There was food, there was wine, there was a staggeringly relaxed atmosphere, and there were these amazing musicians onstage playing extremely unusual and difficult music with about six seconds of rehearsal time, and it was amazing. It all came together.

My big piece for the show, Poems Without Names, was supposed to be 5 minutes, clocked in at 21, and after the 15 minutes of rehearsal we had I was terrified. The tricky moments weren’t quite together, the ensemble hadn’t quite grasped what I was doing with individual notes underneath and between words of poetry – I was scared.

But thanks to the truly frightening talents of these amazing musicians something happened between 6:30 and 7 last night. And it just worked. They got up there and told a story.

We’ve got a solid recording and some shot-for-YouTube video, and when I can get everything together I’ll post it on the blog. But for now, trust me, it went wonderfully.

And oh yeah – String! Robert and Elisabeth tackled a song that I wrote for Twenty-Four Magazine, with an unusual backstory to do with erasing most of a play and sleeping very little. But the song sounded great, and very soon we’ll have a real recording and a real video to share with the backers of Twenty-Four Magazine’s Kickstarter project.

Everyone knows that there are six people in the new music world, and only about 500 or so in the actual world, forever running into each other in cafes in Vancouver (I think that’s Neil Gaiman’s image), but a lot of them turned up at the show last night. Two Princeton friends with giant decade-long gaps in our friendships were there, as well as my cousin Matt, who has practically tripled in size since I saw him last, and who has moved to New York.

It was a wonderful night.

Keep watching this blog (or my Tumblr, Twitter, or whatever else) for audio and video from the show, as well as the final clips and videos from the Ruckus Amongstus, which happened in January at Exapno.

To everyone who worked on the show, came out to the show, or just wondered how it was going from far away, and especially to Burton Raffel, author of Poems Without names, thank you.

What I’m doing is this:

Here’s the full score of Poems Without Names

Let me know what you think. Do you like the poem? Can you follow the score without scratching your head too much? What do you think of the whole saxophone and lute combination?

And more than that, come out on March 17 and hear what Rhymes With Opera does with the piece:

Rhymes With Opera Salon
7 PM, Saturday March 17
Christ Church United Methodist
520 Park Avenue, New York, NY
FREE ADMISSION

Late Update: response from Burton Raffel

Who, you know, wrote the poem.

Dear Kevin,
Wow.

I usually run through my email, just before I go back to writing for the day. But I went waltzing right through your extraordinary piece, unable to stop. It has been so long since I wrote the long poem, and I have been working so hard at my prose and (in translation) the poems of Dante, Chaucer, and the unknown author(s) of El Cid, that I find myself astonished that I in fact wrote this! You’ve edited beautifully: you don’t have a thing to apologize for. I can’t go to the piano and pick out some shades of your music: my fingers (no thumbs!) allow me three or four minutes, every second or third week, and sometimes simply refuse to let me have any keyboards time. So I look forward to hearing it, in due time.

Wow again: you make the poetry come across infinitely more impressive than I expected. Muchas gracias!

Oh yes: on p.21, after the word “louse,” I think you want a comma rather than a period. Yes? No?

Of course he’s right about the comma.

Rhymes With Opera Salon
7 PM, Saturday March 17
Christ Church United Methodist
520 Park Avenue, New York, NY
FREE ADMISSION

The salon’s going to be a wonderful event, with lots of musicians trying out new things, playing music for each other and the audience, and eating what we all bring to share. I’m hoping we’re going to be able to get the whole thing up on YouTube. We’ll see.

The piece is now finished. Last night I made the last composing decision about what sounds happen when and in what way they’re made. But the pencil score I’ve made is basically useless to anyone who isn’t me. I still need to notate it. What I’ve got may accurately describe the sounds I want, but it is certainly not a usable set of instructions for how to make those sounds.

Making those instructions, the playable score, is what I’m going to be doing this weekend. If I don’t get it done and delivered by Monday morning I’m officially late, and very rude to the generous musicians who’ve agreed to take on the piece in the first place. Really I’d like to be able to give them a whole month with the score, but that’s clearly impossible, so I’m just giving them this blog post, with links to both the pencil score and text of the piece, both in google docs.

Poems Without Names, text cut from Burton Raffel’s original poem

Pencil score, in concert pitch, very hard to read

Making the score will be fairly complicated, even though there are, if you look at the score, very few notes. But because I’m aligning individual notes to individual syllables of music, and not using metered measures that much, getting everything just where I want it is going to be a very fiddly detailed job, and I expect it to take 20-25 hours to get the score made just the way I want it.

I’m going to have a fun weekend. In the meantime, enjoy the text and score! Let me know what you think!

But here we are. Michael Feldman, who directed the film, and I got to work on submitting our film to festivals, and on February 17th I’m headed off to the New Jersey Film Festival to screen our work. If you’re around, come and join us!

