C&V Roundup: The Last Three Sessions

Rachel Peters, guest blogger
Composers & the Voice Composer Fellow, 2011-12

It’s been a long time since you’ve heard about what goes on behind closed doors in our C&V laboratory. There are now three classes to describe, so as Inigo Montoya says in The Princess Bride, “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.” And fellow Fellows, please chime in if I’ve misremembered or omitted something.

December 12^th: We whisked through our final Role Analysis roundup, then onto acting class, where we worked with our partners to identify and agree upon beat changes in our assigned scenes from Ibsen’s Ghosts. Each team read their scene in front of the group with these discoveries in mind.

In the evening our singers were back to perform our second pieces. Let me just say that if you think opera is fusty and outmoded, we are here to prove you wrong! Topics for the evening included but were not limited to stalking, S&M, a transgender Jewish wedding, racist cops, and robot love. We began with Amy singing Ronnie’s absolutely heartbreaking “When I Find You,” another installment from her Holocaust-era opera The Waiting Woman. Then Rebecca sang my “Pronoun”; the take-home message for me was that writing the approach to the note is everything and can change the sound entirely. Justin treated us to another of Sara and Zach’s monodramas, “Installing your Blinds,” by turns lilting and sinister. Next up was Brandon’s interpretation of Mika’s setting of Rob Stephenson’s text, “O Song,” full of potent and timeless images. Equally potent are Mika’s tempo markings and instructions. My favorite is the last [instruction]: “Basically don’t make a big deal of it.” Jorell sang two songs in a row, Sidney’s harrowing “Stop and Frisk” and Rob’s playfully twisted “A Man’s Needs.”  Also from Rob’s Fetish (An Erotic Opera) was Andrea’s plaintive performance of “Talk to Me.”

December 19^th: Our ranks were severely diminished by flu season and awards season- only three of us were present for an evening of acting and libretto study. After a new warm-up game called “Big Booty,” we had a chance to delve deeply into some physical character work for Ghosts based on 1) a highly detailed questionnaire Kathleen gave us 2) some people-watching we’d done with our characters in mind. Ronnie and were both assigned to play Mrs. Alving, and I was fascinated by our very different takes on her physicality. Then we played our scenes in different styles to change up what could become rote line readings. This included telenovela and, of course, opera.

Maestro Steve led us through a final sweep of Tosca libretto/score analysis (see previous blog entries for burning questions and some answers thereto), then we read William Ball’s libretto to Lee Hoiby’s A Month in the Country. We discussed potential choices of fach/range for each character relative to age and type, then Steve revealed how Hoiby went along with or against them and why.

January 17^th: Special guest star Charles Jarden started off the afternoon with a chat about the logistics of producing new work and a helpfully candid/candidly helpful Q&A. Then it was on to Improv with Terry. Highlights included “Freeze Transformation,” identifying given circumstances when walking from somewhere specific and then to somewhere specific, grappling with a difficult imaginary object, free association singing based on a (not musical but literal) theme, and a game I can only call “Bippity Bippity Bop/Jello/Airplane/Elephant.” Reportedly we now have a robust toolbox from which to build longer form improve scenes.

In the evening, we heard the singers perform our third pieces. Again, we were not quite a full house, but those who were there did benefit greatly from the extra time. First came Rob’s “Soprano’s Lament” for Amy. This song, which features a lot of patter and what Amy called “chewy words,” mainly in one particular place in her range, led to a very productive discussion about stepwise vs. leap motion up to climactic high notes and optimal ways to navigate back and forth across the passaggio. Rob was open to experimenting with some changes as Amy got to try out what felt best. After that, Brandon sang my cabaret standard-ish “Baby in a Jar” (lyrics by Robert Maddock). Everyone offered up a variety of suggestions for interpretation, and after incorporating a few things I had not previously considered, the result was better than I ever imagined. Next came Sidney and Daniel’s clever interpolation of Walt Whitman’s text into another narrative. It is a terrific study of what can be done while the singer stays on only one or two notes for long stretches. Justin’s stalwart and fiery execution is proof that what looks like a lot of one thing on the page can take on all sorts of colors. The incredibly athletic piano part helps the cause too—Go Mila! Finally, Jorell sang Sara’s and Zach’s latest monodrama, “Shush, Love.” (It was Morbid Lullaby Night at C&V!) Sara, Zach and I hail from MuSiCal ThEaTrE lAnD, among other places. Every time they present I am pleasantly shocked at how they careen wildly from tropes of contemporary musical theatre sound to something altogether different; this new piece was certainly no exception. It seems to be a trademark that gets more refined every time, which is especially fun because their characters are always so blissfully sick.

