I've been composing lately. This is something that I wanted to do as a teen. Back then, I was really into The Beatles (later, Duran Duran) and played guitar more than piano. But even though some good chord progressions came to me from time to time, lyrics to fit them never did. In fact, music and poetry existed in separate worlds. I still have a couple of journals from those years and there are some poems among the prose, but no music.
My music classes in college (for both BAs) taught me the fundamentals of music notation, music analysis, orchestration, etc. I did compose a few pieces for those classes, but they were mostly exercises in counterpoint or a particular technique.
Historical Musicology had absolutely nothing to do with composing—unless it was looking at the works of composers from the past. I did this very well, I’d like to think. And since I did spend an awful lot of time looking at music composed by women, at least I found inspiring role models in the archives.
2010: During an unplanned viewing of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, my guardian angel pipes up in my inner ear.
2011: This guardian angel, Madison Hatta, sonneteer, starts declaiming sonnets through my pen, copious amounts of them over the years. I stopped counting at 200. These “Madisonnets” mix Wonderland-ish imagery with my biography. They make me laugh. They also have a particular rhythm to their rhymes that ventures towards being musical without quite becoming music. (For the technically minded, most are Alexandrines, though some are iambic pentameter.)
Fast forward to 2025. It’s 15 (!!!) years since I first saw the Tim Burton Alice during which Madison so politely piped up in my inner ear. The morning of March 30, 2025 I awaken, and there’s this melody going through my head. I quickly reach for my iPad and hum it into the device. I think that I can fall back asleep, but a few minutes later, the lyrics come through, so I sleepily recite those into the iPad as well.
Once the day is truly under way, I listen to the recording at the piano and begin the process of figuring out exactly what those notes are so that I can write them down. The lyrics expand and complete themselves once I begin to write them out, and then I set them to the music. It took me a couple of weeks, maybe a month, to notate it all neatly using manuscript paper, ruler, pencil and eraser, while going back and forth to the piano to double-check things. And then the trial by fire: I give it to my accompanist and we go through it… and it works! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
We’ve done “You’re Alice in Wonderland” in concert twice, and at some point, we’ll do it again. For now, here’s a demo recording: https://aprillynnjames.com/track/4926595/you-re-alice-in-wonderland-8-5-2026-demo
Enjoy!