Nico
Muhly,

I’m sitting backstage at Benaroya Hall in Seattle simultaneously re-packing my bags and listening to these outrageous republican debates. I love it so much! I’m going to do a pre-concert moment in about half an hour’s time — I’ve been sent a sort of loose set of guidelines for what we might talk about and it’s a lot of Schubert — it’s the Unfinished on the same program as tonight. Last night, I premiered, along with Owen, Shara & Bryce a new work by David Lang that basically extracts all the “death” bits from all the Schubert songs. The piece, Death Speaks, is meant to be a companion to his Little Match Girl Passion, with which it was paired last night. I met Paul Hillier! I am kind of his biggest fan but I refrained from whipping out my “No. 1 Choral Music Foam Finger” and writing the Psalm settings from The Cave on my chest in latex paint.

(an aside: has everybody seen, recently, the Ian Bostridge videos for Winterreise? He looks SO fine in these videos although it’s too bad it’s no pictures of Julius Drake. Julius Drake, in addition to sounding like a lesser Ducktales character, is one of the best collaborative pianists ever in the history of ever. He’s done albums with everybody you’ve ever known about, and is a really sensitive and wonderful performer. Apparently he and my homegirl Alice Coote just did a Winterreise at the Wigmore Hall that made everybody throw their knickers at the stage; it’s heartening to know that it’s still music you can do in any octave about which people will lose their shit.)

Last night was strange: it’s very rare that I play music in public other than my own or, like, Thomas’s. I had an experience that I’ve never had before. We’ve been working on this piece for a few months, but only really started putting it together in the last few days. Playing David’s music, in my experience, is rather like cooking octopus, where either you do nothing to it at all or boil it for a million hours with a wine cork. Last night, our normally minimal approach to the fourth movement kind of went to the other side, and an unexpectedly tender moment happened in one of the bars and I lost track of my triplets!!! That’s never happened to me before; I’m normally super solid, but it was so B-flattish and delicious. By the time my eyes got back to the page, it was probably a half a second, but I sort of fudged a left-hand moment and made a weird face I hope is not on video. I should also point out here that David’s music is crazy-looking on the page. You really have to follow it like early Nintendo (scroll mode!) or you can get not just lost but destructively lost.

Everybody get back into the L.M.G.P., though. David’s music is often process-based, and when text is involved, the text is sort of subjected to the same process as the notes, sometimes to a kind of abstract effect. In the Passion, the texts and the processes driving the car align in a really beautiful dance, and each of the many, many movements has a toe-curlingly great moment. Shara and I watched from backstage and I still get deep deep cilice passion pangz from “Eli, Eli.”

Today, I got up at Sparrow’s Fart and flew from San Francisco to Seattle, just in time for the dress rehearsal for my new piece, So Far So Good. I blogged about this piece before; it’s growing on me despite its oddness. There’s a trumpet solo which sounds really really American and delish. There’s a horn line that I’m pretty sure I ganked from Harmonielehre and that’s fine with me because I love that piece more than garlic. Newt Gingrich wants to go to the moon and I’m also fine with that. Ludovic Morlot is absolutely heaven.

Who administrates the indecency laws on the teevee? Are they laws or just conventions? I’m curious for a couple of reasons but mainly, I’ve been obsessively watching the Jersey Shore. It’s kind of incredible: totally indecent grinding is shewn, the word, “smash,” which is used as a stand-in for “fuck” is presented uncensored, and yet, there are certain parts of these women’s rumps which are blurred out. The usual swear words are bleeped out, even when one buys the season via iTunes, which seems disappointing, in a way. For $3 an episode, I wouldn’t hate a potty-mouthed Staten Islander. They appear to not be allowed t o say the word “blowjob” even though a notorious one appears to be the McGuffin of a major subplot this season? But they can fully say, “I’ma gonna smash this girl in your honor in your bed.”

I suppose I have the same question about the showing of brand names. All the blurring makes you actually run through the visual lexicon of brands in your head and be like, “…no….no….no….ah! It’s Bacardi!” It seems to undo whatever work it was put there to do.

Another anomaly: everybody is completely honest about all the various procedures they do to their bodies: tanning, hair extensions, eyebrow trimming, hour-long hair blowouts, et cetera. However! All these boys have perfectly hairless thoraxes and at no point does anybody confess to a chest wax or anything — it’s strange, it’s like the one thing nobody’s talking about despite the fact that it is, one presumes, something that has to happen at least once every few weeks?