We’re second on the program, too, so if you have a problem with Film Festivals in general (an allergy to thick plastic-rim glasses and black turtlenecks?) you can duck out early. Here’s the YouTube embed in case you want to see exactly what we’re screening in New Brunswick, but in HD:

We had one hell of a day, starting with loading in and lunch, through last minute rehearsal, tech and soundcheck, forgetting to eat dinner (and then getting fed dinner by OCCUPY WALL STREET who were cooking on THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FLOOR FROM US!), through a little over three hours of fantastic music, monologues, spoken word, improvisation, live audio replacement for YouTube videos, triumphant, raucous applause, and then cleaning up and loading out – we were out of by building by 1 AM. For a few of us that was a 15 hour day, and I’ve never loved my job more.

Exapno was PACKED! We got out extra chairs, and filled those, and had people standing behind that. It was incredible.

Stay tuned for YouTube uploads

As promised, we’ll put as much of the show on YouTube as copyright allows. We’ve got to clean up the audio and edit the video a little, but we’ll be getting these videos out to you hopefully at a rate of around one per week.

And oh yeah – if you have photos or videos of the event from your telephone (I know some of you do!) please post ‘em in comments or email me – we’ll get a Flickr gallery together or something to go with the youtube videos.

To all of you in the audience who came up to me as we were packing up to say “please do this again soon”, I want to! So badly! We’ve got at least a few months before it happens though, so before then, let me know in comments what you loved, what you hated, what you want more or less of. We can do whatever we want, and if we’re going to put on a great show next time I need to know what you all thought of the dizzying array of performances you saw.

If you’re around Brooklyn today you can go see Zach Herchen perform a reprise of Victoria Cheah’s Strange Loop at Vaudeville Park in Williamsburg, and if you’re looking for the awesomest thing to do tomorrow, go see Sylvana Joyce & The Moment, who closed our show last night, at Webster Hall!

I’ll write more about the show after more coffee and brunch (yes, including the cocktail recipes!), but for now, THANK YOU EVERYONE for making the night a wild, wild success!

Here’s what I mean. If you’re putting on a show, and you’re not a drummer, at some point you’re going to be standing around, having totally finished “your bit” of the work. You’ll have set up your guitar, or soundchecked your flute, or whatever, and the drummer will still be running back and forth to the car and lugging gear bags back to the stage.

It always happens. Drummers just have more to carry, more to set up, and then more to take down again when they’re doing a show. And if you, with your hands free, don’t decide to go help the drummer, here’s the thing:

I will never work with you again.

I won’t say anything, and I won’t think you’re a terrible person, and the show will go on. But when it comes time to put together the next show, I’m not calling you. Because you don’t carry drums.

When someone else has more to do than you, and you’re working towards the same goal, help them. Don’t look at the job as “my bit” and “their bit”. Look at the job getting done.

The new music group Eighth Blackbird is well known in music circles for passing this test with flying colors. There’s one drummer, and everyone moves the gear. Between shows, often most of them fly, and there’s a van on the ground driving filled with drums. They all take turns driving the van. Also they play music really well, and are doing a really cool thing right now with Amy Beth Kirsten, but that’s a different story…

Why talk about this now?

Because we have a show coming up on Saturday at the Exapno New Music Community Center. And it’s got all kinds of music on it, all kinds of different performances. And everyone working on the show would, I know, carry drums.

We’re going to be putting on a great show, and that’s the most important thing, but even before we load in to tech on Saturday afternoon, I’m proud of these artists. I’m looking forward to showing the audience not just a good time, but a great bunch of people making it happen together.

I could do that alone, imagining everything in my head. But theater’s funny. Once you get it up on its feet it’s a completely different animal. So I did something odd. I got a bunch of actors, a director, a choreographer, two cameras and lunch together one Saturday. And we rehearsed just those scenes. We experimented, changed, explored the characters, and came up with these videos here. They aren’t finished films, or even finished performances – we had 1 rehearsal. But they do tell the story I wanted to tell for these two scenes. I may change the timing to speed things up a little, and I may tweak a few of the gestures, but what I have to work with now is a video libretto for two of my mime sequences.

These two scenes happen before the play proper begins. We’re getting a look at both couples as they were before the plot happens. The four of them have gone off into the woods for a “picnic”, and then both couples go off on their own to… well… you know… canoodle. In these two videos Puck had the curly hair, and is watching what the humans are up to…

Wait, was that a pair of handcuffs?

Yes, that was a pair of handcuffs. We’ve created a motivation for Demetrius. Yes, we’ve created it out of thin air. Where else would we find one?

In the play, Demetrius spurns Helena and tries to force Hermia to marry him for… some… reason. She’s pretty, I guess. In this version, Demetrius is a stuffed up prude. And Helena, being a little more adventurous when they’re off canoodling in the woods, spooks him. That’s why he runs off and tries to get Hermia.

This way Demetrius has a motivation other than being randomly evil, Helena’s character is all set up for “use me as your spaniel” and, we hope, you can finally tell the four lovers apart! That’s not usually a feature of productions of Midsummer.

