The Fishergirl

Hilarie's composing debut

Development History

The birth of "The Fishergirl"

The Fishergirl is a coming-of-age story of Dannie Trescott, a modern-era “Everywoman” who faces the same issues most women, if not all people, encounter today. The story’s central theme is universal, one’s desire to be truly known, past our ethnicity, gender, social standing, occupations and more. Set in the early 1900s, Dannie, a fishergirl from Castine, Maine, navigates the treacheries of gender bias, class distinction, greed, mental illness, and violence while finding her way in life. As we should all aspire, she finds truth, love, and family by trusting her heart. The story is uplifting, fresh, and surprising with unexpected twists and turns.

In the fall of 2014, Hilarie Clark Moore began writing the story, music, and lyrics for The Fishergirl. Her inspiration for the story came from three sources: historical family artifacts, which influenced her choice of geographical and historical settings, her home on the Connecticut River which influenced the imagery of water, and her reflections on issues present in today’s society. Family letters from the Civil War and other historical artifacts inspired the settings of Castine, Maine, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans during the early 1900s with a backstory set during the Civil War.  Dr. Moore’s love of the Connecticut shoreline and the Connecticut River inspired the strong themes of water.  She incorporated some of her reflections concerning the challenges we all face in today’s American society.

After receiving positive feedback from music colleagues on her music, she formed a creative team that includes Ron De Fesi, Gwen Gunn, and Zoila Savale. Ron De Fesi, artistic director of the Hudson Opera Theatre and musician extraordinaire, ensured that the vocal lines would showcase the beauty of the voice. He added his talents to the production with his masterful and creative orchestrations. Gwen Gunn, feminist playwright, wrote the dialogue and contributed to the backstory for The Fishergirl.  Dr. Zoey Savale edited the project and provided guidance to the creation of the story.

We believe that this magical work, with its intriguing plot and characters and overarching messages, can be successfully realized in a piece for musical theatre and / or opera which will resonate with a diverse audience of all ages and backgrounds.

The Fishergirl is a beautiful marriage between opera and musical theater.

View Upcoming Performances Radio Interview

The Synopsis

Dannie Trescott, the daughter of a Maine fisherman, faces significant trials as she steers through dangerous straits to find her true course in life.  Although Dannie’s story takes place in the early 1900s, she is a modern-era “Everywoman” facing the same issues most women, if not all people, encounter today. As she navigates the treacheries of gender bias, class distinction, greed, mental illness, and violence, her challenges in finding her path in life are universal and ageless. She finds truth, love, and family by trusting her heart and choosing to look past discrimination and slander.

 “I appreciate the individuality of your voice and the way you infuse a sense of the past into an expression that is contemporary without being trendy. Your music and your vocal lines create an emotional atmosphere that I felt directly.”

– James Kuslan, contributing writer at Opera News.

The Creators

Hilarie Clark Moore

 Composer / Lyricist / Storyteller

has blended music academia and performance in her education and career. She earned a Bachelor of Music degree in French horn performance from the University of Connecticut and a Ph.D. in music theory from Yale University. She has taught at both Yale University and the State University of New York, Orange County Community College.  As a professional freelance musician on the French horn, she has performed in both local and international symphony orchestras and opera companies.

As an orchestral conductor, Hilarie Clark Moore has over 20 years of experience conducting community orchestras.  Presently, she conducts the New London Community Orchestra and the Cheshire Symphony Orchestra in her home state of Connecticut. In addition to conducting, she is the founder and principal coach of Chamber Music by the River, a chamber music festival she runs from her music studio.

In her first major work, The Fishergirl, she expresses her unique voice, “an alluring musical language” in her “Post Romantic” compositional style.