Anybody who is interested in how the Rhode Island accent works would be well-served by studying Pauly D, who has one of the finer specimens of the same. His family comes for a visit and his mother! Her accent was almost identical to the awesome lady who works at Venda Ravioli on Federal Hill. I’ve never been happier. It’s like when Emeril (from Fall River, which I think falls in the Rhode Island Accent Watershed) says “Lamb Heart.” The Jersey Shore is a real triumph of the editing room; I think there must be a kind of Sympathetic Linguist in there with them, who seems to be constructing mini-narratives around single words and turns of phrase just for my delight!

OMG OMG OMG you know what would be the best thing in the world on Top Chef would be if they could do a post-concert meal. That’s always seems like the biggest problem in the world, and readers of this space know that I am perpetually — especially when on the road — bemoaning post-show options. Pre-show is easy everywhere in the world because all you need is hummus and red wine and some of them Stacy’s pita chips, but afterwards is complicated. Pretend, for instance, a show ends at 10. There are people who helped organize who want to come with, and then there are some people we know who want to come with, but really, what’s at the heart of the matter is six people who have just sweated and had adrenaline and lactic acidz and need to get some unfussy food with an air of the fabulous to it, to accompany an inappropriate drinking sequence — start with bourbon and move to red wine then back to bourbon! Yes ma’am! It’s a hard chord to strike: what’s required is some combination of the St John in London and the Landmarc in New York, but without it being the One Fancy Restaurant in the Place Where You’re At because usually they’re too expensive and get nervy when people order different amounts of things. Some of the best post-show moments have been stolen ones: grab one person and run to Lupa after a show at LPR. Charlize Theron just said, “if you had to cast a bean, that would be the bean to cast” right before she ate a lamb’s heart, by the way, on this week’s episode, while wearing a white goddess-toga? Also Eric Ripert. Anyway somebody tell Padma to calllllll meeeee or more specifically to call Nadia.

How are we feeling about fancy cocktails these days? I feel like there was once a time where I would seek out a complicated thing with a million ingredients and an egg made by a dude with historical facial hair, a vest, and a bow tie? But…of late…? I don’t know. I used to crave it and now…I suppose I wouldn’t kick it out of bed. The changing tastebuds!

So, another sequence of travel! This particular itinerary is loosely sensible: New York to Salt Lake to Seattle to New York to Winnipeg to Santa Fe to New York to Kitchener-Waterloo to Lewisburg to New York all in approximately a month. I had a jarring month over the New Year in which I had to kind of reconcile a lot of tax mishegas from the Distant Past, reorganize the apartment and its attendant billings, redo my whole online life (unsubscribe! unsubscribe!), and carve out time to make two smart sets of revisions to Dark Sisters and Two Boys as well as start writing this monster collaboration and finish this cello concerto and learning this piece which is harder than it looks. Also all my friends had babies? So, that’s a half-assed excuse for why I haven’t been posting anything.

The baby thing is crazy. I have some friends whom I had pre-planned to visit about a week after they had the baby. In the course of things, I didn’t really confirm and then the baby was late so I ended up being the first non-family visitor to this Very Tiny Creature. I’m an only child, so I didn’t grow up around nuggets that size and it was intense for me. I’m really looking forward to being a Fabulous Uncle-style figure – I think I’m much more suited to that. I love going to the zoo and my job is basically making noise.

I just had a very heartening ride to the airport; in the course of natural banter, it came up that I was a musician, and my driver said that his daughter is in this middle school in Brooklyn. I’ve spent a few minutes nosing around the website and I’m just really happy to see all of this — the site itself is kind of nuts but it encapsulates, it seems, all the stuff going on. The model seems to be one in which kids are dancing, singing, playing a zillion instruments, acting: a kind of holistic Orff eduction. I’m into it. I wish there were some oblique way I could participate in young-ish music education; a few years ago I did some volunteer work and a few years before that worked in Colorado in a K-12 school teaching music for a few weeks and it was actually really, really great.

