I love it when the blobs come to life!
We’re doing a bonus Cabaret this year. (get your tickets! Wednesday, June 8!) For me, that means taking an other stack of piano-vocal scores and turning them into band arrangements for a pro rhythm section.
By far, the most exciting part to me is when we start playing in our dress rehearsal. These bars of music that I’ve speedily notated for the band become living music between collaborators. Even now, as I’m writing the final charts, I’m getting excited about it.
I get excited because this static thing – blobs on a page – becomes music so easily in the right hands. I get excited because when you step back, it can become hard to believe, that this hacked-together notation system is sufficient to allow musicians to be on the same page for music they’ve never played together. I get excited because so often, I spend hours of rehearsal getting young musicians ready to perform, and it’s a thrill to be performance ready on the first or second time through.
But most of all I get excited because writing music is what I love to do. And I love to write music because it becomes music.