The band Incendio, who you helped co-found, performed with Ballet Fantastique at the Hult Center in 2011, 2013, and for the company’s sold out ZORRO® in 2018. What are you most looking forward to in this next BFan collaboration?
In the previous shows BFan choreographed to music that was already written and recorded, and that we had all played for years. This is a completely different situation. This is all new music that has never been performed or available. The album with all the artwork is just being made. I am looking forward to the experience of playing and performing the music live with all these incredible musicians and seeing the choreography with the costumes and lighting. Really seeing the whole thing come together is so exciting!
Our dancers are very excited to get to perform to your live music! Does working with dancers influence how you play as opposed to performing a concert solo?
Absolutely! You must make sure that the timing and arrangements are exact! You can’t change the tempo or extend a solo. We also are watching for the cue from the ballet to start the piece. It’s all very exacting in a way that we don’t ever really worry about when we play without the ballet.
Our Robin Hood & Maid Marian performance is set in the 12th century. How has this time period influenced the score you created? Tell us about the process of choosing instruments to compliment a more contemporary ballet while also staying true to the time period in which the story is set.
Donna and Hannah had a very strong idea of what kind of music they wanted. When COVID hit, the direction changed. Pre-COVID, they were wanting music that was a bit more like Pirates of the Caribbean, but I think COVID was an awakening to what the reality of that time was, which was pretty dark and sad.
So I am pretty familiar with renaissance and medieval music, having studied and performed it extensively in the past. I really love that style as well as modal music. We have some older folk instruments, the tres, charango, mandolin and I bought a saz from Turkey for the project. The nylon string guitar has a lot of similar qualities to the lute—we also used steel and 12 string guitars. We tuned the guitars to an open D tuning for quite a few pieces as the music in that time period was modal. This period is before Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier.” Lisa plays the Celtic harp, cittern, bass and percussion. Aryeh plays the fiddle, nyckelharpa, violin, cello and harp, and Eliot plays all forms of flute and fiddle. Did I mention how amazing it is to have all these musicians? Most people don’t even know what a Swedish nyckelharpa is, let alone play one! The music is very much centered around a D modality, with some pieces being in E and G, but mainly modal are though there are a few diatonic pieces. The instruments from that period are designed for that music so if I’m writing for them there is not going to be a lot of chord changes or modulations.
We also wanted to marry that style to much bigger drums and some very big orchestration that wasn’t going on at that time. Adding big drums is always fun and impactful. If I was writing more full orchestrations or diatonically I could not include certain instruments.
This kind of “fusing styles together” is what we’ve been doing with Incendio for years. I just had to conform that process to these different styles of music.
