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Old Growth - MUSIC
Notes by Alex Eddington
Old Growth is not a musical -
but you could call it a piece of experimental music-theatre.
Or, a play with music. That's what I call it.
I am firstly a composer. Writing music is my vocation. In the last few years, I have been writing and performing my own plays on the Canadian Fringe Festival circuit. Old Growth is my third - but my first two-hander...and my first play with live music.
Which might be a little odd, since 2007's The Fugue Code was about J.S. Bach, and church organs, and all the characters were musicians.
So are the characters in Old Growth. Alex and Aura (they share our names, but they are not us) are music students. She graduated, but he dropped out. She plays flute, very well - and he's a composer, who has some hand-drums and does what he can with them. This is true of the real Aura and Alex too.
At the core of Old Growth are two suites of little pieces for solo flute - called "Branchings" and "For the trees" that I wrote for Aura back in November 2007. They were never supposed to be in the show. They were exercises; I gave myself the challenge of writing "music that sounds like a tree". These pieces are symmetrical. They're recursive! Like a spruce tree!
It turned out later in the process that this is just the sort of thing my character, character-Alex, would write for character-Aura, and that this is the way they would have put together their little ritual that they perform for the murdered Golden Spruce tree: they pieced it together from music they already had, music he wrote for her, music he wrote for the tree, music that they improvised together as they travelled and as they rehearsed. So this is basically what we did, minus the travelling. Yet.
"Working it out in rehearsal" is not something Aura and I do very often. We're classically-trained musicians. We like to have it on paper. So starting from a kernel of composed music (i.e. the "Branchings") was incredibly helpful. Aura's a superb improviser, though, and what she does with this material is largely her own. I play the drums. I do what I can with them...
And at the core of Old Growth is a travelling song, a song "that is like a simile that is a metaphor for a journey," as Alex says. They sang it into being - and so did we...
You can read more about the COMPOSER side of me (Alex Eddington) HERE
(and eventually listen to some excerpts... soon...)
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