If you thought that I would find a way to avoid plowing ahead and finishing the Finale, and hence Christmas Carol, you would be a winner.

I have successfully distracted myself from that accomplishment by updating the software that runs this blog (WordPress) and by forcing myself to start hammering out abortive attempts on another piece that I have promised to compose for over a year now.

This piece is a simple art song (ha!) for a friend, John Tibbetts.  John attended GHP in 2008 as a Social Studies major and for some reason decided that I would make a dandy mentor as he moved from high school to college.  So he latched on to me, and I’m fine with that.  It’s been a warm friendship through good times and bad for both of us.

John is a preternaturally gifted lyric baritone majoring in opera at Georgia State University, whose program oddly enough is a national standout.  He recently starred as John Proctor in Robert Ward’s The Crucible; both he and the production were topnotch.

Anyway, some time ago I offered to write him a song for his senior recital. Since his junior recital is tonight, it’s probably a good idea to get started on the piece, even moreso because his star is rising swiftly and if I don’t do it now, he will be too far above my skills to even look at performing it.  (He’s already acquainted with much more famous composers.)

I’m using a text that is an intense love song, a song of obsession and frustration, in which the singer confesses that he is so blinded by his lover’s beauty that he cannot be sure he’s ever really seeing or touching her herself.  It’s a text I think young Mr. Tibbetts will understand intimately.  So all I have to do is to match that passion in the music, right?  Right.  Expect this one to be a 6 on the LSCA.

Update: And I’m done with the Finale.  Ha, and also double Ha!

I’m on the final piece of A Christmas Carol, the Finale.

Out of 160 measures, I’ve poured in about 60 of them.  This piece is proving a little more difficult than the rest, because my memory of it is based entirely on the fully orchestrated accompaniment I had programmed back in the 90s.  Now I’m having to reimagine it with a much skimpier ensemble.

At the moment, I’m just plugging notes back into the score just to get me from rehearsal letter to rehearsal letter, and then I’ll go back and make it sound as full as I can.  Fair warning to the synth keyboard player: hope you can divide that keyboard into two separate instruments.

Let’s see what trivia I can dredge up about the songs in Christmas Carol‘s score.

Opening — Listen for that interval of the descending fourth throughout: “Christmas!”

Bah! Humbug! — A perfect example of my early predilection for oddball meters (5/4 in this instance) as well as for waltzes.  Lots of interior rhymes,  just like Sondheim.   Fun for the audience; not so much for Scrooge.

Past’s Arrival — The Ghost of Christmas Past’s theme is simply two tritones, starting on the G/C “Christmas” interval.  Some might think they hear the old Campbell’s soup theme in the “countryside” theme, but they would be imagining things.  I’ll tell you when I’ve stolen something.

Country Dance — Piece of cake to write, given my years of experience with the University of Georgia Period Dance Group.  But getting Finale 2014 to get the repeats right was an ordeal.

A Reason for Laughter — The NCTC Gala in 2002 kicked off my last season as artistic director, and to prepare the audience for my swan song, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, we staged the finale of Act II.  The audience was surprised and delighted that they a) understood it; and b) thought it was funny.  But no one thought it was as funny as Caroline Carr and Stan Gentry, who were watching from the wings and suddenly recognized Figaro’s entrance as the opening of this song.  Yes, I had stolen the phrase, figuring no one in Newnan would ever really recognize it.  Oops.  Hoist on my own petard.

That You — It’s like this.  I’d been reading The Unanswered Question, by Leonard Bernstein, and I was struck by a comment he made about Don José’s “Flower Aria” in Bizet’s Carmen: no one phrase really repeats; the song just kind of grows.  So I set out to do something similar.  The result is a song that demands a two-octave range from a soprano, and not the right two octaves.   It can’t keep to the same meter for more than three measures, and the accompaniment always sounded clumsy.  On the plus side, it’s pretty.

Christmas Present Street Scene — This was originally a church choir piece called Gloria in excelsis, never performed, and so I cannibalized it, adding the Christmas Waltz (I am a dab hand with a waltz) and the Chorale for the churchgoers.

The Cratchits’ Prayer — Another cannibalization: this one from Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor, which we had done the year before maybe.  There’s a scene in which two lonely types sit on a park bench and sing “Too Late for Happiness.”  I don’t know whether there was official music to the song, but I just wrote one for us.  Another quirky meter (7/4) cum waltz.  Also: this song was nicknamed the “Gag a Maggot Song” for its shameless bathos.  Also also: because of this song and the later scene at Tiny Tim’s death, anyone playing Bob Cratchit was automatically nominated for the now-defunct NCTC 4-H Award, given to that actor who milked a scene beyond the call of duty.

