Do you know how ridiculously lucky we are to have such a wunderkind as Jeremy Douglass as our resident composer and music director? Because it’s ridiculous. Jeremy plays live on stage straight through this 70-minute performance including songs and scenes and atmosphere, and he also contributed additional lyrics alongside Federico García Lorca’s poetry. We asked him a few questions about what’s going into this one:
“Most of the music is just accompanying straight text. We wanted to make a “play with music with some singing” and not a full song and dance musical. So, in this regard I found the rhythm of the text, and the inflection of the words and set those to melodies that “sound” like speech. Now that the cast has learned the melodies like they’re songs, we’re focusing on how to make them sound more like musical speech.
There are a small handful of songs in the show that don’t pull text straight from the play. One is an unaltered Lorca poem set to music. Another is inspired by a Lorca poem. And two I wrote from whole cloth, lyrics and music.I suppose my inspirations were fantasy movies like Legend or Dark Crystal but tinier. Daintier. We’re in the world of bugs. It’s a fairy tale, a tragedy, a comedy. I want the music to sound like all of these but not on a grand scale. These are innocent creatures grappling with huge emotions. Our sound is small and intimate but can flourish into something magical.
For live scoring I’m pulling from much of the techniques I learned at American Stage as music director for music theatre improv. It involves lots of listening. A deep musical vocabulary and a keen skill for translating emotion to music on the fly. It’s really the most fun part of this. Some of the underscore will be set in intent and motivation, but from night to night the details may change and even develop as the run of the show continues. Come to the first night and last night and you may find the underscore has morphed over time.
I suppose my inspirations were fantasy movies like Legend or Dark Crystal but tinier. Daintier. We’re in the world of bugs. It’s a fairy tale, a tragedy, a comedy. I want the music to sound like all of these but not on a grand scale. These are innocent creatures grappling with huge emotions. Our sound is small and intimate but can flourish into something magical.I’m using a lovely set of virtual instruments called Impressionism by Spitfire Audio. This virtual instrument is a love letter to 150 years of impressionist art. It’s filled with brightly colored hues, pastel washes of strings and woodwinds, harps and vibraphones and even some atonal clusters. Mixed in with this are some nylon guitar and some big, often menacing low end strings. Not a piano in the whole show!”
THE BUTTERFLY’S EVIL SPELL is on stage May 7 – June 1 at the Straz Center in downtown Tampa.
