ComposerLaFave: News and Views from an American Composer/Writer

Hi. Remember me?

Should I claim to be a blogger, when weeks go by that I don't make an entry? Maybe not. A blogger, as I understand it, is someone who sends pixels spinning into the Internet on a nearly daily basis, whereas I missed the entire month of October.

On the other hand, what else would you call the screen before you but a blog? And who writes blogs but bloggers?

At least my excuse is a good one: Diet! The Musical. Susan and I rewrote it, produced it, and video taped it. Now we're in the middle of editing the tape and posting musical numbers to YouTube.

Info on the first two entries:

"Who Needs a Man (When a Gal's Got Chocolate)?" at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh79gWbQBes

"Never Enough" at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLz1rJsotD4

Enjoy! More to come. If you like the songs, visit the website (www.dietthemusical.com) and spread the word. Drop me one while you're at it.

- Ken

Diet! Rules

Everything is Diet! The Musical for at least the next two weeks.

From next week's column for the Desert Advocate:

Here’s a pop quiz for you, in two senses of the word “pop”:

What entertainment franchise has made more money than any other? By franchise, I mean licensed work of any kind: music, movies, TV, the theater.

Right away, I’m sure you’ve eliminated the theater. I mean, movies and TV gross much, much more than anything you can put on a stage, right? The probable answers to this question for most people would include Star Wars, the Harry Potter films, and maybe the Beatles songbook.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The richest entertainment franchise in the world is…

The Phantom of the Opera.

The musical about a guy who lives in a sewer and seduces a young singer has grossed $1.9 billion in various productions around the globe, much of going to its composer and producer, Andrew Lloyd Webber – excuse me, Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber to you and me.

Which brings us to Diet! The Musical.

Diet! The Musical has also made $1.9 billion, minus that same figure. All right, it hasn’t made a buck yet, but then, it hasn’t opened yet. The ariZoni-nominated new musical opens in a new production Oct. 3 at Theater 4301 in Old Town Scottsdale, and runs there through Oct. 7. (The show was nominated on the basis of its initial, more intimate premiere production last spring at North Valley Playhouse.)

I wrote it. Well, I wrote the music and half the lyrics. The book (dialogue) and the other half of the lyrics were written by Susan Simpson LaFave, who, conveniently enough for a collaborative team, is related to me by marriage – ours. Why did we write this show? Why have we spent a year of our lives figuring out how to tell the story-in-song of two young women and their “quest for love and the perfect body”?

Not for the money. Well, not primarily.

Art and money are friendly enemies. Nobody I’ve ever known has gone into the arts for money. (We’re not counting pop music here, where fame and its attendant riches seem to be the No. 1 ambition.) People become artists because they love the art they practice, or because they have something to say that can only be said through acting, or writing, or dancing, or composing music. But at some point – and that point arrives early in a money-conscious society – it also becomes necessary to pay the bills without having to sling espresso for minimum wage. What to do?

Everyone’s answer is different. Susan and I decided we could come up with a show that has singable melodies, fun lyrics, and good story telling, while also appealing to the general culture’s obsession with weight and weight-loss. We believe we’ve done that with Diet! The Musical, and we believe audiences will respond en masse, filling up Theater 4301 every night, as they filled the smaller space of North Valley Playhouse last spring.

People want new musicals. If the evidence of Phantom isn’t enough for you, check out the crowds who stuff Gammage Auditorium every time a new show hits that space. (This week, it’s Jersey Boys.) Official cultural spokesmen shove the musical to the side, claiming that audiences only want pop music, NASCAR, and professional wrestling. We believe that Diet!, along with the many other musicals that premiere every year, prove them hopelessly wrong.

For information on Diet! The Musical, or to buy tickets, call (480) 994-2787, or log on to www.dietthemusical.com.

- Kenneth LaFave

Farewell to "The King of the High Cs"

Luciano Pavarotti will be buried tomorrow, and with him the enmity of many critics who judged Pavarotti musically deficient.

Much ink and many pixels have already been spent discussing Pavarotti's lack of musical knowledge, fear of learning new repertoire, etc. Placido Domingo, it is said, is the more intelligent singer, the better actor, the more adventurous artist.

And all that's true. But, so what? Music doesn't have to be one thing, nor does it need to be judged by one set of criteria. Pavarotti was all about his voice: That incomparable glorious instrument that was gifted to him by the gods of music, and which he generously shared with the world throughout a spectacular career. Listen to vintage recordings of Pavarotti singing "Nessun Dorma" or "O Sole Mio" or any number of other arias and songs, and you will be spoiled for hearing anybody else sing them. Powerful, open, exuding joy, Pavarotti's voice was the splendor of the tenor world for much of the past half-century.

Toward the end, yes, the voice grew tired and strained. Age does that to every singer. But even as Pavarotti kept singing into his 60s, losing much of his sheen and power, he continued to project through his performances a profound lust for life. Music can be about that.

