VCDS-Music Director interview

Adam Lam11min

Speaker 1

00:00

And first question is, from your perspective, what was your experience like working on Kosta quartet as a music director? Or what were responsibilities? And what was it like working on time?

Speaker 2

00:15

Yeah, that's a great question. Um, well, I was I was the music director last year. So I came into this with with experience, like, I kind of knew what I expect, like what to expect. And I think that kind of helped me adapt and be more flexible with the online platform. In terms of like music director responsibilities, you oversee all the the musical and acoustic versions of this show when you connect it to how that translates to the character development and the director's vision. So a lot of collaboration. So over the summer, I made all the rehearsal tracks or like I recorded all the music, and I added everyone's vocal line so that they could record because I figured this was back in the summer when we were unsure, like a business school going to open or not, so we weren't sure if we were going to be totally remote. But yeah, so we prepared for being totally online. So I made all the rehearsal tracks. Auditions, were interesting, because it was all done online. And normally, when you when you listen to people, you want to hear them all sing together to hear how their voices blend. But we but we couldn't do that. And we got really lucky that we have a very talented and hardworking cast. So yeah, and then I guess just a lot of collaborating with the director, organizing with the stage manager having rehearsals. And what's unique about this musical is that it's instead of having like a separate cast and separate like musician group, like band. This musical I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's like every, like the cast does everything. So they play the music, they sing they act. So I so I wasn't just teaching like to separate rehearsals, I was just teaching them like the entire like the all the music, essentially. That's

Speaker 1

02:06

to build more more onto that. What was your strategy and process for practices during the year considering that you couldn't get people over in one room for these practices? Yeah, so

Speaker 2

02:21

we would have, we essentially broke it down to one rehearsal is one musical song. And then they were always done in two hour, roughly two hour increments. So then there are four cast members. So I would split it up, we'd always start with like a check in to see like, how is everyone doing? And then we would go in depending on depending on the the song and how much sometimes their solos, sometimes it's split pretty equally in terms of like four part harmony, I would I would split up the rehearsal. So if everyone's doing the same amount, everyone wants to get like 30 minutes. And at the very end, we would all stay behind and sing it all together. So one person's unmuted, and they'd be singing along with their rehearsal track. And other three who are muted would sing along to that person over zoom. And so that was really building like, like their musical ear actively listening to, to the person because a lot of communication is nonverbal and music, like just seeing like, what are you breathing? When are you coming in matching those rhythms matching the consonants. And so, so yeah, even though it was online, we did a lot of singing together. And we also use band lab, which is like the Google Doc version of GarageBand, where everyone can just record their own parts and sing it together and see other people's parts. So we did a lot of that, too. So even though we were a part, we were still able to mute make music together.

Speaker 1

03:52

interesting to hear and you have some familiar with the current events are actually here. There's a collaborative element there too. And I guess, one thing I'd really like to learn more about is from a perspective of someone who's considering tuning into ghost this year, why do you think it's an excellent production for them to move into and tune and learn more about?

Speaker 2

04:21

Yeah, for sure. Well, I think my personal opinion is I think it's always a good time to, to watch an art artistic production. What I really appreciate about these CDs is how financially accessible all their shows are. I think it's about $5 for students and $10 for non students. And it's going to be April 2 to fourth. But there's no like there's no exact time of streaming just from that time period, you can watch at any time. So whether you're in this time zone or a different time zone, it's it's super accessible to everyone who's able to access it. And then in terms of the plot, I think it's just a very unique musical. It doesn't follow the normal musical traditions. It doesn't even sound like a traditional musical like, you know, like those big Broadway pop songs. It doesn't. So, yeah, and it just it just interesting. Like, it's very much. Like if you're into like, really listening into like the lyrics and, and seeing how Dave Malloy, the composer of the musical, kind of laid out the whole thing. It's just four characters. For actors, and they just they play all the characters, and they they jump to different, like time periods and country. So the musical kind of takes influence from from different, like aspects of different types of storytelling. And so just the way it's weaved, I think is super unique. And yeah.

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