Spotlight on VOX: Scott Davenport Richards

 

This week, composer Scott Davenport Richards talks about his new work, Charlie Crosses The Nation, which will premiere at this year's VOX festival in May.

 

 

"Precarious line" conjures up the image of a vast chasm on each side of a piece of tennis court tape (at least to me).  Ordinarily, I might respond "Precarious? Why should it be precarious?" but recent events surrounding Senator Obama remind me that though the chasm may have shrunk to the size of a drainage ditch, it is still an obstacle.  If we are going to tell stories about America and Americans, how can we ignore American musical language?  We don't write the librettos in Italian.  I thought John Gay put an end to that 280 years ago.

 

 

The first thing I need to make clear is that this is absolutely not a work about Charles Mingus.  This piece's "Charlie" is both a composite and an allegory.  I was fascinated by the stage picture of a young man who has to travel through the world carrying the burden of a string bass.  (I was a bass player for a time.)  Like jazz, Charlie was born in a brothel, the illegitimate child of mixed African-American/European-American parents.  The sequence in Germany was inspired by stories my father and uncle told me about the segregated army, and Dave Brubeck's account of forming an integrated band in the segregated army.  I chose the name "Charlie" because there are so many famous jazz "Charlies;" Mingus, Parker, Hayden, Christian... and also because "Charlie" was the soldier's name for the enemy during the Vietnam War and there is still an echo of that meaning in the resonance of the name.

 

My exposure to August prompted me to begin listening to all the other things voices do besides pitch and rhythm.  When I played Sylvester, the stuttering nephew who ruins the recording session in the original Broadway production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, I was straight out of Yale, a newly minted B. A. in music who thought he knew everything.  I have to confess that when I first read the script, (we did Ma Rainey in a developmental staged reading at The O'Neill Center), I felt that it was re-hashing Black Revolutionary issues from the 60's and that the musician characters didn't seem to know how to talk about music, etc... I did not understand the power of the play until we got on our feet, performed it, and I discovered that the words had their own music.

 

From my father, who among many other accomplishments, developed, directed and produced August's first six plays at The Yale Rep and on Broadway, I learned patience.

 

 

Yes, definitely.  I am discovering ways to use shared motives and lyric hooks in ensemble sequences to combine multiple character's story lines.  I'm looking forward to the performance, because I hope to discover new ways to utilize the wide range in intimacy between the orchestra, the big band inside it, and the rhythm section inside that.

 

 

I am very grateful to the Jonathan Larson Foundation and the Larson Family for their invaluable and effective support of Musical Theatre artists.

 

Much of the music in Rent ("Santa Fe" aside) is a combination of a Rock/Gospel hybrid interspersed with some East Village Punk/New Wave.  Both of these styles rely on vocal power and melismatic virtuosity to convey emotional meaning rather than a precise understanding of every single word on first hearing, which is the goal with most American Musical Theater styles.  I can't help thinking that, somehow, the Grand Opera structure of La Boheme created space for the large voices of the characters in Rent to tell their stories successfully and that this is somehow a factor in its success.

 

Charlie Crosses The Nation is already something of a musical theater/opera hybrid.  It's sung and heavily orchestrated, but there are also a lot of words and they come at the singers very quickly.  The question is, where will it be produced?  In an opera house or in a musical theater?  There are definite advantages to either venue.