- Kenneth LaFave

The return of Diet! The Musical

I had a lot of fun writing "Diet! The Musical," and now I'm having still more fun re-writing and producing it for the commercial stage. Come see the show Oct. 3-7 at Theater 4301 in Scottsdale, AZ.

Here's the official press release.

Aug. 30, 2007
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Call: Kenneth LaFave; 480-200-9210

DIET! THE MUSICAL Returns Oct. 3-7 at Theater 4301
Popular, Zoni-nominated original musical about the “Battle of the Bulge”

What: Diet! The Musical
Where: Scottsdale Center for the Arts’ Theater 4301
4301 N. Scottsdale Rd. (in Old Town Scottsdale)
When: 8 p.m. Oct. 3, 4, 5 and 6, 2007
2 p.m. Oct. 7, 2007
Tickets: $36
Call (tickets): 480-994-2787
Website: www.dietthemusical.com

DIET! The Musical, the new musical that broke box office records when North Valley Playhouse produced it in the spring of this year, returns in a new production Oct. 3 – 7 at Theater 4301 in Scottsdale. Produced by Dreamweaver Enterprises, the new production of Diet! The Musical will feature four of the five original cast members in a new staging by Laurie Lemley, with a revised script and three new songs.

The show tells the story of Lynne and Pat, roommates who go on a diet together, only to find out it’s what’s on the inside that really counts. Nicole Lang plays Lynne, and Andrea Tripodi appears as Pat. Marco Valadez plays Frank, Pat’s would-be boyfriend; director Laurie Lemley appears as Lynne’s mother, Connie; and Ken Goodenberger turns in a triple threat performance as Lynne’s boyfriend Josh, a merciless Gym Instructor, and Jean-Paul, a French photographer of plus-size models.

Susan LaFave authored the book, Kenneth LaFave composed the music, and together Susan and Kenneth LaFave wrote the lyrics for Diet! The Musical. Among the more than 20 songs in the show are ones with titles such as “Am I Fat?,” “Twenty Points a Day,” “Fat Pat,” “All You Can Eat,” “Pleasingly Plump,” and “Big Beautiful Woman.”

Diet! The Musical sold more tickets during its 10-day run at North Valley Playhouse than any other production in the four-year history of that community theater, despite the lack of a marketing budget and the fact the show was new and totally unknown. The production was subsequently nominated for three AriZoni Awards: Best Original Musical, Best Original Book for a Musical (Susan LaFave) and Best Original Music Composition (Kenneth LaFave).

For tickets to see Diet! The Musical Oct. 3 – 7 at Theater 4301, call 480-994-2787.

***

For music theory types only....

All right, everyone's invited to read this. But music theory geeks are probably the only ones who will care about it.

In classical music theory, we do something called "Roman numeraling." This means we assign the Roman numeral I to the first triad (or chord) of any given key signature, II to the second triad, III to the third, etc. This in turn implies a certain heirarchy of relationship between the various pitches in that key, a fixed system that gives Western tonal music its particular flavor.

It has always struck me that the system, while it works splendidly within limits, defies the truth of the human ear. When we hear pitches, we don't naturally hear fixed points in immovable heirarchy. We hear shifting relationships, an intricate web of possibilities that are limited only by the composer's decision-making process. From the composer's standpoint, this means there is a greater tonality than the system traditionally called "tonal." This tonality is intuitive and will not be limited by any system. When the standard-isue tonality of triads in rigid heirachy broke -- about a hundred years ago -- it produced a non-sensical thing called "atonality." Twelve-tone composers, as they were called, structured the dozen tones of the chromatic scale as discrete entities, completely unrelated to each other. What had been, under standard tonality, a system of relationships, became a system of anti-relationships, of pitches sounding wholly on their own.

While tonality and "atonality" seemed to be opposites, both were based on the assumption that either the relationship between pitches would be heirarchical and fixed, or there could be no relationship. But again, that's not how we hear. We hear infinite potential in even a single pitch. The composer's job is to explore that potential. A great composer does so without reference to any system, or at least in spite of having to work within a system.

I've developed these ideas in an essay just filed to NewMusicBox. Below is an excerpt. I'll let you know when the entire essay posts.

"Debussy averred that music is made only of rhythm and color. Pitch is a function of color; a matter of where, in the span of some universal monochord with infinite fundamentals, it falls, and of what other pitches are sounding at the same time. In the German-based tonal system common to our music, a B-flat is tonic because we say so and it remains tonic until we say otherwise by modulating away from it. In the French way of comprehending harmony, you can’t do that, for even if you play only a c minor chord and return to the B-flat, that B-flat chord is now changed forever. It has a different sonic context and is therefore a different entity. Its relationship to other pitch classes and to its own internal elements has shifted.

