Hands-On Brand Name Composer For a Ballet
The New York Times
M J Kim/MPL Communications
Paul McCartney and Peter Martins at a rehearsal of “Ocean's Kingdom,” which will be put on by the New York City Ballet.
By JON PARELES
Published: September 9, 2011
THE composer, dressed down in denim and Nikes, strolled into rehearsal at the New York City Ballet’s Studio 2 late last month to see for the first time what the choreographer Peter Martins had made of his score, “Ocean’s Kingdom.”
Over the next hour, as the music played from a CD, the 48 dancers portrayed a romance set in a royal undersea court and a magical forest, with nobles, handmaidens and thugs. There were poised geometric ensembles and bursts of individual acrobatics, a ballroom scene, embraces and battles, even a brief bit of drunken comedy, all clearly telling a story.
Composer and choreographer watched intently, often leaning together to confer in whispers. At the end the composer leaped to his feet with a standing ovation, exclaiming, “Whoo!” That “Whoo!,” high and sweet, could have come straight out of a Beatles song.
Which made sense, because the composer was Paul McCartney, trying his first ballet and being, it turns out, far more hands-on than a typical ballet composer. With “Ocean’s Kingdom” he has taken a part in everything: story, sets, costumes, even elements of the dance itself. As a novice to ballet composing, he approached the project in his own fruitfully naïve way. “The great thing for me was I never worked like this before,” Mr. McCartney said afterward. “One of the reasons I do this is to have new experiences in my life.”
Mr. Martins, the company’s ballet master in chief, said, “Paul obviously has a great ear, but he also has a great eye and many wonderful ideas, so I was happy to use them as his input really enriched my creative process.”
When the run-through ended, Mr. McCartney chatted for a few moments with some of the lead dancers, who earnestly asked him about nuances of their characters and basked in his approval. Mr. McCartney returned to attend the next full week of rehearsals, said Sara Mearns, one of the company’s principal dancers, who plays the central role of the princess Honorata.
City Ballet has often commissioned new ballet scores — Mr. McCartney joins a lineup that includes Wynton Marsalis, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Charles Wuorinen and John Adams — but the composer generally plays a more limited role. Ms. Mearns said Mr. McCartney “was there in all the rehearsals, and he would sit there and watch and he would chime in. He really is a huge part of the process in the ballet, and he really cares a lot about it. This is definitely something new for everybody, to have this kind of energy around a ballet.”
“Ocean’s Kingdom” is the centerpiece of the City Ballet’s season. Its opening, on Sept. 22, is the company’s annual gala. And while the score is remote from rock ’n’ roll, Mr. McCartney’s name and music are likely to draw audiences that are not ballet regulars, whether it’s baby boomers who paid hundreds of dollars to see Mr. McCartney this summer at Yankee Stadium or fashionistas curious about costumes designed by his daughter Stella McCartney.
The production is budgeted at $800,000, said Katherine E. Brown, City Ballet’s executive director. “It’s on the high side, but not really out of proportion for its size and scope,” she said, citing the size of the company, the full orchestra, and the length of the performance. Mr. McCartney “donated his services,” Ms. Brown said, and Ms. McCartney made “her resources available at a very reduced level.”
For City Ballet, Ms. Brown said, “it’s an investment in repertory building and in audience building.” The annual gala, which has previously raised a little over $2 million, has already drawn more than $3.7 million this year. Ticket sales for the production are strong, Ms. Brown said, and it has drawn new donors. “I am really struck at how universal his appeal is,” she said. “And Peter and Paul have a very simpatico kind of artistic relationship.”
“Ocean’s Kingdom” is, in many ways, an old-fashioned story ballet: a tuneful, tonal, orchestral work, in four movements, that accompanies a straightforward tale of love, complete with a princess. Written by Mr. McCartney, it illustrates the adventures of King Ocean’s daughter, Honorata, and the earth royalty who both desire her: King Terra and his brother, Prince Stone. (In true storybook style no one worries about breathing.) Mr. McCartney’s music unfolds through motifs and episodes, not pop verses and choruses; it harks back to Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Holst and Vaughan Williams, with a touch of Gershwin when the tough-guy Terra contingent struts in. In both music and dance, aquatic tranquillity contends with earthy brashness, a divide to be bridged by the lovers.
