After several weeks of preparation and a spate of last-minute rehearsals, on Tuesday we finally put on our "Butterfly Lovers" collaboration, "we" in this case being me and three of my fellow students: singers Yi and Jeongyi, and pianist Chaoran. So it's time to ask: how did it go? I'll do this from two angles. Firstly, I'll talk a little about the performance itself - what worked well and what could have been done better. Then in my final post I'll move on to some wider thoughts about the collaboration that resulted in the show.
But before I do that, a word about the "opposition". I jest of course - I mean our fellow students' other collaboration group: Natalie, Nicole, Misia and Max. I have to say, their performance was fantastic: a live, partially improvised performance (on two violins, cello and voice) accompanying a series of short, impressionistic films on the subject of - and summoning up the mood of - dreams. The whole set balanced pre-recorded electro-acoustic soundscapes with live playing very convincingly, and the overall sense was one of unease and barely contained violence. I particularly enjoyed the last film, a kind of mashup of L'Age D'or and Blair Witch for the TikTok generation.
Clearly, the whole group had done a lot of work, but if I had to guess, I'd say that Misia and Nicole in particular had had to step some way outside their comfort zone, with Nicole playing cello to an at least partly indeterminate score, and Misia (ordinarily a fine pop singer) turning in a truly arresting set of Yoko-esque vocalisations (friends will know that I mean this very definitely as a compliment). If I had one very slight criticism it's that I think they could have made one of the pieces more, well, song-y. Now this is a bit ironic, because in our group I was pushing for the exact opposite! But given Misia's normal milieu I wonder if the others might have met her halfway? I'm thinking Yoko again here, but also Arthur Russell (I know Max is a big fan) or even Nico's post-Velvets work. Anyway, just a quibble - this was really great stuff.
So, on to our show - a very different beast indeed! (I won't go over the performance's form and content: my last post did that in some detail.) I think broadly it went very well - and certainly everyone truly "stepped up to the plate", to use that ghastly phrase. It was very apparent that everyone had done a lot of work on their individual contributions in the final few days before the show.
I've said before that the show was always going to be somewhat disparate, formally speaking, but the balance of pre-recorded tracks and atmospheres with live performance worked, I think, as did the balance of narration and song. Put another way, despite its very different parts, it was cogent structurally.
This was the first time we'd performed the piece with amplification, and while this led to a little trickiness (see below) it certainly gave the piece more punch. As a musical theatre specialist, Jeongyi has great mic technique, but this was apparently the first time that Yi had sung with a mic; nonetheless, once Jeongyi showed her how to avoid too much "mic pop", she handled it well. Their solo singing was of course great, but I especially enjoyed their singing together: the blend of very different vocal techniques made for a lovely sound.
Jeongyi wrote an English version of the folk tale which she narrated over some atmospheres I'd made from bits and bobs recorded at our rehearsals and the results were particularly effective. You could certainly tell that Jeongyi had previously studied stagecraft: her narration was perfectly paced (she also suggested stage directions to Yi which I thought brought their duets to life nicely).
The "big number", "Why Did You Make Me Fall in Love with You?" worked especially well, although it may be the piece in which the others were most in their comfort zone, so arguably it didn't entirely pass muster in terms of the project's aims - but it sure worked musically. The decision we made a few weeks back to break it down into slightly different textures was the right one, with solo and duo singing over piano accompaniment, followed by a brief but very lovely piano interlude (with Chaoran almost sounding Jarrett-like!) and a concluding beautiful a cappella duet. I'd made a few suggestions about the arrangement, but sat this one out and just enjoyed it.
So, the tricky sound issue... As I said, this was the first time we'd performed the piece with amplification, and I'm not entirely sure we got the balance right. We were positioned slightly behind the PA speakers with no monitoring; I had the opportunity to step out front during setup, and I think we broadly got it right, but it's hard to tell in the moment. In retrospect perhaps I should have sat at the front, but I didn't want to look too conspicuously like "the director", and I wanted to sit next to Chaoran both to be able to communicate with her clearly and also not leave her a little isolated on the stage. (As it happens, I think the staging - thrown together in minutes, truth be told - was pretty good, in an austere way.)
The problem with monitoring was especially felt in the first song proper in the set, "Who is He?" I've written about this previously, but in brief, I'd written and recorded a backing track for the piece that uses a lot of arpeggiation and delay which makes it potentially difficult for the others to follow. In our last couple of rehearsals, we'd pretty much nailed this, albeit with me doing a lot of pseudo-conducting. On the night, as it were, even I was struggling to keep track of proceedings, and we definitely drifted somewhat. That said, the drift only really happened in the last section of the piece, which is pretty much diatonic to Db, so I think we got away with it! But in all seriousness, I knew this was an accident waiting to happen and should have prepped a more straightforward backing, with clearer rhythmic cues.
The song that really didn't work, at least for me, was the closing number "The Truth", which Jeongyi and I performed as a voice and guitar duet. It's a rather lovely song, and Jeongyi sang it beautifully. It was my accompaniment that rather let it down. Given all the background research I did in preparing my recent Barrett Browning settings, I might have written a richer guitar part, but as it was, in truth I rather "jazz busked" it. Given the amount of layering and arrangement in the rest of the show, I think this closing duet was a whimper-not-a-bang moment.
But overall, I think the performance was a qualified success, and it was clear that the others really enjoyed participating in it. Next time, then, a final word about the collaborative process itself.