The Chess Chronicles, Part 2: To Rearrange Or Not To Rearrange?

In Part 1, I decided to use the handwritten "London" vocal book as my piano/conductor score because it had everything I needed for the production including ensemble parts that were crammed into any available space on the pages.  I still don't know with 100% certainty which version this book is, but from what I've seen online and from the order in the score, it appears to be the original 1986 West End version.  (This is typically referred to as "The London Version".)

From my discussions with the director, it sounded as if she was going to stick to the 2008 Royal Albert Hall version for inspiration.  This would include using the story as presented in the 1986 West End version ... which was the same production that I was using as my source for the music.  So we were definitely on the same page there.

This gave me four sources that I would end up using to determine how the music would go:

1. The 1986 West End piano/conductor score
2. The original soundtrack album
3. The 2008 Royal Albert Hall concert, with Idina Menzel and Josh Groban
4. The Concord Theatricals rental scores

The next question was:  How much was I willing to change what was in the score?

A quick explanation for people who aren't music directors:  All shows are "changed" in some way in order to fit the needs of the production.  In the case of ACTC, it's not a huge stage (the Lyceum holds 200 people), so music that's written for set changes, or to get people from point A to point B can always be trimmed down,  Vamps are usually shorter, and I'm almost always cutting big chunks of music out of the scores in order to make it all work on a small stage.

There are also times when music is actually ADDED to the score, depending on the needs of the director and/or choreographer.  I did a show for Vanguard once where the choreographer used a YouTube video in which a big dance number had been completely rearranged.  By the time I found out, it was too late to change it, so I had no choice but to listen to it over and over until I had the arrangement figured out ... and then transmit that to my band.  It ended up great in the end, but it was just a lot of work, and a lot of customization.

So making changes to the score is inevitable.  But how much?  Did I want to do the songs "pretty much how they're written"?  Or did I want to lean into a lot of customization in order to get the music the way I liked it?

Here's the list of considerations that guided me in my decision:

• The 1986 score SHOULD be very similar to the 1984 album as they were being produced at the same time
• Making major changes is like eating Lay's potato chips -- "nobody can eat (or rearrange) just one".  So committing to making a major change in one number is just going to make it that much easier to rearrange everything ...
• The show is HUGE.  Do I really want to make that many changes?
• Endgame #2, which is the list of previous chess champions, is ridiculous.  Who cares about these people?  They have nothing to do with the story except for historical interest.  Also, our chess champion is a FICTITIOUS person; so why would we care about presenting a list of REAL champions in music form?
• Endgame #1 and the Prologue are essentially the same music, but it does nothing to advance the story.  Three minutes of a standalone orchestral/choral piece in which no words are sung.  What is this doing in the musical?
• The 2008 version had some extensive changes made to several songs, as well as choreography which would result in rearrangement ... and I'm using the 2008 version as one of my sources.
• My choreographer will almost certainly be using music that I don't have .. and so I'll be rearranging ANYWAY.
• I'm retired now.  I've got the time.

In the end (at the beginning?), I decided to go with rearranging wherever it was needed.  Spoilers:  This resulted in a LOT of customization.

The first, and easiest, musical change I made was to toss the Prologue.  It's not in the original 1986 West End score, and the main theme has nothing to do with anything else in the show except for Endgame #1.  There are a few areas where themes from the show are interpolated, but not enough to make it interesting enough to keep.  So instead of starting the show with it, I decided we would start the show with The Story Of Chess, which is how the West End production was started.

Interesting note:  The name of the first piece in the Concord rental score is:  "Prologue:  The Story Of Chess".  I guess they decided they didn't want to use the Prologue music, but still wanted to use the name for unknown reasons.

And we're off and running.  In the next post, we'll look at The Story Of Chess.  Meanwhile, here's the Prologue from the 2008 version for your listening enjoyment:

The Chess Chronicles, Part 1: Beginnings

I was originally offered the music director position of Chess on 19 Jan 2019.  At the time, the plan was for ACTC to produce it in the summer of 2020.  Somewhere between then and the cancellation of West Side Story in March 2020, Chess got pushed out to 2024.  ACTC did Forever Plaid in 2023, and we did two productions of Marvelous Wonderettes in 2021 (music only, at Escencia Green park) and 2022 (full production).