Mr. McCartney could have simply completed the music and let Mr. Martins and his company do the rest. He didn’t. “I’m used to doing, and being involved in, many elements in the things I do,” he said, the cover art on albums and the placement of a video screen for a stadium concert.
For “Ocean’s Kingdom” Mr. McCartney wrote the entire story line, scene by scene, and made paintings to suggest the backdrop for each act, which will be projections, and the final tableau. Mr. McCartney suggested to his daughter that the costume design include tattoos for the bad guys.
Mr. Martins recalled telling Mr. McCartney: “You’ve done the music, you’ve done the libretto, you’ve done the scenic elements. And Stella’s doing the costumes, and you told her, ‘I want tattoos.’ I said, ‘The only thing you haven’t done is the choreography.’ ”
Mr. McCartney laughed, and said, “Just give me a couple of weeks.”
In fact, Mr. Martins revealed, he incorporated some of Mr. McCartney’s body language into the dance. A signature stance for the ballet’s bad guys — the “Terra punks” — has the right arm raised, elbow bent and fingers splayed, and the left arm outstretched: a “Shazam!” pose. Mr. Martins said, turning to Mr. McCartney, that one day while they were listening to the punks’ music in his office, “You stood up, and you went like this” — he assumed the stance — “and I thought, well that’s a great image. And I threw it in the ballet.”
The collaboration began when Mr. McCartney met Mr. Martins in March 2010 at the School of American Ballet’s annual Winter Ball fund-raiser. Soon afterward, Mr. Martins asked if Mr. McCartney would be interested in writing ballet music. Along with his rock albums, Mr. McCartney has released four classical albums since 1991: two oratorios, a “symphonic poem” called “Standing Stone” and an album of shorter pieces, “Working Classical.” The “Ocean’s Kingdom” score is due for release as a CD (Hear Music/Telarc/Concord) on Oct. 4.
When Mr. Martins approached him, Mr. McCartney had already written a few minutes of rippling, oceanic music for the filmmaker Jacques Perrin; it had gone unused, and he had been thinking of extending it into a larger piece. Now he had a purpose for it, but no guidelines. “Foolishly I didn’t ask,” he said. “I didn’t say, ‘Well, what’s this ballet about, that we are going to do?’ ”
“I thought, what do I know about ballet? What the average Joe knows — ‘Swan Lake,’ ‘Nutcracker Suite.’ Well, I thought there’s no point in me doing that or trying to do that, because it’s been done by Tchaikovsky better than I might ever be able to do it.” While composing the music, he attended a Royal Ballet performance of “Giselle” with an analytical eye and spoke to the dancers afterward; mostly, however, he worked on his own.
He added, “With most things I do, I imagine myself as someone in the audience, so I just thought, ‘Well, what would I like to see?’ ”
Mr. McCartney does not read or write standard music notation. For the past few years he has used a computer program that simulates orchestral instruments. “I find it very addictive, so when I have time off I’ll go in there and just make little pieces and things, ‘cause I enjoy the process,” he said. By summer of 2010 his oceanic fragment had grown to about 50 minutes of music.
Only after he had written the music did Mr. McCartney start considering a story. He went through the piece with an engineer, identifying points in the music that could suggest characters and plot. “It’s either going to be a load of rubbish, or it might start to have a hint of a story,” he said. “O.K., this is somebody beautiful coming in here. This is somebody noble. These are baddies. So I just got it and blocked it out.”
A baby-naming book gave him monikers like Honorata and Stone. “It just kind of organically grew as the music did,” he said. “And I finally thought, well, this just seems like a good enough story.”
It’s an accessible fairy tale with a glimmer of environmentalism. The sea kingdom is serene and elegant; the earth intruders are angular and aggressive. “There was this subplot that I mentioned to Peter that seemed to emerge,” Mr. McCartney said. “It was never mentioned in the ballet, just kind of in the back of our minds, that there’s this ecological thing of the purity of the oceans, the destruction and pollution by the earth people, and who will win.”
