Nico
Muhly,

Hi everybody — it’s been a while but I’ve been rather inundated with work, about which there is not much to say except that it’s been a huge pile! The good, and exciting, news is that Dark Sisters is upon us. I’ll be blogging here and there as it gets put together, although at this point, it is sort of deliciously out of my hands. I enjoy a sort of avuncular relationship with it; it’s really being raised by the surrogate parents from the design team, stage management, lights, costumes, hair (!), and of course, Rebecca, the director. Look:

Before we plunge into the thick of it, though, we’re doing a little teaser at LPR this Thursday, and everybody has to come! It’s funny, because Clarice, Yuki & I have played at LPR a million times, and the team from the opera company has not. We’re doing a bit of a puu-puu platter of things — some old things, some new things, a few things by me, a little bit from Satyagraha, you know, the ucze.

As ever, you can peep the opera’s website for information, or sign up for the iTunes channel . I would direct your attention to this wonderful essay by Ken Verdoia about, loosely, the modern implications of the FLDS’s complicated history.

I’m really excited to see that my previous post has generated some interesting conversation in the comments threads. Scroll down or click here to read the original post and check out the comments, some of which I have replied to. The one point I wanted to re-iterate here is that I don’t think composers should put music on their website without getting permission. My primary concern here is for educational purposes. The other stuff – putting it online, promotions, etc., — all of that is a totally different issue.

And now, I want to talk about that issue just for a hot second. Real talk: the internet has made contemporary classical music in live performance exciting. People get excited for a new Adès or Reich piece; the orchestras are all up on twitter and facebook bigging it up, sometimes the composers are there too. This is, I think, a good thing. However, what it has done is call into question the amount of time between a premiere and when a recording is available. I’m thinking, specifically, about Adès’s Tevot and Reich’s Double Sextet. Carnegie was all excited about all these things, we all went to them live, and it would have been nice, I would argue, to have been able to get a recording of those pieces at that time.

Real talk: it’s bootleg recordings of these pieces. Real talk: I still bought the commercial recording. However, I was more excited about the bootleg DubSex because I was still buzzing from the performance I heard. That’s the thing: all the social media is great for orchestras to get people in the hall; I think we’re seeing that working very well. If the recording biz could get involved earlier, we’d be in really good shape.

I am also pleased that my post from a few days ago has, in fact, caused the Sequenza21 spam to stop. It’s really for their own good: if your twitter feed is caught in a feedback loop, you lose followers and people find it harder to separate content from noise.

I want to get specific for a minute about something that I think affects a lot of composers and performers (but especially composers). It’s getting recordings of new work, and making recordings of new work, and that whole matrix. I feel like I speak from a place of enormous privilege in this regard, because I have wonderful publishers both in the US and the UK who are attuned to the specifics of this, as well as relationships with two record companies who are easy and willing collaborators. But my goal, in the long term, is to get this fixed for everybody, because it’s a complete nightmare. Let me break it down. Let’s say that you’re a young composer and an orchestra decides to commission you. Wahoo! You spend six months writing this thing, spitting, crying, elated, all that. You haul ass to wherever it is that the orchestra is at. You work with them in a very limited amount of time, rushing up to the stage to investigate an errant bowing in the violas, running to the back of the hall to make sure the bowed vibraphone is speaking loudly enough. Then, it’s the day of the show, y’all. The concert happens, it goes pretty well! You see, above the stage, a few dangling microphones, so it should stand to reason that you should be able to hear a recording of the piece at some point. Not true. What then happens is an unbelievable series of Kafkaesque email threads, out-of-office messages, invented holidays, bizarre threats, secret handshakes. If you’re lucky, and very very persistent, you might end up with a CD of it, along with a note saying that “this never happened” and “don’t tell anybody you have this.” It’s really weird, right?

I understand that there are union regulations about recording work, and also about the way in which recordings can get very easily exploited. However, I think that I speak for a lot of people when I say that the things young composers want to do with the recording of their orchestra piece are: (a) send it to their mom, (b) be able to play it for other composers/musicians in either an academic or social setting, (c) listen to it privately to see if they can learn anything from it, and maybe, maybe (d) put it up on their website. I can see why an orchestra would have an objection to (d), but the other 3 things seem pretty much fair-game to me, especially (c). Let me also, for those of you not fully immersed in this world, explain something about orchestra music.

If you went to Juilliard, as I did, chances are you will have written an orchestra piece and submitted it for a once-monthly orchestra reading. When I was there maybe it was twice a semester or something? Anyway, what happens is that it’s 9 in the morning, everybody’s bleary, they read through your piece, a whole bunch of cobwebs and bats and shit come flying out of the closet because writing orchestra music is really complicated. There’s a big step between writing for, say, a quartet-sized ensemble and a fifty to sixty-piece orchestra. The way line works is different, blend is different — it’s a huge learning curve. Okay, so you have thirty embarrassing and exhilarating minutes. Maybe the next year, you do this again. Then, when you’re older, you submit a piece for the orchestra concert, you win the competition, and your piece gets maybe three hours of rehearsal over 2 days, and then the show. This is, it should be said, not a complaint about any of this, but just the reality of the situation. When that concert happens — when it’s really your first time dealing with an orchestra, you sort of leave your body and barely listen. It’s the recording that lets you double-back and realize that maybe that bass clarinet shouldn’t be doubled by all the celli, but only half. It’s the recording that allows you, even more importantly, to realize that all the incredibly intricate string details that would sound like £1,000,000 in a chamber setting sound like insects in the acoustic of an orchestral hall.

