the juliet letters

I went to a great production of The Juliet Letters last night at the Southern Theater. It's a song cycle that Elvis Costello wrote in collaboration with the Brodsky String Quartet and was inspired by letters people write and leave under Juliet's purported balcony in Verona, Italy. Someone began collecting them years ago and started answering them.













I am not nor have I ever been a fan of Elvis Costello (his screechy vibrato annoys the hell out of me) but this was a great find. The album itself was put out in the early 90s and is just him and the quartet. Due to this, I'm assuming it doesn't really fit in with the rest of his catalog of works and how the record company let him release it I'll never know.

The cycle itself--in my humble opinion--doesn't really work as a piece of concert music just on its own but, every now and then, there is a song that grabs your attention and holds you in. Artistic Director Jake Endres sensed this potential, I think, and went about amplifying it with various things here and there that worked really well:

• Instead of one singer/actor, he split it into 4 different parts and added harmony in just the right spots.
• There were excerpts from the Shakespeare interspersed among the songs and it was really good to hear it again: "He jests at scars that never felt a wound."
• Her balcony is represented and, at the end of the show, she finally appears. They actually included the entire balcony scene amongst the proceedings (which was powerfully acted by the guy portraying the young man). It never fails to get me every time.
• Jake wrote some really fine new music to underscore some of the dialogue scenes. I'm not certain (and I don't own the original album for comparison) but I think he also wrote an entirely new movement that takes place in India. That particular letter was dated 2003 and the cycle was released in 1993 so I'm fairly certain that's true.

It was a great show and the staging was really cool (particularly the "Romeo's Seance" movement). It's only playing another couple of days so you should get out and see it if you get the chance. Here's a video of the original lineup performing the "Jacksons, Monk and Rowe" movement 15 years ago (complete with early-90s apparel) .


I've been diligently working on the choir/oboe commission.









I've selected a modal-ish scale reminiscent of music from east Asia and the middle east and it's been interesting to try and incorporate it with my own emerging harmonic language. It's jarring sometimes to try and combine them but I'm really enjoying the challenge of that as well as the language.