Tuesday, February 17, 2009

The Journey to Opening Night, part 2

To recap from part 1, In September or so I became part of the design team (as composer) for an adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The director (Leah) and I agreed that I should get a copy of the script and start looking at it to determine what musical cues to write. I had assume that Leah had found an adaptation that was already written and had been performed. Turned out it would be a bit more exciting. Mitchell "Bucky" Fay, long time member of the Cromulent Shakespeare Company, was doing a new adaptation. So Leah, Bucky and I met to discuss the show. I found out the script was going through some revisions and I would get hold of it when those revisions were done.

Leah told me this was a play, not a musical, which was somewhat of a relief. I have worked on a few musical projects now, and they are big jobs and very time consuming. I was looking for something a bit smaller in order to try to keep my sanity between family, work, and fun music projects. In my mind I thought this would just be a few sound cues to set scenes. I was wrong.

It didn't turn into a musical, but when I got my hands on the script I found out that there were 5 songs in it—and a number of them for the entire cast. Writing songs is very different than writing instrumental music for me. With instrumental music I can just thinking of where I want the melody and harmony to go and then write out the music. With songs, everything has to fit in with those pesky words. That takes more time. The other “problem” is that I love doing it.

The chance to write music for Quasimodo and Esmeralda was a really exciting prospect for me. Also I wondered if Frollo might have a song or two. But I had to remind myself that this was not a musical. Also Leah had told me that the casting had been done without regards to musically ability. I didn't know if any of the cast felt comfortable singing on stage.

So the next step was to send out a survey to the cast to ask what kind of musical background they had. Once I knew that I could start thinking about specific songs. You don’t need to be classically trained singer to sell a song. But I believe the performer has to feel comfortable. In order to do that the composer needs to have some understanding of the performer’s voice so that an appropriate piece for both the performer and the character can be written.

The surveys came back and it was clear that we had a real mix of people with musical experience and without. Esmeralda could sing, but Quasimodo and Frollo did not have a lot of musical experience. Since we had a mix of experience I needed to take that into account as I wrote the songs for the entire cast.

(Next time: the writing of the songs begins…)

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