So, the moral of the story is, getting a recording of your piece is really, really important. I know that I listened to the two pieces I wrote for the Juilliard orchestra obsessively with the score, and without that process, I wouldn’t be half as facile as I am — or confident, or comfortable — writing orchestrally now.

Something really maddening happened to me in the past. I was dealing with an orchestra and we had very, very limited rehearsal time. It was the end of their season, everybody was tired, it was kind of a mess. The first orchestral rehearsal I had my little desk set up with my phone out (to keep notes on), two sets of scores, a million pens, etc. The rehearsal, shall we say, left a lot of room for improvement. I experienced some classic Orchestral Sasstalk:

Me: Hi, so can the bass clarinet just play out a little bit more in bar 91?
Bass Clarinet Dude: I just don’t think you’re going to hear that.

(Suffice it to say, not only could you hear it already when he was playing it pp, despite its f marking, this is not the way that conversation is meant to go).

The other thing about rehearsals is that one tends not to give brass a hard time for flubbing high, exposed passages. Brass instruments are like those crazy dragons from Avatar or whatever; it’s some kind of spiritual connexion that has to be achieved between the lips and the metal and sometimes you just aren’t going to get that at 10 AM on a Tuesday morning. So I happily ignored some brass peccadilloes. Strings: a rhythmic passage (let’s say it’s about as hard as the Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements in terms of counting) was a disaster. A little stroll down the stands revealed that only the concertmaster had slashed his bars (as in, showing the sub-beats to make reading the passage simpler), which, of course, was the problem. It would be as if New York City only put street signs every ten blocks; unless you know the city by heart, you’re going to need to remind yourself which is 8th and which is 9th. Anyway, that was kind of maddening, and the whole experience was pretty disillusioning and heartbreaking and awful; my reaction to a bad rehearsal is never “I hate those musicians” but it’s “I must be such an awful composer, and an awful person, that I can’t get these people to commit to this music.” At the end of it, though, came the amazing thing. Somebody from the music office said she wanted to talk to me. Oh, I thought, maybe they’re going to apologize for that not-great showing. Not so much. Apparently one of the musicians in the orchestra had made something akin to a formal complaint that I had recorded the rehearsal! Evidently, he thought that he had heard a noise coming from my iPhone that sounded as if I had been playing back what they had just played? Ooooooooooooooooooooh girrrrrrrrrrrllllllllll. It was at that time that I lost my mind. There are so many things wrong with that. I had to check myself, because what I wanted to say was, “Yes, I recorded it, because what I love to do in the evenings is draw a lukewarm bath, slit my wrists, and listen to adults sight-read my music worse than children through my phone’s speaker.”

I should also add that this organization — whom I love! – has the opposite of sent me a recording (which I know exists because I have Beheld It) of the multiple performances they’ve done of my work. In fact, the woman I attempted to (politely) hound about it, and whom my publishers also (politely) hounded, ignored our emails, until such a time as it was revealed that she had left the organization, presumably to avoid the task of slipping the CD into the mail? I mean: I get it. Shit is bureaucratic, who knows about the rights issues and nobody wants to run afoul of a musicians’ committee. But in this case I would have accepted the secret handshake, because I want to do better next time.

I am really pro-Union for musicians. I appreciate all the protections that are in place against musicians inadvertently having their work exploited in ways beyond their control. I also understand that musicians are insanely underpaid if you consider how much time it takes through practice, school, etc. to be in a professional orchestra, or semi-professional orchestra, or really to be getting paid for music-making at all. This model, though, is totally fucked. The idea that a professional musician, after a pretty bloody rehearsal, would be most concerned with whether or not the composer recorded it on a cellphone is a misprioritization on every level. If I had been recording it, the point would have been for me to sit at home obsessively going over the score in order to make myself a better composer, and better able to write better music for that same player in the future. Everybody wins if, after a concert, the composer gets a nice CD with the logo of the orchestra on it. The alternative is some James Bond shit: little Edirol recorders hidden in duffel bags, hiring a friend to sit in the hall and “check for balances” whilst propping a device on the knee. Nobody wants that. Loosening up the recording contracts is going to be an investment in getting higher quality orchestral music written across the board, because writing for orchestra is always learning on the job.

I want to give you a recent example. Excellent Conductor X conducted the Y Sympherny and soloist Z in this concerto I had written for the occasion at an outdoor festival. The rehearsal was cool — about forty-five minutes, we worked out some balance issues that you are always going to have with concerti. The dress rehearsal was basically a run and some notes: again, totally cool, totally professional. Everybody sounded awesome. Perfect showing at the concert from X and Y and a stellar performance from Z. Microphones all over the place, broadcasting the concert onto the lawn for picnickers. During the show, I was sitting there inside, nervous as anything, trying not to twitch. I was listening, but I was not listening. I was paying attention the same way you pay attention to a movie you’ve seen before.

