Cue the orchestra: The intersection of art 080924

Share this story...

Cue the orchestra: The intersection of art, fashion and music at the Pageant of the Masters

By MARRIE STONE

Photos by Jeff Rovner

Night after night, many Pageant-goers gather on the Festival green before the show to enjoy live music. Whether it’s jazz, blues, rock, opera or country, the bands are the stars of the show. When the Pageant bell rings, guests take their seats in the Irvine Bowl to watch art come alive. But what some don’t realize is the world-class concert they’re about to attend. Even those who know the surprising talent that occupies the orchestra pit may not understand what it takes to make this music happen and the extraordinary amounts of coordination and cooperation required.

I spoke with Pageant Director Diane Challis Davy, scriptwriter Dan Duling, Music Director Albert Wood Potts III and William Liston, one of the Pageant’s long-time composers, to uncover the magic behind the music. What I learned may surprise you.

Click on photo for a larger image

Pageant of the Masters Producer and Director Diane Challis Davy

Serving up a musical feast…from scratch

Contrary to my assumption that the Pageant relies on existing musical scores, I discovered the orchestrations are largely original, composed anew every year for each show. Challis Davy enlists seven or eight composers to write the songs that accompany each piece of art. For the past 15 years, Liston has played an integral role in composing roughly a third of the show.

“Bill Liston is often my first call for segments that incorporate singing, dancing and movement,” Challis Davy said. “He has a way of enhancing the drama and storytelling. I can’t explain his talent, but it is magical. He’s a shapeshifter, comfortable with any musical period or style you can think of. And he’s a virtuoso instrumentalist on the saxophone and clarinet.”

Click on photo for a larger image

Composer, arranger, orchestrator and woodwind soloist William Liston

Sometime between January and March, Liston receives pdfs of the art and script. “This gives me a visual and idea of what the narration will be. Then I go into brainstorming mode. Richard Doyle, the narrator, records three or four takes of each line. They choose between those demos – the flow and timing. Once we have our demo, I write the music to accompany it,” Liston said.

“My job is to capture the emotions behind the visuals without pulling people’s attention away from the stage. And my job is to accept that the music isn’t the focus, except when there is no narration (maybe during a scene change or when the artwork is only accompanied by music).”

Liston researches the art and composes a score apropos to the period. He also creates a musical bed that runs beneath the narration, ensuring that when Doyle speaks, he’s not competing with the orchestra.

Click on photo for a larger image

Narrator Richard Doyle

It’s a well-coordinated dance. Duling also keeps the music in mind when writing the script. “As I’m composing the individual texts for the tableaux, I’m always imagining the tone, the attack, the subtlety of the music I’d like to hear accompany it. It’s another reassurance knowing Richard, my narrator, will adjust his performance to complement the musical bed.”

Liston occasionally uses existing soundtracks as inspiration for his own creations. For example, this year’s show – À La Mode: The Art of Fashion – includes a tribute to eight-time Oscar-winning costume designer Edith Head. Head worked on 11 Hitchcock films. À La Mode includes five pieces to honor her creations, including two movie posters and two colored-pencil sketches of Tippi Hedren and Grace Kelly. Liston used a bit of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo soundtrack to inform his score.

“Herrmann is one of my heroes in the movie genre because he did such original music,” Liston said. “It was minimalistic, but it had such impact. Understated but brilliant. I wrote original music that captured the feeling of several Hitchcock films, including To Catch a Thief with Cary Grant.”

Click on photo for a larger image

A view of the orchestra pit, which includes 20 professional musicians

For the segment entitled “Fabulous Footwear,” Liston used musical themes he’d created earlier in the show, twisting them around at the end to accompany the final piece – Angel Shoes. “It was fun taking my earlier themes and modernizing them with quirky instrumentation,” he said.

For 18th and 19th century artwork, Liston draws from music written during the time (this year Bach, Handel, Debussy and Rachmaninoff). Classical music has the bonus of being available in the public domain. He adapts the pieces, taking long scores and condensing them into 30-second or two-minute chunks to fit the show. This sounds easier than it is. “There are big decisions to be made. It can’t sound like I’m throwing a blob of yellow onto a blue canvas. It needs to flow in and out of my original music,” he said.

Click open story button to continue reading…

The Pageant’s Met Gala posed a different kind of challenge. The eight pieces included in this section meant Liston needed to write a long block of music to accommodate not only the varied works, but the robust narration. “Those longer segments force me to consider not only what type of music will work, but where the applause breaks happen in the music. If I can turn a 15-minute segment into five 3-minute segments, the work is easier. The audience gets a breather. Maybe something overwhelms them, or makes them laugh, and there’s a natural place to have a break. I have to be focused on both the details and the big picture.”

Click on photo for a larger image

Miles McAllister on trumpet and Dillon MacIntyre on trombone

Then there are the moods – and emotional turns – Liston needs to manage throughout the show. “I want to bring the applause up for the intermission to whet the audience’s appetite for the second act. That last segment needs quicker music or louder sound. That all needs to be considered. Sometimes I work backwards to the beginning. Approaching it in reverse allows me to see if I’m looking at it the right way. It requires a little abstract thinking.”