Here’s a final bit of video, that didn’t make it into the final run we did of the Helena/Demetrius scene, but I think will be useful as I actually start to compose this passage:

So…. whaddya think?

Funny? Convincing take on Midsummer? Good structure for the scenes? How about the crappy Cat Stevens I was playing in the background for mood music?

This Saturday, 8 PM, at the Exapno New Music Community Center, the curtain goes up. But we don’t have a curtain, since this is an extremely DIY, seat-of-your-pants, make-it-up-as-we-go-along kind of show. But we’ll start at 8. Or maybe a little later if people are having too much fun enjoying the cocktails.

Check out Exapno’s website if you need help getting there, and feel free to circulate the concert flyer as far and wide as you like. Doesn’t it make us look like an awesome underground dance club? Thanks, Victoria!

Check out the full program below for the astonishing range of stuff that will be happening this Saturday. As for my own music, Rachel Gawell is going to perform The Seafarer, which I wrote for her way back in the day, and which premiered on one of the very first No Signal shows.

Summer’s Twilight

We’re also going to be doing some improvisation with Mike Compitello on marimba and miming actors for Summer’s Twilight. At the heart of that piece is the interaction between the four lovers, played by singing actors, and the two fairies, who speak all their lines through the marimba or the cello. As I write the different sections, I need to know how the actors and the instrumentalists can communicate, how much they understand, how they control each other. I also need to know how much of that interaction is clear to the audience, so that I actually get the laughs that I want instead of just playing some music and doing some blocking and no one understanding it.

So this is research, but it’s also comedy improvisation. That’s why I’m quite so glad to have Mike Compitello, Casey Middaugh and Rose Ginsberg on hand. We’re going to learn a lot about Summer’s Twilight, and we’re going to make you laugh while we do it.

Ruckus Amongstus

The best way to RSVP is through the Facebook event. If you’re curious about who’s playing what or what any of this stuff is, just let me know in comments and I’ll tell you all about it – especially the delicious cocktails we’re creating for the evening, or your choice of youtube videos for us to use in improvising film scores….

Here’s our program, as it currently appears on the facebook event page.

Come out to Exapno for a VERY unusual evening.

We’ve got virtuoso performances of contemporary classics alongside pieces by composers right there in the room.

We’ve got a Bad Plus cover, spoken word, V-Day, physical improvisations, haunting female voices, and a folk/rock band jamming to close out the night.

PLUS: We’ve got Fantastic and Original Cocktails!
PLUS: We’ll play YOUR favorite YouTube videos, and IMPROVISE A SCORE!
…..Start submitting now in comments…..

And if you can’t make it in person, we’ll put as much of the show as we can up on YouTube in the weeks after the show so you can catch up on all the action!

Suggested donation: $10

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RUCKUS AMONGSTUS!
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Gestenstücke by Juan María Solare
Strangeloop by Victoria Cheah — WORLD PREMIERE
Giant by The Bad Plus
Khan Variations by Alejandro Vinao

***IMPROVISED YouTube Film Scores***

Physical Improv testing for Summer’s Twilight by Kevin Clark — WORK IN PROGRESS
We Two Boys by George Lam
Phthia

***IMPROVISED YouTube Film Scores***

Textual Healing
Monologue from “A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer”
The Seafarer by Kevin Clark, translation by Burton Raffel
My pain by Edward Thomas-Herrera

***IMPROVISED YouTube Film Scores***

JAM!!!!

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PERFORMERS:
Peter Bellomo, Sara Phillips Budde, Kevin Clark, Dennis Clark, Dave Cohen, Michael Compitello, Sean-David Cunningham, Matthew Dunnam, Lainie Fefferman, Michael Feldman, Rachel Gawell, Rose Ginsberg, Zach Herchen, Jaime de Jesus, Alan Jeffries, Emily Kadish, Orlando Klass, George Lam, Robert Maril, Casey Middaugh, James Moore, Domenica Romagni, Andie Springer

Ian Richter is just such a one. I’ve crossed his path before, but the first time I got to know him properly we were sharing a car ride to New Haven where I spent most of the time talking about economics (don’t ask – it’s not a great way to keep everyone going during a road trip).

Gary Louie, the saxophone professor at Peabody, he of the sweet tone and dramatic arm movements, has taken to giving his students a crack at my setting of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. So at the end of the trip to New Haven for New Morse Code‘s premiere concert (it was great) I got this recording as well. Even better.

He’s still in school. But that hasn’t stopped him producing his own live recording, which for this piece requires a lot of re-balancing of the spoken and the played portions as well as all the usual mucking about with reverb and the rest of it. How many recordings feature the engineer performing, anyways? Neat, huh?

These three videos feature haiku by Mindy Klenoff, Georg Lauer and myself. The original Facebook thread on which they were written and the walls of Journeyman’s bathrooms have many more. As for performers: Elisabeth Halliday is singing, and Lorna Krier is playing a really cool piano/synthesizer hybrid. Those hands washing themselves belong to my uncle, Brian. Enjoy!