I’ve also been watching every second of these Republican debates. I can’t bear this whole thing with Newt Gingrich where he gets to have three wives and gay people can’t have nann and then randomly gets to still be sanctimonious about it? I can’t bear Newt Gingrich’s fake-blunt answers or that whiny scold Santorum. But it’s so fun to watch I can’t turn it off! I can’t help thinking how irrelevant my specific life is to these people and this process; I’m as involved in the process as I can be — I read everything and vote all the time, including absentee which is a Whole Process for those of you who have never done it — and yet it feels very sim-city to me. All the alarm bells in my head tell me to run far away from these people — what is up with Karen Santorum!? Have we all processed that she lived with in a sex-type way the obstetrician who delivered her? And now is homeschooling all those weeping children, see illustration? Or how about how Newt Gingrich’s second wife, with MS, was inwestigated for taking a half a million dollar bribe from some dude in Paris to win her then husband’s favor?! I get the same vibe as I do with those cancer grifters, accused molesters, Stephen Glass. Some reptilian part of my brain is constantly alerting me that something is up. Ron Paul not knowing who wrote those newsletters? The weird thing about authorship — especially before the internet — is that somebody wrote the thing. It doesn’t particularly matter who — is there anything sadder than scholarly work about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works? Yikes. Anyway, Ron Paul. Fuck that dude. Would it be so hard to find the person who wrote them and talk about it? I think that would be interesting: even if they (by which I mean The Author and Ron Paul, who may or may not be the same Entity) disavowed half the stuff and still believed in the other half, it would be, as they say, a teachable moment.

I’ve written a piece for the Seattle Symphony which premieres this coming Thursday. I’m excited! It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything purely orchestral. I’ve been in a constant state — for almost two years — of writing narrative pieces or pieces too short to have anything other than a fragmentary narrative. This commission – plus or minus twenty minutes for orchestra with no specific program – was a real challenge coming out of two operas. I have a confession: I am not naturally very good at structure. If there are four or five things that I’m fluent at, musically, structure is not one of them, and it’s always a struggle. I attribute it to the fact that my favorite favorite music in Tha Formative Years was Purcell verse anthems. I’m thinking of one in particular: Sing Unto the Lord. Check out the score here. Basically, it’s a sequence of perfect little two-minute emotional mini-statements keyed to the text. There’s an alleluia that comes and goes and comes back again. There isn’t much that relates A to B to C, which isn’t to say that the piece doesn’t work; on the contrary, it’s my favorite! Anyway, that structural model doesn’t translate very well into secular music — I’ve always said that writing sacred music is writing incidental music to a play whose plot we all know, so there is strangely more flexibility to bounce around structurally. But when I first started writing instrumental music this was sort of the model I’d use: a series of not particularly interrelated great ideas. John Corigliano, my teacher at Juilliard along with Chris Rouse, kicked my ass about it and made me listen to music with developmental (rather than additive or just Massive) structure and I can do it now! I know how to do it! But sometimes? I check back in with Purcell and those big choral works like the Te Deum which contain fast music, slow music, duets, trios, beautiful music, pomp & incense, curlicues. I’ve tried to make a version of the same for orchestra with a slightly more modern sense of structure in which stuff comes back, but changed (“stuff comes back but changed” being, I think, the one emotional gift of the romantic era I have fully unwrapped). The piece is called So Far So Good and I’m really excited! Okay now I’ve had like nineteen Delta cappuccinos and I am ready for aviation!

So apparently the war in Iraq is officially over as of today. I don’t have much to say about that except that we should maybe all take a second (ten minutes, really) and listening to the heartbreaking third section of Steve Reich’s Different Trains.

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Steve Reich
Different Trains: III. After the War
Kronos Quartet

A few things about this. 2:05 in, there are some really delicious chords that I’ve been stealing for years. The minute this album came out (the Kronos version) I was right there sitting on the floor with a pencil and manuscript paper trying to figure out the voicings. The other thing is that around seven and a half minutes in, Reich really turns it out. In a miniature Mahlerian structure, almost, he introduces an almost folk-like melody with “there was one girl who had a beautiful voice,” followed by an anguished, central-european chromaticism on “and they loved to listen to the singing, the Germans,” which suddenly transforms into a sort of sun-dappled flautando environment for the final lines. It’s super super gorgeous.

Note that although I’m using the iconic, original Kronos recording here, there are now five or six others, including the wonderful Smith Quartet, the London Steve Reich Ensemble… more and more people, and younger people, too; this is a piece that has been so outrageously important to me, and I’m sure to a large number of young composers, and it’s great to see it falling into the fingers of our contemporaries.

