Collaborators in Conversation: Jeffrey Harris and Daryl Waters

Jeffrey Harris

This season at the Huntington, we are telling seven distinct American stories. To tease out the connections between the shows, we’ve asked artists from different productions to interview each other about their work. Below Jeffrey Harris, music director for A Long and Winding Road, talks to Daryl Waters, arranger and orchestrator of A Civil War Christmas.
This interview has been highly edited for space; please find the full interview at here.

Daryl Waters
    How did you each become involved in music?
    Daryl Waters: I’m a musician today because of a random, kind act decades ago. When I was seven years old, the secretary at my family’s church retired. She gave my mother her very old, very big upright piano, which we somehow crammed into a tiny living room. After taking a few piano lessons, my teacher realized I had a gift and recommended that I attend the Cleveland Music School Settlement. Because it was geared to income, I’d spend my Saturdays taking piano, violin, theory, and music lit classes with top-notch teachers for about $8 per week. I don’t know where I’d be today without the gift of that first piano from Lydia Delvigs.
    Richard Rodgers with Lorenz Heart, 1936Jeffrey Harris: I was adopted at five by my grandparents, Alice and Harry Harris. Alice had been a very successful singer and actress on stage in operetta and musicals in the 1930s and ’40s. Harry was a businessman with a great love of music. He managed a theatre for a while with Alice in Yardley, Pennsylvania. Growing up with them, I was steered to the piano when I was eight, and around that time, discovered this big piece of furniture in the living room — Alice called it “the breakfront.” Inside was her vast sheet music collection from the 1900s to about 1950. As soon as I could read music, I started pouring through all that literature — Rodgers, Kern, Porter. I learned about song form at an early age. To this day, whether it’s playing, composing, or orchestrating, my biggest love is the American popular song.
    What is the role of an arranger or music director?
    DW: A successful arrangement in theatre has to convey feelings that complement what’s being seen. Having a chorus of voices for A Civil War Christmas gives me choices. For example, the chorus can become the background to support a soloist singing the melody on quiet, somber numbers, or they can support a joyous moment by singing the melody along with full, glorious harmony. From project to project, the key is to be sensitive to the material and, in the case of new shows, the performers.
    JH: In our show with Maureen, we are dealing with pop and rock songs from the ’60s and ’70s. My feeling is that pop and rock-based music is not inherently theatrical. Music from records and radio of that era all had steady drum beats and not a lot of harmonic progression — very much a step backward from Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers — and a steady driving backbeat is very dull to me on stage. So Maureen and I went through a long process of finding the songs from that era that have real quality, and infused them with our great love for American standards and jazz.
    DW: Considering that pop songs by nature are an expression of sentiment, it’s not surprising that they often reflect — and to varying degrees, chronicle — the times they were written in. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, and to this day, songs like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On”, concerning the tumultuous times of the Vietnam era, still resonate with me.
    Album art, The Times They Are A-Changin' by Bob DylanJH: A lot of the songs in A Long and Winding Road are quite topical — very much from the times they were written in. The ’60s were a time of great change and upheaval in America, and the writers represented in our show like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon very much reflect that. We do a very different treatment of Dylan’s “The Times, They Are A-Changin’.” When we first ran through that song, Maureen was shocked at how it could easily have been written right now. I guess some things haven’t been so much a-changin’! For me, the most poignant material is the stuff of Jimmy Webb’s we do. He was one of my first influences as a songwriter and musician, so doing those beautiful songs of his take me back to a time when I was just starting out, discovering and exploring.