into this musical, Magpie's Song, I wrote the first drafts of the opening and closing numbers within the same handful of hours.
The problem I was trying to solve was one of dramatic action. The evening was already crammed with story, so an opening saturated with unrelated narrative content (which works in the case of, say, "Kesa" from See What I Wanna See, but not for this piece) would overload an audience's attention. The key to unlocking the song was realizing the song's real purpose. In it, Magpie has to create the theatrical, musical environment for the evening. That she may tell her stories, she needs a theatre, and she needs to bring the audience into the heightened space of musical drama. if I could parcel out that space-making act over the course of a song, turn it into a progression of its own, I had an opening number. That structural backbone gave me everything I needed to write a number with development, but without story.
In this first draft, the opening and first verse were flipped: the song started with Magpie asking the audience to buy into her performance, then she broadened into her meditation on theatre. My director Tomás suggested I write in a stronger opening gesture. Instead of dragging my face through the rusty cheese grater of rewriting, I reversed their order. This had two major benefits. One, grappling with human nature proved to be a much more powerful opening gambit than meekly asking for the audience's generous investment in a musical. Two, it made Magpie into a more potently mythic, theatrical figure, and that power carried with her through the song and the show.
All this reminds me of Craig Lucas's masterclass- in it, he speculates that opening lines have a fractal relationship to the piece as a whole. This analysis certainly holds true for Magpie's Song. "When we gather in the darkness/one voice calls us all the same..."
THE INSTRUMENTAL.
Because Magpie lives between the evening's three very disparate worlds, this most exposed song (along with the closing number) had to thread the needle of setting up the evening's musical language without privileging any constituent sound or musical vocabulary. At first, my instinct was to use motifs from each story in equal admixture. Experimenting with this only ever ended up producing abortive fragments that sounded tame and clinical. The opening number needed to be galvanizing, especially because it asks of the audience three stories' worth of attention and investment and investment instead of just one. It certainly couldn't sound like an intellectual exercise when Magpie herself is a force of intuition and subconscious energy.
I went back to basics, staring at my WWJD (What Would Jeanine Do) bracelet. The music should be reflecting the dramatic action. In the song, Magpie is unpacking the most elemental materials of theatrical storytelling. The music, therefore, should have Magpie unpacking the most elemental materials of music. That, for me, was a major scale, in all its boundless possibility and bedrock simplicity. I took that scale and spun from it two hard-rocking riffs.
Those two riffs plus a sus chord, all permuted over various harmonizations, constitute the building blocks of the opening and closing numbers. They're also meant to represent, at least conceptually, the building blocks of music itself.
THE BRIDGE.
Here, having animated the stage, Magpie starts bringing her players to life. They introduce themselves on terms that link the characters they'll play: Vega/the Firework Vendor is "open skies", Archer/Old Hunter is "wise old age". It plants the idea in the audience that these characters, and these stories, rhyme in unexpected ways, even as their forms and styles contrast so strikingly.
The original draft of the piece had the same actor play Apprentice and Lead Hunter, with Altair playing Young Hunter. When we were holding auditions, a singer came in with such a wonderfully vulnerable presence. I had the epiphany that seeing that person go on the Apprentice's journey would be so much more horrifying, and seeing that person make the Young Hunter's choice would be so much more deliciously ambiguous. That actor ended up not being a part of the Yale production, but the decision to switch made the show and characters richer. "Give me a young man's eyes".
I always try to write "tight" songs, reusing material within an inch of its life. In the case of a song like this, whose raw materials are so plain, I was right on the knife's edge of writing something earth-bound. The moment when the harmony on "miracles" cracks open, it's like the ocean of the greater world pours into the evening- it's so magical to me, and that's when I feel the show really comes to life every night I sing it.
THE CHORUS.
The freshly-animated ensemble joins Magpie, and supports her through the end of the song. Magpie asks the audience for the order in which they'd like to hear their stories, then the show begins in earnest.
"Give us a hand,/'cause now the story must begin."
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