More AYLI music, part 3, maybe?

You may recall that I needed to orchestrate “Juno’s Hymn” and “Juno’s Gigue” for the EDM environment of As You Like It’s 5.4. Here they are.

I suspected that this was going to be too heavy/dense for my cast to cut through, Hymen’s solo in particular, and so it was. I will have to thin it out before showtime.

Here’s the dance:

Much more successful: very joyous, very catchy — the piece’s infectiousness is the only reason I didn’t try to rewrite the Hymn.

And then on Monday I realized I really needed to take a stab at Hymen’s entrance music for rehearsal that night. You may recall that this moment — the completely improbable court masque bursting onto the Forest of Arden — was the trigger for my whole concept of the Forest as Temporary Autonomous Zone and the EDM music that permeates the show.

(To recap, it occurred to me that the awe factor for the original audience might be approached, if not replicated, by a very contemporary treatment: festival music, smoke machine, lasers, etc.)

So I pulled up GarageBand with its library of techno/EDM sounds/loops and started playing with it. And lo! this stuff is good. (It was also a lot of fun to work on.)

Not only is it perfectly cromulent as music per se, I was gratified to see that it beautifully underscores the moment onstage.

I do have to keep going, linking the Entrance (underscore the dialog into the Hymn), the Hymn (underscore into Jaques de Boys’ entrance) and the Gigue (underscoring the Epilogue into curtain calls).

Cras melior est.