“What excites me about merging prose and music,” Rich Shapero says, “is that, of all art forms, music is the most emotional and literature is the most cognitive. I’m not a fan of the Broadway musical or opera. Musical exchanges of dialogue seem less compelling than when they’re spoken on the stage or in film. But the internal monologue or soliloquy works well in song. It can express deep emotion, it can stop and start, slow down or race ahead with its own logic, without seeming artificial.”
It was this kind of dramatic voice that Rich thought appropriate for the music of Wild Animus. But he hit a bump:
“Originally, I thought of the story-told-in-song as a lengthy song-cycle with free-form elements, much like the Wild Animus pieces have turned out. I’d been working on that for about a year when I realized that what was sung was suffering because I was trying to jam so much detail into it to make it work as narrative.
“Ultimately, I came up with the idea of uniting prose with song, using the written word for detail, and allowing what was sung to be more elliptical and suggestive, following the emotional trajectory and pace of the story.”