DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
2012

For much of my time as a music teacher, I worked at Calder High in Mytholmroyd, a school renowned for its creativity. Each summer, it staged a high-quality musical in its enviable state-of-the-art tiered theatre, attended by parents and members of the public alike. My first involvement with these productions came when I rescored a piano reduction of Oliver! for student and staff musicians. The following year, Jez Gregg—a dance and theatre teacher at the time—presented me with a play he had written based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The script, divided into two acts, featured numerous intended songs, for which he had written lyrics. He invited me to compose original music for the entire production, and I embraced the challenge with fervor. Jez envisioned a ‘circus/cabaret’ aesthetic, emphasizing distorted versions of traditionally ‘straight’ music. The eclectic group of musicians available allowed for a wonderfully unconventional ensemble, which included piano, bass guitar, drum kit, trumpet, trombone, alto sax, tenor sax, tenor horn, guitar, synths, glockenspiels, flute, cello, violin, viola, and an array of percussion—limited only by our resources. My copy of the full play spans 34 spiral-bound pages of carefully studied text, annotated extensively with notes on instrumentation, casting, and stylistic choices. It remains too heavily marked up to merit digitization, but a summary of the work’s structure—drawn from handwritten notes—is as follows: Act One 1. Introduction – (opening song Alice in Wonderland, through-composed) 2. White Rabbit – (rushing motivic music) 3. Falling Music – (motivic with dance) 4. Mouse – (pizzicato motif) 5. Garden of Live Flowers – (through-composed) 6. Caterpillar – (motivic music) 7. Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee – (choral harmony) 8. Cheshire Cat – (jazz-based trio motif) 9. The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party – (magician-like, through-composed) 10. End of Act One – (reprise of Falling Music) Act Two 1. Jabberwocky – (layered vocal percussive ostinato) 2. Humpty Dumpty – (arrangement of nursery rhyme) 3. Pig and Pepper Polka – (folk-inspired, accordion-led) 4. Cheshire Cat reprise – (jazz trio) 5. High-Speed Tea Party – (club dance music style) 6. Queen’s Dance – (stately, through-composed) 7. Diegetic Fanfare/Trial – (simple motivic music) 8. Chase Sequence – (reverse of Falling Music) 9. Up the Rabbit Hole – (reprise of Wonderland song for trapeze finale) Beyond the core musical numbers, the production was enriched by continuous musical special effects—whip cracks, rattles, slides, and any sound that could heighten the theatrical experience. After the performance, many individual parts were taken by students and, sadly, lost. However, a handful of full scores and piano parts (which I primarily played throughout) survive. With this being pre-smartphone, no recording exists of the production, but I have documented four scenes’ music: the opening song (Alice in Wonderland), The Pig and Pepper Polka, The Queen’s Dance, and The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. This project remains one of the most challenging yet rewarding compositional experiences of my career. It was the perfect finale to my time as a school music teacher, merging the vastly different skill sets I developed during my teaching years with those honed in my life as a composer before entering education. (Due to the fast-paced nature of composition for this production, the scores were often left unformatted. Please excuse any misaligned text, untidy notation, or apparent lack of articulations and dynamic markings—we knew what we were doing!)