Afterwards, you’d think that because of the microphones, it would take about thirty seconds for somebody to be like, hey, here’s a link to a Dropbox file with your piece recorded in it! The point of my owning that recording, by the way, would be to listen to it privately, and figure out what I could improve with it. I’d also send it to my mom. I wouldn’t put it online, obvs. I’d play it for the friend who introduced me to Z so many years ago at Juilliard, because that seems only polite, rather than the email I sent her being like, “you should hear this piece! But you can’t! Haha! Nobody can! Only the people who were there!” So now, we’re in the Email Thicket. Words I have heard: $200, Impossible, Working On It, Cassette Tape (!). On the other hand, I walked into the St Paul Chamber Orchestra just now and immediately signed a waiver saying that I can get a high-quality CD of the piece as long as I don’t put it online! Wa-hey! Let’s choose model b! And I’m secretly wishing somebody would send me a cassette tape.

I’d love to know what I, and other composers, can do to encourage all organizations to work with composers to ensure that we can continue working and learning based on live experiences. Leave me a note up in the comments.

We are gearing up towards the tenth anniversary of 9/11 never 4get, and I’ve been glutting myself on late night TV documentaries and hysterical websites. Counteracting all of that is Danny Felsenfeld’s very simple project Music After. Check it out here, and read Alex Ross’s take here. They have a funding link, too, here.

Beloved, y’all, gentle readers, I have been having connectivity issues! It’s too many hard drives, too many conflicting operating systems, I can’t get Logic to talk to Reason, I can’t get the samples to let me register them, it’s crazy! It feels precisely like trying to cook in an unfamiliar kitchen that has been child proofed: those maddening plastic clips on all the drawers, the almost-invisible blueballing plugs on the sockets. Your girl is VEXÈD. The upshot is that I have taken it upon myself to completely reorganize all my media, clean out the virtual drawers of unsent emails, and the physical drawers of knotted cables and chargers for Pay-As-Þú-Go cellphones from Iceland, now obsolete.

Also, I am trying to remove the presence of Spam from my life. I have the most hideous spammers: Sequenza 21. It’s basically a new music website — I stopped going there about two years ago, because I was in Iceland trying to explain to somebody the “Uptown-Downtown” argument and happened upon a comments thread to end all comments threads. I nearly drove a car containing some of my best friends into a lake, and so it was decided that I’m not allowed to go to that website anymore by community writ. Also, they’ve repeatedly, and over the span of many years, called me (or my music; one can never quite be sure) “flavor of the month,” and (cue Sex & the City music here), I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of puranic time cycle these people are living in in which a month can last so very, very long. Anyway, every morning, on the Twitters, I wake up to:

…which is doubly stressful because my last name is misspelled, and I can’t figure out how it even turns up in my feed! It’s a disaster. So any readers who are on good terms with our friends over at Sequenza21, tell them to call off the dogs! I suspect they’re not doing it intentionally, but if they’re doing hall of mirrors stuff to me, I wonder what they’re doing to the rest of you.

I am super excited, in other, much more pleasant news, that the wonderful Swedish outfit Loney Dear is about to release a new album called Hall Music. Click on that link for information about when it’ll be available where you live at. His music is wonderful. I’d like to say that I worked on Hall Music, although what I actually did is make some live arrangements for him last year, some of which partially trickled into what you eventually hear. Here is one of my favorite songs of his, from a previous album:

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Loney Dear Ignorant Boy, Beautiful Girl

I love a song that is based on drones, too — Whitney Houston It’s Not Right But It’s Okay works in a similar way. The melody is, in a sense, an agitation of a single pitch, and the friction between the drone and its neighbors is what drives the song forward. Everybody get involved.

This fall, we’re starting to make Dark Sisters happen! I’ll be occasionally blogging about it, and there is a website (about whose impending redesign I am enormously enormously excited), and a twitter account @darksistersoper. The process for this opera is, I think, relatively rare. The three commissioning organizations — The Music-Theatre Group, Gotham Chamber Opera, and the Opera Company of Philadelphia got organized way in advance, and we cast the piece before I started writing anything. Then, they insisted on having two workshops with the actual cast, which is, I think, relatively unheard of? The end result is that now that production is about to start, I have nothing to do! We’ve workshopped with the orchestra (same players as the actual show), the singers have memorized the work already, we’ve collaborated with Rebecca Taichman, the director, on the characters with the singers, and the designers (the wonderful Fifty-Nine Productions) have been with us through all the workshops. I’m excited to see how this compares to the larger, more x-factor process of putting together Two Boys. Join us in November when it happens.

Linguists, I need your help again. My favorite online personality, Funky Dineva, has released a video that has a really clear articulation of a [tr] turning into a [kr] sound; one finds this in the south.

It’s really clear at 3:45. Is there a word for this process? You see it in print, too, rendered out in the fabulous blog MediaTakeOut. But then you see it transform from speech to text to speech again, in the case of the Hoe Stroll. The Ho Stroll (as I would spell it) gets rendered “Hoe Skroll,” but then gets re-rendered thusly. Ur help needed.

[UPD8! It's called the Stream-Scream merger. Watch this space.]

