I am not sure what most of the other music teachers think of me. They seem to be a chirpy bunch – they’re a bucket of smiles and mid-day Mandarin jokes I’m not privy to. And they seem interested in me being interested in their office and in them. Asking a question, even through a translating third teacher, is generally appreciated. But we work parallel, not together: typing away at our desks before rushing out to teach one of a million classes about something possibly related to music.
Seven and Seven, however, thinks the world of me: I am his very favorite person. And I am his very favorite person because he has been waiting for sweet fortune to provide him (1) a real live composer and songwriter to serve as editor and advisor and wartime consigliere, and (2) a rehearsal pianist for his musicals. I am a piano-playing composer with a decade of music school under my belt. Seven and Seven would a thousand percent buy me at a slave market, if that were an option. It’s not, so he contents himself with sending me file after file of notes and score for his musical.
“So,” he will say, “you play this? Maybe… gimmesomenotes?”
Seven and Seven wants notes on his latest masterwork. He is, as he told me immediately upon meeting me, the founder and creative engine of Musical Club at International K-12. I ask him why he likes musicals so much, and he tells me:
“I… findthemonline? And I think… this ismylife.”
Seven and Seven can speak English, sort of – which, don’t knock it: Chinese is a very different language, and you don’t see me slinging around Mandarin phrases. He can converse, and that’s damn impressive. Still: he’s not quite fluent, and he’s trying to write a career’s worth of musicals in English. And this is his life. And despite looking like a fourteen-year-old, he’s over thirty, he tells me.
I find a poster for one of his older works in the music office. It’s for a run at The Great Gatsby. I’m going to let the poster speak for itself:
When the critical realism meet a nice story.
When the face a role you never challenged.
The charm of the stage will break out at that moment!
There are many vacancy of characters.
What are you waiting for?
Come on and indulge your passion for the stage!
This is more than singing and dancing, This is our thoughts, our youth!
Treasure this precious experience of life and win the future!
I hope Seven and Seven likes teaching at IK-12, because I do not think English-language musicals are his life.
He does, though, so I find scripts and scores for new songs pretty regularly in my inbox, and I dutifully read them. I want to leave it there, but Seven and Seven demands feedback from a real live English-speaking musician. He demands prompt feedback, too, despite the fact that I am teaching eleven class sections in a country where I don’t speak the language and have lived for about sixteen days could really use some class preparation time or at least an extra run to Cat Ears. I develop a system to deal with Seven and Seven, and by the end of my second week of teaching I am quite good at it: I learn to give him just enough feedback to overwhelm him, but not so much that he interrupts me at my desk more than twenty times a day to ask, “What does this word mean?”
Then Seven and Seven sends me demo recordings of his songs, and they are everything I ever wanted from life.
Now, note here that I’m drawing a distinction between learning English (really hard and impressive!) and writing musicals in a language in which you’re more or less conversational (not a great plan!). Keep that in mind as I tell you: Dude can’t pronounce the sound “th.” His is a deep, chocolaty “swish” sound: “through” becomes “sorwow.” The phrase “Through fire” becomes “sorwow fuhwreer.” He’s not super great with “L” in traffic, either; and makes a wrong turn on every vowel sound. “Rubies” is “rubbys,” which is a sex cult I am not about. It comes out like he’s making fun of Chinese people. I hear his first pass at a song and think, “This is racist.”
The reason I hear Seven and Seven’s maybe racist song is that Seven and Seven is the one singing across all of his demos. And – sweet Christ – trying to act as he does it, in possibly a cockney accent, through vaudevillian bits of sing-talking. This sounds like he is being swallowed by a blender.
That’s the better sound, though. Since he has decided to record every singing part for me, he also has to sing the alto and soprano parts. If you didn’t sing in chorus in high school, this means he’s up in the stratosphere, where fifteen-year-old girls are supposed to warble. He also breaks out the Sprechstimme cockney up there. This sounds like he is being swallowed by a blender, testicles first.
I think he’s trying to do cockney because of the material. Not satisfied with his Gatsby, Seven and Seven has decided to adapt A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is like me deciding to write an opera in Chinese, and also deciding that modern Mandarin Chinese is fucking weak sauce and that I’m instead going to adapt the works of some fifteenth-century Cantonese poet. Jesus what a heat check.
Seven and Seven not only wrestles grimly with English phonetics, he also doesn’t know what all the words mean. And he – like most of us – really doesn’t know what words in Shakespeare mean. He sets different parts of the play that only loosely spell themselves as scenes, and has characters talking over each other and out of sequence.
There’s a bit early on where Puck – the famous trickster spirit – explains to a fairy (and thus to the audience) who he is, and whom he works for: the king, Oberon. After his spiel, he silences the fairy, saying, “But room, fairy! Here comes Oberon!” In Seven and Seven’s version, Oberon announces himself, singing, “King Oberon and his queen…” [here the music winds up for the pitch] “are HEEEEEEERE!” This is like watching The Godfather to find Brando yelling, “Heeeeey, everybody! Here comes the Godfather!” to go along with a little shimmy.
Even if you do speak fluent English, and know your Shakespeare, and can understand Seven and Seven’s warbling, this shit is still functionally inscrutable. Seven and Seven just slapped unaltered chunks of Shakespeare’s text on paper, understanding tops 70% of the individual words – let alone the Shakespearean phrasing – and decided, “This is a fucking banger.”
It’s my job, as pianist-in-residence, to actually play the banger for the students to sing along. This is not super easy. Seven and Seven’s music is mercifully legible, or close to it, but the man makes some choices. He likes to set things in obscure keys and use inconsistent notation to mask the very direction of the line he wants me to play. As a dedicated professional, I practice thinly, bluff a lot, and leave out about half of the notes.
