Interview with Liza Carbé, Robin Hood Composer
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This Mother’s Day weekend, Ballet Fantastique brings our world premiere of Robin Hood & Maid Marian to the Hult Center stage.
In production process for a full three years, Robin Hood & Maid Marian represents exciting firsts for BFan’s in-house creative team, including the company’s first ever full score commission. BFan often works with original music and world-class composers, but has never before had the honor of having music written specifically for one of our stories! From the first incredible news that we had received a competitive Hult Endowment grant for this score commission, Ballet Fantastique Resident Choreographer-Producers Donna and Hannah Bontrager knew they wanted to work with longtime BFan collaborators Liza Carbé and JP Durand. This LA-based team has written music for Entertainment Tonight as well as Paramount movies and TV. Liza’s brand-new compositions and arrangements for Ballet Fantastique’s Robin Hood & Maid Marian premiere have been uniquely written to match Donna and Hannah’s intricate choreography and the story libretto crafted by BFan’s creative team. The score heightens the story’s drama and brings these heroic characters to life!
We wanted to reach out to Liza to hear her inside perspective on performing alongside BFan’s artists, learn about her career in music, and discover more about the process for creating the brand new score for Ballet Fantastique’s Robin Hood & Maid Marian.
In the 21st century, it’s incredibly unique to have a new score written for a new ballet. How unusual is it in the world of music? How is this project special to you?
First, I feel incredibly fortunate to have this opportunity and thankful to Donna and Hannah for choosing myself and JP, my husband and musical partner, to be part of this collaborative experience.
Writing a unique score for a ballet is something that doesn’t happen very often for many reasons. There are usually budget and time constraints and it’s just easier to focus on choreographing to existing music. There are dance companies that push the boundaries and are willing to take on the challenge, like Ballet Fantastique, of writing a grant and coming up with something completely new.
Working with BFan is something that I always look forward to! Seeing our music put to dance is always very exciting! Being a part of a joint creative process with BFan and writing the music to their vision is unique and exciting. This project has not just been about composing the music, but about understanding and creating music that supports and enhances BFan’s visual concept and storyline, while still being true to my artistic sensibilities.
We’ve also been very fortunate that by some serendipitous stroke of cosmic intervention we have the perfect team of musicians to perform this music. Lisa Lynne and Aryeh Frankfurter not only masterfully play many of the unusual instruments that are part of the score but live in Eugene and just happen to be very dear friends of JP and mine. Completing our team is flutist and violinist Eliot Grasso, a professor at the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance, whom I have not yet met in person.
LisA LYNNE
ARYEH FRANKFURTER
an instrument being played during robin hood
Tell us about your career in music! Where did you get started?
Both my parents were musicians, and my father was a visual artist from Sicily, so I grew up in the arts. I sang in my first musical when I was 6 and then started taking Spanish guitar lessons at age nine and accompanied myself singing folk and pop songs—then eventually started writing my own. I attended Cal State Northridge, where I got my Bachelor of Music with emphasis on classical guitar and voice. I studied a lot of composition and performed from renaissance to modern classical on guitar and voice as well as singing in Madrigal choirs.
During college, I started to play the bass and performed in rock bands all over Los Angeles. When I graduated from college, I went on the road with the female metal band Vixen. Then went on to do a world tour with R&B artist Leon Patillo, then did a two-year tour with Lindsey Buckingham (guitarist of Fleetwood Mac). Somewhere in the midst of all that, I had an original trio called Red Van Go. We put out a self-released CD and did two tours of Japan. There were all kinds of other crazy musical adventures throughout the years. Then in 1993 I met my husband, Jean-Pierre Durand, and we started writing music for Entertainment Tonight. We wrote hundreds of cues that eventually went into the Paramount music library. This led to us writing for more music libraries and scoring for TV shows and film (something that we continue to do). We have placements in the hit comedy Bridesmaids, Law and Order, Breaking Bad, The Big Bang Theory, the popular video game Far Cry 3 just to name a few.
Somewhere around 1999 we started our current world music group, Incendio, with our long-time partner Jim Stubblefield. We currently have eleven albums out and have toured and continue to tour all over the world.
JP and I started playing acoustic duo guitar versions of popular songs as well as originals and people were really enjoying the music, so started our “Carbé and Durand” duo. We have a couple of albums and quite a few singles as well. In 2022 we scored the Star Trek: Picard audio drama “No Man’s Land” featuring Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd and written by Kirsten Beyer and Mike Johnson. Kirsten Beyer is the co-creator of Star Trek: Discovery and one of the writers for Picard and a lovely human! During that year we also wrote and recorded a LoFi and a Metal album for IFM music library.
When I write this all down it looks impressive or schizophrenic. I’m not sure which. Probably both.
You are working currently alongside your husband and partner, JP Durand. What is that collaboration like and how has this partnership influenced your creation process for this new score for Robin Hood & Maid Marian?
I have the extremely good fortune of having an incredible personal and professional partner. We met playing in a band, so our partnership started out on a professional note.
We found out that we worked very well together (and fell in love) both having different strengths that complement one another. Any type of creative collaboration is very tricky—you need to have a partner that not only shares and understands your sensibilities but one that you trust. We are both thankful to have that in each other! We rely on each other to review each other’s work and listen and look for anything the other may have missed.
We collaborate in many ways. Sometimes we sit down and write a piece together from the start. Other times, one of us has an idea and we use that as a starting point. We both come in with songs that are close to being complete and the other will add something to it, perhaps a countermelody or another production idea. Then there are other times when one of us will pretty much work on our own.
This project was one like that for me. This type of orchestration and style is more in my wheelhouse, so I wrote all the music. JP helped with the production and did all of the mixing, mastering and technical support. He is also my other set of ears catching things that I missed, which is invaluable! Most importantly he supplies me with red wine and chocolate, and I listen to his obscure facts and stories.
What will audiences love about this show?
Well, I hope they love the dance, music and story, obviously (laughs)! BFan productions are always an immersive experience. They design and create their own costumes, which are always colorful and perfect for the production; they hand-pick or help direct the music production for each scene; they are meticulous about the stage design and lighting; and of course, they are master choreographers. It’s an amazing vision that they have developed over time, as well as developing a loyal audience. So, with the care and commitment they always deliver, I am sure that the audience will feel like they have been transported back to the medieval period. Their dancing and energy are so inspiring!
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.
For Ballet Fantastique, collaborating with you to create our first-ever full-length score has been a dream come true. What has it been like for you to create a full-length score for a ballet? Have there been any unexpected challenges or opportunities?
With any new project, things come up that are unforeseen. Robin Hood was completely unchartered territory for us. The music unfolded as BFan conceptualized what they wanted so there were lots of changes and revisions. I was also trying to get a handle on how to get the sounds that they were looking for. They did send me examples so that helped but it was an evolving process for sure.
Then there was a lot of down-time due to COVID and coming out of COVID. Usually, I would use that time to finish the music but—because I wasn’t always sure what they wanted, I would wait until we all regrouped. In retrospect having all this time was a good thing, as it gave all of us time to let the concept and the music develop. When we write for something like Star Trek: Picard “No Man’s Land,” we write, record, make revisions and hand in the music. But with the ballet, there are charts that need to be made for ourselves and all the musicians, there are tracks we will be playing with that incorporate all the orchestration, and, of course, we have to all get together to rehearse. So, there are a lot of technical and logistical considerations that we hadn’t initially thought about.
The opportunity to write all this music as well as perform with BFan and all these wonderful musicians was an unexpected opportunity. We will see what other adventures arise from this.
My attitude is always say yes and then figure out how to make it happen!