“Ocean’s Kingdom” is a rarity in Mr. Martins’s career: a new narrative ballet. Although he has done versions of “Swan Lake” and “Romeo and Juliet,” his work is generally a more abstract response to a composition in the tradition of his predecessor George Balanchine. “That was a challenge for me,” Mr. Martins said. “But it was very well paced, I thought. So that’s why I’m surprised that the narrative didn’t come first.”
Mr. McCartney said that at times Mr. Martins “would say, ‘Listen to this,’ and he would be showing me my own music,” he said. “I knew the king came in at some point during these three minutes, but there it was, it was an exact cue. It was as if Peter had said to me, ‘I need to you to write a king entrance, 10 bars.’ ”
Mr. Martins did offer suggestions on the story: in particular, a lovers’ pas de deux in the third act. “We’re sitting there listening to the music, and Peter said, ‘This is erotic, yes?’ I said well, yeah, sure,” Mr. McCartney recalled. “He really put his interpretation on it. But then I was able to go, ‘Wow, thank you for that.’ Because I think at that point in the ballet we’ve had the elegance, we’ve had the punks, we’ve had the dance, we’ve had the romance, and then at this point of despair, suddenly you get sex, and I thought, that’s a good idea.”
“It’s always a good idea!,” Mr. Martins said, laughing.
Mr. McCartney also revised the music with choreography in mind. “When I first played it to Peter, one of the first things, what he actually did was count the music,” Mr. McCartney said. “The opening, because I hadn’t really written much for dance, the rhythm was 4/4, very straight.” He snapped his fingers, humming the tune. “Then I thought: ‘Oh, O.K., you are going to be counting are you? Well great, I’m going to throw you some stuff then.’ ” He chuckled. “A little 7/8 started to creep in, and 2/4 bars and things, and I knew it would give you something to play with.”
Throughout the collaboration, Mr. McCartney said, “he could see I was having loads of ideas.” He grinned. “I was kind of hoping he wouldn’t say, ‘No, no, that’s O.K., thanks, enough.
The New York Times
M J Kim/MPL Communications
Paul McCartney and Peter Martins at a rehearsal of “Ocean's Kingdom,” which will be put on by the New York City Ballet.
By JON PARELES
Published: September 9, 2011
THE composer, dressed down in denim and Nikes, strolled into rehearsal at the New York City Ballet’s Studio 2 late last month to see for the first time what the choreographer Peter Martins had made of his score, “Ocean’s Kingdom.”
Over the next hour, as the music played from a CD, the 48 dancers portrayed a romance set in a royal undersea court and a magical forest, with nobles, handmaidens and thugs. There were poised geometric ensembles and bursts of individual acrobatics, a ballroom scene, embraces and battles, even a brief bit of drunken comedy, all clearly telling a story.
Composer and choreographer watched intently, often leaning together to confer in whispers. At the end the composer leaped to his feet with a standing ovation, exclaiming, “Whoo!” That “Whoo!,” high and sweet, could have come straight out of a Beatles song.
Which made sense, because the composer was Paul McCartney, trying his first ballet and being, it turns out, far more hands-on than a typical ballet composer. With “Ocean’s Kingdom” he has taken a part in everything: story, sets, costumes, even elements of the dance itself. As a novice to ballet composing, he approached the project in his own fruitfully naïve way. “The great thing for me was I never worked like this before,” Mr. McCartney said afterward. “One of the reasons I do this is to have new experiences in my life.”
Mr. Martins, the company’s ballet master in chief, said, “Paul obviously has a great ear, but he also has a great eye and many wonderful ideas, so I was happy to use them as his input really enriched my creative process.”
When the run-through ended, Mr. McCartney chatted for a few moments with some of the lead dancers, who earnestly asked him about nuances of their characters and basked in his approval. Mr. McCartney returned to attend the next full week of rehearsals, said Sara Mearns, one of the company’s principal dancers, who plays the central role of the princess Honorata.