The text, which Reich compiled from interviews:

Then the war was over
Are you sure
The war is over
Going to America
To Los Angeles
To New York
From New York to Los Angeles
One of the fastest trains
But today they’re all gone
There was one girl who had a beautiful voice
And they loved to listen to the singing,
The Germans
And when she stopped singing they said, “More more,”
and they applauded

The limit of my ability to be practical in Icelandic: trying to buy “you know that rubber thing in your garage that keeps the cold air out that they sell in SkyMall that seals itself to the concrete by way of pressure? That, but for the shower.”

This is what I came to Iceland for: this frozen, inconsiderate wind. The wind doesn’t belong to the land the way it would in Vermont (“the wind was running down the road towards the house.”) This wind doesn’t even see this house; the next thing it’s going to worry about is the west coast of Norway. It’s violent, outrageously cold, and I’m so so happy.

I’ve decamped, after all the madness of Dark Sisters and the hubbub of finishing pieces before the new year to Iceland, where my schedule looks, more or less, like this:

…which is very exciting: the arctic expanse of an empty diary. I have a hearty to-do list, but it’s mainly smaller things — or smaller, at least, than wrangling together an opera. The big consideration at the time is a cello concerto for this cellist Olly Coates & the Britten Sinfonia, which will happen in the UK in March, and then will receive its US premiere in January 2013 with the deliciously named Zuill Bailey and the Indianapolis Sympherny, who commissioned the piece along with the Barbican. It’s shaped up very nicely but strangely: the middle section bears the traces of Qawwali and has — as much of what I’ve been writing recently does — a commitment to a single, unchanging drone.

You guys. Even though I didn’t have shit-all to do, really, putting that opera together was exhausting! It’s like a strange version of plate spinning because it feels like work without actually being work. It would have been entirely possible — and indeed, maybe preferable? — for me to be a ghost in the process, but eventually, my schedule freed up such that I could, and did, make a (productive) nuisance of myself. What is difficult about the process, actually, is negotiating degrees of perfectionism in other people. This is probably more of an issue for me and Dr. Rosenfeld, but really, what it breaks down to is this: the piece exists as the document I’ve produced (two very large scores), but then is received as a collection of various processes ranging from the way in which the pit that houses the scissor-lift is painted to the font in the programme to the morale backstage to the presence (or absence) of supertitles to the morale in the follow-spot booth and on and down and up and over. It is a series of interconnected decisions and, in some cases, negative-space decisions (actively not making a decision about something and “letting it be”) that really surrounds the piece and puts it into three dimensions.

Rebecca Taichman, the director, and I are similarly neurotic people who will obsess over the font of the apostrophe in the supertitles: this is probably a good thing, given what we do. The question becomes how to gauge the limits of others in dealing with these details. For me, it’s technical and emotional: when I walked backstage the other day, did the fly-operator seem angry? Is there anything I can do? Is there anything I should do? It’s a complicated issue, of course, of degrees of control, and one that I imagine composers struggle with their entire lives.

The insane, insane thing about operas is that they are reviewed (and really, evaluated) on their opening night; there’s a huge amount of weight given to the opening. In theater, or a musical, the show would have been open for weeks working out those unthinkable obstacles that no amount of workshops can help one 4c. For me, two operas in, it’s one of pace and adrenaline. My instinct, as a performer, is to rush — a funny thing happens to me once a month, where I’m playing with a pre-recorded tape, and when an audience is there, I’m Absolutely Positive that an Imp or a Gnome has crept into the computer and slowed down the recording by 25%. I have never performed Skip Town without feeling that I am being punked by the tempo gods. Tempo is so subjective anyway: one writes quarter equals 120 on the score when, in the presence of an audience, what’s actually desired is twice as fast. But who can know that? One thing I love love love about opera singers is that they react to the presence of an audience: little pauses became big ones, and they started making dramatic decisions in character, which is nothing you could ever really write in the score and is the magic fruit of an enormous collaborative process. But it adds time, and I would loved to have had another three days to cut, let’s say, one-hundred seconds out of Act I before being subjected to critical proportional scrutiny. It’s also a bit of a game to zone out the insane online chatter about operas: it’s a funny thing. People? Actually want operas to “fail,” whatever that means for art. There’s a community online of manic, smug, glee people who think they know anything about what we’re trying to do — those same vicious queens backseat programming opera seasons, revealing false information and writing in declamatory fragments. I always want those people to ask themselves if they’re really making the world a better place before sounding off on the internet; I’ve stopped reading years ago but imagine how awful it must be to be a cast member in a piece of mine, getting dragged down just because a crazy person wants to play World of Opera Warcraft? But it’s fine! We’re gonna do it all again in Philadelphia this summer and I’ma get in there with a scalpel and make the piece the best that I possibly can, which, surely, is all that can be expected from lovers and haters alike. I’m excited.

