--Interview with Mrs. Maria Newman and Mr. George Thatcher
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| An elite member of the new generation of American composers, Maria Newman, composer of the musical piece "Prince," is the daughter of Alfred Newman, a nine-time Oscar Award winning composer. George Thatcher, her husband and the conductor of "Prince," is also a prominent composer and lyricist. |
MN:
The poem "The Prince" is absolutely beautiful. I picked it
because it had so much music in the words right away, and I felt that it would
be lovely to write a piece of music to it. It's a lovely poem. George will
be conducting the piece with a full orchestra, and with a beautiful solo soprano
named Anne Marie Ketchum.
GT: 's a very sensual poem - the way the words flow together, the imagery. I remember reading it - we read through it. They gave us quite a few of Her poems and they were all beautiful, but this one struck me as one that would really suit Maria's writing style and what we are trying to achieve - writing more of an art song than a pop song or a commercial style song.
More traditional. - more traditional orchestra, more traditional harmonic concepts. There's no rhythm section per se laying down a beat like you get with so many of the big ballads and pop music. There's a lot of tempo changes, a lot of rubato; a lot of the harmonic structure is more like what you find in, I don't want to say a Schubert song, but still once again, it's a lot more like a modern language harmonically than that, but I think it's a very beautiful piece for a very beautiful poem.
