Artist Exposé: Jane Bate
Jane Russell Bate is a Connecticut musician who has immersed herself in music from an early age. Along with an introduction to piano lessons through the West Hartford Summer Music and Arts program, her school and private lessons in piano, flute, and bassoon impelled her to follow music as a career. Though Bate earned her B.A. at Smith College, she spent two summers during those college years studying with Ray Wright and Manny Albam at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, an experience that prepared her well for musical composition.
To date, Bate has written fifteen musical works for ensembles, three of which - all for concert band - are published by Alfred Publishing. One of those three - "Hymn to the Beauty That Was" - was written in memory of the Petit family of Cheshire, CT, three of whom were murdered in 2007.
Bate's most recent project is a musical entitled "SALEM", which required research both on how to write a musical as well as gathering info on the background of the trials themselves. Very quickly, the writer was drawn to the character of Samuel Sewall, who was one of the judges involved in the infamous witch trials. Previous to those trials, Sewall had judged a pirate trial in which the judges had deemed the pirate to be guilty, but the pirate's family talked the judges into setting that pirate free! This left Sewall with a conscience badly in need of repair! Sewall, though known mostly for his role as one of the 1692 judges, was also likely the most prolific diarist of the era, championed the abolition of slavery, and fought the belief of that time that women could not go to Heaven!
When the Witch Trials of 1692 began, Sewall was likely very concerned that he must be correct in his judgments and not succumb to outside pressures to free the accused "witches." History tells us that, when a church commemoration of the trials (and lives lost) was held five years later, Samuel Sewall was the first person to apologize for his role in that awful event.
In writing SALEM, Bate has utilized many lines from the actual trial transcripts, occasional lines from Sewall's diary, as well as some lines from Rev. Parris' sermons. The music in SALEM reflects several genres (from opera to pop to jazz) in order to underscore the universal applicability of "witch trials." For casting purposes, the show requires: 5 girls (pre-teen to mid-teens); 1 boy (with unchanged voice); 6 adult women (one of whom, Tituba, is dark-complexioned); and 8 adult men. Some of these actors double as other characters, and all those onstage should be able to sing.
For more information on SALEM, please email: dacapo.24@outlook.com.
The detail that makes this profile land is the research behind SALEM: a composer who writes fifteen works for ensembles, then stops to learn how a musical is actually built and who Samuel Sewall was, is doing the unglamorous part of the job that most people never see.
The practical problem for a musician with that catalogue is that the audience now meets the work on video platforms first, and there is rarely budget for a shoot per piece. What a composer usually has instead is a recording, a score, and a good photograph, which is enough to build a short piece around if the audio is treated as the spine rather than a soundtrack added at the end.
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