Shrek the Musical - Music and Stories

Written by Joshua Iyer
Published: July 2, 2014 at 3:10 AM [UTC]

I've had three rehearsals for Shrek the Musical. The pit orchestra is more like a chamber group - there are only two violins, and the rest of the instruments are percussion, drum-sets, two keyboards with different channels of instruments, and then winds and brass. In playing one of the violin parts, I have 116 pages of music to learn and practice! In those three rehearsals, two last week, one this week, we've sightread most of the book, and at home I've been marking fingerings. It's a lot of fun to play in a musical - to tell a story through literally music, as I've mentioned in past entries. Maybe when playing with the actors (our performances start at the end of July and beginning of August), it will inspire me even more with writing music for cinema, since it's not THAT different from theatre...

I've also been starting to slowly orchestrate the piano part of my violin concerto, where I tell the story of "Little Snow-White", Grimm's Tales, as well as continuing to plow through my Doctor Who suite for full orchestra. Additionally, I've been obsessing over the Animal Crossing movie. I've finally found a site where I can watch it, so I've been trying to see just how Kazumi Totaka uses his video game music, orchestrating it effectively, in a cinematic sense.

It's really cool what music adds to stories, and in telling two stories with composition (the Doctor Who one I actually wrote), one story through performance on violin, and one story through listening and analysis, I'm going to be able to have a lot of ideas if we still are able to do a film in August.

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