There was a lot of  time to prepare for Chess, and I wanted to get started as soon as possible.  I reached out to a friend who has a lot of scores, and asked him if he had PDFs for Chess.  He sent over the "Vocal Score", which actually had a full orchestral reduction as well as all the Ensemble music.  These scores ended up being what I used in all the performances as I didn't like the rental scores at all.  (Notes were too tiny, and too many mistakes.  More on that in a later post.)

The Big Question that I needed to answer for myself was:  What will I use as the basis for my approach to the score?  Chess is a show that has been reimagined several times since the Cold War ended (around 1990).  So would it be more like the original show?  Would it be like "Chess In Concert"?  How much choreography and blocking would there be?  How much of the story would we be telling?  And how would all of those elements influence the music choices that I made?

I started searching YouTube for performance videos, and the one that I kept coming back to was the 2008 Royal Albert Hall performance featuring Idina Menzel and Josh Groban.  This wasn't a "fully staged version", but it also wasn't a full concert version.  It was something in between, and seemed to have most of what I was looking for.

I'm also a fan of the original soundtrack album, released in 1984.  This was the album with "One Night In Bangkok", which became a hit in the US (#3 on the Billboard Hot 100) and the UK (#12). Not all songs from the musical are found on the album, but the arrangements are excellent.

So my approach would be to create an amalgamation of these two sources, and figure out how to make that work within the vision of my director.  This would be a challenge, but I was willing to put in the time to make it all happen.  Like the title of my blog says, I'm retired now -- so I have more time to devote to projects like this.

Garage computer is back up and running

In my last post, I said I had three things to do.  Wishful thinking, to be sure.  Make that SIX things to do:

1. Reinstall "tank" drives, and get Plex working
2. Reset crontab
3. Verify that Roku works from our TV
4. Restore Samba access to the "tank" drive
5. Revive my "To Do List" software
6. Either get Zina working again or find a new music streaming option

REINSTALL "TANK" DRIVES / RESET CRONTAB

"tank" is an old ZFS convention, and refers to a single logical drive made up of one or more physical drives.  In my case, it's just a single 8T drive which contains all the media, in addition to other miscellaneous stuff.  I also have a second 8T drive which is used as a RSYNC mirror via crontab.

I've been using RSYNC in a standard archive mode, which adds anything new from the active drive into the backup drive, which means that the backup drive grows larger than the active drive over time.  Since I'm rebuilding the system anyway, I decided this was a good idea to wipe the backup drive and run a fresh RSYNC from the active drive.  There's about 1.38M objects on the drive and 6.4T of data, so replicating everything took several hours.  Once it was done, the following line was put into crontab:

0 2 * * * /usr/bin/rsync -av /tank/ /tank_copy/ >> /var/log/rsync_tank.log 2>&1

GET PLEX WORKING EVERYWHERE

This was my first time restoring Plex, so I was pretty nervous.  If the restore failed, then all my organizing of the DVD would be lost.  I downloaded the latest Plex, opened up the default port so I could talk to it from my Windows desktop, and verified that it worked.

Next step was to restore the library.  I thought at first that this would be /usr/lib/plexmediaserver, but it turns out the correct path is /var/lib/plexmediaserver.  The /usr tree is binaries, and replacing that with the old ones caused Plex to break.  Restored the originals, and then verified that I could play content on my desktop.  The restore worked, and I was able to play content by traversign through my categories.  WOO HOO!

Next step was to get it working from the TV.  Since I'm using Plex in a "non-authenticated" mode, all I needed to do was point to the new nodename, "kenny".  I'm running standard everything, so this worked right away.  It's nice to see that kind of success every now and then; it seems like most of these rebuilding tasks are a big hassle.

Plex is now working, and this is a big relief.

RESTORE SAMBA ACCESS TO "TANK"

Every time I go down this road, I try to use NFS on the Windows box.  And every time, I fail.  For some reason, NFS is the easiest thing in the world on Linux boxes, and a complete nightmare on Windows boxes.  I can understand that being a problem in, say, 1998.  But it's 2024 now, and this problem still isn't solved.  I mean, MAYBE it works on Windows, but it's not trivial to set up.  And it SHOULD be.

So I gave up on that particular road, and went back to basics of Samba.  I made it all work using this tutorial page, and then customized it for my use.  My entry in /etc/samba/smb.conf looks like this:

[tank]

path = /tank

browsable =yes

writable = yes

valid users = scott

read only = no

This is after using smbuser to create the "scott" account, which is what I use from the Windows box when I mount the share.