I have been watching an unbelievable amount of cable news in the last week. I had a crazy thing where I got back from London and immediately flew to Iceland and then flew home, and all the while, this debt ceiling thing has been raging. I got kind of obsessed with it, because it seems like both sides are working with entirely different sets of facts, rather than interpretations of the facts. I have never seen so many people shout at each other, “that’s just not true!” on television before! We are having a problem of definitions. I am normally used to arguments being about interpretation, as in the case of Steve Reich’s upcoming album cover for his piece WTC 9/11. Read this article (and the entire comments thread) here. One interesting thing in this post by Bob H is that he doesn’t include one of the interesting glosses Reich provides us about his title:

Reich opens up a second meaning of the initials “WTC,” as the World to Come. He draws in the voices of some of those who attended to the Jewish obligation of shmira in the days after 9/11: sitting near the bodies of victims before their burial, reciting and singing Psalms and other Biblical passages ceaselessly. In Reich’s treatment, shmira is almost is an act of willing a new reality into being, though none of us is sure what actually is to be: “The world to come,” as one of Reich’s interviewees muses, “I don’t really know what that means.”

I took that from NPR, but it’s been discussed in other places. Reich’s music has, in the last 30 or so years, taken on a more nuanced motoric cross-referencing between the energy of New York and the devotional practices, both solemn and ecstatic, of traditional Judaism (viz. Tehillim, Daniel Variations, etc.) This is particularly poignant in his large music-theater work The Cave, which I feel like we should all take a second to appreciate:

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Steve Reich The Cave
Who is Abraham?

So, what this is is speech fragments taken from interviews Reich and his wife conducted in New York in 1992 with people from artists (Richard Serra) to astronomists (Carl Sagan, who weirdly gives the most historically intense description of Ur) to scholars (Saul Rosenberg) about, essentially, Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael and how all that ish brings us to the Cave of the Patriarchs. The speech is doubled, literally, be the instruments in Reich’s ensemble: strings, clarinets, vibraphones, pianos. It’s a combination, as much of Reich’s work is, of documentation and weaving the disturbances in real life into a fabulous and moving tapestry. He has been up to this since Phase Patterns, but for me, it really reaches a wonderful ripeness in The Cave. I bought the disc the second it came out, and remember being so insanely moved by the chords 3:14 in (“God speaking to you) and the wonderful bit of fancy at 5:05 in this excerpt: from the linear “Father of the faithful” to the percussive and dynamic “father of faith” half a minute later. That sequence delivers us to a piece of straight up technical bad-assery, when Reich doubles Carl Sagan’s folksy baritone with his percussion instruments, and slams the punctuation with bass drum and piano. It still makes me as happy as it did sixteen (!) years ago.

Ooh Fréttir! They’re gonna change the cover!

Does anybody else think that Sarah Palin’s hair is laid like the meme of Tracy Chapman looking like the predator?

I am, at long last, back in New York. We had a not-overly-sentimental last night of Two Boys on Friday, followed by a completely tame after-party experience with the cast and creative team and some crew (does “crew” include stage management? Those guys were the best). Friday was a fun show — apparently there were millions of subs in the orchestra, which always makes for a slightly more anxious (in a good way) conducting style. I always think a little surprise energy helps things move along, like an espresso from a new place or an unexpected free sample of chocolate.

I’ve been loosely holding my tongue about the Overall Experience of this opera, just because I felt like really, the whole thing wouldn’t be done until I was back in this specific chair with this specific coffee and everything loosely in order. Let me give you a little overview of what a morning post-opera is like. I wandered over to my score cabinets to discover that the dog-sitter has left three copies of the New York Times review of the piece above my Albert Herring score. I am not reading any reviews or blogs or whatever at all, at least yet, although I’m told that this one is great. I’m having all of them posted in the press section of this space, so, if anybody’s curious, check it out. I opened up the internet-machine to discover a host of opera-related internetz. Nicky Spence is on twitter! (@nickythespence). Facebook is filled with the cast writing one another sweet notes about how much fun they had. The costume designer is in a tiny hotel room in Paris. One of the actors has a new job starting next week. All of these people are my new friends and co-authors. Then I turned on twitter. It’s like, usually a cesspool of haterade, and some nice stuff, but today there is an especially vile exchange that I’d like to just briefly wade into to make a more elaborate, and I hope mature, point than is being made in 140 characters or less. Essentially, there is a round-robin of haters all who either came or didn’t come to the opera who hated it and that’s their right. But then! One of them is an artist! Oh snap. He says, “Every single person I’ve spoken to about the opera said it’s over-hyped bilge. Yet no one dares to openly say it.” (I’d interject here that I think half of the internet went right ahead and said it, as well as several national papers). Okay. Now, in the interests of us all being adults here, let’s name names. This is written by the very excellent pianist Nick van Bloss, whose Goldbergs are really good. The canons are especially clear and I like them a lot, and he looks a little bit like Mark Padmore, whom I love. His comment came in the middle of a more elaborate (and very mean-spirited) conversation about press & PR and all that stuff, which is a very good conversation to have. So let’s have it!

