Unrelenting Light - Tori Amos -foorumi

“I’m working on a musical with the playwright Samuel Adamson. That’s an unusual process, because at a certain point you have to write with a committee and the intriguing thing is, can everybody decide to point the rocket ship into the right galaxy? Some people are traditionalists and not necessarily open to a modern read. Some really want a modern read, and you can’t do both and make everybody happy.”
"It's a real learning curve to see how people can be brought together and put aside for certain musical styles. Some are really back in the 1950s, and if that's what they want then I'm not the right person to do that. Give me Wagner any day. Give me a mixture of everything from the 20th century in order to create something really fresh, inspired by the best music of the last hundred years... but if you ask me to give you Oklahoma, then I'm probably not the person. I'm not stuck in those sorts of structures. I can take out of them what I want and apply them to something else, but I don't want to live writing those structures now."

Recently, Amos was writing to order, for a musical called The Light Princess, which is hoped to open this year at the National Theatre. "My brief was to come up with a processional, a beginning, and my role model, I guess you could say, was the beginning of West Side Story.

"Little did I realise," Amos laughs, "that some people on the team had fantasies that I would come up with a whole different approach, like an Oklahoma or a Carousel, stuff my mother was crazy about!

"I was looking towards a more Wagnerian approach and in order to do that, I will open my mind to a certain time period in music. I will study those structures and the chord progressions used at that time... and so we go back to that phrase, my compositional vocabulary or palette. Sometimes I'll have a palette working solely for that song."

When it comes to confessional song-writing, Amos warns, "It's one thing to use your journal as a jumping-off point. But just because somebody's going on and on about their broken heart, that doesn't make it great art. You have to be able to take the energy of your experience and weave it in a way that makes me, the listener, want to care about it."

One way of doing that, she declares, is to stop looking at your experiences solely from your own point of view. "Many times I've gone, my God, this works so much better if I turn the tables and sing about what happened from the guy's point of view. Sometimes when I really get into a song, I begin to see, 'Oh, wait a minute, what is my part in this?' And I decide to play the protagonist, because it's a much stronger point of view. In the song Professional Widow, for example, it's much stronger to be the aggressive one."

The National will also host a musical by American singer-songwriter Tori Amos in April 2012.

Amos, who had a number one hit with Professional Widow, has written music and lyrics for the work based on a story called The Light Princess by Scottish writer George MacDonald.

Mr Hytner said they had been working on it for "three or four years" and it was "suggested" by the MacDonald fable but would have a different title.