It might seem a stretch to imagine indie-pop singer-songwriter Sean McVerry performing at the upcoming program of Ballet Vero Beach. The native of Woodbury, Conn., is more at home in Hell’s Kitchen, where for the past two-and-a-half years – apart from a tour with his band – he has played at the popular piano bar Don’t Tell Mama.
Turns out, ballet has been a part of his life since he was a student a State University of New York at Purchase. Majoring in studio composition, he and his peers collaborated frequently with the college’s other arts conservatories, among them, dance.
He was a freshman when in 2010 he met Chloe Watson, a dance performance major. A graduate of Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas, she had won a scholarship to SUNY-Purchase, where for three years she studied under the late dance mentor Kazuko Hirabayashi.
Watson and McVerry began collaborating around their junior year, when McVerry cut and edited music for the dance department’s annual recital. “Since then, I’ve done lots of music for dance companies, including around New York,” he says.
“I’ve been living in Brooklyn since 2013, working as a session musician and touring with a couple of bands,” says McVerry. “But writing for dance is something I’ve always loved to do.”
The same is true for Paul Gay, a retired classical trombonist and conductor. He is also a composer and has written two works for ballet. One, entitled “In Which Cia-Cia San Goes With Pinkerton,” will be featured in the Vero program next weekend.
The works of both composers have been heard here before.
Two years ago, Gay premiered a composition with the Brevard Symphony Orchestra at Community Church, honoring the victims of the Paris shootings that killed five cartoonists with the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The year before, one of Gay’s sonatas was performed at the Vero Beach Museum of Art.
That was also the venue where McVerry’s composition was heard. He wrote it for a dance in Museum in Motion, a program performed by Ballet Vero Beach.
Gay, a New England Conservatory graduate, played trombone with the Boston Symphony, the Boston Pops, Boston Opera and Boston Ballet. He has conducted the New Hampshire Philharmonic and the New England Repertory Orchestra and, during his graduate studies at Boston University, the school’s brass and wind ensembles. All the while, he was composing.
His collaboration with Adam Schnell, Ballet Vero Beach’s artistic director, seemed destined to happen. “Ever since I first started thinking about starting the ballet company, people have told me ‘You’ve got to meet Paul Gay,’” says Schnell. “When we finally sat down together at Starbucks, we talked for three hours.”
It turned out that Gay knew the late choreographer Samuel Kurkjian, Schnell’s ballet mentor at Walnut Hill School of the Arts. “Paul had played with the Boston Ballet Orchestra and he had great memories of Sam Kurkjian. That just cemented it,” says Schnell.
“He’d never seen my choreography and I’d never heard his music but we saw we had a lot of the same ideas about the creative process. We were finishing each other’s sentences.”
As they left the coffee shop, they agreed Gay would send Schnell a CD of his compositions.
“I fell in love with this composition,” Schnell says. “I was totally inspired. He so clearly communicated these two characters, the Japanese woman and the American G.I. In a solo piano score, I had never seen someone do that so well.”
Schnell has set a classical ballet to Gay’s piece, using Ballet Vero Beach company members Vivi Demarco and Matthew Carter. Both also are part of the Omaha-based Ballet Nebraska. Gay’s inspiration was the Puccini opera “Madama Butterfly.”
For the performance, Ballet Vero Beach commissioned a recording of the work. Gay suggested they send the work to Artem Belogurov, a Ukrainian pianist Gay had arranged to have perform at the art museum two years ago along with violinist Aleksey Semenenko; among other works, the two performed Gay’s Sonata for Violin and Piano.
“Artem went into the studio last summer and recorded it and sent us three tapes of the same piece sand said pick which one you like. So not only am I working with an amazing score, I’m working with a fresh recording, which is crazy. Your own personal recording that no one has used before,” says Schnell.
Watson and McVerry, who have worked together on number of projects, based this piece loosely on Shakespeare’s “Ophelia,” using dancers Katherine Eppink and Sasha York. This time, McVerry was able to compose in the Ballet Nebraska studio as the dance took shape over several days.
“There was a lot of improvisation with the dancers too,” he says. Afterwards, he and Watson emailed videos and recordings back and forth until the finished project was set – more or less. McVerry says he expects to “still react to the dancers’ movement” when he performs the piece next weekend.
“You have to be sensitive to the movement,” says McVerry, who typically composes on his Mac laptop. “Unless you’re able to write to movement, nothing melds or makes sense.”
“We have a world premiere recording and a world premiere score and the composer playing live. For us to be only in our fourth season, I’m am justly proud of that,” says Schnell.
Program 2 also includes a new work by Schnell, “Anything You Can Do,” choreographed to Vivaldi’s Concerto for Three Violins in F Major, a work of music that he has toyed with for 15 years he says. Schnell is calling the program Composers and Choreographers.
Performances are Saturday, Jan. 20, at 8 p.m., and Sunday, Jan. 21, at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. at the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center. Tickets are available on the Ballet Vero Beach website or on the day of the performance.