Fred’s Waltz — Yet another cannibalization: when I was in high school, I wrote an overture to The Madwoman of Chaillot, never performed.  This waltz was one of the tunes.

20 Questions — The opening phrase of this one was inspired—if that’s the phrase my lawyers prefer—by the opening phrase of an Australian composer’s symphony.  Also, kudos to Marc Honea, who as a yout’ took the assignment of writing lyrics for this seriously enough to write a neat little scene.

Ignorance and Want — One of the best things I’ve ever written, this grim mazurka pounds out Dickens’ message in perfect 3/4 time.  The text is lifted directly from the novel.

People Like Us — I thought it would be fun to write a little fugue-like piece where each character enters one after the other and keeps adding to the list of material goods they steal from the dead.  The message underscored Dickens’s, that you can’t take it with you.

Graveyard — A setting of the medieval Dies irae, of course.

Finale — I will state outright that I think this is the best ending to any version of Christmas Carol anywhere.  It starts with Scrooge “waking” in his bedchamber, whirls us through his delirious realization that he’s alive, and then we’re off to the races.  The ending of the novella is very quick, but most adaptations get bogged down in fleshing out each part of the ending in detail.  Here we just romp through the turkey, the Philanthropic Gentlemen, the Cratchits, Fred’s house, and Bob Cratchit’s raise, all to the giddy scherzo of “Hey, boy, what day is today?”, woven throughout with the Christmas Waltz, and ending with the reprise of “A Reason for Laughter.”  Done, and done—thunderous applause.

In 1980, the members of the Newnan Community Theatre Company prevailed upon me to set Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol to music. Their thinking was that just as every ballet company in the world did The Nutcracker every holiday season, most theatre companies did Christmas Carol, and with similar financial objectives.  They were not wrong.

I set about cannibalizing older pieces and writing new ones, and in a couple of months I had it all pieced together.  It was, as expected, a huge hit, and we did it every year for a number of years.  In fact, after the Newnan City Council effectively shut us out of the Municipal Auditorium and we had no home, it was the cancellation of Christmas Carol in 1983 that spurred the movement that got us the old Manget-Brannon building as a permanent facility.

Eventually we tired of the same piece every year (although audiences never seemed to), and we began alternating with other holiday offerings.  It was last presented in 2001; the last time I directed it was 1992.

When Newnan Theatre Company (same group as NCTC, just a different name) expressed an interest in reviving a couple of years ago, I discovered that I had none of the sequencer files on my computer, nor any of the MIDI files.  It was too late in the year (plus it was my first year  as GHP director, I think) for me to reconstruct the whole thing.  When the topic came up again recently, I was ready, and so I am in the middle of re-orchestrating all 18 pieces, plus reinventing the overture, which was never written down on paper at all.

When I began seriously setting about the task, I was shocked to find how close I had come to losing the whole show: I had only the original, handwritten piano score plus a few vocal pages to go by, and these were scattered across several notebooks and files.  I had nothing resembling the full orchestration that I had developed in the sequencer.  It was all going to be from scratch.

That’s OK.  I want to start over with a live ensemble, and so I’ve been working with a piano, a synthesizer keyboard, a flute, a clarinet, a cello, a glockenspiel, and chimes.  That should be enough.

I’m now two months into the project and am halfway finished, although the “Finale” is a monster by itself.  So far, so good, although Belle’s song, “That You,” set me back two weeks because I had to seriously rethink the harmonization and accompaniment.  The melody was always fine, but everything else was clunky.  It’s better now, but not without a lot of struggle on my part.

Part of the struggle has been dealing with Finale 2014’s idiosyncrasies, including a recent upgrade that was supposed to fix a serious problem and instead reinstated it.  (I ended up downgrading to the first version of Finale 2014, something I’ve never had to do before.) And then the USB extension cable connecting my keyboard to the computer went bad without warning, etc., etc.

I’ve also procrastinated by updating nearly every other piece of music I’ve ever written from whatever version of Finale it was originally created in (as early as 2003 in some cases!) to 2014.  Worth it, but hardly productive.  (Check out William Blake’s Inn in its new settings.)

So today I hammered out “That You” and should be rolling straight through the rest of the show.  If I keep at it, I should be done by the end of April.

Check it out over to the left under My Music.