I understand that an opera house’s goal is to do things: put on great work, and get people in to see said work. The composer’s job, as far as I can tell, lies exclusively in the first category. However, there is an expectation that the composer will help with the second. That includes doing an extraordinary amount of press, because having press surrounding a project gets people in to see it, or at least, makes people aware of it. The press has nothing whatsoever to do with the work; the work is finished almost seven months before one starts talking to anybody about it. I’m looking at this diary here and it says that I did, on average, five press “things” a week for the two months and change I was in London — this is interviews, photos, phone calls, emails, writing things, all manner of radio. Believe me when I say that none of this is my choice, but also believe me when I say that the lovely press team at the ENO did everything they could to make it painless. Missing 20 minutes of a piano and stage rehearsal to talk with an obstinate reporter about something she could have googled is not my idea of a good time. Being in a hot room with some ancient dude from the beeb making me answer questions about Rufus’s opera, which I liked, and he clearly didn’t, was obnoxious. However, I understand that doing this press cheerfully and without complaint is part of making the Whole Thing Work, and so I do it. (Also, these people are doing their jobs, just as I’m doing mine). I use “The Whole Thing” in the sense not only of the many moving parts that make up the opera, but also, the world of new work, commissions: I’m committed to making the process as transparent as possible, and, through that, making the whole thing seem less scary and unknowable. The goal is that not just what I’m doing but all new music gets more exposure.

The idea of things being part of something bigger is incredibly important to understand in an opera, too. Inasmuch as it stems from two pens only, it is a hugely collaborative – necessarily collaborative – endeavor. Leaving aside the creative team, there are close to a hundred people running around on stage making this enormous mechanism work. The work is as much for them as it is for the audience; their commitment to it is hugely, hugely important. So you think about them when you do that ninth interview of the day, or that totally inconveniently-timed radio interview. You also think about the singers, who, at the time of the radio interview, are working with vocal coaches figuring out how exactly to place the [ch] sound in the word much, and you think about the props department rigging up the little yellow lights that surround the laptop screens, and you think about the video team staying up all night to re-format some of the text in a projection near the end of Act II, and the administration of the opera, who have bravely put their weight behind a very complicated and multi-faceted new work. I’ve done press — not for this project but for other things — where you know they are reading off of a hastily-googled playlist of buzzwords: Gay, American, Young, Philip Glass, Björk, in any order. It makes me want to take holy orders. The last time I endured a press junket I made the mistake of reading all the reviews afterwards, and in some cases, I got punished for over-exposure by the same paper that had, in my opinion, rather over-exposed me not three weeks before! Is this my fault? Is it anybody’s?

I’ve been guilty of this bad attitude before, although never publicly, with one exception, in this space, about which I am still doing private penance. I used to be like, ugh, Lang Lang, overhyped. It wasn’t until I saw him play the Ravel bothhands concerto in St Petersburg last year that I was like, oh wow, he’s really good at the piano! And all my favorite tempi! And then, sitting in my hotel room at 4 AM in the blinding sunlight, it also dawned on me that it was really unfair and churlish to judge him on “his” outrageous press materials, because there is such a disconnect between how beautiful that second movement is and all those Audi ads, and I’m more interested in (a) than (b), so I just won’t think about (b) anymore. And it’s not like he is the only pianist in the world; every ten seconds another great disc by somebody else comes along, and I buy that, too. It’s the same thing for self-generated publicity, too. I like Milton Babbitt’s music, but I don’t like how he describes music. So I don’t read (b) and I listen to (a). I think Boulez’s music is fucking genius, ecstatic, decadent robotgasm Franco-gay pageantry, and I listen to it a lot. The minute you read anything he writes about anything, you want to vom, so I just don’t read it! It’s just self-contradictory I-was-4-stravinsky-b4-I-was-against-it ooga-booga nonsense anyway, and I think he’s a much better composer than he is polemicist, so I just listen to the music and haven’t read a thing he’s said since 1999. And I’m happy! And he’s happy because I keep on giving his CDs away as gifts and make it rain on DG every time a new album drops.

So, in that context, it is actually galling to get comments that conflate the “hype” around a project with the quality of the work. I understand if you don’t like it. There’s nothing anybody can say about my music that I don’t tell myself about six thousand times a day. But the constant insistence on putting the PR/press in the immediate proximity of the work is unfair, and is especially unfair coming from another artist; I’m picking needlessly on NvB, but the reason it struck me is because I was just listening to his Goldbergs last week, and was like, oop! Anonymous online opera fans, that’s fine: they don’t know how it works, and they don’t need to: they are the weird lymph that keeps the whole opera world afloat and they buy tickets and they come and hate everything and that’s great. File under: bile or catarrh. Not nice to smell but it has its purpose. Critics, too; they’re a strange bacterial species and you take the good with the bad — it helps with the cultural digestion and also sometimes can give you cultural thrush. But Nick van Bloss, girl, why you got to do me that way? Was the piece really that bad, or was it made more bad, in your eyes, by the press? Are all of our efforts — all hundred and change of us — in the service of something truly that awful? Or is there something else at work here? I think the moral of the story is that we owe it to each other as artists to ignore this secondary noise and focus on the work. I’m almost regretting voicing this so extensively; it took almost as long to write this as it would to sit down and listen to the opera! But then it occurred to me that this needed to be said: if there are people who honestly came to it and felt angry at not only the work, but the hype (or some strange emulsion of the two, which seems to be more likely the case), this is a conversation that we very much need to be having.

