Archive for April, 2009
Prodigal God
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
Someone I took a musical writing class with last year has just released a 5-song demo for a new musical called “Prodigal God,” along with a snazzy website.
There are several encouraging elements to this show. (1) The music is actually enjoyable. It feels a lot like evangelical worship music, but well… I like that kind of music pretty well (within limits). (2) One of the collaborators is evidently a pastor. Exactly what kind of theological perspective this play has is not entirely clear to me, granted, but it’s dealing with Christian subject matter one way or another, and that’s encouraging.
My only real concern is that this demo sounds fairly album-y to me - I really don’t understand how it plays as a theater piece. It might work as sort of a narrative concert, a la Jesus Christ Superstar. But the production values don’t seem easily translatable to, say, an off-Broadway production with 5 instrumentalists. Not to say that it can’t be. The mental image just isn’t forthcoming.
New RiftMaker Music
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
Just to prove that I’m making some progress in the RiftMaker department, I thought I’d post mp3s of some new songs - hope you enjoy!
How to Get Started Writing the Score… Tomorrow
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
I’ve been perusing various “engraving” programs, or sheet-music writing tools. The idea here is actually to get my songs for Tell Me a Beautiful Lie written out so that folks can sing them, or at least try to sing them before telling me that it’s too high/too low/too awkward.
The two main packages, from what I can tell, appear to be Sibelius and Finale, but they’re both horrendously expensive, and it’s not clear that I need all their features. Fortunately, both programs offer a wide assortment of less expensive versions of their main packages with various features unceremoniously hacked off. It doesn’t seem like a terribly good way to design a program - I’m not sure that there’s a real meaningful line between Finale PrintMusic and Finale SongWriter that says, “Yes! I need a program that allows me to write lyrics but NOT space the lyrics legibly under the notes!”
Hopefully, PrintMusic will do the trick for me. Either way, it’s going to be a painstakingly tedious process.
A New “As Far As I Know”
Sunday, April 5th, 2009
I’ve been playing around with the idea of a new version for “As Far As I Know,” Katya’s plaintive song that ends the opening sequence (after “When the Red Morning Dawns”). I like the original song well enough, but I fear that it’s structure limits its memorability (the ostensible title is heard only twice, and no musical theme, with the exception of the connecting melody, ever repeats). You have to establish what kind of musical you are up front, and if you throw a wandering melody at the audience that early, they may get the impression that “Oh, this is THAT kind of show - a show with pretty but aimless music,” and first impressions are not easily counteracted.
So I’ve written another attempt at the melody, restructing the song so that the title appears more often and the main theme repeats, while still trying to retain that feeling of build-up that I liked so much from the original number. Let me know what you think.
KATYA:
As far as I know,
He’s still out there, somewhere…
Perhaps some cafe, still debating.
As far as I know,
He still writes me from there…
In his pack
There might be
A great stack
Of letters for me!
And somehow I know that he’s waiting…
Waiting for me.
As far as I know,
He still dreams he’ll kiss me
And I’m in the poems he’s creating
As far as I know
He will always miss me
Til he flees
From that war,
And he sees
His girl by the shore!
As far as I know,
He could ride tomorrow
Far from the storm that’s abating!
As far as I know,
There’s an end to sorrow -
Never fear!
Never doubt!
When it’s clear
Love will win out!
And somehow he’ll know, I’ve been waiting…
Waiting so long!
So long!
So long!
As far as I know…
Welcome to Chris Guin Creations!
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
So the first wave of my website redesign has now been instituted - the idea being to make the site easier to navigate (no flash), and a little more grown up. Also, I just really like changing the look every so often - the way some people like rearranging the furniture. (The presentation is more grown-up, there’s still plenty of goofy content.) narfscavern.com and creativelavatory.com still both point here, so old links don’t need to be updated, but now chrisguincreations.com is the official url.
I’ll be phasing in more old content shortly, and I’ve also been continuing work on both Tell Me a Beautiful Lie and RiftMaker, and should have things to post before too long.
Thanks to Nikky Wood for helping with the redesign (and to the Plotts and Williamses for their feedback).