"Alice's Theme": Music & Lyrics by Danny Elfman

Danny Elfman's soundtrack to Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland will be released on CD (an ancient kind of optical disc used to store digital audio) next Tuesday, March 2nd, and there's some short clips at the Amazon store if you desire a teaser. I couldn't help noticing the opening song - with children's voices singing "Oh, Alice, dear where have you been?" - and I found the complete lyrics at a blog called cinemusic.net. I'll include them with that website's charming introduction:

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, starring Johnny Depp as Elijah Wood The Mad Hatter begins pissing off prickly Lewis Carroll purists on March 5, 2010 in theaters everywhere in eye-popping 3D. Lending musical support is Burton’s constant composer Danny Elfman, AKA film music’s most awesome red head.

Threaded throughout the score is an original song penned by Elfman, called “Alice’s Theme”, and it opens up the Disney Records score album due in stores on March 2 (obligatory Amazon link). Here’s a sneak peek at the song’s lyrics (thanks to the supremely talented LD for these)…

“Alice’s Theme”

Music and Lyrics by Danny Elfman

Oh, Alice, dear where have you been?

So near, so far or in between?

What have you heard what have you seen?

Alice, Alice, please, Alice!

Oh, tell us are you big or small

To try this one or try them all

It’s such a long, long way to fall

Alice, Alice, oh, Alice

How can you know this way not that?

You choose the door you choose the path

Perhaps you should be coming back

Another day, another day

And nothing is quite what is seems

You’re dreaming are you dreaming, oh, Alice?

(Oh, how will you find your way? Oh, how will you find your way?)

(There’s not time for tears today. There’s no time for tears today.)

So many doors – how did you choose

So much to gain so much to lose

So many things got in your way

No time today, no time today

Be careful not to lose your head

Just think of what the doormouse [sic] said…Alice!

Did someone pull you by the hand?

How many miles to Wonderland?

Please tell us so we’ll understand

Alice…Alice…Oh, Alice

(Oh how will you find you way? … Oh, how will you find you way?)

Sing along!

I've never met a prickly Lewis Carroll purist, let alone a pissed-off one, but I would presume they're easily decapitated with a vorpal sword. Or defenestrated with a defibrillator.

Anyway, if you are not familiar with Mr. Elfman, he is the film composer and long-time collaborator with Mr. Burton, the man wrote the iconic music for Batman, The Simpsons theme, and those wonderful songs for The Nightmare Before Christmas. He has done less-than-stellar work for some of Mr. Burton's more recent mediocrities. Elfman is often mocked in the classical world for basically having a team of composers do his work for him, although I sometimes feel this criticism is harsh. (After all, Renaissance painters employed whole crews of apprentices, Dale Chihuly has a studio to manifest his glass-art masterpieces, and George Gershwin didn't do the orchestrations for Rhapsody in Blue (free round of drinks if you can name the composer who did!) Art is not always the product of an agonized solo genius, sometimes she can be more of an architectural designer, et cetera, especially in the film music world. Thus ends this parenthetical rant.)

As dear to my adolescent heart as Elfman's music for The Nightmare Before Christmas is, there's many cringeworthy lyrics (e.g., "I wish my cohorts weren't so dumb / I'm not the dumb one / You're no fun / Shut up! / Make me!") I would pay a large sum of money to hire William Shatner to read the lyrics to "Alice's Theme" as a beat poem accompanied by bongos and upright bass (as he did for Sarah Palin's verbiage). In conclusion, Mr. Elfman should hire a real librettist.

Kristian Scheiblecker's Lewis Carroll songs

A musician named Kristian Scheiblecker has written very pretty songs set to some of Lewis Carroll's 'non-nonsense' poetry. I do not know if they are to be released for sale in any format, but you can listen to a thirteen-track playlist of them (some labeled 'unfinished'), at his website journeys.se - which, even if it continues to evolve, already plays together nicely as an album. According to Jenny Woolf, he performed at the (UK) Lewis Carroll Society's December party at the Art Workers Guild in London. She reports:

This year, a couple of Swedish guys called Kristian Scheiblecker and Pontus Nilsson came specially to perform some songs based on Carroll's so-called "serious poems". They have been classically trained but the music was more like early Leonard Cohen to my ear. You could certainly imagine Kristian sitting there in his Victorian cottage in Sweden and composing the music in the dark winter nights.

To my surprise I found that Carroll's poems made terrific lyrics. Read purely as poetry, they are mostly rather banal. I was particularly impressed with "Only A Woman's Hair" which makes a most touching ballad.


"...and, as I touch that lock, strange visions throng
Upon my soul with dreamy grace-
Of woman's hair, the theme of poet's song
In every time and place. -

A child's bright tresses, by the breezes kissed
To sweet disorder as she flies,
Veiling, beneath a cloud of golden mist,
Flushed cheek and laughing eyes- -

Or fringing, like a shadow, raven-black,
The glory of a queen-like face-
Or from a gipsy's sunny brow tossed back
In wild and wanton grace...

...The eyes that loved it once no longer wake:
So lay it by with reverent care-
Touching it tenderly for sorrow's sake-
It is a woman's hair."

-quoted at length from jabberwock.co.uk/blog

Ms. Woolf compares his voice to Leonard Cohen, but it reminds me more of the Scottish Bard Robin Williamson, with fewer mordents. Scheibecker quotes Carroll scholar Edward Wakeling below the songs for an introduction to Carroll's non-nonsense poetry:

Rare performance of Alec Wilder's original music for the 1957 LP Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

In 1957, a popular dramatized LP version of Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland was released, narrated and sung by Cyril Ritchard. It's still widely available, even on iTunes here. The music, which many children of that generation heard so many times, was written by light classical American composer Alec Wilder - (He also wrote television operas, like Miss Chicken Little [1953] for CBS, and was friends with Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett.) A piano reduction of this score, with song versions of just about every poem in AAIW, has been in print from Tro Ludlow Music since 1986. However, the original instrumental score, for woodwind quintet plus percussion, was lost.

