I meant to write a post every day this week like I did for A Healthy Marriage, but if that was a tech week to end all tech weeks, then this has been a tech month squeezed into a week.
Since Sunday, I’ve been privileged with the opportunity to be resident composer for ArtYard in Frenchtown, NJ. Over the course of 5 days, I would work with 5 artists to write original music that would accompany stories they’d be telling to a live audience at the end of the residency. I’ve done stuff like this before: Comic in a Day, 48-Hour Musicals (the birthplace of The Eleventh Hour!), Ensemble Project, not to mention years of jazz improv lessons. For me, writing original music is- has been since I was 11 or 12 and asked my mom to switch me from the classical track to the jazz track- like breathing. I remember saying to my jazz teacher as an ignorant and honest teen, “I don’t like classical because I don’t want to just play someone else’s music.”
What I had not done before is involve so many other musicians in my rapid creative process. ArtYard did not just want a man at a piano or a singer-songwriter with a guitar; they wanted a band (or an “orchestra,” as the tech director says). Unsure though I was, I knew that while I had not ever composed something so quickly for other live musicians (with busy lives and unique skillsets and artistic integrity of their own), in A Healthy Marriage I brought the musicians up to speed in about 2 days on an original score with over 30 unique songs. I didn’t know how, but I knew I could. I often tell myself and others that in the theatre business, you can always take comfort in knowing that “by this time next week, you’ll already have done it.”
Piano/keyboard/synth/guitar- me
Drums/percussion- Dan McMillan
Upright bass/double bass/electric bass- Jason Rivera
Oboe/English horn- Fabian Schulz
Together, we will play original music to elevate and deepen stories of veterans from the Frenchtown area in a night of “crankie” theatre called “Veterans Voices.” Get tickets here. Each crankie is being deliberately and lovingly built by hand by one of the five other resident artists and will tell a story of an individual who gave them an oral history. These are not all “war stories.” They are stories of having served and the ripple effect it has had on life.
Today, Friday, the band comes to town. My sheet music and software instrument demos are in their hands. From 10 am to 10 pm, we will rehearse in two-hour blocks with the five artists. Then we will all retire back to the house- ten people where all week there have been 5- for one last sleep before the big day.
One of the artists, Elsa Mora (who is also the artistic director of ArtYard) is working on a crankie about a trans woman who joined the air force as a pilot after a lifelong interest in airplanes. After serving (while presenting male), she came out to her family and began living as her true self. She now has an interest in birds. Elsa explained to me the poetry and symbolism of that transformation. An airplane and a bird still fly, but while one requires fuel, metal, a pod inside it, physics, training, discipline, roaring noise, rules, rules, rules…the other just flies, like it was born to do.