Mean Time

It was a rainy London day.  The kind of drizzly rain that creeps its way up the leg of your trousers, like a wick in oil.  Not cold.  Not warm.  There was an impending Tube (subway) strike and the ongoing weekend maintenance on the lines which causes the usual snarls and hiccups of transit.

Perfect day to go explore.

No, really.

One of my classmates lives in Greenwich, and was an incredibly generous and knowledgeable tour guide.  "So, King Henry VII, you know, King Henry VIII's dad? Well, he moved his family out of London because of the plague - and built this palace for the royal family."  The palace - which on Sunday was taken over by the filming of the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie - became a Royal Naval hospital for sailors, then the Royal Naval College.  I learned a massive amount of fabulous history and fun facts.




See that lovely stretch of green park in the foreground?  When they built the first subway line (the oldest line in England) - it was not allowed to cut across the royal park, so the train line stopped on the left hand side - everyone would disembark and take horses across the park - and reembark on the train line where it picked up on the other side of the palace!!

At the top of the hill is the observatory.  Commissioned in 1675, it has been a center for astronomy and navigation - and is best known as the prime meridian (0 Longitude).  The prime meridian was officially decided by international convention to be at the observatory in part because of its glorious history in time keeping and navigation.

We stopped for a cup of coffee and the skies cleared up while we mulled over the learning experience in general and a few assignments in specific.

When we headed back out, we stopped by to meet Douglas,  a friend of my classmate.  Douglas is currently the Assistant Musical Director of Les Mis (on the West End).  We were welcomed in and offered tea - and while we sipped, our host bubbled over with the new developments of the musical he is in the middle of writing: a dark comic musical - with film noir flair - based on Orpheus Descending.  A fabulously complex opening number was unveiled as he explained the layers of characters and levels of sound that would be joining into blended voices by the end of the number.  While he sat at his baby grand - playing and singing and swiveling on the bench to explain the next layer, I was deeply honored to get a peek behind the curtain of someone else's creative process.  'Here's where the church choir - in a vaguely Carmina Burana vocal attack are mirroring the cigarette girls and club owners of the Prohibition-era Chicago nightclub's lyrics - which are set to a jazzy beat.  Here's how the lyrics line up.  Here's how these disparate melodies actually create a complex harmony.'

At this point, he moved over to the soundboard and computer set-up - and pulled up some sound files that played the musical tracks to all the intersecting vocal parts as well as the accompaniment.  I got to read the lyrics of the lead female at the beginning and end of her journey to hell.  I was floored.  The piece is in the very early phases of the process, but I absolutely had a vision of seeing this on Broadway in the not-too-distant future, and thinking to myself, "I sat in the composer's living room in Greenwich, drinking tea, and watching this amazing piece of work start to come to life."

As artists, we are so incredibly wrapped up in our own process.  How we get from point A to point B.  And especially in school - we are intensely scrutinizing the creative process, and figuring out how and what works for each of us.  But there are very few times you get to see how the magic is made for any other art form.  A painter may allow you into his studio while he is in the middle of painting.  A musician might allow you to sit in on rehearsal.  Being an observer of the genesis, the core, the birthplace of any creative process is a rare gift.  It made my day.