ASCAP submission

Is OUT the door!  Now on to the Fringe ...

Grand Central Centennial

We’re tantalizingly close to the next phase of this project, and I should have news to post as soon as next Monday.  Meanwhile, I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while, so if you’re at interested in New York City history, architecture, and just all-around awesomeness, you should definitely go check out Grand Central’s Centennial website.  Click on the events tab and you can scroll through the full year’s worth of festivities.  Penn Station would have celebrated its Centennial last year; sadly, 2013 is the 50^th Anniversary of the start of the demolition.   If you don’t pass through Grand Central on a regular basis, it’s worth a special visit, if only to get a bit of a sense of what might have been.

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Grand Central Centennial

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ETA: We have found our singers! I appreciate everyone's responses, and I know there are a couple of messages from people in my inbox that I need to reply to individually, but as of Sunday night, we're set. Thanks again! Hi! Once again, I’m putting it here before I put it on craigslist: I am looking for 2 (two) singers, one male, one female, to record a demo CD for a new musical. To be clear, we need singers, not actor-singers or singer-actors or actors who sing or singers who move well – just singer-singers. This is partly to avoid confusion — we’re not ready to cast at this point, and we don’t want any misunderstandings about “doing the demo = doing the show,” and partly because we can’t have anyone on the recording who is or who might soon be Equity, because that severely restricts what we’re actually able to do with the CD. So we don’t care what they look like or how old they are or what physical “type” they are, we just need them to have good, strong, fairly versatile voices (since basically the male singer will be singing all the male roles and the female singer will be singing all the female roles). Ideally we want people who are quick studies and who bring a degree of “professionalism” to the table — meaning that they will show up on time and be reliable and easy to work with. It doesn’t matter if they have no actual “professional” experience. We will pay them, although admittedly it won’t be much, but we will at least try to make it worth their while. And of course they can use the recordings of their own voices however they like — if they want to put some of the songs on their website or on a Youtube “reel” or whatever, we’re happy to have them do that. We’ll be getting started in early February, and the recordings will most probably be done at the arranger’s home studio in Queens, so availability to travel to Queens is important. If you know anyone who might be interested, please either leave a comment or send me a message, and we’ll work out a way for me to hear some samples of their work. Thanks!

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OMG OMG Music is Happening!

I'm a little behind schedule in posting this, but as of early October, I have found a brilliant, talented and all-around awesome arranger, and he has given me permission to introduce him here.  His name is Taylor Williams, and of the hundred or so responses I got to the craigslist post I mentioned earlier, and of the maybe dozen or so I winnowed them down to, he was literally the only one I even needed to interview in person.  I figured I'd found the right person, why look further?  So although a good chunk of the past few weeks actually wound up being devoted to a completely unrelated music writing project (which is now basically done), we recently started getting seriously underway with the Skyline score.  The show has 14 unique songs, 12 of which I had actually written music for, and I've given him lead sheets for ten of those, which he is currently putting in Finale.  My hope is that by the end of the year, we should be in a good position to start recording stuff in early 2013.

It's a weird and sometimes overwhelming thing to hear music you've only ever heard in your head  -- in this case for several years -- actually played out loud by a gifted musician, so there's been a bit of an emotional component to this whole process that I'm not really ready to talk about right now.  But the short and sweet of it is:  Music is happening!  Music is happening!!  Yay!!!

Never Been Happier To Be Wrong

Hi there! Been a while, I know. But there have been doings! Of things. And admittedly they've been few and far between, but they are about to become manier and closer together, and here is the gist of them: In short, I decided earlier this year to just give up on what had become an increasingly quixotic attempt to find the right composer for this project, and just go ahead and use the music I had written myself. This, unfortunately, is a lot easier said than done. The reasons why are both complicated and stupid, but more than anything else they have to do with the fact that I am apparently psychologically incapable of learning to play a musical instrument. Weirdly, I have a decent grasp of theory, and can both compose and transcribe quite well; the problem is that the transcription part takes me for-freaking-ever, mainly because of the whole not playing an instrument thing. So I came up with this too-complicated-to-go-into-right now plan to find someone I could both hire AND collaborate with, to work with me on the few parts of the score that weren't done yet, and also to flesh out and arrange the parts that were. Now this is the kind of thing where, God knows, there's just no way of predicting how it's going to work out, and at the time, I posted the following on Facebook:

Projected breakdown of responses to my recent craigslist post (per 100 replies):
35 emails informing me that I may have already won a prize!
30 declarations of outraged indignation that I “expect” them to do the proposed work for such a pittance (pro tip: you’re a complete stranger on the internet. I have no idea who you are. I don’t “expect” you to do anything)
20 headshots/resumes from “actors” who freely admit they have no clue how to do the thing I need done, but who couldn’t help noticing that it had something to do with a new play, which they’d just love to be in when the time comes!
10 demonstrations of deluded nutcasery in which the respondent’s entire CV consists of the words: “I’ll do it. Can I get the money now?”
3 well-meaning inquiries from earnest but utterly inexperienced newbies who claim to “know they probably aren’t qualified” but hope to be considered anyway!
2 worthwhile replies from educated, skilled people who will blow me away with their competence and know-how, who at the last minute will decide they just don’t have time to do this right now.

And, well -- that is not what happened at all. What did happen was an overwhelming response from nearly a hundred genuinely qualified and talented people. In fact, there were so many that in order to thin the list down to a manageable number, I actually had to rule out a lot of the applicants on the basis of some pretty arbitrary criteria. I mean, not "arbitrary," but certainly not based on talent or ability. So, for instance, they had to be based in the 5-borough area. I know this is the electronic age, and people can do amazing things long-distance, but for this project I really need to be in the same room with the person. Maybe s/he doesn't need to be, but I do. So, those people from DC and Boston and the Adirondacks kind of got cycled out pretty early on, to say nothing of the ones from Japan and Australia and the Netherlands.
And I decided not to interview anyone who didn't specifically mention being a pianist. Because again, no disrespect to the guy whose main instrument was the oboe (although he's also skilled on the French horn), but I actually need to be able to hear what this is going to sound like when it's done. I mean, I need to hear what it sounds like now -- meaning, I need to be able to know that all my notation is correct, and the chord progressions work. I can't hear harmonics on a solo wind instrument.
And the people who -- okay, can I just say something about this? If you're replying to an ad for a job you want to be considered for (even if it's not a "real" job), do you think it's a good idea to open your cover letter with the words "I might be willing to consider doing this?" I really don't like to seem unreasonable, but there's a level of enthusiasm I'm looking for, here. It's an artistic collaboration! And the guy who opened with "Wow! This sounds really interesting!" may have been brown-nosing, but I want to talk to him.
Then there was the guy who expressed interest, but had some questions for me. Each and every one of which was answered in the text of the original post.
You get the idea. And even at that, it was hard, but I finally narrowed the field to about a dozen. With luck, by the end of next week, I will have someone officially on board. You cannot imagine how much I'm looking forward to finally getting this project back on its feet.
More as it develops.