Despite its being Christmas Eve, I have forced myself to tackle the next bit of Make Way. I had orchestrated the Rabbit’s entrance in a very restrained manner, and today I looked at the next twenty measures or so, moving through the Wise Cow’s reply to the opening of her waltz.

On the whole, I think it’s not even there yet. I was working in SoftSynth mode to save memory, but when I tried it in Garritan Personal Orchestra, it sounded so different that I think I will have to continue in memory-suck mode.

My mind’s not really tuned into it, of course, so I’m not sure whether what I hacked out today is going to stand. It’s not very subtle. What I may need to do is go straight to the last stanzas and orchestrate the big finish, then back up from there.

I may also try backing off some of the orchestra and letting the piano handle some of the chordal accompaniment for the first stanzas. It’s what I’m used to hearing anyway…

This is proving an interesting challenge, because this piece was one I sketched out many years ago but didn’t actually write until we returned from Scotland, i.e., 2003, and as such is representative of my “mature” style, just more solid in structure and development. I like it a lot; I think it’s quite a nice piece, and making the transfer from piano score to orchestra is difficult. Like Milky Way, it has got to sound exactly “right” to fulfill its promise. And at the moment I’m not sure I’m getting it exactly right.

That’s the joy of using the computer, though: it can be wrong again and again, and I can just switch instruments until finally it is exactly right. Whether I achieve that by January 9/10 is another question.

I didn’t think I’d get anything done today, but tonight I started on the orchestration for Make Way. I figured that of my three choices it needed the most attention. Both Marmalade Man and Tale of the Tailor sound halfway orchestrated in the playback of the piano score, so if I went ahead and tackled Make Way, then everything would sound as if I had some orchestral inkling come January 10.

Speaking of which, Marc has taken the bull by the horns and started discussion of the music and the piece as a whole over on the Lacuna blog. I don’t know that we’ll get anyone talking on the site again, yet, but it’s worth a shot.

Anyway, I got twelve measures done, which is not as much work as it might sound. The cello part was obvious, of course, but then the rest of the accompaniment? Strings in the chords? Double the melody? Where? Flute’s too low; have I overused the clarinet? Oboe’s too strident, even for the Rabbit, at least in the opening.

What I’ve ended up with is simplicity itself: the lilting downbeat quarter notes in the cello; melody in the flute and clarinet; and only the bassline of the chordal accompaniment, in the bassoon. Very spare, and I arrived at it only after putting the chordal accompaniment everywhere I could think of: low strings, oboe, horns, harp. All of it was too much, and now I’m opening what will be the most glorious waltz in the piece with a very, very restrained ensemble. Perfect.

Some days it’s easy. Today, for example, I was creative before I even woke up, hence the early post.

I’ve carrying around in my head for a couple of days some musical ideas for the prologue. In Lacuna, we’ve discussed several ideas for staging, and the one that keeps popping up in my head is the one where we open in a dreary, earthbound inn, where children are stuck with nothing to do and all their elders repress them.

So, from the darkness, we hear a double-bass, rasping out a long, slow note. That note grows stronger and more toned, then the bass slides into a slow version of the Inn theme. Low strings join it in desperate arpeggiation, but the theme goes nowhere, until it bursts into one of those minor (dim.?) orchestral stingers. Lights up on the Dreary Inn, dull and gray and isolated down right.

Old codger reading aloud, unintelligibly [yes, Marc, he can read from Blake]. Two ladies taking tea, murmuring with pinched noses. Three children, fidgety, shushed by the ladies and the codger.

Disreputable looking handyman, in whiskers and a smock, shuffles through. Surreptitiously hands the children an engraving of … something the audience can see, the Wise Cow or the King of Cats… “Watch,” he tells the children, and as he shuffles off, the engraving vanishes in flame.

He returns and gives one child a music box. “Listen,” he says, and the child opens it. It plays the Inn theme, and the child is shushed. The old codger goes to the harmonium and begins playing “Jerusalem,” badly. The handyman comes in and stops him, with an “Out of Order” sign, indicating he needs to repair it. He plays a couple of bars of “Blake Calls for Fire.” The lighting struggles to change, as probably it does each time Blake’s magic threatens reality.

The handyman turns his back to us, and when he turns around, he sheds his whiskers and smock and is revealed as William Blake. “Believe,” he says to the children. He spreads his wings (!) and soars into the space center stage. He beckons the children as “William Blake’s Inn” begins, more eerie than I’ve got it scored at the moment.

At “Two mighty dragons brew and bake,” the couch where the two ladies are sitting turn into the dragons. The ladies themselves sprout wings and become the “two patient angels.” The feathers from their shaken linens bloom into the snowstorm. Other children can be dimly seen playing in the snow. The Inn pulsates with light here and there.

And then it all fades. Blake soars away and vanishes. The dragons turn back into the couch, the wingless ladies take their tea, and the old codger finishes wheezing out the last two bars of Jerusalem on the harmonium, now without its “Out of Order” sign.

The children are left to find their way to the Inn, now the only reality they want to see.