"Roman numeraling is an illusion based on the mistaken idea that tonal relationships must be codifiable or they cannot be tonal relationships. We are told to call the German system 'tonality' when, in fact, all relationships of pitch are inherently tonal -- not in the sense of adhering to an arbitrary system that posits stable tonics, but in the sense that every pitch in some way suggests every other pitch. There is not and cannot be any such thing as 'atonal' music."

- Kenneth LaFave

The 1950s as high-water mark in American arts

From my current column for The Desert Advocate:

"In the myth that has been created to assure us we must be living in the culturally most exciting of times, the 1950s are generally portrayed as dull, unadventurous and unimportant, except for the first stirrings of rock ‘n’ roll.

"Maybe small‑town America was asleep then, but her urban artists weren’t. The 1950s were a peak time for the American arts. In the years following our country’s emergence as a superpower after World War II, we produced advances in music, theater, literature, painting and dance we never equaled, before or after. In music, jazz burst into bebop, stretching the musical language in previously undreamed‑of directions, while in the concert hall, works by the pioneering Charles Ives at last were allowed to enter, and to influence, a new generation of composers. Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams arrived on the theater scene to tell us more about ourselves than some wanted to know, and the musical, born as cheap entertainment, attained maturity.

"Jackson Pollock decided to drip paint on canvases and helped spark the brazen new aesthetic of abstract expressionism. George Balanchine reinvented European ballet with new, sharp, American accents, while Martha Graham took modern dance technique to its furthest reaches. The “beats”– Jack Kerouac among them, but also including the poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsburg and Gregory Corso ‑ emulated jazz in the written word and spun whole new galaxies of experience.

"For invention and innovation, no other time in our country's artistic history even touches the era from 1946 to 1963."

To read the entire column, go to:

http://www.thedesertadvocate.com/082207/arts/foothills.htm

Ballet Arizona's "Play" -- a preview of my review

The waiting period between a performance and the publication of a review of that performance can be an unbearable stretch, particuarly if the publication in question is a traditional monthly magazine. Newspapers at least can get a review on their pages overnight (if they choose to do so!), and the Internet can do it instantaneously. But monthly magazines? Let me put it this way: I saw Ib Andersen's extraordinary new full-length ballet, Play, in early June in Phoenix. I filed a review of it to Dance Magazine on June 12. And in about 10 days from today (Aug. 20), you'll finally be able to pick up a copy of Dance Magazine's September issue and read it. It will not run on the magazine's website, but here's a teaser:

"On a black stage sparkled with points of light, an ensemble engages classical vocabulary, starting with the simplest of school steps and moving on to intricate, athletic combinations for ten solo dancers: Kenna Draxton, Kanako Imayoshi, Natalia Magnicaballi, Michelle Mahowald, Christina Noakes, Joseph Cavanaugh, Ross Clarke, Robert Dekkers, Ilir Shtylla and Astrit Zejnati. Everyone finds the air in some way peculiar to them; the men in bravura jumps, the women in elegant and unforced pointe work. As Mozart’s music transforms into meditation, the dancing morphs unexpectedly into two gymnastic turns: A man held aloft by two other men in splits position, and a woman in an unsupported headstand in reverse splits. Masculine and feminine, bonded in heavenly classical language, have divided – split – into two directions: Man being lifted upward, woman headed into the earth."

Read the rest in the September Dance Magazine.

- KLF

Mark Morris Meets Mozart

If you don't yet know the work of choreographer Mark Morris, I envy you the thrill of discovering it for the first time. Morris is arguably the best American choreographer since Balanchine (who died in 1983), though that invites a pointless comparison with Balanchine's style. Morris' style is his own -- indefinable, incomparable. In 2002, I wrote this in the Arizona Republic about his Peccadillos, as performed by Morris at Scottsdale Center for the Arts:

"A bulky, middle-age man dances fluently to the music of a tiny toy piano as childhood fantasy meets adult reality. The tunes are Erick Satie's innocent airs; the gestures are big and wide, yet measured and exact.

"The contrast of scope -- between toy piano and big man, tiny sound and large dance -- is oddly touching. The air is stained with poignancy.

"The dancer, the choreographer, could only be Mark Morris."

Morris has a new work, loudly praised by all those who have seen it. It's called Mozart Dances, and on Thursday night, Aug. 16, PBS will telecast it as part of the Live From Lincoln Center series. Watch it, tape it, Tivo it, do whatever you need to do in order not to miss what promises to be one of the most exciting new dance works of the decade.

Given my admiration for Morris' artistry, you can imagine how deeply pleased I was when Lincoln Center asked me to write program notes about the music Morris chose for Mozart Dances. To read my notes, go to:

http://lincolncenter.org/programnotes/mm-mozartdances-081507.pdf

- Kenneth LaFave

Rhyme Time

Writing lyrics for Diet! The Musical, I came face-to-face with that greatest of English-language challenges: Rhyming while still making sense.