Ron De Fesi

Orchestration

Ron De Fesi (Orchestration) has been the Artistic Director of the Hudson Opera Theatre since its founding in 1977. A student of Sixten Ehrling while at the Juilliard School, he also attended the Hochschule für Musik in Munich, Germany where he completed specialized study in Baroque and Classical performance practice. Additionally, he has a bachelor’s degree in pre-med from Manhattan College, and a graduate degree from New York University in music performance. As well as having been a guest conductor for numerous orchestral, choral, ballet, and opera companies, he has been artistic director and principal conductor for several organizations over the years. He has directed and/or conducted over 350 productions. He is also a basso cantante, and has performed over 100 roles in opera, oratorio, and musical theatre. He is an organist and choir director, plays the cello and the piano and teaches voice. A gifted and prolific arranger, his operatic and ballet reductions continue to be heard globally, as well as his arrangements for numerous instrumental ensembles of everything from classics to po.

Gwen Gunn

Dialogue

Gwen Gunn was a cofounder of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective and has had her plays produced at The Theater for the New City, Westbeth Theater, The Joseph Jefferson Theater and The East Fourth Street Theater in Manhattan. She grew up in Dayton, Ohio, attended Duke University and graduated from Antioch College. After moving to New York, she married actor Moses Gunn, worked in child development research, and earned an M.A. from The New School for Social Research.

She and her husband and two children moved to Connecticut in 1975 where she studied poetry with poet Richard Raymond and Professor Mark Johnston and co-edited the poetry magazine

Embers. Gwen has had poems published in national and international journals and recently won two firsts in the Confederation of State Poetry Societies contests, one of which was the national Winners Circle Award. Her latest book of poetry is Tastes. She also worked as an editorial assistant and writer of theatrical bios for Sachem Publishing, and started a company

Ziola Savale

Story Advisor / Editor

Zoey has sung with choruses at some of the great music venues worldwide, including the Sydney Opera House, the Forbidden City opera house in Beijing, Palau de la Musica Catalan in Barcelona, and New York’s Carnegie and David Geffen Halls.

A Vassar graduate with an MA and PhD in English, she enjoyed three decades teaching that subject. However, she has always performed music as well, including singing in the stage choruses of the Hudson Opera Theatre and Delaware Valley Opera. She has been a member of Warwick Valley Chorale, a 100-member community chorus, since 1978, and its president for more than ten years.

the fishergirl song samples and lyrics

My Beautiful Lily

Widower William Trescott, a fisherman and father of our heroine, Dannie Trescott, answers the question of why he doesn’t date.

The Song

 

Lyrics

Lily, my beautiful Lily.
My lovely dear Lily.
My candlelight in the dark,
My warmth in the cold and the stark.
She was my love, my dear Lily, Lily.

Chasing the sea’s bounty every day.
I know the pull of the sea for me.
Though I go out there to fill my nets,
It’s the pull of her heart brings me home again.
My heart was full with my love for her.
My life was complete with her love for me.

Lily, my beautiful Lily.
My lovely dear Lily.
My candlelight in the dark,
My warmth in the cold and the stark.
She was my love, my dear Lily, Lily.

The River's Journey

A spiritual song sung by the spirit of Dannie’s grandmother and at the end, Dannie. Grandmère tells Dannie to chart her own path just as a river finds its path from the first drops of water trickling down from the mountain tops to the blending of the fresh with the salt. Grandmère reveals her tumultuous early life.

The Song

 

Lyrics

From the first drops of water,
Trickling down from the mountain tops
To the blending of the fresh with the salt,
Life is but a river’s journey.
Life is a river finding its true course.

I was born to a life of privilege and wealth.
The sun danced on ev’ry small ripple of my gentle birth.
But that life, it was carved from the yoke of slaves,
chiseled by whips and chains.

Like a turbulent waterfall
Plummeting down onto the rocks below.
Dangerous measures were taken
To change the course of bloody rivers.

I was beaten beaten for my defiance.
Beaten for my convictions!
Hurt but never, never broken for I found the river
That erased my brutal waterfall from my dark past.

A Whiff

In “A Whiff,” Dannie Trescott senses that change is in the air for her. She wonders how her Castine community will acclimate to new advances in technology and to the demands that tourists or “rusticators” bring. She hopes she can navigate her way in these everchanging currents.

