Ah, yes, the return of shameless self-promotion!
If you’re around this Saturday, I invite you all to two opportunities to see my super sweet opera ensemble–Collective Opera Company–perform our new piece:
This work is really a synthesis of a lot of ideas I’ve absorbed over the past year or so. The duet is very much “found,” but also has the distinct mark of compositional and theatrical ideas that interest me.
The twelve-minute vocal score is assemled from digital image examples culled from the online repertoire database of The Metropolitan Opera. Then vocalist Paula White and I cut, pasted, sliced, diced, retrograded and inverted the material so it sounds–hopefully–contemporary, although every now and then you’ll be able to hear one of those classic lines sort of barrel through the largely atonal complex.
Then the text is plied together from transcripts of instant message chats between myself and a writer whom at first I had intended to write an original libretto that sort of spanned the opera’s historic themes. But then, over the course of g-chatting about the project, I realized that the matter of our instant messages addressed, in a way that was matter-of-fact and genuinely curious, the questions we all have about what opera is today; how it’s made, who makes it, who produces it, and where do we go see it, etc. So we ended up rolling with the g-chats.
It’s by far the most difficult work we’ve created vocally, both because the material is scored and atonal, and because we sing unaccompanied, well, except for a lovely backdrop of nature sounds that will whisk the audience away to the oceanside, then into a dark forest at night, after that, you’re off to a Saharan sandstorm, and finally, birds chirping on a lovely sunny morning in a meadow!
The duet is a little zany but also earnest in the way it adresses the central questions surrounding opera today (I get to sing a little premonition about what Gerard Mortier will mean for opera in NY!) while errantly dropping comments about those mundanities that make up the, shall we say, dark matter of conversation.
You get two chances to see it, so no excuses. We’re being presented by American Opera Projects for the Make Music New York Festival, along with Opera On Tap and Rhymes With Opera, so it should be a hot-ass day for new opera!
P.S.
I forgot to mention that the “staging” (read: movement) is determined by the always inventive, sometimes superlative, and seldom correct punctuation of the g-chat transcripts!
UPDATE:
Here’s a photo from our Fort Greene Park performance.
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