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Composing Operas Harry Shoplas handed me a shiny euphonium when I was nine I think because I was husky and looked like I could manage carrying the thing back and forth to school. He quickly switched me to alto saxophone—my brother Britt played the baritone saxophone in Harry's super-cool dance band and I aspired to playing with him. I loved the smell of wet reeds, and the taste of cane, but I could never get the thing to play softly. Our fifth grade band concert closed with a song called Spanish Eyes which I recall because it was the last time I touched a saxophone.My sixth grade teacher Norman Cummings allowed me one Halloween to organize, direct, and star in a live recreation over the Linfield Grade School public address system Orson Welles' 1938 Mercury Theater production of War of the Worlds. Rehearsing and performing it with my chums was my first exposure to live theater. I was euphoric; like a cat with his nip. A year later the talented, driven, somewhat emotionally unstable Wallace Tomchek at Pilgrim Park Junior High School painstakingly taught me Norman Dello Joio's lovely 1948 art song There is a Lady Sweet and Kind. I was a boy soprano with a quavering vibrato; my dead-straight bangs were the work of Mother and a pair of pruning shears. He introduced me for the first time to a world in which poetry and music are inextricably intertwined. If the passion for drama came first, music followed quickly and came with greater ease. Combining the two—becoming an opera composer—seems now to have been inevitable. The choral repertoire Tomchek taught us was sophisticated and eclectic—challenging Gesualdo madrigals, slick 'swing choir' arrangements in close nine part harmony, and a yearly fully-staged musical with orchestra which he designed, directed, rehearsed, and conducted. Since then I've attended professional productions of my operas that weren't as excellently produced. He cast me in supporting roles (I hadn't the looks or vocal power to carry a leading role), and gave me opportunities to direct. I recall with particular fondness directing Dan Quakkelaar and some other friends in Thornton Wilder's The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden. Kay Hartzell conducted the choir at Brookfield Central High School. By then I was more interested in music than words. She allowed me to whip up some parts for small combos for the spring musicals. Kay was a gifted and caring choral director. When, twenty three years after graduating high school, I returned to hear Kay's successor Philip Olsen conduct We're All Here, a work commissioned by Phil and Milwaukee's fine professional contemporary music ensemble Present Music for chorus and mixed ensemble, I was astonished and moved to recognize in the chorus the faces of the children of the boys and girls with whom I attended High School.
I have only written operas whose characters are coming to grips with the same issues I am as a man at the time of the creation of the opera. I can't imagine working from any other place.
Having chosen issues common to myself and my characters, I then can (and must) respect them enough to let them choose the sort of music they are going to sing, not me. If my operas have been deemed eclectic it is only because the characters in them have been. First I merge (as an actor does in his role) with the character I am writing. Once I cannot separate the character from myself in my own mind, I am ready to hear the kind of music I must sing. The character's age, access to education, cultural reference points, etc. all function as parameters in my conscious mind; how the character feels emerges from the subconscious: I think, feel, and improvise the orchestral part, sing and play. The rest is instinct and dictation. Exactly to the extent to which the subconscious leads, the character comes across to me as psychologically and emotionally verifiable.
I have written, in this order, four major female roles: Mamah Cheney (an upper middle class Caucasian proto-feminist who left her husband to take up with Frank Lloyd Wright and was destroyed by it), Vera (an African American transvestite Lap Dancer from the red earth country of rural Virginia in the throes of personal reinvention—it was Vera's quest for personal reinvention, not his gender issues, with which I identified), Mona Morales (a lower class Caucasian woman married to a Latin man who, in a fit of jealousy, murders her), and Amelia (an upper middle class Caucasian who has lost both parents, is on the verge of childbirth, and moves from loss to recuperation).
I have identified more intensely with the four major female roles in my operas—especially while writing them—than any other characters I've created. I believe I can track the progression of my own mourning for my mother through my characterizations of these women. For the purpose of telling a story about the collision of words, music, performance, sex, death, and nationalism, Paul and I chose five traditional ballads that Joyce and McCormack might have performed that evening, and used them as the musical and textual foundation upon which the piece was built. Consequently, throughout the recital, the characters shifted between 'performance mode' and the expression of their inner thoughts. Premiered at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, my favorite production of this work so far has been a site-specific staging that I did at the Century Association in New York. I would like to see it done in a good Irish pub anywhere in the world, with a beat-up upright piano and four singers in street clothes moving in and around the patrons as they enact the story. My pre-compositional Process has never changed. I retype and reformat the libretto to reflect what I intend to do to it musically, storyboard it on the wall, and illuminate it with various colored pens and pencils-say, red for one character, blue for another, orange for another; musical / poetic themes and motives that I want to 'track' also get colors. Standing with a glass of wine and dreaming on the entire act is as close as I'm likely ever get to understanding how a painter must feel working on a mural. A real sense of the pallet of ideas at hand is literally rendered in the colors arrayed on the storyboard.
Once the entire opera is 'on the wall' I decide what the most important dramatic moments (the 'emotional nuclear reactors') are in each scene; I specify what the climactic moment of the opera is, work downwards in triage fashion to the least important moment. I do not compose 'from left to right.' I compose the music for the most important half dozen moments in the opera first. The music for the rest of the piece then spreads outwards from these key moments like concentric ripples.
I believe in workshops. But I also believe that if an opera fails, the ultimate blame is the composer's, so he, and not the stage director or librettist, should be the pilot. *** 'Most pieces,' Virgil Thomson once quipped, 'withdraw themselves.' I've always believed that it is a composer's job to write music, not to waste energy thinking about whether that music will be of use after he is dead. Nevertheless, at a certain point, one has to acknowledge one's strengths and work from them. After thirty years studying, attending, composing, and coaching opera, I have begun to finally realize that I am only barely beginning to understand what writing one entails. One successfully produced opera is a composer's visa at the border; two means you've bought property. I'm not certain how many operas one has to write before citizenship in the opera world is earned; I only know that every time I finish one I feel further away from understanding how to make one. My vocal music in general and my operas in particular have engaged me the most intensely, made on the repertoire the closest thing to a lasting mark. Yes, 'all that we see or seem,' as Poe wrote, may be a 'dream within a dream,' but—given my choice—there's no place I'd rather spend my dreamtime than in a darkened theater, observing as the magnificent human and mechanical apparatus of an opera company in motion brings one of my operas to life. |
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