20 years ago...

I recently told this bit of history to a burner friend, and it occurred to me it would make an awesome blogpost. CAUTION: It is a very long story.

Twenty years ago this week I — along with my Lovely First Wife and son — were in Ayr, Scotland, shepherding a group of kids through rehearsals with the Scottish Opera.

Allow me to explain.

In 2001, I realized that serving as the artistic director of the Newnan Community Theatre Company had lost a bit of its charm after 25 years. I let it be known that I would leave that role at the end of 2002.

For my swan song, I decided that I was going to direct The Marriage of Figaro — because when else would I ever be allowed to? — and so I spent the second half of 2001 translating Mozart’s comic masterpiece into singable, modern English. I retained all the original jokes and included some of my own. (It’s available, FYI.)

Your author in the role of Count Almaviva, discovering the page boy where he has no business being (again)

And how did a three-hour 18th-c. comic opera about a philandering aristocrat and his crafty servant fare in a small Southern town? Sold out houses, roaring laughter, a triumph. (One patron who was an opera buff said he had seen Figaro all over the world, and ours was the first production that captured the chaotic, antic spirit of the piece. That was mostly because we treated it like a classic musical comedy instead of some sacred relic.)

So I’m in the middle of rehearsals for this thing when my Lovely First Wife mentions that she ran into our friend Bette, who had a project she wanted me to take on. Not until Figaro is over, I said, and I had to repeat that firmly to Bette, who the next time she saw me immediately began her spiel to convince me.

What did she want me to do? Apparently our sister city of Ayr had commissioned the Scottish Opera to create a kids’ version of Robert Burns’s “Tam O’Shanter,” Scotland’s national poem; it had two adult opera singers, a small pit, and as many children as you could cram onstage. It had premiered the year before, and now Ayr wanted to restage it and invite children from all its sister cities to come participate. Bette wanted me to audition, train, and accompany our contingent to Ayrshire.

The auld kirk in question

Short synopsis: Tam is a notorious drunkard, and one night riding home from the pub he sees lights and hears music coming from the old church. He stops to investigate and finds a witches’ sabbath going on, all of whom he knows from the village. One particularly bonny young lass excites him, since she’s wearing a little shift that her mother made for her when she was much younger, and he cries out “Weel done, cutty-sark!” (short skirt) — and all the witches begin to chase him. His horse has better sense than he and heads for the bridge over the River Doon (the Brig O’ Doon). The witches manage to snatch the horse’s tail, but they cannot cross running water and Tam gets home safe.

We were assigned the roles of Tam’s drinking buddies in the pub. I made parents sign a document that said they were OK with their precious little one playing a drunkard. No one balked: this was a free trip to Scotland. (We had to pay our airfare, but the Scottish government paid for the rest of the trip.)

At the final banquet; All these wee bairns are now lawyers, teachers of the year, parents. Grown-ups.

We had decided not to involve the school system, which was smart. Chicago’s group went through their school system to do this, and got smacked down because they had been invited to play the witches and that gave the Powers That Be the fantods. So we added satanic revelers to our efforts.

It was a great trip — we got to meet our counterparts from Norway and Germany and Scotland. The rehearsals were professional and tight; our kids won kudos from the director for being the best prepared.

While we were there, I and the family traveled to Doune Castle, which you will tell me you’ve never heard of, to which I will say, “Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.” Also: Ni!

Every time there was a castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it was Doune Castle. If you tell them you’re a Python fan when you buy your tickets in the gift shop, they’ll hand you coconuts to use to accompany your explorations. Somewhere I have video of my then-14-year-old son singing “Knights of the Round Table” in situ.

I bought a miniature of the Castle, and it sat on our pianist’s keyboard at Newnan Theatre Company when I was the first non-professional Arthur King in Spamalot in the state of Georgia in 2013.

Anyway, the trip was great fun — we were treated to tours of local castles, we had a Burns Supper (complete with haggis, neeps, and tatties), we danced at a ceilidh, and the show itself was delightful.

The adults on the trip decided that we should reciprocate: Do a production in Newnan to which we could invite all our new friends. But a production of what? We have nothing that approaches the cultural importance of “Tam O’Shanter.” (The Scots begin studying it in third grade.)

And then, on the plane going home, I remembered the three or four songs I had written years before using Nancy Willard’s Newbery-Award-winning A Visit to William Blake’s Inn as a text. I pulled them up on my laptop and thought they were good enough to share with the others. After we got home, I spent a couple of weeks getting my ideas together, and when we had a meeting to decide whether to try to move forward with the project, everyone was very enthusiastic.

I have written elsewhere of getting Nancy’s permission and what a lovely, giving artist she was while I was working on the music. William Blake’s Inn remains my proudest achievement in music. (It remains unproduced — you, yes you, can have a world premiere if you want one.)

And now, in a final loopback that you would condemn as improbable fiction if it were now played upon a stage: when I was working on Figaro, I told the set designer that I wanted a muted color palette like that used in my favorite book when I was a child, The Color Kittens, by Margaret Wise Brown.

I ordered each of us a copy — I hadn’t actually seen the book since I was little — and you can imagine my astonishment to discover that it was illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen: the illustrators of A Visit to William Blake’s Inn!

It occurs to me that with A Visit winning the Newbery in 1982 and my first seeing it in 1983, this story actually began forty years ago. I think I need to go lie down until the globe stops spinning.

I've been composing...

…and you know what that means: MOAR WHINING!

Not yet, actually. I haven’t really had to struggle yet. Instead, I’ve been going through all the folders and files in my MUSIC folder on the laptop and opening them up in Finale, 1) to update them to the latest version; and 2) to see if there’s anything I had forgotten about or could use.

And lo! there was tons.

First up, a little fragment that I had crapped out back when I was trying to be serious about SUN TRUE FIRE, the orchestral/choral extravaganza that I decided to create based on an epic 11-paragraph spam comment. (You will note my hopeful comment that I would try to compose this thing in 2015. ::sigh::)

I commented at the time I wrote it that this fragment would probably end up as one of the Ten Little Waltzes, and I think it’s time to call it. Since it wasn’t one of the original 19 ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS, it plucks T out of the lineup for its title.

“Little Waltz T” [pdf]

But wait, there’s more!

Also buried in the SUN TRUE FIRE folder was this fragment, an ABORTIVE ATTEMPT for the final stanza in the spam comment. It is quite lovely, and I have proposed finishing it as a piece for violin and piano at the suggestion of my cello teacher, Donna. (She’s a professional violinist.)

We’ll just call it “new piece” for now: pdf

More to come… I hope.

***update: Here’s that ended up.