"Mama's Mantra"

We had our first assessment this past weekend, after hearing our actors sing and read ... what a joy to hear something you've created out of your head actually manifest and be interpreted through professionals!

The RED Team has three musicals, and all three went up -- happy to say we came in the closest to time (15 minutes), but of course, we didn't have all our songs done either. I unfortunately goofed with our lead, Cain -- I didn't think he was as much a tenor as he was, so I'm just hiking up his music up a third or a fourth. He'd auditioned with "Joanna" from Sweeney Todd (lovely tenor!) but did The Beast from Beauty and the Beast too (strong, strong baritone as well!), so I didn't even pay attention to range. My mistake. Such a gorgeous voice -- I gotta take advantage of it! Take a gander here:

Christopher singing "The Christmas Song"

I love me a man that sings! (Yes, Maureen, I KNOW he's married, that's not the point, the boy's got a voice! :)

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After the actors left and commented on their roles (same five actors in all three shows), we proceeded with our two-hour/per show assessments. Not such a bad experience for us -- there were a lot of clarity issues re: story, but only for the better, and pretty good about the music and lyrics.

Did I ever mention the title of our show?

"Cain and Abel: The Naked Truth"

We've met about our restructuring, and "Mama's Mantra," the lullaby I tortured myself with earlier, has been cut. :( I teasingly tell our lyricist that that's the LAST TIME I ever write a piece before I get a lyric because it's too easy for them to "disappear"!

But it's true -- it slows the show down (which is comedy DEATH) and doesn't really pay off. Oh well. Hopefully I'll use it again somewhere, sometime.

Hope you like it.

"Mama's Mantra"

What a nightmare!

I've spent all night researching and listening to lullabies so I could be go off and be intuitive and write 16 bars (or rather 32 -- AABA format). I even talked to Mom about her singing... she was just "too busy" to sing to me:

"Besides, honey, you were a good baby. I gave you milk and you were happy. And if I was asleep, you'd play quietly in your crib as long as you could see that I was there."

Even though she couldn't remember her own mother singing and especially her never having time to rock any of us (except the youngest who was a bit sickly and uncomfortable), it was cool to talk about this. I don't feel like she plowed me with milk to shut me up (my original excuse for growing up fat -- which is a lie anyway since I was a skinny kid!), but she actually had a nice memory of back then. That's not usually her strong point, Mom is a no-nonsense, let's get work the done kind of gal. (But I also know why too: she was always disobeying her own mother so she could go out and play! hehehe Hence, the music to Pilya...)

In any case, I'm having a hard time starting this damn thing and have a terrible headache and case of cabin fever. So I'm buying batteries for my roll-up piano, bringing some headphones and going to the park or the library.

I just need to have something on paper for my collaborators TODAY or I'm in deep scheduling poop.

Oh, and by the way, the very last thing Mom said is she does remember her mom humming/mumbling or singing something to her little brother to get him to sleep, but it wasn't anything that had words or a tune she could remember.

Wow, validation... isn't that cool?!

Lullaby

Hi Heidi and Viv,

I'm writing you two because you were in class when I wrote "Lily" -- the piece that I still hum to Kate at bedtime?

Well, I'm working on a lullaby for the mini-musical tonight and look what I read in wikipedia:

Asia has its own versions of the lullaby as well. In Tamil (a language of southern India), a lullaby is called a thaalattu (thal means "tongue"). A melodious sound is created by frequent movement of the tongue at the beginning of the song, hence the name.

But most notably is the use of the oyayi in the Philippines, also called huluna in Batangas. In fact, the use of a song in putting a baby to sleep is so popular that almost every mother in the province is said to have composed at least one lullaby for her child.

So I don't know if I should be mad or assume my mom had one and just forgot? I know when she had her first grandchild she could only come up with church hymms in English... but she was always singing to get the baby to sleep... so maybe I'm not so "left out" after all...

I feel very comforted for some reason, and wanted to share.