We are poised to take over the opera world in 2012. Thanks as always to all the performers, coaches, and teachers. Next session: more Improv with Terry and Acting with Kathleen.

C&V Mentor Meeting: Lunch with Daron Hagen

Ronnie Reshef, guest blogger
Composers & the Voice Composer Fellow, 2011-2012

A few weeks ago, Steve Osgood, Charles Jarden and I met Daron Hagen, my C&V mentor, for lunch. We met at Henry’s, where Daron dines often, and despite his enthusiastic recommendation on the cheeseburger, I decided to go for the pasta primavera. Unfortunately, I did not foresee the trouble I will run into later, trying to eat long spaghetti and maintain my table manners. I think that eventually I might have lost a few points in the table manners section, but at least I enjoyed a great dish of pasta primavera and a wonderful conversation with three fascinating opera men.

And now for the more interesting part of the meeting: Daron Hagen. I first met Daron almost a year ago, when he was on a judging panel of a competition I participated in, with my 2009 one-act opera “Requiem for the Living.” I only got to the third place in that competition, but the benefit of the judges’ comments was worth much more than receiving any prize. I think that I will always remember Daron as the first one who stated to me clearly that opera should aim to touch at people’s hearts. Daron’s concept, as I understand it, is that opera must always be accessible and communicative, the story must move the audience, and that the music’s role in making this happen is huge. For me, I guess it means less thinking while composing, and more following the heart. Sounds easy? Well, it’s not. But this is not the place for that discussion.

Opera for the People!

Back to Daron: in one of our chats back in that opera competition, we discussed the opera world today, and Daron said that opera should not be the aristocratic genre that it is mostly today, but the opposite: the genre of the people. I couldn’t agree more: the tuxedos, shiny evening dresses, splendid halls and crazy pricesare taking the opera away from the people,where it belongs and where it was born. When opera was born, it was meant to be entertainment for the people, who will laugh, have fun, and even eat and drink during the performance – not as it is today, that people have to sit squeezed in fancy clothes and forced to be silent for four hours. These discussions with Daron lived in my mind for long after the competition was over, and have had a great effect on my operatic and vocal writing since then.

Having Daron as my C&V mentor was great news for me – I know that we see eye to eye about many things (might be more accurate to say that I see many things the way he does…), so I knew we would be a good match. In addition to this, Daron is an amazingly busy composer. Only this past year he had two full productions of two of his seven operas. Daron has written twelve concerti, four symphonies, over 150 art songs and song cycles, and over forty chamber works. Just what I’d like to be in twenty years! Or, on a more serious note – I sure have a lot to learn from him about the business of being a composer, the practical aspects of it, and the politics involved.

A practical aspect, for example, which we discussed in the lunch at Henry’s, was the size of orchestra I should employ for the opera I am working on now. So many non-artistic considerations: size of halls, instrumentation of other operatic works which my piece is likely to be programmed with, orchestra policies regarding employing only some of their musicians – I was happy to have this kind of advice from an experienced composer.

I can keep writing here forever about Daron, myself, and Opera. But maybe I shouldn’t – this might be a good point to stop and save some ideas for later.

Thanks AOP for lending me Daron for a year, and thanks Daron – I am looking forward to working with you soon – this time over a cheeseburger!