It's harder than you think. Hip-hop, which supposedly thrives on rhyme, fudges rhymes left and right. You'll hear "water" rhyming with "harder," "change" with "same," and words or syllables "rhyming" with themselves. This is largely true as well in contemporary pop and alternative rock. Old pop demanded exact rhymes (see the lyrics of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Oscsr Hammerstein II, etc.), and the one place where that's still the case is the musical theater.

I remember attending one of the ASCAP/Disney musical comedy workshops in Burbank a few years back, where portions of new musicals were performed a panel of professionals. Among the panelists was Alan Bergman, co-lyricist (with his wife, Marilyn Bergman) of such standards as "Windmills of My Mind" and "The Summer Knows." When a song in one of the new musicals tried to rhyme "time" with "nine," Bergman stopped them cold: "'Time' doesn't rhyme with 'nine,' no matter how many times you've heard it on the radio." Exposed for decades to fudged rhymes and non-rhymes, most people wouldn't understand that. But in point of fact, to rhyme, two words must end in the same sound, and "m" and "n" are different sounds.

I've written a column about this for The Desert Advocate. Below is an excerpt. For the whole thing, go to www.thedesertadvocate.com/080807/arts/foothills.htm.

"I’ve been thinking of rhyme lately, and how in popular song it has largely disappeared, or has been so altered as to be unrecognizable. My teenage son shares with me songs by Radiohead and Incubus and other contemporary groups, and for the most part, rhyme is absent. There are exceptions (White Stripes relies heavily on rhyme), but most recent rock lyrics treat rhyme as strictly optional. As for the admittedly small amount of hip‑hop I am exposed to, either the rhymes come quick and easy, rhyming for their own sake and without relationship to the story being told; or they aren’t real rhymes at all, but fudged approximations.

"Rhyming in English is tough because the language isn’t well suited to it. Think of 'love,' certainly one of the more important words for a songwriter. It has exactly five possible rhymes: 'of,' 'shove,' 'glove,' 'dove' and 'above.' (With the current use of 'gov' as short for governor, I suppose there’s now a sixth.) That’s why you’ve heard so many songs that include, 'You’re the one I’m thinking of' or 'You were sent from heaven above.' They are there to set up the rhyme.

"But 'glove' and 'shove?' I’m sure there are lyrics using these, but the words don’t exactly lend themselves to high romance. Envy lyric writers in Spanish, Italian or French, languages where appropriate rhymes flow like wine. As the Canadian critic Hugh Kenner observed, 'The Romance languages are romantic because love rhymes with heart rhymes with flower. The English language is English because love rhymes with shove and heart rhymes with fart and flower rhymes with power.'”

- KLF

Is This Any Way to Run a Culture?

From my weekly column for The Desert Advocate (the whole thing can be found at www.thedesertadvocate.com):

The director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, England, reprinted thinly disguised versions of Austen’s novels, including the perennial Pride and Prejudice, and submitted them to 18 different UK book publishers. The result: 18 rejections. Writing in London newspaper The Independent, publisher Andrew Franklin frankly stated the reason. Was it the changing taste of the reading public? Nope. “Publishers turn down masterpieces every day,” Franklin admitted. Why? Because there are just too many submissions for readers at the various publishing houses to deal with. Some 200,000 books are published every year, Franklin stated, and for every one of those, “20 to 30 others” are rejected.

“It’s a numbers game,” he concluded.

“No one can be surprised to learn that not every manuscript gets the careful attention it deserves. It should not come as a shock that many manuscripts are returned unread to the sender. We need to clear our desks in order to look after the authors whom we do sign up, and the unsolicited manuscripts are often a chore to be dealt with at the end of the day by an overworked intern.”

In other words, getting published is largely a matter of luck.

I can attest that, in the much smaller world of symphonic composition, a very similar phenomenon holds sway. If you were to list the most performed living composers, you would be shocked – as I was, when a friend in this dubious “business” informed me – that more than half of them are supported by seven‑figure trust funds. To be a composer takes such an enormous amount of time for such little financial reward, that to be successful at it heavily favors the wealthy. After all, they can spend all their time soliciting publishers and performers, and if they fail, what’s the difference? They don’t have to go back to their day jobs. They don’t have any!

In other words, the new books and the new classical compositions that reach your eyes and ears have at least as much to do with the sheer good fortune of being born to wealth and/or the dumb luck of having your manuscript one of the few that actually gets read.

I ask you: Is this any way to run a culture? If practicing medicine was a profession available only to those born rich or those whose applications just happened to be picked up from among the thousands otherwise discarded unread, wouldn’t medicine suffer? How can we care so little for culture as to leave it to anyone but the most talented, whatever their bank account or luck quotient?

- Kenneth LaFave