[Leeran]

For my high school senior project, I composed a musical for our drama department. Here is a link to a soundtrack recording: http://lzr.cc/UiMusic.htm

All the lyrics are taken from the dialog of the play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. I had about a month to compose the music, and I would have done a lot differently if given more time. But I'm pretty happy with how a lot of it ended up. A lot of the songs had more complex orchestrations that the band and/or the singers never had time to rehearse with. For these songs, I just played piano.

The soundtrack was recorded in a single, 6 hour-long session. All the performers involved are high-schoolers, with varying levels of experience. The jazzier songs are a little on the weak side, and I'm aware of that. The reason for this is that when we recorded them, the drummer was unavailable, and was added in later. This weakened both the time and general feel of these songs. Someday, we might be able to rerecord them.

Some of the best songs, in my opinion, are Whitewash, Never Betray Your Friends, Prologue, and A Misunderstood Man.

This was a huge project, and I was under pretty severe time constraints, but overall I'm pretty satisfied with the result. My school put on the production in November. The singers are all members of the drama department, and some of them have never sung before, so they get some slack.

I'd really like to get some opinions on what you this score from some musical-connoisseurs, so I'm posting it here!