Back to my abused straw-man: that comment is vexing coming from an artist who has had her own PR spice rub; homegirl’s excellent musicianship can easily be overshadowed by extramusical concerns that are much more pressnip than the fact that her ornaments are tight. The first sentence of xi bio on Wikipedia says that xi suffer from Tourette syndrome, right there! I know that people don’t (or at least shouldn’t) edit they own Wikipedia but do you see how unfair it would be for another artist to forever and permanently conflate however it is that this diagnosis has played in the press with NvB’s own desires and volition? It makes me sad more than angry, to think that another artist, whose work I like and respect, who has also done a ton of press (even some personal, kind of intimate press) wouldn’t understand how this works. (I should add here that it is odd that it’s continuing after the show closed, as if somehow I’ve made something that is so vile, so offensive, that it needs to be talked about during the summer holiday). Normally, I take on the sort of self-helpy attitude to just ignore the haters, but coming from artists, it’s harder to ignore, and especially on something so connected to the body as twitter, which, unlike blogs, comes into my pocket.

I know that doing as much press as I have done for Two Boys struck me, at the time, as rather a lot but not excessive. Also, it is in my nature to be simultaneously nervous about over-exposure and also very eager to please all my collaborators and particularly the Press Lady whom I rather like; as in, we would totally hang out outside of work, mybe. She gets paid cash money to understand how the press works. I get paid cash money to write the opera. We have to help one another out, she and I, and at a certain point, she has to trust that I’ve written something worth publicizing, and I have to trust that she’s not going to over- or under-do it. And I also understand that the opera house has to fill some percentage of their 2,300 seats and that the way in which they can be emboldened to commission other new works is by having a new work get enough people through the door one way or another. This is very important, and I think this goes to the heart of the matter: having a new work that people go to, even if you don’t like it, is a very, very good thing, because chances are, the house will be emboldened to then put on something that perhaps you will like more. I cannot overemphasize this, and this is how I feel like I can be Christlike in the face of music that is not to my taste. Cosmetically, crazy online + print buzz about something new, whether it’s Tom Adès, or me, or Luke Bedford, or a new production of the Rang cycle, is Good in a larger way. Waking up and posting something snippy or mean or dismissive on the internet helps positively nobody, and works actively against something you like ever seeing a stage or a wax cylinder because the world will be filled with bitter people as opposed to people trying to do the best they can, which, at the beginning & end of the day, is all I was up to with Boys. All of us on team classical music are sailing through tricky passages, but there is room for everybody both florid and thorny.

Moral of the story! Everybody buy Nick Van Bloss Goldbergs here, and everybody buy Boulez’s Répons here, support young artists here, and let’s keep this conversation moving forward.

Okay! Now that that’s out of the way, more on the opera process. Beloveds, it is crazy and fun. I would (and will!) do it again in a second. It is not, as some had warned me, a slow burn. It’s actually an excruciatingly slow smolder for about four weeks, and then the last two weeks are like holy shit everything’s happening at once. The first four weeks are tiny details working on a sound-stage, basically, figuring out little gestures and putting together the phonemes of the piece. Then all of a sudden, around week three, words begin to emerge, and at week four, a grammar, a style! I aged about ten years in the first orchestra rehearsal, and required a very serious evening of drink with Tom Adès and others who had Been Thru It to right me again. The first few days on stage were simultaneously breathtakingly great — costumes! — and breathtakingly frustrating: why can’t we just see the whole scene! Why is everybody talking about this little swatch of fabric that nobody can even see? Of course, by that point, the show has its own gravitational pull and all these different things are running around like crazy: the lighting designer is here, the video is there, there is somehow still more press (Latvian magazine!? Who is this Brazilian woman with a camera crew?!) and it’s just an intense, crazy cartoon-like and gorgeous process. And then suddenly: you’re open and everybody flies in from America and one’s parents turn up and one’s boyfriend’s parents turn up and it’s priests everywhere and friendly homosexicals and mean homosexicals and cabaret artists and polygamist floral arrangements and widows and strippers and the baritone’s cute mom and the soprano’s baby-daddy and who knows how many children! So good.

In other news, can somebody find me a way to exchange my iPhone 4 UK from Orange to O2? I can’t bear Orange anymore!!!

So! Has everybody been following this huge mess happening at Opera North? I’m going to dip my toe into this very gingerly because it’s kind of all over the place. Let’s first start by summarizing what we think is going on.

Librettist Lee Hall & composer Harvey Brough collaborated on an opera called Beached, which was an Opera North production, and somehow incorporated 400 denizens of Bridlington, which is kind of northeast of Leeds, by the sea, in Yorkshire, I guess? This has been underway for about a year. Apparently last weekend, the main primary school involved threatened to pull out of the production:

Hall’s account of the affair is published in an article for the Guardian. Hall writes: “The request seemed to come from a completely different era. I thought there must be some mistake and that Opera North would support me by finding a way round this completely outdated hysteria. I was amazed when they accepted the school’s position. I was repeatedly asked to excise these references to the adult character being gay.” There are still hopes that a resolution may be found. A spokeswoman for Opera North said it had been trying to act as a mediator between the school and Hall and had not taken a side. “The school has said that the work is inappropriate,” she said.

