Untamed Woman

Music Notes

Ursula and I collaborated over zoom since she was based in New York and I was in Colorado.  Before I started writing the first note of music, Ursula and I sketched out the ballet story and segmented it into  four movements.  Once we had the story outlined,  I went to work, creating the music for each movement and reviewing it with Ursula, revising it until it had the mood and energy that Ursula envisioned for her choreography.

I felt strongly that the music be performed by live musicians on stage with the dancers.  Based on the space (and budget), we agreed to a trio of piano, viola and cello.  In addition, Ursula requested that I include a shamanic drum, an instrument that Ursula uses in her spiritual and meditative sessions, and is not normally paired with traditional string instruments.  

During one of our creative sessions, Ursula shared that she had a melody that kept replaying in her head.  I encouraged her to sing it to me over the phone so I could transcribe it.  The melody became the musical theme  that links the four movements.  Within each movement, I used fragments of the melody or created new variations which communicated the emotions and story that Ursula wanted to tell. 

The Adante movement introduced the notes of the primary theme, but did not fully reveal it.  Ursula led a workshop with the dancers and together they developed movements inspired by the music. But as often goes with creative projects, they ran out of time to complete the choreography.  A week before our premiere, Ursula asked me to cut ninety seconds of music without impacting the choreography she had already completed.  This is when my film score training became useful.  Using a video of the first movement, I strategically cut 32 bars of music and tested it with the existing choreography.  The new version fit perfectly with the movement and phrasing that the dancers had already rehearsed.  In fact, I felt the first movement flowed even better without the 32 bars.  Sometimes a shorter statement is better!

During our creative process, we decided that a ballet about the human experience needed human voices.  The second movement, Moderato, starts with a solo voice singing a motif embedded in the original theme.  Eventually the voice fades away and the music moves forward with each instrument having a turn to present a variation of the theme.   When mocking up this movement for Ursula, I realized I did not have the right voice samples to demo the piece for her and I did not have a good enough voice to sing the part.  My niece, Lauren Gunnelson, who sang with an a cappella group in college, was visiting me around this time.  I asked if she would sing the part I wrote so I could record her voice in my mock up as a placeholder.  When I played the recording at our Denver Open Rehearsal program, I had people coming up to me at the end of the show telling me how much they loved “that voice.”  So Lauren’s voice became the “mystical” voice of the second movement!

The third movement was originally written for a “new works” concert.  I wrote a musical suite which included segments of the first two movements of Ursula’s ballet and finished with an energetic Allegro.  I was under a deadline for the concert and Ursula and I had not discussed the music for the third section of her story.   When I shared the finished movement with Ursula, she immediately connected with the energy and fast tempo.  The only catch was that she wanted it to be longer.  She loved the last nine bars and wanted me to expand it from a short punchy ending into a full second section.  Inspired by Beethoven’s technique of extending the endings of his symphonies, I transformed the original nine bar ending into a 59 bar coda, which delighted Ursula and allowed her to fully choreograph her story.

For the fourth movement, the Adagio, Ursula came up with the idea of using her voice, which has a rich, deep and earthy tone.  In her spiritual practice, Ursula usually sings extemporaneously, improvising as she feels the music in her body.  This presented a challenge since the dancers needed music that would be performed consistently at each performance.  I had sketched out a chord progression for the fourth movement that I shared with Ursula while she was visiting me at my home studio in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.   She started singing with the harmony, so I turned on my microphones and started recording her.  Ursula went into a trance and began improvising, expressing the pain, sorrow, and resolution of her personal life experience.  

I took the recording and edited it, reordering sections to create a musical structure, and building and adding layers of Ursula’s voice, so that it could be played with the live performance of the piano, viola, cello, and shamanic drum.  The result is a unique composition that begins quietly, builds to a raucous intensity of four layers of Ursula’s voice plus all the instruments, and concludes with Ursula’s solo voice and the cello.  Ursula choreographed a stunning dance that brings the ballet to an emotionally charged ending as the dancers perform Ursula’s choreography to the sound of her complex, primal voice.