EVOLVING MUSIC FOR EASY VIRTUE
Kevin Gill
801 E. Ann St.
Ann Arbor,
MI 48104
USA
[Editor's note: Kevin Gill was music director for the March 18-20,
1994 production of Easy Virtue: A Reconstruction of Plautus'
Cistellaria at the University of Michigan.]
When I started working on the score for Easy Virtue, I originally
intended to make it entirely a jazz composition with some sort of
music behind the whole production. I worked on this idea for about
a month, scribbling all my musical inspirations on the script of the
play and thinking through mentally what types of jazz would be
appropriate to the drastically changing moods of the play.
The next step was to actually compose and perform the music. This
proved to be the most difficult part of the project. I didn't have the
instrumentation or the musicians available at the times I wanted
them to play the music I had come up with. Also, their
backgrounds in music were very different from mine, ranging from
classical to gritty blues. It would be extremely difficult to
coordinate everyone and arrange the amount of practice time needed
to make my vision concrete. We simply didn't have the time to
teach everyone to play jazz.
To combat this problem, I turned to a MIDI hookup to a Macintosh
PowerBook, and a MIDI capable key pad. Through this medium, I
had all the instrumentation that I could ever want and more. MIDI
also created another problem however: I couldn't get the jazz sound
I wanted. A digital instrument simply doesn't sound like jazz. This
was the final problem that convinced me to change my approach to
using more traditional music for this type of production.
I composed marches, disco, some blues, a waltz, and a few other
short songs that would be used on the transitions between character
exits and entrances. I recorded the music onto a tape and
experimented with playing it during a few of the rehearsals. There
were problems with the timing of the music versus that of the play.
The time that scenes took to complete in the play varied quite a bit
depending on the energy of the actors and the different ways that
they interacted with each other. The tape was static, and always
took the same amount of time to play, so I had to work a lot with
cutting it off short at certain places that I wrote into the music that
could work as endings to the songs if they had to.
I never refined these songs past the second version, which was still
a bit sloppy, because I wanted to get the approval of the instructors
before putting a great deal of time into the music, in case they
didn't think it would go with the play. As it turned out, they did
approve of the music, but there were other complications that
arose. The main problem, and the one that turned out to be the
biggest obstacle to the use of MIDI music, was the difficulty of
obtaining the proper equipment to play this music. This equipment
would also have been extremely difficult to set up and take down
every performance.
In the end, I was forced to do everything acoustically. The only
instruments that I had to work with were a piano, my saxophone,
and a harmonica which one of the actors played. In order to turn
the MIDI songs into their acoustic counterparts, I had to learn
music which I had never intended to memorize. Fortunately this
wasn't hard, and in less than one practice session I had a pretty
good grasp of what I was going to play for the performances.
The fact that I was responsible for the majority of the music and
that I was playing it by myself with no backup led to an interesting
conclusion. I could play a majority of jazz after all. I decided that
most of what I played would be improvised. I've played quite a bit
of piano and saxophone jazz, both solo and in a band, so I was
confident that I could pull it off. I ended up improvising everything
for the first dress rehearsal and polishing it for the second dress
and the performances.
The final version of the music was basically what I had envisioned
in the first place, but instead of a band it was me playing simplified
versions of the music I had thought of at the beginning of the
project. Aside from the fact that it was difficult for me to see what
was happening on stage from behind the piano, it was a really
enjoyable experience. I've only played piano in front of that many
people a few times before, and I was used to playing my sax
primarily for a groups of six or seven people who would ask me to
play in our high school band room after school was out. The
crowds actually helped me to relax and play well because an
impersonal audience can be easier to face than an intimate one. The
only thing I regret is the wasted time composing on the MIDI.
Kevin Gill
Kevin Gill is a first-year undergraduate of undecided major at the University of Michigan.