Tendency No. 6
“The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe”
the tendency to underestimate oneself
The first piece of mail I got when I moved to New York was a housewarming gift from Jen Ryan, a copy of Sheila Heti’s short-story collection “The Middle Stories”. Jen made a lovely inscription on the flyleaf; inscriptions from the givers of books might be my favourite thing ever. These intense little fables have been sitting with me for awhile now, and so it seemed natural to try and set one for Tiny Alligator. Although this is prose, Ms. Heti’s sentences are distilled like poetry, and she repeats things in composer-friendly rhythms.
But I just couldn’t get started. What if I ruined a perfectly good story with all of my woodwindy interventions and overbearing brass chorales? Plus I’ve never worked with leitmotifs before, nor have I ever tried to develop characters in public.
As always, the solution was to book a show and tell everyone what I was going to write for it, that in fact it was already mostly written, and how excited I was.
I started with this video. And then I started writing.
Ten nerve-wracking weeks, three all-nighters and 65 score pages later, we sat down to rehearse this piece yesterday. At over 17 through-composed minutes, it’s the biggest thing I’ve ever written. We put in many sweaty hours at the Art of Jazz studio beating it into submission. For all of the extra work they’ve put in, I owe my band several kegs of beer by now, and also my first born child, and also his first car. But it’ll be worth it: I’m thrilled with the results.
Like most music I write, the song came out robust and pretty earnest. Since we’ve had no time or money to properly workshop it, we’re considering Thursday’s performance its first draft preview. I’m looking forward to hearing Kristin Mueller-Heaslip as the Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, Jen Ryan as the Narrator, and Alex Samaras as An Older Fellow Who Was Quite Charming-Looking, and also the milkman, baker and mailman (don’t worry, there will be hats, so as to avoid any confusion).
http://musicgallery.org/node/304