Okay. That’s from a different article in the Guardian, by the way. Lee Hall also has written his own version of the story in another article in the Guardian, in which he says:

But by last week, we had reached an impasse. The opera’s main character is a gay, retired painter, and in one scene he is the victim of taunting. At the school’s request, I agreed to tone down the violence of the language in this scene, but not the character’s straightforward defence of his sexuality. Word came back from Opera North that, unless I removed the lines “I’m queer” and “I prefer a lad to a lass”, the whole project was in jeopardy. (It was by now far too late to replace 300 schoolchildren.)

He continues,

What I find bizarre is the insistence that no one – not the school, not Opera North, not the local education authority – is being homophobic. Instead, we have the strange position that, because the children are of primary-school age, these lines are too difficult and confusing for them. It feels to me that, because I was unwilling to remove these lines, the opera’s chance of taking place has vanished.

So it seems to me as if the opera company is in a very very uncomfortable position here, where they have to choose between supporting their artists and negotiating with the community, which is, after all, what an opera house should do. There are some missing steps here, though, that we’re not seeing. For instance, how did it get so bad between Hall and Opera North that he just went right ahead and wrote this piece in the Guardian? Was that done with the blessing of their PR department, thinking, perhaps, that the attention would help sway people to do the right thing? Probably not, as their own statement ends pretty nastily. Check out the comments thread below the statement if you want to wade deeper into this. Also check out this awkward morning show clip.

The other question I have is: why is this happening now and not a year ago? What was the process by which the libretto was vetted? The morning show people asked and got a really convoluted answer; are these people crunk like how Danny Devito was that time? Who got sent a copy of the libretto? I’m particularly sensitive to this, because Craig Lucas and I have just gone through an idyllic collaborative process with the ENO and the Met putting together Two Boys. Anybody who wanted to read the libretto could read it, and all the adults in the production were charged by our director, Bart Sher, to take care of the kids (we had a dozen actors and two singers), making sure nobody was uncomfortable. Bart spoke with the parents of the kids — particularly the singing ones — well in advance of the production period. And in the interests of full disclosure here, allow me to excerpt for you some moments from the opera:

Congressman. did any girl give u a haandjob this weekend?
Page. i’m single right now
Congressman. did u spank yourself this weekend?
Page. no
Congressman. in the shower where do you throw the towel?
Page. in the laundry
Congressman. just kinda slow
Page. it works

(If you don’t know the reference, I’m not going to tell you, but it’s a matter of public record).

Later, a chorus contains the (loudly sung) text:

I love you…part me in 2…love u like a sister… kill urself … What’s eating you? … i love u u u … i want to kill him … u still there? … i know who u r … Castrate me and cook it while we have a Last supper … Money hungry … sweet dreams, sweet dreams, sweet dreams.

So, there’s that. And then there is a very complicated sex act, which is made more complicated because neither character is in any way explicitly homosexual, but there is a homosexual sex act referenced. This sort of gets at the issue that Hall brings up in the awkward morning show about differentiating between sex and sexuality. [This is neither here nor there but I do wish that people could get it into their heads that straight people engage in homosexual sex acts all the time. It may not be their, like, biologically determined preference, but the bars close early here and what all else is there to do?]

The ENO and the Met were amazingly supportive through this entire process. At no point did anybody say that we had to de-gay anything. If there were uncomfortable murmurs, they never reached me, and the general atmosphere on the stage and off the stage was one of completely uncompromised support for the work. This isn’t to say that we didn’t get word-change suggestions all the time, but usually this was to do with the nuances of British English or with the procedural gestures of police work. I would say that 95% of these notes came to us during the workshop process, which began over 18 months ago. Most of them both Craig and I happily took on board. The last week of production we got a few little bits and bobs — usually from the singers, who do indeed know best about this kind of thing — regarding what would be clearer to hear over the orchestra. Craig removed, quite happily, a few tossed-aside obscenities because the word “shithead” is hard to sing.

We got notes from people at every level of production — Peter Gelb and John Berry had small and welcome handfuls, as did the rehearsal pianist, the stage managers, even a cellist! It’s good: it takes a village. There was a healthy conversation about whether or not we should put a warning on the website & poster saying that it might not be suitable for kids, although I think that the sexual violence in Two Boys is approximately one sixth of that in Don Giovanni. [Another aside here: consent, in its modern interpretation, is really easily brushed under the rug in these conversations.] All of this was handled calmly and without hysteria. Both houses were enormously helpful in helping me navigate the relationship of this piece to the “True Story” upon which it is very loosely based. The press have a really really obstinately and stubbornly hard time understanding “loosely based;” I did one interview with this writer who must have thought that Craig and I sat with a whiteboard with the word “TRUE” on one side and “OUR OPERA” on the other and that at the day’s end, there would be a percentage of things that were directly correlated and that we could, at the time of the interview, provide her with just such a percentage, and also, that any of this is relevant to anything. Moral of the story is that the ENO helped me retain my ladylike composure and I did not step to this ridiculous woman like Hannibal Lecter. (Yet another aside: the laws about privacy and all that are so confusing to me. If the “troostoryuponwhichtwoboysislooselybased” had happened up in American, those boys would both have reality shows and their moms would be on dancing with the stars or something.)

