Okay, here’s Mike Funt’s “Horsefly Rag,” extended to include the slow opening and then a quiet little waltz stuck in the middle of it.

Comments welcome.

“Horsefly Rag,” extended | score [pdf] | mp3

Last year I wrote “Horsefly Rag” for my friend Mike Funt, who is as far as I know a world-famous clown.  At least that’s what his letters from his Asian tour indicate.

He finally got around to thinking about using the piece, now that he’s famous in Tokyo and all, and, as I thought all along, we need to add more to it to make it a viable clown piece.  I had actually left an entire measure rest in there specifically for the purpose of inserting another segment before the big finale.

He felt that as well, but also wanted an introduction to bring us into the piece, or in his words, “As though the fly is just waking up and kind of stretching [and] moving into his day.”  He suggested the opening of Rhapsody in Blue as something that would please him.

With that in mind, here’s our first pass at the opening:

Horsefly Rag, now with intro | mp3

As I’ve mulled over what I want to do when I grow up, more and more I keep thinking that I would like to be a composer.  True, I’ve been writing music for a long time, but for the most part no one’s been performing it. It seems to me that if I want to be an actual composer, then someone should start playing my stuff.

To that end, and having read Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking, I have started putting out there that I would appreciate the universe’s cooperation in getting my music performed.  This is not the same as the occasional competition that I might enter; this is pointblank asking my friends and acquaintances to take a look at my stuff and to keep it in their minds that they have a friend whose music is available for performance: church choirs, high school choirs, community choruses, chamber groups, soloists, orchestras.  I’ve done it all, although not at any level of output like a professional composer.  As I recently said to an old friend, I’m not untalented, but I’m untrained—I don’t work quickly.

Am I working on anything at the moment?  Yes:

• A Christmas Carol has to be revamped: reorchestrated and exported into sound files that can be sucked up into QLab for rehearsal and performance this December at Newnan Theatre Company.
• “Horsefly Rag”: Mike Funt has asked me to add a slow opening and a slower interlude before the big finish.
• Seven Dreams of Falling: I will be getting back to work on the Minotaur’s “Rip me from this darkness” aria.  Soon.  Ish.
• Five Easier Pieces:  I’m going to finish that before the end of this year.  I am.

So what are you waiting for?  Go check out my stuff.  And perform it.

My middle-schoolers have been working on their monologs for tomorrow’s performance, using the concept of the “unreliable narrator,” as exemplified by Greg, the narrator of Jeff Kinney’s fun series The Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

The opening number, “Dear Diary,” is going to be adorable, you guys.  The kids have been pros at making the lyrics their own, and I think you should all show up at Newnan Theatre Company tomorrow, Friday, June 26, at 4:30, to see the results.

There have been changes, of course, since I first posted this last week.  I lowered the entire piece a whole step so my singers weren’t as uncomfortable (although they were quite capable of hitting the notes); I added a measure at the opening for choreography purposes; and I adapted the accompaniment at the end to give the cast a stronger cue for the ending.

Here you go: score [pdf] | mp3

As we worked on projection and focus, I gave my students someone to whom they could sing: Cthulhu.  The concept is that if you sing well, the mighty Cthulhu will eat you first when he arises, sparing you the ignominy and pain of the inevitable suffering accompanying his arising.

I’ve decided that next summer’s workshop will be “The Call of Cthulhu,” and we’ll adapt one of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories to a Story Theatre version, making all the sound effects and theatre effects with minimal props, ending with an enormous puppet of the Great Old One rising from the rear of the stage amidst fog and dreary lights.

So here’s a first draft completed of “Dear Diary: a song for hapless liars,” the opening number for the middle school theatre workshop I’m teaching next week.

The theme of the camp is Diary of a Wimpy Kid, playing off Jeff Kinney’s delightful book, but that’s just a hook.  The actual purpose of the workshop is character development, and as I said in the previous post we’ll be creating unreliable narrators who believe they’re telling us one thing but whom we see straight through.

“Dear Diary” | score (pdf) | mp3