By guest blogger Josh Schmidt, Music Composer of Baal
Baal came to me through Keith Parham's idea that I would enjoy working with Zeljko Dukich. Keith was of course right. Not only did I instantly respond to Zeljko's vision of this wildly intense, complicated, and mysteriously personal play - but I responded to the text and its emotions itself. Vividly.
From the beginning I saw this piece as a sort of dark pastoral - this world in which we are always redirected toward our natural roots, and always forced to see our natural endgame - death. Mortality has a unique and powerful way of uniting all of us rich or poor, tall or short, fat or thin, pretty or not - and our protagonist lives his life as if each day will be his last - and he experience life to its fullest and on his own selfish and self-serving level.
Nevertheless - hard, full-out living has its consequences even on those internally wired to exist in no other way. Baal's intense experiences eventually become a burden which increases through time, aging him - perhaps even mellowing him to the point where we all get - the point at which the need for stability and the love of another outweighs the craving and dedication for a lifestyle on the fringe. This is the nexus, I feel, where all of us as humans reach either come to terms with maturity - not in a conventionally thought of maturity through the lens of civilized society, but one of emotion and personal value
I came to realize what the music of Baal should be on a visit to Lisbon, Portugal. There, my wife and I went to an after-hours Fado jam session. Fado is the Portuguese word for fate - and indeed this is the music of human fate, and with it hunger, love, sex, death, and this curiously powerful notion of the loss of something that once was - not simply nostalgia, but a word that has no English counterpart -saudaudes.
The performance took place in a crowded room filled with locals (we were the only tourists, brought by our friend who wanted us to experience the "real" thing. The room was lit with a single bulb, and when music played the crowd was deathly silent. All of Fado is derived from chord progressions that have been around for centuries; its text four line stanzas which in cases like these are often improvised around melodies that are references of tunes in the air for generation but retain the distinct personal spin of the person singing. And you share with the crowd your fate - in the dark, in silence. Then on the last verse the performer is rendered mute for two lines, and the crowd wordlessly and reverently hums the reflection of your fate, your pain in their own personal way, all of this leading to rousing finish.
This was to be the music of Baal. And how convenient that all of indicated songs in the text could be organized in quatrains.
If you would like to hear Fado - type it in on your Itunes Store interface, or look up artists like Amalia Rodrigues or Mariza. It will be worth the search...
But inspiration does not stop there - in the hands of Ian Westerfer (Baal), Wain Parham (Music Director) and our fabulous cast - all sorts of other parallels have emerged. When we share our fate, our pain - all sorts of personal experiences both in life and music can color the music in unexpected ways. What at once seems like a didactic imposition can now sound like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Violent Femmes, Marlene Dietrich, Nick Lowe... the list is as endless at the cumulative life experiences of our cast and director dictate. This ensemble mentality and the play's demands on our personal investment force me out of the rehearsal room, leaving only the barest of musical skeletons in the hands of these capable artists to flesh out on their own. When I return, I am amazed at the transformation. This is much less my music; this is the music of us. It may be different every night, much like the Fado jam sessions in Lisbon, where the energy, the fate, the pain of a new audience will invariably color the end product. Who could ask for anything more alive than that?