Mindplay Off-Broadway
Please forgive the radio silence - I’ve been busy for the last few months working on the music for Vinny DePonto’s show Mindplay that opened in Boston earlier this month and will be moving to New York City for its Off-Broadway run from mid December through April.
Regular readers may remember I’ve been improvising live music for Vinny’s one-off shows for the last couple of years, so I already had an idea of the musical palette I’d use in terms of instrumentation, but the actual musical material for the show was scored from scratch taking inspiration from the show’s broad themes - the mind, memory, thoughts and dreams, and the use of cassette tapes. I played around with degrading and warping sounds to reflect these themes.
Unlike a traditional musical or Broadway show Mindplay is not timed perfectly to its score. There is a lot of audience interaction and participation, so scenes vary in length, and I needed to write music that could be shortened or extended accordingly while still seemingly totally natural and organic to the production.
Here is an excerpt of a track from Mindplay.
While most of the music for the show was composed one part at a time and layered, this track was improvised and recorded live in one take with no overdubs.
Nerd alert: I programmed my NuRAD (the electric wind instrument) to harmonize the melody notes as I play them. All the notes and expression MIDI data is being sent wirelessly to the rig behind me to control a couple of synthesizers (the lead and string sounds). These sounds have different attack and sustain times are being processed by a couple of pedals to add some tonal modulation and reverb, as well as to create the impression of a large ensemble rather than one player.
I’m going to keep experimenting with these techniques as I look forward to expanding my solo show. So watch this space.
On November 6th, after deleting my Apple News app, I started working on my next album. I’ll have more to share in a future newsletter, but I’m excited by the progress so far. In the meantime you can listen to the four albums I released in 2024 here.