With the lyrics written and the tune composed it was time to start getting the orchestral backing in shape. Needless to say that I didn't have the budget to afford the London Philharmonic so I used the same technique as I would when scoring a film or television project that didn't have the budget for live Orchestra.

Sample libraries, with recordings that are able to simulate every instrument of the orchestra and played back from computer composing software can provide a fairly realistic alternative for projects like this and I used pretty much every library I had...

In setting my goals and scheduling I had allowed some time at the start of the project to complete some research into the conventions of the genre to make sure I got the style right for the Aria. I paid a visit to a wonderful music store I love behind Carnegie Hall in New York to pick up a few Orchestral Scores of pieces from the greats like Verdi and Puccini. Now there was no way that I was going to be able to produce anything like as good as these masters. I had 8 weeks and had never written an Opera piece in my life. I could have had 8 years and still not written anything a tenth as good as these but you have to start somewhere. So for one week I poured over these classic scores, absorbing the orchestration, the harmony, the melodic choices and range of the vocalists.

After a week I had a pretty good idea which classsic elements of the genre I wanted to include and had started to form the melody and harmony. The next week involved getting a basic structure down at the piano, working out the rough shape of the tune and the underlying harmony. At this point I had no lyrics so I must have driven my neighbours mad in New York, singing nonsencial phrases in Italian just to see how the melody might work with words.

Once the basic building blocks were done it was time to start on the words. As I don't speak a word of Italian I figured the best thing to do was  to write the words in English myself, then use an online translator to get a rough translation to make sure they were going to fit in Italian and then finally to get an Italian translator at the final stage to make sure that the exact grammar was correct.

I wanted the words to repflect not only how I felt about my father but also the thoughts of my brother David so I brought him up to speed on the project and together we began brainstorming possible ideas. Luckily my father has provided us with plenty of inspiration over the years when it comes to writing about the massive influence he has had on our lives. In fact the hardest part was paring it down to only 3 minutes for the song. A few days later and we had it. A set of lyrics that we felt best expressed our thanks to a father who had shaped us as men.

I now had a set of lyrics that worked in English and were translated into my worst pigeon Italian. I needed some help and I was lucky enough to be able to call on my friend Tanya Blumstein to assist with the translation of the lyrics. I met Tanya many years ago at the Cannes film festival and we've been friends ever since. Amongst her many talents Tanya is a gifted linguist, often dialect coaching Hollywood actors  in films such as King Kong. However in this instance it was her ability to speak Italian that would help me out enormously. I called her at home in Paris and explained what I was trying to do. Being the superstar she is, she immediately offered to help and  gave up a lot of her time helping to correct the grammar which given thatI had mainly translated my lyrics using Google, needed a lot of help!

Nonetheless we ended up with a set of lyrics that worked in English, made sense in Italian and worked melodically and rythmically which was going to be crucial when it came to singing them. We also now had a title, "Grazie Il Mio Padre", or in English "Thank you my father". Here are the lyrics below in Italian, to continue reading about the next stage of the project and see a translation into English read on to Part 3

I recently had the opportunity to explore an area of music that I was familiar with as a listener but completely inexperienced with as a composer and what an experience it turned out to be.

My father, Jim, was turning 75 and I was thinking about possible gifts for his birthday. We have always been extremely close and I wanted to get him something special and memorable but also very personal.
He shares my love of music and has been an avid Opera fan his entire life. In fact from his teenage years onwards he has pretty much listened excusively to Opera his so a musical gift, particularly  Opera theme would seem to be a suitable way to go.

However over the years I'd pretty much exhausted this line of present buying. The family had bought nearly every possible Opera CD and DVD as well as books, tickets to live performances and all manner of other paraphernalia. With two months to go to his birthday I was no closer to coming up with a solution until one day I had an idea. Sitting as a passenger on a flight to New York, glass of wine in hand, Opera playing on my ipod,  it came to me. I'm a composer, why not simply write him an Opera....

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OK so not quite so simple. A couple of slight problems not the least of which being that I had less than 8 weeks in which to do it, I had no idea how or even if I could do it and on top of that I had a ton of other film and music business that I was going to have to move around to make this happen.

Nonetheless the more I thought about it the more I thought it might be the perfect gift.  So I sat about working out how I might achieve it. A few things were obvious straight away, firstly that there was not going to be enough time to write an entire Opera even if I knew how so I was going to have to settle for the main Aria which seemed like an achievable goal.  I have been a proponent of David Allen's Getting Things Done or GTD approach to time management and goal setting for several years and I decided to use this to start setting some goals to ensure I could complete the project on time. One of the techniques that GTD proposes is to mentally envisage a project as completed as completely as possible, called "starting with the end in sight". I imagined exactly what the finished result would look and feel as if I was there, in the future, handing the gift to my father. This helped me get clarity on exactly what was going to be required and what steps would be needed to get me there. I then set deadlines and benchmarks for the next 8 weeks to make sure it was all completed on time. It was important to be able to hand it to him on his birthday.

The finished product I imaged would be an original aria, custom written and composed for my father, with lyrics specifically written to express my gratitude for his faultless fathering over the years. He is a huge fan of the great Italian tenors like Pavarotti, Carreras and Domingo so that made the decision easier. It had to be a piece for a Tenor voice, ideally sung in Italian and I decided to go for a style that would pay homage to great arias like Nessun Dorma.  I imagined it would be perfect to be able to sit him down on his birthday and present him with the track, recorded onto CD, along with a printed and bound copy of the manuscript and lyrics with some words explaining what the project meant to me.  I also decided to video document the process to make a short behind the scenes DVD that could be included in the package.

So began what would become one of the most incredibly satisfying and important musical projects I've ever undertaken. Read more in Part Two

So I've finally relented. After what seems like forever not understanding what on earth Facebook was for and don't even get me started on Twiitter I've  finally seen the light. Having spent the last few weeks learning about this new fangled "internet" craze I think I can finally see the appeal. Seriously, when my co-producers and I first started using digital technology to produce movies we were right at the cutting edge of technology and completely at home with the internet.  How things have changed ! Less than 10 years on and now a child of eight  is probably  more internet savvy than I am!

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So I decided enough is enough, time to embrace this whole new shebang, web 2.0, social media and all. So began several weeks of studying the net, reading various books and lots of patient friends explaining why Twitter is not just for letting people know that you're eating a pizza or other earth shattering revelations. Now after all that mental graft I feel I must easily know 1/1000th of what I need to know and I'm probably up to the internet mental age of an nine year old...what progress ! Still you have to start somewhere.

Shortly I hope you'll see some rather groovy icons along the side of the page which do all sorts of things...don't ask me what... I haven't got that far yet. Seriously if you don't know what on Earth they are for, you're just like me several weeks ago and I'd highly recommend finding out. It's a lot less painful than it looks and actually a lot of fun. If you really can't be bothered or it just seems a bit daunting then drop me an email and I'd be glad to share what I'm learning. Who knows I might even put it in my blog. I'll start with a facebook page and Twitter and in the coming weeks there will be updates and links to my LinkedIn, MySpace and Flickr pages as well as  a new Youtube channel.

I'll be keeping a music composing blog here on this site, the idea being to have a separate blog elsewhere for my film producery related activities and there will also be a regular blog detailing my adventures scoring the movie LVJ coming soon on a new website at www.lvjmovie.com. I'll post links between the two and also on Facebook and Twitter etc....see how easily I throw these terms around...now what's this whole email thingy about?