COMPOSER

How do you work?

Before beginning on a new song or cycle, I choose a subject, poet, or idea and find a text that seems to illuminate what I have in mind. I look for texts that are primarily lyrical, and texts that seem to me to have music in them. Then I study the texts, looking up definitions of various words where multiple meanings may apply, reading them out loud to hear the actual sounds of the words and feel the rhythms in my voice in a very physical way, and arranging them in a way as to form either a concrete narrative arc or at least a logical progression (where a continuous story is not as strongly implied).

Because I’m a pianist by training, I’ve found the most natural way for me to write music is to improvise – playing various possibilities at the piano, while singing vocal lines until I find a combination of piano and vocal music that seems to fit the text properly. I usually do this very quickly (what my first teacher, Frederic Rzewski, used to call “crashing through”), often getting an entire song done in a day or two.

Editing is next, and here is where everything slows way down. After writing a song in a day, I can often spend a week or two inputting the music into Sibelius software, and then going through and asking all the appropriate questions. Did I get the right notes? What are the dynamics? Are tempos such that text can be easily sung so an audience doesn’t have to strain to hear the words? Is that vocal line going to be enjoyable to sing?

Once the details of the music have been established, I hand off the Sibelius file to my husband (a highly trained musician) who also works in electronic publishing. He prepares the final layout for the score before we proofread it.

The proofreading stage can also take a while. It is so hard to see one’s own work in an objective way. Here, too, my husband works with me. Between the two of us, we usually go through a series of round-trips through correcting, revising, and updating the engraved score…and after each update, we proofread until there is nothing remaining to change. We sometimes perform as many as six round-trips back and forth between us, correcting and revising as we go.

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