The “Muse Room” is the room in my house where I make music and my wife makes visual art. Published the first Friday of every other month (though not this time), each issue of Letters from the Muse Room includes news and updates about my music, as well as something that has inspired me creatively over the past two months.

Dear friends,

Happy September! It’s been a long ten months since the last Letter from the Muse Room. But it’s not because the Muse Room has been silent! I’m writing today because I have two new projects to share with you.

First, most of my year thus far has been taken up with writing a new piece for full orchestra. It was commissioned by Kirt Mosier, the music director of the Lee’s Summit Symphony. Kirt commissioned three other composers, as well as himself, to each write a piece for the Lee’s Summit Symphony titled The Haunted Pavilion. (The Symphony plays at the Pavilion at John Knox Village in Lee’s Summit, and the concert’s in October, so… you get the idea.)

[The Pavilion at John Knox Village.]

I had a blast writing my version of The Haunted Pavilion; it’s a spooky and fun piece that features ominous glissandi (slides) and a sinuous waltz melody that unwinds over a slow version of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice melody in the bass. Listen to a MIDI clip of the first two minutes of the piece here: https://www.ajharbison.com/wp-content/uploads/thehauntedpavilionopening.mp3.

But MIDI can never do the real thing justice — so if you’re in the Kansas City area at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 12, come to the Pavilion and hear my piece (and three other pieces with the same title)! Just click this button for tickets:

I hope to see you there!

[The first page of The Haunted Pavilion score.]

The second project I’ve been working on (after finishing The Haunted Pavilion) is a reworking of an old project. Nine years ago, my brother, my sister-in-law at the time and I wrote a musical.

[Two brothers excitedly gesturing to a sign advertising the musical they wrote.]

If we were to take another picture today like this one, I would probably be wearing a hat and he probably would not be.

My brother wrote the script, my sister-in-law wrote the lyrics and I wrote the music. It was an enormous project and I had a short time in which to write a whole lotta music — 28 songs, plus underscore and orchestration. I recorded rough vocal demos of all the songs, but because I was pressed for time, they were very rough vocal demos.

I recently was listening back through those vocal demos, and remembering how much I’d liked the music I’d written, and thinking that the one run of performances the show had nine years ago wasn’t enough for how good the material was (the script is REALLY good and the concept is brilliant — ask me about it sometime).

So, I have decided to go back and arrange some of the songs for piano, and lower them (because the role of Saul/Paul is for a tenor, and I am not a tenor), and record them, so I have good recordings and not just very rough vocal demos.

[The opening line of music for the song “The Law and the Prophets.”]

My goal is to finish the composing/arranging by the end of September, and finish the recording by the end of October (and then do a little mixing and mastering after that). So hopefully in two months or so I will have some good recordings of these songs to share with you!

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A book that has inspired me over the past several months was one I wasn’t necessarily expecting to agree with, due to its provocative title — Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music by Martha Bayles.

[The cover of Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music by Martha Bayles.]

But I was pleasantly surprised by the book’s incredibly astute evaluation of the popular music of the 20th century. Martha Bayles is extremely insightful and incisive in her observations and analyses, and also has some very funny wry commentary. It’s a long book, and some of the subject matter (dealing as it does with “perverse modernism” in art) is not for the faint of heart, but it’s well worth the read.

Thanks for reading through this newsletter! I hope to see some of you at the concert on October 12, and I hope to have some new music to share with all of you in November!

Peace,
AJ Harbison

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