Oregon Music News

Music and flying. These two diverse careers have kept Rodolfo Ortega aloft during his adult life. A graduate of the Manhattan School of Music and a former solo pianist who earned his flying credentials in the late 1980’s, Ortega, 45, composed two musicals for the Northwest Children’s Theater, including the recent steampunk version of Pinocchio.

Listen to song samples from the show.

He wrote an opera, which has yet to be performed, and has composed original scores and musical accompaniment for over 250 plays in the past 15 years.

He’s composed ominous harpsichord riffs for a kids’ production of Frankenstein, 19th century-style Spanish guitar music for Miracle Theatre, band marches for Profile Theater, and an East Indian score for a California production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for which he had to learn a whole new musical scale.

OMN asked him about his life, career, accomplishments and work techniques.

How did you get interested in composing?

I actually started with one of my piano teachers, Richard Faith, at the University of Arizona, where I got my undergraduate degree. He was a wonderful composer. We spent a third of the lesson on piano, a third on composition and a third talking about the soap operas he watched. I didn’t do any compositions other than just fiddling around. Then in grad school I did more compositions for myself, even though I was a bona fide classical pianist, and my entire focus was on piano performance.

How did you start composing for stage plays?

It was through a friend, Antonio Sonera, an active member of the Portland theater scene. He said this company called Miracle Theatre was looking for a composer for one of their shows. I did one composition for them, they liked it, and hired me to do more. Then it just blossomed from there.

What theater companies have you worked for besides Miracle?

Artists Repertory Theatre, Oregon Children’s Theatre, Northwest Children’s Theater, Profile Theatre, Sojourn Theatre, Triangle Productions, Portland Actors Conservatory, the now-defunct Tigres Heart–I wrote almost everything for them for years. I did all the Shakespeare music there, and now I’ve been doing a lot of the music for Shakespeare Santa Cruz.

When creating a musical–let’s take Pinocchio–how do you start building the songs? What’s your entry point?

First, I sit down with the playwright, director and producer, and ask, “What’s the tale you want to tell, and what’s the message we want to present?” In the case of Pinocchio,” for example, what it is we want the child to come away with? With this in mind, we figure out the world we’re creating where the characters live, because that informs what type of music I’ll do, what I can get away with, and what I can’t.

Then I usually write an eight-minute score for myself that will never live in the piece, but just basically explores themes. I’ll flesh out Pinocchio’s themes or a theme from flight or from fear, and interweave it into a personal overture. From that, I work backwards and tease out what is Pinocchio’s leitmotif, then create ideas for each of the characters, and not just for characters, but for themes, very similar to  Wagner’s idea of leitmotif–It’s not just Tristan and Isolde, but Tristan and Isolde in despair, Tristan and Isolde happy.

You work these permutations out, then you have this enormous bin of musical ideas from which you can start fabricating songs.

What’s different about creating original music for a non-musical play?

In a musical, obviously the songs draw attention to themselves. I think when you’re watching either a play or a movie, music should not draw attention to itself. But if it wasn’t there, you’d miss it. The music should always be supporting what is there, but the audience should never realize it is there, although obviously they can hear it. You can do this little thing: Watch Jaws, and take out the soundtrack. The movie’s not even half as scary, and it even looks silly at times.

When you compose, do you work on synthesizer, computer or piano?

I do end up on the piano or a keyboard.

Sometimes, the music you’ve composed for plays seems of higher quality than the actual play or production.

Technology has allowed us to develop these phenomenal scores that are very inexpensive to reproduce, whereas some of the other technology in the theater is not as advanced. So productions run into limitations. At the end of the day, it (the music) should be about storytelling, not technology.

Where did you grow up, and when did you get involved in music?

I was born in Cuba, and my family came over to the United States when I was little, and set up roots in Portland because I had an aunt that lived here. I went to Rose City Park School where I first played the trumpet, then I started piano at an early age. I went to Madison High School, then got my undergrad degree at University of Arizona in Tucson. I later got piano performance and education degrees at the Manhattan School of Music.

After graduation, I toured for about five years performing classical piano, then I came back to Portland and started doing composition, and started seeing the other side of the page: That just drew me in. I also fly for Horizon Airlines. I travel a lot because it’s free, and travel absolutely inspires me to compose.

The stuff I’ve written for theater is only a small fraction of what I write. I’ve written an opera based on “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” (inspired during a trip to Paris). I’ve written hundreds of art songs. If I had all the money in the world, I would love to spend years of my life at a piano down in Mexico writing art songs.

Are there musicians in your family?

My uncle, Rafael Ortega, was a very famous pianist in Cuba. The rest of  my family, with deference to them, are tone-deaf.

You’ve carved yourself a niche in Portland as a composer for theater, certainly the city’s busiest live theater composer. Did you ever think you’d be doing something like this?

I think some of the groundwork for that was Gunther Schuller, the famous composer, brass player and educator. He wore many hats. At the Manhattan School they would tell us, “Well, if you’re the best interpreter of Bach, you don’t need to worry, you’ll be alright, you’ll have a position.” Then Gunther Schuller came in and gave a great lecture one day. He said, “I know you’ve heard that mantra, and it’s not true. The best of you that play Bach beautifully will end up at Starbuck’s.” And he said, “You should learn how to do arrangements, how to orchestrate, how to do Makita commercials…you should learn to do all of these things because you never know where you’re going to end up.” That lecture stuck with me.