Released in 2009 "Music is God" (Have guitar will travel) is one of the songs I wrote and arranged for and with Jon Anderson legend of the Progressive Rock and leader of Yes, Jon&Vangelis, Jon&Kitaro. More informations www.alessandroderosa.com

Music is God ( Jon Anderson \ Alessandro De Rosa)

53 CD 2  - ACT III - 10_1 - Scene XV - Learning Alchemy

THE ALCHEMIST  - Favola in musica inspired by the Paulo Coelho's novel 
Music by Alessandro De Rosa, Lyrics by Jon Anderson 

THE IDEA:
The idea to set to music “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho came to De Rosa, young musician and composer, in 2006 when he started his collaboration with Jon Anderson, legendary voice of Yes, Jon & Vangelis and Kitaro.
De Rosa had the idea to write a music based on the Coelho's most famous novel and he composed all the orchestral part of the entire opera. Then Anderson enthusiastically joined the project, enriching it with fascinating and unimitable lyrics and voice melodies. 

In March 2009, with the insertion of the last missing songs, the two musicians completed a musical demo of the opera which they are currently proposing.
The entire opera consists of approximately two hours of music, meant to be functional to a theatrical and multimedial show involving several disciplines, from ballet to modern theater, from animated projections to symphonic concert.

The Alchemist, a tale set to music, has undoubdetly got the chance to become a very valid cultural and commercial product: the book, a contemporary novel addressed to a variety of audiences; the music, refined and modern, thought and built in  great detail as a support to the show; the voice, unmistakable and unimitable, of one of the most particular artists in the rock and pop contemporary scene; the project as a whole, an ambitious and extremely fascinating work in which many expressive arts merge in one great event.

After listening to the entire work Master Ennio Morricone said to De Rosa: 'Alessandro, this ambitious project is very well composed, refined and really well built!'
 
THE MUSIC AND THE LIBRETTO:
The  Alchemist is an opera in 3 Acts plus a prologue and a conclusion. The musical language used is mainly symphonic with some sonorities from the pop and rock world.
Target of the project infact, according with the polysemic text which it is inspired, is a big audience, from children to adults. The music is composed sometimes as 'soundtrack' of a sequence or a dialogue, sometimes it becomes the main object, the aim of the scene.
De Rosa wrote also the adaptation from the original story selecting different scenes from the book scoring it in music. He invented also the Minstrel\Troubadour character who has the important function to describe the audience in which part of the story they are. Anderson composed all the vocal melodies of the songs and recitative parts adding beautiful and descriptive lyrics. In order to present the whole product we decided to add to the music a descriptive narration which helps the listener to link music to meanings. This narration could be deleted or reduced  whenever other descriptive elements are available. At the moment we have two versions of this narration: one is the résumé of the famous 'audio-book' read by J. Irons, the other one is told by Jon Anderson. The first one is simply the selection of some parts of the book, the second one was created 'ex novo' by Anderson and De Rosa writing a version on the real story.
We choose in this case to transcribe all the version narrated by Irons because it is more detailed and similar to the original text.
For the moment all the texts and lyrics (from recitative parts, songs and narration) are in English. The idea, in a second step, is to translate everything and make versions in other languages.

53 CD 2 - ACT III - 10_1 - Scene XV - Learning Alchemy

The Alchemist

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