City Ballet has often commissioned new ballet scores — Mr. McCartney joins a lineup that includes Wynton Marsalis, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Charles Wuorinen and John Adams — but the composer generally plays a more limited role. Ms. Mearns said Mr. McCartney “was there in all the rehearsals, and he would sit there and watch and he would chime in. He really is a huge part of the process in the ballet, and he really cares a lot about it. This is definitely something new for everybody, to have this kind of energy around a ballet.”
“Ocean’s Kingdom” is the centerpiece of the City Ballet’s season. Its opening, on Sept. 22, is the company’s annual gala. And while the score is remote from rock ’n’ roll, Mr. McCartney’s name and music are likely to draw audiences that are not ballet regulars, whether it’s baby boomers who paid hundreds of dollars to see Mr. McCartney this summer at Yankee Stadium or fashionistas curious about costumes designed by his daughter Stella McCartney.
The production is budgeted at $800,000, said Katherine E. Brown, City Ballet’s executive director. “It’s on the high side, but not really out of proportion for its size and scope,” she said, citing the size of the company, the full orchestra, and the length of the performance. Mr. McCartney “donated his services,” Ms. Brown said, and Ms. McCartney made “her resources available at a very reduced level.”
For City Ballet, Ms. Brown said, “it’s an investment in repertory building and in audience building.” The annual gala, which has previously raised a little over $2 million, has already drawn more than $3.7 million this year. Ticket sales for the production are strong, Ms. Brown said, and it has drawn new donors. “I am really struck at how universal his appeal is,” she said. “And Peter and Paul have a very simpatico kind of artistic relationship.”
“Ocean’s Kingdom” is, in many ways, an old-fashioned story ballet: a tuneful, tonal, orchestral work, in four movements, that accompanies a straightforward tale of love, complete with a princess. Written by Mr. McCartney, it illustrates the adventures of King Ocean’s daughter, Honorata, and the earth royalty who both desire her: King Terra and his brother, Prince Stone. (In true storybook style no one worries about breathing.) Mr. McCartney’s music unfolds through motifs and episodes, not pop verses and choruses; it harks back to Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Holst and Vaughan Williams, with a touch of Gershwin when the tough-guy Terra contingent struts in. In both music and dance, aquatic tranquillity contends with earthy brashness, a divide to be bridged by the lovers.
Mr. McCartney could have simply completed the music and let Mr. Martins and his company do the rest. He didn’t. “I’m used to doing, and being involved in, many elements in the things I do,” he said, the cover art on albums and the placement of a video screen for a stadium concert.
For “Ocean’s Kingdom” Mr. McCartney wrote the entire story line, scene by scene, and made paintings to suggest the backdrop for each act, which will be projections, and the final tableau. Mr. McCartney suggested to his daughter that the costume design include tattoos for the bad guys.
Mr. Martins recalled telling Mr. McCartney: “You’ve done the music, you’ve done the libretto, you’ve done the scenic elements. And Stella’s doing the costumes, and you told her, ‘I want tattoos.’ I said, ‘The only thing you haven’t done is the choreography.’ ”
Mr. McCartney laughed, and said, “Just give me a couple of weeks.”
In fact, Mr. Martins revealed, he incorporated some of Mr. McCartney’s body language into the dance. A signature stance for the ballet’s bad guys — the “Terra punks” — has the right arm raised, elbow bent and fingers splayed, and the left arm outstretched: a “Shazam!” pose. Mr. Martins said, turning to Mr. McCartney, that one day while they were listening to the punks’ music in his office, “You stood up, and you went like this” — he assumed the stance — “and I thought, well that’s a great image. And I threw it in the ballet.”
The collaboration began when Mr. McCartney met Mr. Martins in March 2010 at the School of American Ballet’s annual Winter Ball fund-raiser. Soon afterward, Mr. Martins asked if Mr. McCartney would be interested in writing ballet music. Along with his rock albums, Mr. McCartney has released four classical albums since 1991: two oratorios, a “symphonic poem” called “Standing Stone” and an album of shorter pieces, “Working Classical.” The “Ocean’s Kingdom” score is due for release as a CD (Hear Music/Telarc/Concord) on Oct. 4.
