For me, The Casserole was a bit of a study in comedic writing. Much of the year I spent at Guildhall writing this piece focused on adapting my compositional technique to create opportunities for comedy.
           One way in which I worked to do this was through clearly delineated musical characterization, found through consistently applied musical colors. Comedy operates on the unexpected, and so, for music to be funny, it must create expectations. In the excerpt offered, throughout Rehearsal R, I work to build a growing unease through the layering of unfamiliar sounds over the clearly patterned, almost ritualist, contrapuntal Contrabass/Bass Clarinet/Percussion lines. So when, at Rehearsal S, a pizzicato texture suddenly intrudes—(an orchestrational color, which underscored the first entrance of the mundane world in the opera, at reh. H), the listeners’ expectations are upended. Although the juxtaposition of the mundane and magical worlds aligns with the dialogue, the tight proximity of these two disparate blocks of music material gives the audience license to laugh at the absurd aside—“Eyes of newts!”—happening in the midst of a necromantic ritual.
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