Will it never end?

My husband the composer is very busy right now, orchestrating sections of his opera, a work in progress, for workshops in the city of my birth and then in the city of its premiere at the end of February and beginning of March respectively. I am very busy copying his orchestrations and producing parts for the players. We’re a regular team, he and I.

Also at the end of February, one of Canada’s major symphony orchestras will premiere a new work by my husband the composer for narrator and orchestra. The narrator is a very famous guy, as you can see from the linked programme, and Hubby asked months and months ago if he could read music or not. He never got an answer.

So he wrote the piece, a 15-minute work for triple winds and brass (which is a loud band, in case you’re wondering), giving the narrator places to speak where he is cued by the conductor, and others where he has actual rhythms. I copied it, extracted parts and sent them off to the librarian. I wrote about that ordeal earlier. I have also developed quite an intimate relationship with said librarian as he called me repeatedly with different requests. The last time I spoke to him, I said that he wasn’t to contact me again unless he wanted to tell me how wonderful I was. In other words, I had done enough.

He called today, however, with some very bad news. It turns out that the famous actor does not know how to read music. His agent requested that a score be made for him, with a recording, that will allow him to learn his part considering his musical illiteracy.

There is no recording. The piece hasn’t been performed yet. Hubby and I listened to the midi playback of the Finale file, and it sounds absolutely awful. I spent the entire evening making a separate part (originally we thought the narrator would use the full score). It was more of an arduous task than one would have thought. I sent both the part and Finale file of the full score off to the librarian with a note dictated by my husband suggesting that he engage the services of some enterprising computer music geek to make a passable midi recording from it.

Needless to say, I got no work done on the opera score tonight. At one point I had to get up and leave the computer, complaining that I felt like I was covered with ick. Hubby asked what that was, and I said that my skin felt like it was crawling. After walking around the house, putting a log on the fire and scarfing down a handful of dried blueberries, I felt better and got back to work. I will talk to the librarian tomorrow, and warn him he’ll be getting another bill.

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