In an earlier post, I described how the libretto for "Patricia" came about. At the end of the day, I had a bunch of pages of attractively formatted text and that was it.
Now for the music.
For the next couple of years, I episodically tried to get someone interested in composing the music, and finding a singer, for JUST ONE ARIA – sort of as a demonstration project – and always offering to pay for it. Several people expressed interest and took my contact information. I then typically never heard from them again, or in the rare cases when I did, things never went anywhere.
Puzzling this over, I came to a couple of tentative conclusions: as a non-musician, I was not part of what might be called “the club” and as a result not to be taken seriously, and my age may also have been a factor. I also started to think that the era of “starving musicians” must have come to a dramatic end. No one seemed in need of any additional income.
Then one day, driving back from the gym (late in life, I became, before the pandemic struck, a gym mouse – the diminutive form of gym rat), I saw a sign by the road advertising voice and piano lessons. You guessed it: the phrase “why not?” flew into my head. I stopped the car, wrote down the contact information and had the exceptionally good fortune of meeting Heidi Snyder who, after I described the feminist nature of “Patricia” and the type of music in which I was interested, was not only willing, but enthusiastic. Wow!!
Heidi, then a relatively recent arrival in Seattle, studied double bass, composition and vocal performance at the University of Michigan and had taught voice and piano for over 20 years. Working with her has not only been a great pleasure, but a major learning experience for me.
We started in mid-June 2019 and completed two arias by November of the same year: thought-out, composed, rehearsed (with a singer named Sarah who Heidi knew) and finally audio-recorded to piano accompaniment. At the same time, Heidi’s compositions had to be entered into “Finale,” a computer music notation program, from which they could be printed in a professional manner and, if necessary, relatively easily modified, or transcribed to, for instance, accommodate what is known as the tessitura (vocal range) of a particular singer.
This is a demanding process in part because of the unforgiving nature of technology, but also because of the very wide range of musical notation possibilities. It makes one’s head spin.
Heidi, coming from an earlier era, as it were, did not use “Finale” or any similar computer program so I had to purchase a not-inexpensive copy and enter all the notes and musical notation myself from her hand-written scores. It was a tedious job involving more than one pass through the music. I would complete a score, make a PDF file of it and send it to Heidi. She would review it, make corrections or improvements, photo those with her cellphone, and message the photos back to me. I would then correct the score in “Finale” and send her a new version. And so forth and so on, but the final product looked very professional.
All in all, producing a single song can be a major undertaking – and not inexpensive. But in this case, in large part because of Heidi’s compositional abilities and strong desire to get the finished product exactly right, the voice-with-piano-accompaniment recordings most definitely exceeded my expectations.
----
The final, orchestrated versions of the "Patricia's first two arias can be viewed here:
www.youtube.com/@operetta-patricia
The two songs (about 7 minutes in total) are "All my life I've been sensible" and "I'm good at my work." After playing the first, YouTube may take you off to other stuff that has nothing to do with me and you may have go back, perhaps by starting over. Be sure to start each song from the very beginning because there are a few spoken words that help to explain why the songs are being sung. There are also explanations of the songs, including the lyrics, just below the pictures of the videos if you are interested. Click on “more” when you see the text.
