I was doing Juan Darien; it was my major theater work and still stands to this day as my major musical theater work. In it, there was an Indonesian and also Asian or Indian technique called shadow play, where you would have a puppet that’s lit behind a screen. It’s probably the most ancient form of animation or cartoon, where you have rod puppets that are manipulated. Their actual size can range from really small if you press it up the screen or, if you manipulate the light, they can seem really large if you move them back.
There was a theme from Juan Darien that I enlarged for orchestra for the celebration of Leonard Bernstein’s seventieth birthday, in which Steven Mercurio conducted with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. It was quite a challenge. It let me develop a type of scale called slendro, which is an Indonesian scale that I based this particular theme on, to see where it could take me in a fifteen- or twenty-minute work. This was a joint commission for ASCAP and Meet the Composers.