Final Project -- Musica?

Okay.  So I liked Dr. Burton’s idea of having a collaborative group project where we come up with the main theme of a newly discovered Shakespeare play.  It sounded like most everyone wanted to do this, too.

Andrew had the idea of making Puck the main character of this new play, & since I have no other preference, that sounds fine to me. (Read about it on his blog:  Final Project Idea.) By the way, I agree with the play title of "Star-Crossed."

Aubrie also had a pretty good layout for the project (Final Project Idea).  I think it may work a little better to approach this as a film pitch than as a documentary, but you know, either way will be fine.  It would be cool to have someone write a few lines of Shakespeare-esqe text as an “excerpt” from the “lost play,” Aubrie create a storyboard, somebody else work on advertising, maybe have some psychologists talk about how this play is characteristic of other Shakespeare plays & shows his deep knowledge of human personalities/faults/preferences/etc. 

I would be happy to add a musical component to it, as well, and as far as I can tell, I have 3 ways of doing this:

1.      By incorporating some tunes I’ve already started. This would take probably more work/time on my part than I’ll be able to give, & anyway, I’m not really sure how to continue them—for those bits, it’s been more of a “when the muse strikes, write” situation.

2.      By adding to some mysterious/ambiguous/beautiful lines I’ve written in order to provide a background for the whole documentary/pitch/whatever, as long as the whole work isn’t too long, since there’s only so much time I can give. I would need to find performer(s) & recording technology for this, so if anyone can play an instrument or knows where to find & how to work such technology, I would be happy to hear from you.  (This option sounds like a lot of fun to me.)

3.      By finding music already written that would apply to scenes from the new play.  I could do this by listening to music that’s already finished & produced, choosing pieces that will go along well with parts of the play/documentary/film pitch.  For example, Chopin’s Prelude #3 might be a good background for a peaceful evening scene.  More fiery scenes might use music by Franz Liszt.  I could even look for Elizabethan-era music that Shakespeare himself would have used and listened to.

By the way, if people don’t feel like having music or if someone else wants to do it & we don't need another music specialist, I’d be fine with writing up some Shakespeare-esqe lines.

Well, there you have it, folks. TTFN!

FYI, here are links to a couple Chopin & Liszt songs as examples.  If you just want to listen to them for a nice classical background for studying, feel free. :)

Chopin:  Nocturne Op. 27 No. 2

Liszt:  Der Tanz in der Dorfschenke  (Fun fact:  this Mephisto Waltz was meant to protray the devil dancing around.  Enjoy!)