When Mr. Martins approached him, Mr. McCartney had already written a few minutes of rippling, oceanic music for the filmmaker Jacques Perrin; it had gone unused, and he had been thinking of extending it into a larger piece. Now he had a purpose for it, but no guidelines. “Foolishly I didn’t ask,” he said. “I didn’t say, ‘Well, what’s this ballet about, that we are going to do?’ ”
“I thought, what do I know about ballet? What the average Joe knows — ‘Swan Lake,’ ‘Nutcracker Suite.’ Well, I thought there’s no point in me doing that or trying to do that, because it’s been done by Tchaikovsky better than I might ever be able to do it.” While composing the music, he attended a Royal Ballet performance of “Giselle” with an analytical eye and spoke to the dancers afterward; mostly, however, he worked on his own.
He added, “With most things I do, I imagine myself as someone in the audience, so I just thought, ‘Well, what would I like to see?’ ”
Mr. McCartney does not read or write standard music notation. For the past few years he has used a computer program that simulates orchestral instruments. “I find it very addictive, so when I have time off I’ll go in there and just make little pieces and things, ‘cause I enjoy the process,” he said. By summer of 2010 his oceanic fragment had grown to about 50 minutes of music.
Only after he had written the music did Mr. McCartney start considering a story. He went through the piece with an engineer, identifying points in the music that could suggest characters and plot. “It’s either going to be a load of rubbish, or it might start to have a hint of a story,” he said. “O.K., this is somebody beautiful coming in here. This is somebody noble. These are baddies. So I just got it and blocked it out.”
A baby-naming book gave him monikers like Honorata and Stone. “It just kind of organically grew as the music did,” he said. “And I finally thought, well, this just seems like a good enough story.”
It’s an accessible fairy tale with a glimmer of environmentalism. The sea kingdom is serene and elegant; the earth intruders are angular and aggressive. “There was this subplot that I mentioned to Peter that seemed to emerge,” Mr. McCartney said. “It was never mentioned in the ballet, just kind of in the back of our minds, that there’s this ecological thing of the purity of the oceans, the destruction and pollution by the earth people, and who will win.”
“Ocean’s Kingdom” is a rarity in Mr. Martins’s career: a new narrative ballet. Although he has done versions of “Swan Lake” and “Romeo and Juliet,” his work is generally a more abstract response to a composition in the tradition of his predecessor George Balanchine. “That was a challenge for me,” Mr. Martins said. “But it was very well paced, I thought. So that’s why I’m surprised that the narrative didn’t come first.”
Mr. McCartney said that at times Mr. Martins “would say, ‘Listen to this,’ and he would be showing me my own music,” he said. “I knew the king came in at some point during these three minutes, but there it was, it was an exact cue. It was as if Peter had said to me, ‘I need to you to write a king entrance, 10 bars.’ ”
Mr. Martins did offer suggestions on the story: in particular, a lovers’ pas de deux in the third act. “We’re sitting there listening to the music, and Peter said, ‘This is erotic, yes?’ I said well, yeah, sure,” Mr. McCartney recalled. “He really put his interpretation on it. But then I was able to go, ‘Wow, thank you for that.’ Because I think at that point in the ballet we’ve had the elegance, we’ve had the punks, we’ve had the dance, we’ve had the romance, and then at this point of despair, suddenly you get sex, and I thought, that’s a good idea.”
“It’s always a good idea!,” Mr. Martins said, laughing.
Mr. McCartney also revised the music with choreography in mind. “When I first played it to Peter, one of the first things, what he actually did was count the music,” Mr. McCartney said. “The opening, because I hadn’t really written much for dance, the rhythm was 4/4, very straight.” He snapped his fingers, humming the tune. “Then I thought: ‘Oh, O.K., you are going to be counting are you? Well great, I’m going to throw you some stuff then.’ ” He chuckled. “A little 7/8 started to creep in, and 2/4 bars and things, and I knew it would give you something to play with.”
Throughout the collaboration, Mr. McCartney said, “he could see I was having loads of ideas.” He grinned. “I was kind of hoping he wouldn’t say, ‘No, no, that’s O.K., thanks, enough.
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