It was lost until it was found in Gunther Schuller's attic a few years ago. (Schuller is another swing-era American popular-classical composer.) Professor John Koehn will be staging a performance at Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s College of Fine Arts this weekend and next, with the school's Dean, Michael Hood, reading from the story. 11am on Saturday, December 12th and 19th, at the Indiana Free Library in Indiana, Pennsylvania. Read more about it in the Indiana Gazette.

Wonderland: Alice's New Musical Adventure - Premiers in Tampa Bay on November 24th

Frank Wildhorn is the musical theater composer who brought the world Jekyll & Hyde and The Scarlet Pimpernel at a comparatively young age. Wonderland: Alice's New Musical Adventure will be playing the counties for the next few months with aspirations of Broadway. The World Premier will be in Florida at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center on November 24th, and run thru January 3rd, 2010. It will then leap to the Alley Theater in Houston, Texas.

Here's the blurb with a synopsis from their website:

Now, they are most definitely and exactually BACK!

In this world premiere of a new musical by lyricist Jack Murphy, book writers Jack Murphy and Gregory Boyd and acclaimed composer Frank Wildhorn, Alice is a children’s book writer in Manhattan who is suffering through a creative block, estranged from her husband and alienated from her daughter. It takes a trip to a strange-yet-familiar Wonderland for her to regain her life’s balance and again find the love and everyday magic that reside in us all – if we know how to look.

Wildhorn’s score taps into numerous pop styles, and Murphy’s lyrics provide both wit and wisdom.

Be among the first to see this exciting new production.

There must be something in the zeitgeist that there's so many older-Alice-returning projects to hit simultaneously. (Or is this a perennial take on classic children's literature?) What follows is a slideshow with one of the songs, ending with an advertisement: "Journey with a modern-day Alice to Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World where she must find her daughter, defeat the Queen and learn to follow her heart..."

And here's a few more musical clips from their website:

Faryl in Wonderland

For those of you who like your pop-classical overproduced and over-enunciated, hot tweenage British singer Faryl Smith is releasing her second album (quick on the heels of her first album Faryl, which was the fastest-selling "classical" album of all time.) Wonderland, due on November 30th, is "loosely based on Lewis Carroll's novel", according to this evening's Evening Telegraph.

"[Alice's Adventures in Wonderland] is one of my favourite books," says the former Britain's Got Talent contestant. "It's so dreamy and playful."

Keep watching after the musical clip, the second video is Miss Smith personally announcing Wonderland. It's important to put all this in its proper cultural context, and remember that in the 2000s, hyper-sexualized images of underage girls in popular music was standard and should be judged against the backdrop of the norms of the times.

The Hunting of the Snark - New Short Film Premiers Saturday in Queens

Strange creepy creatures come out of your dens, and go to the world premier of The Hunting of the Snark at the Queens International Film Festival on Saturday, November 14th, 2009. The 30-minute student film is the directorial debut of Peter Pavlakis, a Brooklynite. The synopsis sounds like the plot sticks close to the Carroll poem, and the film trailer has an actor reading verbatim one of the rhymed speeches - so, we can expect a bit of fidelity, not a psycho-sexual re-imagining of the Bellman returning to sea a decade later to confront his nightmarish inner demons (ending in a car chase).

This will be at noon tomorrow at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts Charter Room, 35-12 35th Avenue, Queens, NY 11106.

Also coming out this week with the same title, the transatlantic "cosmopolitan post-bop" group NYNDK released "The Hunting of the Snark" on the label Jazzheads. The album includes hip versions of Charles Ives, Edward Grieg, and Carl Nielsen. The titular track (which can be heard online here) begins with some snarky outgribations on trombone, but I couldn't find any explanation for the use of the Carroll poem's title beyond catchy inspiration.

mmm-kay

"Made in Bombay, born and raised in the UK, and currently based in San Francisco. Micropixie is a self- proclaimed Alien with extraORDINARY Abilities. She is also the extra-terrestrial alter ego of writer, film-maker, and full-time human being, Single Beige Female. Her debut release, Alice in Stevie Wonderland, is a concept album telling the true story of One Little Alien's mission on planet Earth to experience life as a human being."

Micropixie will be playing Thursday, October 8, 6:00-8:00 pm, at CSU Fresno's University Business Center, Peters Business Building, Alice Peters Auditorium, Room PB191. Free admission. CDs will be available for purchase and signing.

A change of pace

Many musical works have been inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice books, and even by The Hunting of the Snark, but I can't think of anything other than academic books that have been inspired by his letters. Fortunately, Free Music Archive fills this void by making available Igor Ballereau's "Lettres à des amies-enfants", five songs for voice, flute, clarinet, violin, viola and cello performed by Jody Pou and Ensemble SIC.

Based on Lewis Carroll's letters to his child-friends Marion Richards, Dolly Argles, Ethel Arnold, Jessie Sinclair, and on his poem "The Mad Gardner's Song," the five pieces are what I would call (not actually knowing anything about it) experimental classical, and may or may not be your cup of tea. But for the whopping price of $0.00, they are definitely worth a listen.

A new take on singing flowers

90% of "Alice," an electronic musical piece, is composed of sounds from Disney's Alice In Wonderland. Created by 19-year old Australian Nick Bertke, the music video (using bits from the film, of course) can seen here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAwR6w2TgxY.