Music

A Midsummer Night's Dream

During May & June, 2001, I worked with City Lights Theater Company of San José on a production of Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. I wrote a number of short pieces of incidental music that were played between major scenes, introducing the group of players during their entrances. I also set to music the fairy lullaby poem from Act II. (Check out a review of the production in the Metro. Too bad the reviewer didn't say anything about the music... Oh well.)

Here is the overture, which includes the three major themes of the production, corresponding to the three "worlds" -- the fairies, the Athenian workers, and the court of Theseus. (By the way, the costuming for the show was vaguely Edwardian, rather than ancient or Grecian in mode, so the music was written to fit with that overall world.)

OVERTURE (mp3 format, 2MB download)

And here is the "Fairy Lullaby" as sung by the Nina Breton and Lilly Small, the delightful pair of ladies who played fairies in the production.

FAIRY LULLABY (mp3 format, 2.2MB download)

Tuning Notes: The tuning for the entire production is "12 of 17" equal tones per octave. By choosing 12 out of 17, the music fits into a standard diatonic scheme. The notes of the chromatic tuning are: C C# D Eb F F# G G# A Bb B. The fifths and thirds are quite wide and bright. The interval G# to Eb is a wolf. The music is mostly pure "major" melodically and harmonically. The lullaby is in G-minor (harmonic) there are some brief chromatic passages.

The Miser

Excerpts from my sort of neo-baroque incidental music for Moliere's "The Miser" as performed at City Lights Theater Company of San José during November & December 2001. (All of the following links are MP3 format files, around 1 to 1.5 MB in size.)

Overture. This leads into the opening action in which a pair of distraught young lovers rush in from the garden.

Act 4 Entry. Act 4 opens calmly with several people sneaking in out of the rain.

Chase Music. Of course every comedy needs a funny chase scene in Act 4. This is it.

Act 4 to Act 5 transition. This transitional music moves from the dramatic high point (discovery of a big theft) at the end of Act 4 to the entry of the police which opens Act 5. This selection is included here with the complete layered sound effects, exactly as performed on stage.

The dance finale, presented here in the vocal version as sung by Harpagon and the Tightwads, recorded live in Bob's Chicken Coop... (The stage version was instrumental.)

And finally three Christmas carol renditions that were used for exit music after the play:

Good King Wenceslas,
Hark the Herald Angels Sing, and
Joy to the World.

Tuning Notes: All of these are tuned in Sylvestro Ganassi's tuning of 1543 (see Joe Monzo's page about the tuning HERE) and performed on a pair of Yamaha TX802s.

Here's a live recording of a little prelude made with Big Tick's Rhino synthesizer while I was a beta tester... This is in ten equal tones per octave. I was lucky to find a few people to record it one summer evening in the suburbs outside San Jose.

Another show I loved working on at City Lights was "Queen of America" by C. D. Payne. Here's the author's page about the show and the premiere. Someday I hope to post a song from the finale.

Check out my Dance page for more microtonal music samples...

And if you got this far, check out my full works page for some longer complete works in MP3 format.

[Click me home again Kathleen]