I went, on Advent Sunday, to Westminster Abbey in London, where they did their fabulous procession and where, after the same procession, Jamie McVinnie played my seven preludes on the Seven O Antiphons. Will Balkwill, a lay clerk, sang the antiphons and Jamie played the preludes; I didn’t think I could be happier until then we all took taxis-cab to St John Bread & Wine and ate five pheasants, a venison & pig’s trotter pie, and a quince Eton mess. And then, of course, the mandatory eccles cakes and lancashire cheese. There’s always somebody, isn’t there, who is spooked by the combination of the currants and the cheese; you should see what happens when these people announce themselves: a great cheering objection, rushing up, slices of ambitious proportion being proffered, thunderous applause and intense scrutiny at the first bite. Get over it, y’all, it’s delicious! Look, incidentally, at this salad of ham, egg, and a strange duxelles-like paste of hazelnut and fatback:

One of the most crazy-making things in the world is this bogus idea of a war on Christmas, which, for those of you fortunate enough not to know what I’m talking about, is a right-wing obsession in which stores who ask their employees to say “happy holidays” are participating in a giant act of secularization and Christian persecution. If you’re bored, google it and wallow, for a few minutes, in the stupidity. What’s doubly maddening is, of course, the real argument to be made which is in favor of Advent: a liturgically rich & complicated season that gets eaten up with all the horrifying premature explosions of ghastly tinsel.

Apropos of nothing: a gallery of Miss Havisham thru the ages.

And: a beautiful, beautiful Advent carol:

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Elizabeth Poston
Jesus Christ the Apple Tree

And a concert I’m very sad to miss: Albrecht Mayer playing music written for the oboe and music not written for the oboe, as well as a new piece by Andrew Norman which sounds like it does Things with the orchestra, which is always exciting. I like this programming notion, too, which is to put a new piece with old pieces played by a great soloist, and promote both. It’s kind of win-win and doesn’t make new music seem like the mandatory but feared Brussels-Sprout, nor does it force one into a ghettoized new music space where it’s just several varieties of Brussels-Sprout in random order, with tedious percussion moving around in-between and that inevitable moment when somebody drops a cymbal.

The exception to that, however, was a fabulous concert I was part of in Dublin last week, with the excellent Crash Ensemble. This is a composer-driven band, under the moral guidance of Donnacha Dennehy (whose new CD is so great, get it right now). They play amplified and are used to playing amplified. Their programming was audaciously big/small; the order of the concert was Correct rather than Convenient, but then the stage changes were handled quickly, elegantly, and without much drama. One of the funny tricks about new music concerts is that instrumentalists have to get used to dealing with everything they normally do, plus one more thing. The nature of that One More Thing changes, but it can be: save us all fifteen minutes by taking your own stand over there, or bring an extra stand light, or unclip your own microphone as elegantly as you play your instrument. It’s a skill-set that most musicians have but usually deploy without the panache with which they play; all these Crashers were excellent at balancing all the additional clippings and hookings without it seeming like a gong show. They did three of my pieces, including a big new one, a piece by Timo Andres for piccolo, glockenspiel, and two bass drums which sounds, in reality, about sixty zillion times more awesome than you could even imagine, a piece of Missy Mazzoli’s, and a piece by Sean Friar (who looks alarmingly like recently-Grammy-nominated Jefferson Friedman, yay Jefferson & the Chiara Quartet!) It was a great show, and great to see a concert of recent works and not have it feel like a solemn litany or a procession through the Stations of the Cross.

