OMTA/OSTA, Oberlin’s student theater association, has a tradition that I wish I had heard about as a prospective student. It’s called Quick!. Every semester, the Quick! organizers choose several students to stay up all night writing either a short stage play or a short musical. The next day, teams of students rehearse those plays. This culminates in a performance scheduled for exactly twenty-four hours after the writers began writing.
One semester, I and my friend (and fellow blogger) Thorin Finch signed up to write a musical for Quick!. It took us nearly ten hours; we were up until almost seven o’clock in the morning! But the experience (which I’ve written about before) got us thinking: what if we wrote a full-length musical? After all, we wrote four songs and a fifteen-page script in ten hours. By that logic, twenty songs and a seventy-five page script would take us fifty hours. It didn’t seem that hard.
So this past winter, that’s what we did.
Winter Term is a special time in the Oberlin school calendar. It lasts most of January, and it’s a time for students to carry out extracurricular projects that might not otherwise fit in a normal college schedule. Students are required to complete three Winter Term projects over the course of their time at Oberlin (although many students complete more than three). Thorin and I wrote our musical as our 2025 Winter Term project.
Students doing a Winter Term project are not necessarily required to be on campus the whole time. In my first year at Oberlin, I went to New York City with the college’s choirs (yes, plural) and orchestra to perform R. Nathaniel Dett’s oratorio The Ordering of Moses at Carnegie Hall. There are plenty of Winter Term projects that take place both on- and off-campus. Since I was planning on spending January getting ready to study abroad in Japan, we decided that it would be best for us to do this Winter Term project from home.
This is to say that I spent most of January in coffee shops around Minneapolis working on my laptop, with Google Docs open on one side of the screen, and MuseScore open on the other side. We wrote an outline of the show, and gradually added more details to it until we found the most appropriate places in the narrative for songs. We found the most natural way to work was by trading off songs: I wrote the first song in the show, Thorin wrote the second scene, I wrote the third, and so on. I wrote most of my songs while sitting at my parents’ old upright piano, laptop on the bench beside me. I think this had a discernible impact on the music. The first song begins with a C major chord in root position, repeated every quarter note — probably the most basic and natural thing it’s possible to play on the piano! And then, over time, that repeated C major chord gradually gives way to a full musical theater opening song.
By the end of Winter Term, we had forty-odd pages of script written. As we were working on the music for the show, something interesting happened: we noticed that we kept reusing the same musical ideas over and over again. This wasn’t, initially, intentional, but we decided to learn into it, using the same musical idea to express similar themes. We finished the script in early March, and refined everything over the summer.
We pitched the musical to OMTA/OSTA this November. (Strangely enough, the pitch meeting was the day after the fall semester Quick! performance.) I’m excited to say that our musical, The Pen and the Sword, will be performed at Oberlin College next May! Thorin will be co-directing the show, and I’ll be co-music directing it. It’s been a full year since we first started working on the show as our Winter Term project. There’s still plenty left to do — for instance, we’re in the midst of orchestrating the show right now. But I know it will be really exciting to see everything we’ve worked on finally come to fruition.