Duling highlighted one moment he hopes will capture the audience’s attention. “In this year’s Pageant, one of my favorite marriages of narration, musical support and theatrical invention results in a transcendent moment. The mood established by the music for John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X [appearing at the conclusion of Act One] draws us into the artist’s dilemma from a standpoint of emotional vulnerability that pays off when we let the audience in on Sargent’s solution. It’s a theatrical coup I’ve wanted to do for years and, in one swift gesture, the art of ‘living pictures’ works its special magic.”

Click on photo for a larger image

Pageant scriptwriter Dan Duling

The Pageant’s perennial finale, The Last Supper, is accompanied by a perennial piece. “Meditation,” composed by Jules Massinet for the opera Thaïs, was also arranged and orchestrated by Liston. “It’s a nice way to end the show, bringing it down gradually to a reverent ending,” Liston said. “Returning fans are used to that. It’s a touching piece of music.”

It’s all about the timing

Sitting in the audience, it all feels so seamless. The artwork appears on stage, the lights go up, Doyle’s silky voice delivers humorous backstories about each piece while the music plays along. But behind the scenes, not a second is left to chance. If Doyle pauses at the wrong moment (he never does), if a work of art is delayed (it never is), if the conductor misses his cue (that’s never happened), the show would be thrown off kilter. There’s no room for error, so every member of the team ensures that errors never happen.

This magic trick requires meticulously prepared demo tapes, click tracks (a kind of metronome embedded in the musician’s ear) and a video monitor of the stage propped on the conductor’s music stand.

“We use similar techniques to how films are recorded in studios to synchronize the music with the picture,” said Music Director Albert Potts. “That’s how we synchronize the music to the stage. Then there’s a person in the booth whose sole job is to cue the narrator to be in sync with the music. It’s far more technical than most people realize.”

Click on photo for a larger image

Music Director and keyboardist Albert Wood Potts III

Potts conducts the orchestra while also playing the keyboard. “It’s very much like how Broadway shows are done,” he said. “We’re able to augment the sound, making it feel bigger and more symphonic while creating synthesized sound effects that go with the show. The 20-piece orchestra creates a full sound to begin with, but adding three keyboard players makes it feel much larger and gives us a lot of flexibility with the effects.”

What makes this work are the skills and talents of the professional musicians, and the low turnover from year to year. “Everybody has played together so many times that the first rehearsal is like greeting a bunch of old friends. We sit down and pull it together very quickly,” Potts said.

“With this level of professional musicians and narration, even what they think is not a good night would never be noticeable to the audience,” Liston added. “We’re talking about gradations of 1%.”

Click on photo for a larger image

Music Director Albert Wood Potts III at work

The crazy things we never think about

Musicians will know how much the weather impacts the instruments. Outdoor concerts, particularly near the ocean where the climate fluctuates, make it tricky to keep on key. If it’s hot, woodwinds and brass instruments go sharp, but strings go flat.

Then there’s performing inside the Irvine Bowl, known for its rustic natural surroundings and lush vegetation. That means critters in the orchestra pit. Musicians have contended with mice, snakes, skunks and even a scorpion.

A few years ago, a freak lightning storm hit the sound booth and traveled from the top of the amphitheater’s directing booth, through the electrical equipment and down into the orchestra pit. Fortunately, no one was injured. The team scrambled throughout the day to get an alternate sound system for that evening’s show.

That same year, rains came down hard during one performance. “The liner above me has a zipper,” Potts recalled. “It started pouring through that seam and straight onto me. I was afraid I’d be electrocuted, but we carried on.”

Challis Davy shared her own rainstorm memory. “Robert Peterson continued to play his violin solo during The Last Supper as others abandoned the pit.”

Better than the original

Potts finds himself right at home at the Pageant. He came from a long line of artists and is an avid art collector himself. I asked if he’d ever been tempted to purchase different types of work based on what he’s seen on stage.

“I prefer what I see on stage to the originals,” he told me. “That’s probably terrible to say, but some of them are done so well. Something about a life-sized model adds an element to the original pieces that – no matter how good – can’t compare. For example, there are two magnificent butterfly brooches that end this year’s show. They’re 10 feet tall. You could never see the exquisite, tiny details on these brooches unless they’re expanded to life-sized pieces. The Pageant really does bring these artworks to life.”

Potts’ observation is an apt analogy to how his own orchestra, with its enhanced keyboards and bold sound effects, functions against a traditional orchestra. The details expand so the audience can inhabit an enhanced life-sized listening experience. Not to mention the element of the unknown inherent in any live theater performance. An errant scorpion, that random lightning bolt, the unexpected downpour run alongside that show-must-go-on mentality that fuels the Pageant. It makes for exciting nights. Lest you forget that, the Pageant’s orchestra is there to remind you.