So, last night we premiered Dark Sisters! It went great. I was incredibly anxious. During dress rehearsals, I can wander around between seats, hide if something starts going wrong, text the director or the librettist little thoughts. The thing with the performance is that you have to sit still and behave like an adult, in the presence of people who won’t have seen the show before. There are so many little insane things that can go wrong: late seating, a mysterious smell. As at any opera, the music is punctuated by the tuberculitic ejaculations of people of a certain age. A watch announces that it’s 8:00: so soon after the beginning! we must have started 15 minutes late! All of these things are happening simultaneously, in a glacially slow hyper-reality. Right at the top of the show, a mysterious rhombus of projected light appears on a scrim. The supertitles go off for about five minutes. It’s one of those things where you start imagining everything else going wrong: singers falling off the stage, the piccolo player spontaneously combusting, the cables holding the screens contorting into serpentine glyphs and strangling the baritone. And what do you do? In a rehearsal, at the first sign of the Rhombus of Mysterie, you can anxiously run around and try to figure out where it’s coming from. In the show, it’s a torture chamber. Of the three-man video/scenic team, one was in the house as an audience member, one was running the show from the light-booth, and the other had already fled home to his family, and I couldn’t even make eye contact with the one in the hall, so instead I grabbed the librettist’s thigh and assumed the brace position. But then it went away; we are talking about a (maybe) two-second apparition here. But then something kind of miraculous happened, that hasn’t happened to me before: the singers were so on top of their game, and the conductor and orchestra so in sync with them, that I floated back into my body and actually watched the piece for the first time. Details I had forgotten about became clear, theretofore buried vocal nuances became precise, and the giant rhythmic footprint of the piece started to become visible. In a sense, it felt like a heightened moment of clarity after a near-accident or after one of those vertiginous shocks just before properly falling asleep. Very exciting! Everybody come see this thing!

Now I have the kind of daunting task of throwing myself immediately into another project: a cello concerto for the wonderful British cellist Oliver Coates and the formidable Britten Sinfonia. I also have to actively avoid reading reviews; it used to be easier before twitter, but now you get tagged in them by whoever runs social media for the papers, so you have to actively avoid clicking on things. There were a few English people who were trolling me by writing these screeds about how the time they spent in Two Boys is time they’ll never get back again, how really I am the most awful thing that ever happened and am indicative of a greater series of social problems, et cetera, and bury it in a link that seems innocent, so then you click, and have about twenty minutes of severe self-loathing followed by an awareness that some people really do wish other people ill. I’ve found that avoiding the entire structure is, for me, a healthier and more productive tack. I’m going to try to blog a bit more, too, and document the process of this concerto because it’s going to be sort of a Closed System, in the sense that I’m going to write it without too many distractions and in, miraculously, only four countries. It occurred to me that Dark Sisters had bits written in: Iceland, the Faroe Islands, New York, Vermont, Cambodia, Singapore, France (the CAMARGUE, outrageously), London, and some proof-reading even took place on a cruise ship near Cozumel (!).

Dark Sisters has been a fascinating adventure for me specifically as it relates to tech, and also, my own insane desire to make everybody happy all the time. It kills me to watch singers bored while lights are focussed around their bodies; it kills me to watch designers not have enough time to work. Specifically, what seems like a form of modern white slavery for the singers seems, somehow, to the design team to be an outrageous deficit of productive time. How these things align is a total mystery to me; one presumes that composers who enjoy the luxury of being long dead are left out of these arguments. It kills me to see the insane conflicting mutually exclusive relationships of putting together an opera all a-boil, but I also realize that it’s this shuttling between agendas that creates the friction and the fun of the work as it exists on stage. My job — which is, literally, to produce a document which, when read by x amount of singers and y amount of musicians in the presence of z amount of design professionals, produces something that we can all agree is an Opera — is done, and has been done for months. So now it’s more a parade of my own neuroses, combined with the herculean efforts of the various departments and the cast. It’s a fascinating emotional bardo: the dual temptations are to hide in my apartment all day, or be there every second and try to subtly imbue every transaction in the theater with benevolence and, put simply, a good attitude. It’s easy to spiral into obsessive questioning: why is that scrim blotchy? Who are all those people talking back there? Is that pipe on fire? What’s that smell? Is this time being spent as cleverly as it could be? I’m sure the props-mistress has her own share of obsessions: Why is that little dress, which looked so good in the rehearsal room, creating an après-ski effect from this distance? What color stationery would a 15 year-old girl in Utah use, anyway? Why is everything covered in diatomaceous earth?

