Alice Unraveled

First things first: I caught a show by a fellow Studio Comp classmate of mine named Kelsey Byrne last night. She never ceases to amaze me; fantastic voice, fantastic compositions, and hearing her perform live with added musicians was awesome. If you don't know what the fuck this girl is about, enlighten yourself. Seriously great.


Now, for some reason I decide to keep taking on projects for next semester, even though I have an absurd amount to do already. In addition to at least 2 movies to score, 2 albums to release and a junior recital to plan (still need to touch base with all my string players and actually write out parts for them), I've taken on the task of orchestrating a musical.


If we want to get technical, it's not the first musical I've orchestrated. But as you well know, Cheap Shots is what it is...

Anyways, the musical I'm working on next semester is entitled "Alice Unraveled", and was written by one Kelly Izzo, another classmate of mine. Kelly is, in a word, astounding. She never stops working... as long as I've known her, she's consistently written at least a song a day, every day, for the past 2 and a half years, and all of them are quality. We had our first collaboration this year on a song for a movie my friend did, which hopefully will get recorded next semester, but this is an incredibly serious project for us. "Alice Unraveled" premiered last year at Kelly's high school, albeit in a musically stripped down form, and the goal this time around is to turn it into a full fledged musical, complete with stage directions and orchestrations.


It's an entirely unorthodox musical in both composition and theme (the musical centers around the sexual assault of a girl, and her school's refusal to believe that it happened), and will most likely call for a wide variety of colors in orchestration. Though I haven't heard too terribly much of the music from it yet, what I have heard definitely calls for (of course), strings, but also heavily effected percussion. I'm formulating ideas as I type this and will definitely share with you all when I have them.


Here's a clip from the title track of the musical, complete with pictures from its first run:

Here's Kelly's blog. Her musical thoughts AND gluten and lactose-free recipes! The girl does miracles for cooking for herself using only a blender and a microwave.


Finally, I'm shopping around for whiny pop-punk singers who can be autotuned to all hell for a one off song I wrote. Shoot me a message if you're interested.


Keep on reading.