Success Montage

Rebecca Ringle, Guest Blogger
Composers & the Voice Resident Singer, 2011-12

Several weeks ago, I walked six blocks through the sunny Upper West Side Autumn to sit down with Ronnie and talk about themes and logistics for my third C&V piece. I’d performed the first piece by Mika and received the music for the second (Rachel’s) the previous Monday evening and now Ronnie was about to start writing my third piece. She and I split a slice of pound cake and I gave her my wish list: feminine characters who are also powerful, vocal lines that start low and arch high.  Ronnie took it all in and offered back lots of brightly-colored thoughts. I felt happy that she left saying “Ok, I have a bunch of ideas now.”

A month earlier, Rachel and I had had a similar conversation over tortilla soup and beer in Brooklyn and I knew Mariah Carey’s walking past during our meal was a good omen. It was. Pronoun is a fun, extroverted, beautiful piece about a special bride.

Mika‘s and my conversation had started earlier in some kind of artistic virtual love-fest when we discovered each others’ tumblr blogs (His. Mine.) back in September while he was writing for me. The whole interaction would have made a hilarious/nauseating puff piece on how the online music community works. We both posted about how much we liked the other’s work. It’s all great for the ego, but there’s more than that taking place. I learned a lot about him that helped in preparing his piece, Internal.

Part of my job is to help conductors and directors come up with good ideas they may not have had. I’ve never had the chance to do this for composers who are writing music with me in mind. I’m eating it up.

Singers choose our rep based not only on interest but on the confidence that we can handle a piece’s vocal problems. In auditions for example, you only perform music that make you sound fabulous. With a 400 year-broad vocal repertoire, there’s no huge need to bother with music that doesn’t feel tailor-made for your voice and personality. On the night of our first workshop performance, I had come back from one such out-of-town audition. I arrived at Penn Station at 6:30 PM, rushed to Brooklyn and performed Mika’s month-old piece. In the context of the Composers and the Voice seminar, I get to say, “You know, I love this phrase that ends on a high B-flat, but I’d also love a measure right here to breathe out and then get a good breath tuck.” We make the piece a bit easier to sing and we make my performance sound more like what Mika wants to hear. We worked on some phrases for color and tried to find what would sound best for a spot marked “Angrily.” Did that mean more spoken or more consonants? When we go through this process, Steven will prod the singer and the composer, asking quiet, open questions like some Socrates with glasses. He’s quite good at simplifying things. “What would that phrase sound like if you just sang it forte?”

The other day Mika and I had a broad-ranging talk on the overemphasis on talent and back-story that plagues lots of cultural writing. He said “Music isn’t magic. Being a good musician is just about wanting to be in this process of trial and error 8 hours a day.” I agreed with him. In movies about sports, war, makeovers, or performance you’ll get a Success Montage. Early in Act III, the director puts on pounding music and chop-edits through months of work, negotiations and false starts in 40 seconds. Classic that come straight to mind: Rocky’s training, long sections of Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (Don’t hate.), and Save the Last Dance (Again, don’t hate… get into Juilliard dancing ballet and hip-hop!). It makes for fun, tightly constructed movies and ridiculous real-life expectations. Most of the good artists and performers I know feel lucky to be stuck in that montage and even when they come up for air and acclaim, they go right back down into muddy work. We’re having a great time in this part of our movie. I hope it lasts a while.

C&V Mentor Meeting: Dinner with John Corigliano

RACHEL PETERS, guest blogger

Composers & the Voice (Composer Fellow) 2011-12

Greetings and welcome to my maiden voyage into the blogosphere. Hold on to your hats, and pardon any errant paraphrases that will be in quotes for the sake of ease but are probably not verbatim.

This past Friday night, Steve Osgood, Bob Lee, and I had dinner with my Composers and the Voice mentor, the world-renowned composer John Corigliano. We shared a delicious meal at Nice Matin on 79^th Street. We faced a couple of challenges right off the bat. First, it was a rather noisy atmosphere, and I was embarrassed to have to repeat much of what I’d said/asked.  It also turned out to be a charged moment for Corigliano (henceforth known here as Mr. C.): he was awaiting a phone call from his longtime partner and current collaborator, Mark Adamo, who was in his first workshop rehearsal for a brand new piece of his own in San Francisco. The singers were new, and the subject matter was potentially incendiary. (“The worst thing you can do in this country is say that Jesus was not the son of G-d,” stated Mr. C.) So we understood when he frequently checked his new iPhone, equipped with robot voice Siri. He asked her, “Do you love me?” Siri replied, “I’m not allowed to.”