Once this was working, I remounted it on Windows as the Z: drive.  (That's kind of what we call it around here -- "The Z Drive".)

REVIVE MY "TO DO LIST"

The only data that I lost was my project and TODO lists.  This isn't a real crisis, as I can rebuild anything that's critical.  Plus, revisiting this enables me to do things like using more recurring Tasks on Google Calendar, rather than locating them in a separate software space.  Bottom line:  It's lost data, but not a big deal

After looking around at various standalone programs, I decided to go with "ToDoIst".  It's got a free option that will cover everything I need to do.  I added three projects right away, then started populating them with tasks based on what I remember from the last few months.

This is a good example of "splintering" a program into multiple parts.  Sometimes this is a good thing as it forces you to rethink what you're doing and maybe try a different way to achieve your goals.  By splitting recurring calendar events from projects, I'm getting the project software more focused and less distracted.

REVIVE THE MUSIC STREAMER

I was having some trouble getting Zina back up and running.  This is a program from 2010, and PHP has undergone three major versions since then ... so there were a few things broken.  I found that by commenting out those lines that were complaining the most, I was able to get Zina to stream music again.  However, Zina didn't know where the CSS files were, so it looked horrible.

Functional, but ugly.  So I decided to try some alternatives:  AirSonic, Navidrome, mStream, and Ampache.  The problem with all these programs is that they don't allow you to manage your collection from a top-level Genres view.  In the case of Navidrome, the "top-level" is Albums, which would be tens of thousands in our case.

It was going to have to be Zina.  I dug into the problem, and it turned out to be a borked variable, which was pointing to a nonexistent spot.  Corrected that variable, and my graphics problem went away.  All my album covers were back, and I was able to play music just fine.

STILL A FEW ITEMS LEFT TO CLEAN UP

I need to get the Zina/MSJ support scripts working from crontab again.  While I'm revisiting it, it might be a good idea to generate the reports in a cleaner fashion.  Downloading album art is still a time-consuming process, and make this easier would be very helpful.  Also, logging in from the main screen in the garage isn't working right now, so I'm being forced to run the iDrive backups from the command line.  Which works fine, but it's just inconvenient.

That's about it.  The system is finally working again, and hopefully it'll stay this way for a while.

Getting the right OS for a garage server

 My old garage server HDD, a 15-year old 1TB WD drive, finally bit the dust.  I'm not going to panic, as this is what backups are for.  And I've been through this process before, so it's just a matter of pulling all the pieces together.

I've got a few SSDs in the garage, and since the main part of my space consumption is on the 8TB drives, I don't really need a lot of root drive space.  So I plugged in a 60G SSD, and started the process of trying various Linux flavors to see which one will work for my applications.

Tried Fedora 40, Fedora 27, and Linux Mint.  None of them could do everything I wanted, so I went back to Centos 7.10.  I like Linux Mint's support for GUI apps, and I think they could probably give Ubuntu a run for their money.  But for what I'm doing, Centos 7 will work great.  The only downside is that Centos is pulling support for Centos 7 in the next couple months.  Not too concerned about that; even after Centos 5 and 6 went EOL, there were still repos out there that supported RPMs all the way up to the last minor version.

As of tonight, my backup program and media server are both running on the garage server.  Next steps are to reinstall the "tank" drives, reset the cron job for keeping them in sync, and then verify that we can watch movies from our Roku TV.

It's time to start a blog

Hi, I'm the Pianoman, and welcome to my retirement blog.  I retired in 2022, and thought that starting a blog might be a good idea to keep track of my various hobbies.  But I procrastinated, life got in the way, and the blog got stuck in the never-ending stack of projects.

The catalyst for finally getting the blog rolling was the ACTC production of Chess at the Lyceum Theater of Vanguard University, for which I was music director.  I spent a lot of time on this score, more than any other musical I've worked on, and I thought it would be a good idea to get all those customizations captured in some format that could be useful to other music directors.  Our production was pretty solid, and it deserves to be preserved in some way.

Besides musical theater, my other retirement hobbies include gardening, genealogy, golf, and the Hidden Mickey Wiki.  I'm hoping I can use this blog to help with those other hobbies as well.

Let the blogging commence!