Achievement Unlocked: Tesla Musical

I've been silent this week because I was back on Moonbase Alpha.  As of right now I have officially completed the first draft of all the music for the increasingly-less-top-secret-project, POWER.  Does this mean that I have no more music to write?  Not at all.  But it does mean that, at least for the current version of the script, there is music that goes along with all of the lyrics.

Upon completing the music I was rewarded with the greatest gift that I have ever received as a musical writer: I popped in a blank CD and told my computer to burn all of the music, and it gave me an error message.  The message?  I forget the exact wording, but the paraphrased version sounds something like:

UNABLE TO BURN DISC.  TOO MUCH MUSIC.  WILL NOT FIT.

So I'm not sure what I win, but I totally won.  After editing some things down I should end up with around eighty minutes of music total, which is MORE than double the amount of music that I wrote for The Fall of the House of Usher.  I am pleased.  Very pleased.  The whole show comes to about two hours and fifteen minutes with a ten minute intermission right now.

I don't remember whether I've given a rundown of what POWER is about on this blog and I don't care to go back and look so I'll just do that right now.

POWER (working title, not finalized) is the surprisingly true rock(ish) musical (not to be confused with a rock opera) based on the epic life of Dr. Nikola Tesla.  A genius who immigrated to America for the chance to build a better way of producing energy, he worked (and then fought) with Thomas Edison and JP Morgan, befriended George Westinghouse and Mark Twain, raised money from Astor and Vanderbilt, and ended up creating a slew of inventions which still baffle scientists today.  X-rays, AC power, florescent light, the radio, wireless energy transfer, Tesla  coils, ball lightning, remote controlled drones, death-rays, an earthquake generator.... Tesla kept himself busy.  Our story focuses mostly on his conflicts with Edison and Morgan and ends with the destruction of Tesla's secret facility at Wardenclyffe (which some thought to be a prototype for a free wireless energy system and others imagined to be a weapon, and which he only got funding for by saying it was going to be for wireless telephony).    

Mostly, though, the story is about the ability of one man to dream, invent, inspire, and rock out while doing so.  At some point down the line there will be a performance of POWER, and I hope that it will be as enjoyable to see as it has been to write. 

The next stage involves rewriting all the music and getting good recordings of it with people who can actually sing the parts (I have done enough crappy falsetto singing in the past week to last a lifetime).