This works well enough for the student members of Musical Club, who in the second full week of class mass in the main auditorium. I’m told this will be a thing on Mondays after the last class period. I had learned to enjoy that time as a point in my week where I am, as the Chinese say, “not working.” But duty calls – or at least, Ms. Music called me over to explain, through Green Tea, that the teachers are expected to help out with at least one club. She gives me a knowing little nod when she says it, which I do not feel great about.
So I’m there on the first Monday, at the piano, as Seven and Seven berates the assembly. He starts in English, but gives up after a little bit and chirps away in Mandarin. I know it’s my turn to play when he jerks a limb at me and nods frantically. Sometimes he comes over to the piano to tell me where to start playing. My mind goes very blank in the interludes between. One afternoon I accidentally achieve enlightenment. (It doesn’t take.)
The kids take Seven and Seven with about a tablespoon of salt. They giggle in the background as he manically reenacts the scenes and orders his cast about the stage. “More!” he yells, but more often just yells in a language I still don’t speak.
Our Demetrius is named Weeds. He has the physique of an eel and just the faintest suggestion of a mustache. He spends a good amount of time in the wings teasing his crush, who is one of those fifteen-year-olds who has abruptly acquired curves and has no idea what to do with them. Weeds, to be fair, has no idea what to do with them either; he just knows he wants to stand close by, in case something happens – something he can’t quite articulate, but feels very strongly about.
I find myself thundering away on the piano as Weeds belts to his Helena, “You trust the opportunity of night with your VIR GIN I TY!!!” Well, that’s the word as written: what he’s bellowing is, “VIR JYE NIH TEE!” After a few weeks of this, I can’t remember how I used to pronounce the word.
Weeds pronounces “virginity” that way because he also listened to Seven and Seven’s demo. The line that precedes this showstopper is longer: a direct, slow draft from the original Bard:
You do impeach your modesty too much,
To leave the city and commit yourself
Into the hands of one that loves you not;
To trust the opportunity of night
And the ill counsel of a desert place
With the rich worth of your virginity.
If you’ve left your Cliff Notes back in your undergrad dorm, this is one of Shakespeare’s young lovers (Demetrius) telling the girl he doesn’t like but who loves him (Helena) to back off – and also, you know, insinuating that bad shit could happen to a sexy little thing out here in these woods.
In the play, this moment is jarring – I don’t recall anyone in Ten Things I Hate About You yelling, “Leave me alone! You could get raped out here, slut!” – but it’s also layered and charming and weirdly sexy (and just blatantly sexual): Helena is very much onboard with Demetrius’ dark wishes. (I’m not a Shakespearean scholar, but I believe her reply is best summed as, “It’s not rape if you like it.”) It’s a moment that requires a delicate touch in performance, and a finely-woven musical coat – if you’re brave enough to try dressing it in music.
Seven and Seven is tragically brave. In his version, thematic nuance is in the blender where he left his ‘nads, and the scene becomes some rando screaming at a woman, “I WISH YOU GOT ASSAULTED, SEX-WISE, YOU WHORE!” The music is a creaky replication of ragtime. It bounces along at a brisk clip – my fingers jangling across the keyboard – as the two leads yell some very impolitic ideas of consent at each other.
The only saving grace of the scene is that the students learned their lines from Seven and Seven, which means that their dialogue is effectively a mystery. Well, except “VIR JYE NIH TEE.” That word is extremely clear. The part before it, on the other hand (“… ill counsel of a desert place with the rich worth…”) sounds like Weeds is choking to death on marbles coated in peanut butter. (Seven and Seven has a habit of putting entire paragraphs in a line of music – on the demos, he’s more or less perpetually gasping for air.)
It’s even worse when Shakespeare gets better. There’s a spot in the play, before all that willy-nilly virjynitee, where Demetrius tells Helena that he is very much not into her, and she replies:
And even for that do I love you the more.
I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you:
Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
What worser place can I beg in your love,–
And yet a place of high respect with me,–
Than to be used as you use your dog?
Not to get too erudite here, but: this is some heavily sexual shit. I am embarrassed for the children singing this to each other, and pretty horny for Helena. It’s a confusing time for me.
But it’s even more confusing for Seven and Seven. It doesn’t surprise me that he is not a very sensual person – he moves like Pinocchio mid-seizure. But I didn’t expect even him to turn this segment into an unblinking, deeply earnest ballad. As Weeds exits the scene, his crush lilts to him, “I am your spaniel!” and I drip syrup over the piano. I’m surprised nobody has a lighter. It is definitely the most unironic rallying cry for domestic abuse – not to prevent it; just, you know, kind of about it – that I have ever participated in.
“When you say, ‘Spaniel,’” Seven and Seven instructs, “show how you love him. With… a lotof… emotion.” He demonstrates.
Teachers and new parents, when they are having doubts about their chosen path, like to recite their greatest hits – the moments that made them just so very sure that they are doing the right thing; that they were meant to mold young lives. I think this is my moment. Don’t ever let anyone tell you I got into music education for the wrong reason.
Some weeks into my time at IK-12, during one of our staff meetings, Ms. Music berates Seven and Seven in Mandarin at length, and he pouts. I ask one of the other teachers for a translation – staff meetings are not for me, exactly – and she tells me:
“Ms. Music says that all the staff must first focus on teaching, and not to put other work first. She says not to ask other teacher for work, until the teaching is ready.”
I look over at Seven and Seven, who is not making eye contact with anyone. The rest of the semester, I prep as little as possible for Musical Club, and then not at all. After all, it’s not really my job to help Seven and Seven treasure this precious experience of life and win the future.