I’ve only become familiar with Mr. C.’s music over the last couple of years, first with Altered States (R.I.P. Ken Russell), then his opera The Ghosts of Versailles, then selections from his vast body of symphonic and vocal works. It’s fair to say that everything I’ve heard so far has blown my mind in one way or another, Ghosts and Circus Maximus in particular. The “Aria of the Worm” from Ghosts of Versailles is like nothing I’ve ever seen on a stage; its physicality has redefined my notion of what an opera singer is capable of executing in performance. The grand theatricality of both the score and the production are heartening to me; the piece reminds me of what is possible with enough imagination despite the current obstacles that new operas face in being born.

Graham Clark sings “The Worm Aria” in “The Ghosts of Versailles” (Metropolitan Opera, Jan. 10, 1992), about 7 minutes in. Aria continues here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_rP7Q7yc90

During early threads of conversation, Mr. C. advised me of two of the most important things a composer needs: a good knowledge (and supply) of wine, and authority over the production process in a recording studio. Then we discussed our respective musical backgrounds. He is actually not conservatory-trained (though he did study composition), and he does not play an instrument—after just two lessons his clarinet was stolen from his high school locker, and he did not replace it. “I played the phonograph,” he joked, referring to his vast collection of LPs, the most cherished and influential of which was Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid. But I’m sure it didn’t hurt that his father was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for 23 years and his mother taught piano. Though I have years of piano and voice lessons as well as two music degrees under my belt, this black sheep of an amazingly unmusical family remains envious of Mr. C., while, of course, encouraged by his rise to prominence.

I asked him if he ever gets stuck while writing. This was on my mind as I had just struggled more than usual with a C&V assignment. He said that for him, writing is a constant process of “getting stuck, then unstuck, then stuck again”; his way to get unstuck is to articulate–out loud and as clearly as possible–what isn’t working, until an alternate path becomes clear. It follows, then, that he is currently refusing any new commissions in order to focus on his new opera-in-progress with Mark Adamo as librettist. May all of us C&V writers be so successful that we are able to turn down commissions!

We spoke of the need for even abstract (in this case, not grounded by linear text) music to communicate theatrical ideas. Circus Maximus is a perfect example of this. His words resonated with me relative to my first C&V song(s) (see Zach’s description in an earlier blog post). Mr. C. also pointed out that, compared to many other composers working at the fore today, his music is rather simple and straightforward in its construction. This is something that trips me up a lot while I’m writing—I often think that if an idea is too easily put across in a bare-bones way, I must be wrong. After dinner when I went home to finish my current song, I was determined to just let the music breathe as necessary. See, Steve, the mentorship is already working!

Soon Mr. C. received the much-anticipated phone call from Adamo, and it was time to end what I’m sure was only the first of several valuable sessions. I handed him a CD of some work samples, and I look forward to his helpful feedback.

–RP

P.S. Don’t miss a new production of Ghosts of Versailles conducted by our own Maestro Steve at Manhattan School of Music this spring!

Composers & the Voice – Session 5, Nov. 7, 2011

Zach Redler, Guest Blogger
Composers & the Voice Composer Fellow, 2011-12

Hey all!

Here is the LONG overdue post from our session three weeks ago, at which our first compositions were brilliantly performed!  It is such a great honor and opportunity for us to have such a safe environment to present pieces that are fresh off the presses.  To be in the company of such a diverse and interesting group of voices (compositionally, lyrically and vocally) really made the night for me.  Slight disclaimer: I do not wish to act as critic or musicologist, but I do have that in my background, so that person will probably be present.  Please correct me or call me out on anything I get wrong.  Also, I hope everyone will add their own feelings about their performances.