In the last few days, we’ve put together the technical elements of the show. Like in Two Boys, the projections are integrated into the environment as elements of plot, not just decoration; this requires a lot more attention than one would imagine. A constant argument is whether or not projections can be demonstrated without the set, but of course, as projections are essentially stylized versions of lighting, one does need to see it in situ and not just on a laptop screen. Separately, the orchestra has been putting themselves together with the conductor. I’ve had a wild ride with the orchestra in this one — it’s essentially a pickup band made up of people who play with Gotham chamber opera normally. This is, however, that company’s first 21st century work, and so I’ve found myself having to explain some of the fundaments of my instrumental writing afresh. It’s a good exercise for me, as I’m very spoiled by my close circle of friends for whom the kind of string writing in Different Trains or Shaker Loops is as standard as Brahms. I’m also spoiled by a close circle of collaborators who can think site-specifically about vibrato: a little bit here, none there, full-tang Dorothy DeLay here, almost Chinese here. And Dark Sisters has, in it, many different kind of musics competing. There is a Martha Graham / Copland Americana wing of the thing that requires a mid-century borderline embarrassing technique, and then a close-up, Makrokosmos-style Meredith Monk meets Scelsi music that creeps out of the pit and into the soloists’ mouths. Then there are the kind of tight, sixth-based chords as one finds in Tehillim. It’s been fun to watch these stylistic things slowly settle into the players’ fingers.

An additional stress, of course, is doing advance press, although this time around has been marginally less hostile than I expected. There’s this fun, slightly multi-culti only in New York one here, and then this other one here, in which my interviewer slightly conflates my friendliness (perhaps misplaced?) with what reads, on the page, as if I’m experiencing an acute manic fugue (it’s been done before, by Gramophone, in which every utterance I made was rendered with several exclamation points).

A lot of people have been asking me what it’s like working with opera singers. Opera singers are, notoriously, difficult, which in itself is not a problem at all. In fact, difficulty can have its own kind of allure, in the sense of a good mark from a notoriously difficult teacher having more value than the same mark doled out by an easy one. And surely the process of becoming an adult is one of figuring out which of ones difficulties should be sanded down in the interests of being a functioning member of the community, and which can be left as distinguishing and endearing eccentricities. Our cast is excellent, and also young, so they’re still figuring out where this Difficulty Threshold is. A new piece always finds people’s breaking points, I should think, faster than rep, although I’ve heard stories of singers’ patience being tested by outrageous new stagings of older works. I’ve found an enormous joy in writing for these excellent singers, especially because I know from watching their dealings with the director and the stage management that they will not tolerate any of what they perceive to be bullshit. If a note seems weird to them or sits in a strange place in the voice, they’ll tell me. If a phrase would work better with a breath HERE rather than THERE, I’ll hear about it. Then we can negotiate. The whole thing is “difficult” only in the same way a hike can be difficult. And surely, the view from the summit is that much more delicious for it. I’ve always told the singers that once they learn the role, the mistakes they make will be in character. These singers have lived with this piece for months now, so their mistakes are always, always more beautiful than what I could have thought of at my desk. I hope everybody can come see this piece; we open in just under a week and run through November 19th, variously, in New York City. Then, this summer, on to Philadelphia! Click here for tickets & things.

Has everybody been following all the new and exciting developments in Texas, Utah, and Arizona with the polygamist sects? Warren Jeffs, the prophet, keeps on going on hunger & masturbation strikes, getting sick, and moving around. Meanwhile, the fascinating and endless appeals process is continuing, sometimes handwritten! A 25-year old fled the twin towns of Colorado City and Hilldale! Here’s a picture of a very large house in Colorado City I took last year:

We’re going back into rehearsals for Dark Sisters, which deals, in a way, with a very similar situation to the one this woman found herself in. However, now, thanks to a long but patchy history of women escaping successfully, it’s easier to ring up the police and a network of informal shelters. If you want to read a strangely wonderful account, check out Carolyn Jessop’s book Escape. It’s strange inasmuch as it’s ghostwritten but not, it seems, ghost-edited, so it follows a very casual narrative structure and occasionally dwells on enormously small details (another sisterwife stole my shampoo!) while eliding over large ones (over the next three years, I had four more children!)

One more interesting thing about that woman escaping: it seems like she got help from Willie Jessop, who used to be a sort of spokesman/enforcer for the FLDS, until one of the various internecine fights inside the FLDS shuffled him around. In a lot of the memoirs written by escapees, he is a sort of villain, and here he re-materializes as a helping hand….