Well, I got into composition my senior year of high school. CCS just seemed like the best program for me. In terms of my personal experience, my high school was a very small high school. 600 students. It was an engineering high school on a college campus, so it was very advanced. They really pushed us to do more; it was very much the CCS philosophy. I remember coming here my junior year on our northern California college tours and they talked about CCS and, I remember my friend Jennifer saw my face light up when they were talking about CCS and right away she said, “Oh, I know where Ryan wants to go.” And, just kind of the intense atmosphere of CCS, the way they really make you go for things. The way they encourage you to go for things you wouldn’t normally be able to do at a college, that’s what I like. Over in the Music Department, it’s so structured. I mean it’s a great program, but I want to get my Masters in Musical Theater Writing, so the professors in CCS are really letting me focus on that. Every once in a while, there’s a class on making a musical. There’s just random classes like that in CCS where every once in a while they come up.
So the kind of music you’re mainly interested in is musical theater?
Yes. I mean, I do some of the more avant-garde stuff. But that’s not my thing. Every once in a while I get an idea, and I’ll just do something random. Like I’m writing a piece for the
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Is Shrunken Head Productions your only experience with musical theater? And the CCS musical “Lovestruck?”
I did theater in high school. In college, I’ve done Shrunken Head. I’m in the pit orchestra right now for a musical in the New Plays Festival. And I was involved in the CCS musical last year.
Did you write for the New Plays Festival?
No, a friend of mine, Bobby Halvorson, another CCS composer, wrote the music for Tomorrowland, a musical at the New Plays Festival. The music’s very fun. It’s post-grunge. Very interesting. This is the kind of stuff I love about CCS. The professors don’t give you a structured curriculum. “I want to write a rock musical.” “Okay, go for it.” But the New Plays festival is through the Theater Department.
What has been your overall experience here at UCSB? And getting involved with musical theater?
It’s very difficult because the Music Department is very against musical theater. Not just that they don’t do it. They’re against musical theater. The voice teachers, a lot of people, the department in general, is just against it. The DA Department stopped doing musicals a few years ago, and that’s why Gina Intersimone and CJ Hayes [two CCS Literature alumni], started Shrunken Head Productions back in winter ’05. We do a musical every quarter, so it’s very intense. It’s interesting, because although we don’t have a lot of departmental support, we pull from a lot of places because there’s a lot of student talent that’s interested. It’s easy for us to get musicians and actors and singers. We have to do a bit of hunting, but you guys always come out of the woodwork and were always like, “Oh, we like you!”
What is the hardest part? Funding, casting, talent?
Just the resources in general, because it’s always hard to get performance space because the Music Department and Theater Department are so possessive of their majors. And naturally, as a student organization it’s hard to get funding. I mean, there’s plenty of grants, but the way things work out it’s kind of hard for us to get them. It’s just kind of the resources in general. The human resources, no, are never a problem. We always have all the talent we need.
Who’s your favorite composer?
I have two. One of them is Jason Robert Brown [writer of The Last Five Years and Songs for a New World]. He’s just so amazing, such a creative lyricist, very intimate lyrics, and the music is always so gorgeous and interesting. For falling within a kind of mainstream idiom, it’s very compositionally advanced work. I’ve taken some of his sheet music into my composition lessons just to show my professor once in a while, “This is the sound I’m going for, I like the way he does this, and is there another way that I can kind of go about the same thing.” And she said, “Wow, this is really cool stuff. Bring this back sometime.”
Who’s the second one?
The other one is the crazy Japanese guy. Mana. My big thing is bringing good music to a wider audience and I mean, okay, Beatles are good, all that kind of stuff is good, but just in terms of compositional style it’s very simple, and formulaic at times. And Jason Robert Brown brings very advanced twentieth century techniques to his writing, and that’s what I really like about him. And Mana, it really sounds like what you’d get if you gave Bach an electric guitar, because he fuses rock with some of the most interesting Baroque classical styles. It’s that kind of fusion and bringing of sound to a mainstream audience that I really like.
What do you feel you get out of the music program specifically at CCS?
Freedom to do whatever I want, and encouragement and training to pursue that. Like I said it’s very structured in the Music Department and in CCS, if you want to focus your degree in musical theater, you can do that. There are a lot of people who want to focus in film scoring, and you can do that, because the professors know so much about it. I mean, you can definitely get that from the Music Department but in CCS, the professors know so much about it, that it’s so easy to get advice on the specifics on everything that you’re doing and there’s always resources on campus. Like the random classes in CCS music that pop up. Like right now there’s a class and it’s called, “From Whole Notes to Bank Notes,” and they basically walk you through every step in the process from getting your music prepared to a professional publishable format, to starting your own publishing company, and it’s just the little things like that that really give you the extra advantage over regular music students…Right now I’m taking a vernacular harmony class, which is harmonies specific to jazz and musical theater styles. The professor is so knowledgeable about that. I’m actually thinking of pursuing an independent study with him over the next few quarters just because he knows so much about jazz and musical theater and opera. And just the way that CCS makes these resources available to you. Just every one in awhile, “Here’s a fun class: string quartets.” You take something that you normally wouldn’t study in depth, and have a whole quarter on just string quartets, and techniques and composers and the repertoire and everything.
Any professors you specifically want to mention?
Well, all of them are really strong in their various eras. I’ve really only worked with Leslie Hogan. She’s my advisor and I’ve been taking composition lessons with her for the last two years. I’m planning to study with Jeremy Haladyna next year. They teach the creative studies composition and instruction. But then there’s also the professors over in the Music Department who are available to us to take lessons from. The one I am talking about, who teaches the vernacular harmony class that I’m taking, his name is Earl Stewart. He’s in the Black Studies Department, but he’s taught in the Berklee School of Music. These professors are all really on top of their game.
So post-college, what do you want to do?
I have my heart set on going to NYU because I’ve done my research, and they’re the only one that I can find that offers a masters in musical theater writing. To my knowledge, their the only one in the nation, maybe the only one in the world that offers a program like this, and that is exactly what I want to do. I have my heart set on going there, if that’s the last I ever do.
And then you want to write for musical theater?
I want to write for musical theater. I don’t even know how I got into that. I was in math/science schools for ten years and then said, “I want to be a Music Composition Major.” It was really interesting.
Were your parents fine with it?
Oh yeah. They were like, “You might want to minor in something else, just in case.”
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