We started with a pairing of pieces by Rachel Peters, performed by Justin Hopkins.  She was so smart and creative to take two completely different texts, one by Oskar Pastior and one by Walt Whitman, and unite them in such a comedic and dramatic way.  The former, “Dominotaurus,” is a setting of, basically, one extremely long word in which each subsequent syllable creates a new word.  So it was Rachel’s choice as to which syllable to stress where, which created a very compelling piece that kept our attention.  Her harmonic language is also clever and, though tonal, it uses a good deal of polytonality or harmonic independence, quoting different “styles” as she goes along to enhance the drama of the piece.  For example, setting a falsetto coloratura section in a simple, almost baroque fashion.  Her second piece, “To A Certain Civilian,” is set with a gentle swing, and cleverly comments on the first with lines like “Did you find what I sang erewhile so hard to follow?”  All in all, a great start to the evening.

Baritone Justin Hopkins sings at the Nov 7 C&V workshop session.

Second on the docket was my and Sara Cooper’s monodrama “Count To Ten.”  Now, normally asking a singer to prepare an eight-minute operatic monodrama when they are only supposed to prepare a three to five minute aria or art song may seem daunting, but Amy Shoremount-Obra really stepped up to the plate.  She took command of the character that Sara and I had created, a 39 year-old prostitute, and really embodied her as she sang about her daily life and her hopes and dreams of one day being alone with just her pimp boyfriend Joe, after he “takes care” of all of the Johns who now think she’s too old, of course.  I am happy to say that I learned a lot about what may work for one singer vs. another and how to be flexible in really chiseling a piece to a certain performer’s strengths.  Luckily, Amy has so many that it wasn’t difficult.

Next, I believe, was Ronnie Reshef’s moving arioso “Transport” from The Waiting Woman, performed by Andrea Arias Martin.  So gorgeous.  It begins with a lovely ostinato (almost a passacaglia) with a pedal C over which Andrea’s voice just hovers, describing being “transported” in a cargo train for eight days and night climaxing on a glorious Bb!  We talked, as we did with everyone, about the possible strengths of small tweaks here and there, such as possibly altering a few pitches and/or tempi to optimize Andrea’s power for the piece.  But, in my opinion, it was a really great arc of an aria that used an entirely syllabic setting in a very lyrical and dramatic way.

Penultimately (I like that word), we heard from Mikael Karlsson.  I really, really enjoy Mikael’s music…and I’m not necessarily one for what I would call “out-there tonal music”.  It doesn’t seem to be atonal because there is definite “line” and “harmonic” direction, but rarely is there much homophony to establish any kind of solid tonal structure.  Though, I may be pulling this out of my butt…maybe Mikael can describe his style a little better. “Internal” from Decoration, performed by Rebecca Ringle is a bit of a tour-de-force.  Though the text is set on pitches, it seems to serve a bit more aliatorically in that certain phrases and sentences are separated in order to create specific word emphasis, rather than complete sentence understanding, which works very well.  Mikael used some “extended” techniques like Sprechstimme and some almost “growling” type sounds, along with directions to “spit it out” or use straight tone (no vibrato).  However, when all is said and done, we come away from the piece feeling connected to this character he’s created and that Rebecca has well developed.

Finally, we ended the night with a piece by Sidney Marquez Boquiren and Daniel Neer called “Washington Square Park,” performed by Brandon Snook.  In what seems to be Sidney and Daniel’s voice, this piece seems to be all about the text.  Sidney does a wonderful job of keeping a musical momentum while allowing ample room for the text to speak in the hall.  I have not yet seen a piece of Sidney’s that uses barlines, which is so interesting to me.  He instead generously gives the performers space to interpret their aria in the most powerful way.  We discussed a little bit of the use of sitting in a tenor’s passaggio on a FF phrase.  And again, like any good collaboration, they came out with a slightly altered tempo that helped the piece come to life as both Sidney and Daniel had envisioned.

Thus ended a great night of new music.  I apologize again for anything I either forgot or got COMPLETELY wrong.  These are just my observations, and please feel free to comment, clarify or just scold me for my stupidity.

Yay new work.  Yay American Opera Projects!