The Song

 

Lyrics

A whiff, a puff, a breeze whispers into the sails.
A gust of air, the wind gently fills the canvas sails
And sends the sailboats by.
I sense, I feel that change is in the air for me.
How do I trim my sails for change
And take an uncharted course?

Our world is a-changing.
We can’t stop the tide that comes our way.
New things and new ways keep shifting
Everything we know, transforming our lives.
The voice of change must be heeded,
Not silenced or restrained.

The Nation's Best Blueberry Pie

The challenge of thanking another for saving one’s life is exacerbated by pride and the failure to find common ground. Dannie tries to help her father, Charles Dandridge, and Kieran Stillwell by serving blueberry pie.

The Song

Lyrics

MY FATHER, A MAN OF THE SEA,
QUIETLY SITS WITH SOUTHERN GENTRY.
AWKWARD, STILTED CONVERSATION.
SO FULL OF PRIDE, THEY’RE POWERLESS
TO SPEAK THEIR MINDS.
MAYBE SOME BLUEBERRY PIE
WILL EASE THE TENSION.

Train Ramblings

As the chorus creates the sounds of a steam train, Dannie, Emma, Mary, Merritt, Carlos, and Kieran convey their daydreams and thoughts as they travel from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans.

The Song

Lyrics

CHORUS
(SOUNDS OF A STEAM TRAIN THROUGHOUT SONG)

MERRITT
STEAM TRAINS!

MARY
NEW ORLEANS’S FESTIVITIES!

MERRITT
STEAM TRAINS!

EMMA
CARLOS!

MARY
NEW ORLEANS

MERRITT
STEAM TRAINS

KIERAN
I FEAR FOR DANNIE.

EMMA
CARLOS!

MERRITT
RAILROAD TRACKS!

MARY
MARDI GRAS!

CARLOS
EMMA!

DANNIE
WHAT BLOOD TIES DO I HAVE THERE?

EMMA
CARLOS!

KIERAN
I FEAR FOR HER.

CARLOS
EMMA IS SO CLOSE!

DANNIE
FAMILY TIES?

MERRITT
DANNIE!
DANNIE MUST BE MINE!

CARLOS
EMMA LOVES ME!

EMMA
HE LOVES ME.

DANNIE
MÉMÈRE FLED HER HOME SO MANY YEARS PAST IN NEW ORLEANS.

KIERAN
HER GRANDMÈRE FACED GREAT DANGERS.
WHAT WILL DANNIE FACE?

DANNIE
AM I BRAVE ENOUGH TO FACE HER PAST OR
SHOULD IT STAY BURIED?

KIERAN
WHAT MUST I DO TO KEEP HER SAFE?
WHAT DANGERS WAIT FOR HER?

EMMA
I WILL SNEAK OUT AND SEE CARLOS, MY LOVE.

CARLOS
I HOPE I CAN SNEAK A KISS FROM EMMA.

EMMA AND CARLOS
WE’LL FIND A WAY TO BE TOGETHER.

MERRITT
DANNIE SITS CLOSE, ALTHOUGH SHE DOESN’T SEE ME.
IS SHE BLINDED BY DARING KIERAN?
WHY CAN’T SHE LOOK MY WAY?

EMMA
HOW MUCH FURTHER?

MERRITT
HOT STEAM AND PISTONS!

DANNIE
IS FAMILY SOLELY DEFINED BY BLOODLINES AND LINEAGE?
MÉMÈRE CHOSE HER OWN!

Our Storybook

With pen in hand, Emma and Carlos want to write their own love story.

The Song

 

Lyrics

I want to live. I want to love.
I want to feel alive inside.
I see you there your eyes on me.
I’m all a glow when you are near.

My head’s full of romance from stories and books.
But the pages of my life are empty or boring.
So here I am with pen in hand.
We’ll fill those pages of our love story.
So here we are to write our story.
Together, together we’ll write one for the ages.