Starting to feel alive again... with options!

Slowly recuperating, enough to make myself tackle looking at both MuseScore and Dorico (5), the two music programs competing for my affections after being abandoned by Finale.

There is other news, actually. Mike Funt, the world-famous clown and playwright, once asked me to write a song to introduce his drag persona, Miss Ella, giving the audience the exposition to understand where she came from. (Pascagoula, but she never talks about that.) It was great fun to work on, and casting about for something to perform at the Really Matters Theatre on May 23 (at Southern Arc Dance Center), I remembered “The Ballad of Miss Ella” and emailed Mike, now working in Shanghei at Universal Studios, asking if he’d mind if I performed the number.

Of course not, he said, and then I asked him if he’d like to pick up where we left off turning his brilliant Marx Bros version of The Romancers into a musical. (It’s already been turned into a musical called The Fantasticks; you may have heard of it.) We had started a decade or so ago and then, as Lichtenbergians do, just stopped.

Yes! he cried gleefully, and so this afternoon I uncovered the show’s .musicxml files that I’d exported from Finale and started with the most complete song, “I Would Never,” in which Thurgood (think Groucho) rips through a patter song of all his unfortunate exes:

There’s a lot you could say for Gertrudë:
She was clean and she came when you called.
I’m afraid I could not have been ruder
When I found she was totally bald.

And so forth, for endless verses. Great fun.

I opened the song file in both Dorico and MuseScore, and I have to say that now MuseScore has the edge: It opened it cleanly and handled the spacing of the seven or so verses perfectly; Dorico, not so much.

Before I get to my main point, if I have one, I want to say that the five songs I started for the show are all killer, at least as much of them as I got done. (The most complete, “I Would Never,” is still missing its big finish, but that’s more or less a copy/paste job.) So we all have that to look forward to, and I have a new impetus to start learning MuseScore for real.

Here’s what bowled me over.

We all know my near-desperation to see William Blake’s Inn produced. One of the issues with the piece is that it needs a full-ish orchestra to perform — that’s both expensive and a lot to pull together. Hoping to lighten that load for potential producers, I took the original piano sketch for “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” which served as a guide for the orchestral score but otherwise was not really playable, and turned it into a 2-piano version which worked fairly well.

I haven’t really listened to it since I did it, and since none of you people have stepped up to perform it, it’s just lain there for a decade or more. So I decided to see what MuseScore would make of it.

Mercy. I was overwhelmed. It needs some polish/adaptation, but heavens, I write pretty stuff. “Milky Way” is a stunning piece, if I do say so myself, and I do. (One of the original singers when we were trying to get Newnan to produce it assessed it accurately: “You feel as if you’ve gone on the journey.”)

Since it’s still in its first phase of adaptation into MuseScore, I’m going to share Finale’s concept of an audio file for you instead of MuseScore’s.

Here’s the score, and here’s the mp3:

Quick fun thing: When I went to Southern Arc’s website to see if they had Really Matters Theatre featured (they don’t), I was poking around and saw this:

This is a production photo of Getting Through Getting Over (2018), for which I wrote the music. Cool!