This one’s a little bit of a cheat, since it’s from the post-2003 period of composition. When I started this project twenty-plus years ago, the thing was a song cycle for chorus and piano. Everything I wrote was for the piano. After we went to Scotland and decided to stage this, it became bigger, and everything I wrote was with an orchestra in mind. Some pieces, like this one, I wrote already orchestrated. However, I did get it up and running with the GPO sounds today, plus tweaked dynamics.
Here is “3. A Rabbit Reveals My Room” in score and mp3.
I think I’m going to create a page for all this so that people who visit here don’t have to track down all the posts.
Molly is doing engraving and printing in art class at present. Perhaps the children in the production should all have their fingers wrapped in bandaids.
I’m thinking about the layering of expressive elements. Each song performance could consist of its rendition, some puppet element, some dance, and some visual statement as projection or as animation (a la Tail o’ Tam) or as blown-up versions of drawings. The elements need not all be aiming to represent the same thing; their goal is just to sit comfortably (and charmingly) with one another. A playful, jolly time for eye and ear.
If we decide to go the way of architectural components, those too would conform to each song.
Again to move with the literalizing of the place of the Inn (a move I’m ambivalent about). What about a forced perspective hallway with many room doors on either side ultimately extending into some curiously curved line leading to a vanishing point disappearing among the stars?
Hm. What if the singers and musicians were behind a scrim with action in front? Contrast that to singers and musicians in front of scrim with actions behind.
Or. Children present an array of objects (made and found) at the beginning of each song. The convention, then, would be that the singers and musicians improvise a setting as a response to the objects; the musical performance becomes the imaginative weaving together of the objects.
I like all your ideas, although I’m really seeing a real Inn from which our ideas emerge, and perhaps a chorus that is onstage with the puppets and stuff, even bunraku-ing throughout.