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Better Than Sex

Writing Music

By Robert BaileyPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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Ira Gershwin

I have put our elder daughter to bed. It is 8:30, and I look at my wife. She is tired and nervous about tomorrow. There is nothing I can say, so I listen.

Inevitably I reflect on my own anxieties: chief among them, the sense that time is no longer in my favour. I’m not over-the-hill; I’m running down the other side, break-neck, and I can’t see the bottom through the nearing thicket.

And with this vision, a note.—A sustained tone bound like a soundtrack to my own mortality. Then a phrase, a repetition, an inversion, a variation. My clomping strides down the hill, a broken rhythm, out of synch, tied over the fence I barely cleared—and when I crash, theme-B rises cautiously from the dust.

From September to November, 2020, I wrote the 20 songs (and libretto) of What Happens In Vegas, performed four times as Moscow High School’s spring musical last May. Before this (including my whole life), I had composed approximately three single works I would consider worthy a public hearing, none over four minutes long. At first, my motive was pragmatic: having had to cancel the previous year’s show in light of the pandemic, we hadn’t the capital to afford the rental fees and royalties of other contemporary theatre. But the day after we finished I started writing next year’s show. I told others it was still the pragmatic necessity, requiring at least two years to make up the one year’s loss, but I lied. I couldn’t help myself. I knew I could do better — better script, better songs — and besides all that, I had to.

Writing music, I step out of my life or hyperventilation. I examine the very thing — time — which, by its incomparable importance and invisibility, most obnoxiously runs out. But I give it signs and landmarks, which, as they repeat in music, let me know the rate of its passage and make it beautiful. Writing music is sculpting time; repeated performance staggers age. The chance to perform again well is perpetual youth without naïveté. It is the freedom to learn without paying an opportunity-cost.

As a pubic high school teacher (English, drama), I produced all this out-of-contract, staying up late. For this I bear no resentment whatsoever, but do desire the remuneration and recognition necessary to improve and distribute my work. Therefore this idea: a non-profit Theatrical Authors’ Cooperative in Public Schools. Membership would include presently employed educators driven to create music and drama for their students. In order to join, a prospective member would submit an annual due and a minimum-60 minute work of music, drama or combination thereof for exposure in the Cooperative Digital Library. The Library could be accessed globally by anyone upon contractual agreement to pay royalties to the Cooperative for any performance. The amount charged to the user would vary according to that person’s regional cost-of-living index, with a potential balance taken out of the dues-fund to ensure the author’s adequate compensation. Since overhead costs would not likely exceed a merchandising website, the remainder dues-fund could be redistributed as rewards to members for mutual constructive criticism and assistance with editing.

Presently, there exists no such database or consortium. If someone like me wishes to promote contemporary theatre relevant to the interests and humour of 21st-century American students, he or she must either pay prohibitive fees to a major distributor (not itself calibrated to the relative poverty of a school system), or betray professional interests entirely and seek pirated material online. The Cooperative I propose fills this gap, and creates space for motivated, multi-talented people to contribute best to their communities. It optimises fine-arts skills across a broad social network, and improves the lives of its participants. The only thing which could possibly augment the satisfaction of completing a song or a dialogue is communicating that work to other people—sharing sculpted time.

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