Okay back to Beached: Apparently one of the offending couplets reads: “Of course I’m queer/That’s why I left here/So if you infer/That I prefer/A lad to a lass/ And I’m working class/ I’d have to concur.” Whoa. I want to know how Brough set that; can somebody send me a score? That sounds really hard to set. If Craig had sent me that, I’d have sent it back just on the grounds that I have absolutely no idea how to unpack the information-delivery-system of that series of statements, and also “concur” is almost impossible to set without the singer doing a very Chinese erhua moment at the end of the [r].

Mark Shenton writes about this Beached/Boys comparison very well here. A guide to arts organizations weathering twitter storms is here, which is great. Oh also, apropos of nothing, I got this via a friend (who is England’s Dishiest Gynaecologist, by the way, ladies, if you want a handsome homosexical ladyparts doctor):

:

What I would love love love to see in this is actually the entire email thread between everybody. I’d love to see the first concerned parent’s email; I’d love to see how all of that worked — and not out of some kind of schadenfreude but because I’m honestly interested to see how this interesting project got to this awful contentious online battlespace. There are steps missing from all of the available accounts, which is what makes this whole thing kind of…operatic. In fact, somebody forward me all the emails and I’ll set them. We can do it in the church in Orford. Those kids know from community opera.

All kidding aside, my heart goes out to everybody involved, and especially to the 300 (!) kids who, for better or for worse, are going to miss out on being in an opera and in ten years are going to be wildly embarrassed about how all these grown-ass people have behaved online and in print. This is, I suppose, the big question: all of these adults are purporting to be acting in the interests of protecting children. What lesson are these kids going to learn by having their project taken away? What are they going to think about their adult role models when they’re older?

I wonder, also, what the correct move is now that there seem to be three factions: the school, Opera North, and Team Lee Hall. I’d love to hear from the composer, obvs, and maybe somebody should slap together a quick mp3 or video of the most ravishing section of the score? Amanda, what would you do? Is it gay parents up there who can make an estink?

Other things worth reading: “What Opera North Could Have Said”, and a roundup from the Guardian.

(Also in all of this have we forgotten about Meet the Feebles?)

More on this soon, but you guys? I am in a festival in Finland called Avanti! and these players are unbelievably great not just as individual players but as chamber musicians and orchestral musicians all at the same time. It’s across the board awesome musicianship in such a divine way. These people are going to take over the world if we’re not careful! It’s pretty intense. And they’re all mixed ages, too – some in their 20s and some in their 50s and older. Everybody seems to be getting along well and every time we call a break in the orchestra rehearsal, some group of them – sometimes not even traditional sections – stays afterwards to rehearse the delicate and difficult ensemble work required to really OWN a piece of music. It’s really inspiring and refreshing, also because when I made a big dill on it and a big fuss on them, they were like, um, doesn’t everybody do this?

Wow, so, big gestures, big motions. We’ve done the thing where we made a big mess and are now cleaning it up. It’s like that moment when you pack for a trip when the house looks like a tornado hit it and then suddenly pants are rolled, smocks folded, socks packed inside shoes and suddenly things have a shape, an organizational itinerary, and a purpose. That’s where we’ve just gotten this afternoon — things that yesterday I thought to myself, “oh my god I am the worst composer in the world I cannot believe I did that” are now seeming okay and, dare I say without jinxing it, pretty good? Such is the strange ballet, I’m learning, of this genre. The music requires all these other elements to sing along in order for the whole thing to work. If the music’s good but the staging is weird, it doesn’t work; if the video is genius but the music is wrong, it doesn’t work. The whole thing is a giant series of trust-falls. We had some clean pairs of ears in last night, which is really useful. I was thinking the other day about how many composers conduct their own operas — Tan Dun and John Adams come to mind immediately. I don’t know how they do it. I would go completely and absolutely insane. Rumon Gamba, Jamie Burton, and the music staff here are outrageously patient and collaborative in a way that I think I’d stop being after about ten minutes of the stop-and-start it requires to technically work through a show this complicated. Anyway, that is my quick update for the day. Everybody go buy the Bon Iver record, and also Seeing Is Believing, which are both out today in the US.

So, we are five days out until the premiere of Two Boys; it’s reached a real feverish moment. There are what I would call physical-technical people working overnight to reset our show from either Midsummer Night’s Dream or Simon Boccanegra, and then there are virtual-technical people performing overnight charettes in grim suburbs, rendering video. Here’s something cool: I walked past the stage door the other night, and they were loading in from the street the large pieces of steel that compose our set:

I love seeing the seats through the back! We’ve been in the theater for a week now, and the basic structure is that we have four 3-hour rehearsals with a piano, and then four 3-hour rehearsals with the orchestra. After that, a dress-rehearsal with the piano, and then a dress-rehearsal with the orchestra, and then a day off and then it just happens. It is absolutely terrifying. The way it stands now, we won’t be seeing many of the video elements until the fourth orchestra and stage rehearsal; some bungled schedule mishegas meant that a very important, albeit minor, role wasn’t at his first stage and orchestra — it’s a role that I was always nervous about actually hearing on the stage and in context, because it’s a young singer with a huge orchestration — and meanwhile, because it’s big and there are flashing lights, people from the opera company are tempted to poke their heads in and see how we’re doing, and the answer is usually some version of that moment when you’re cooking dinner when the sauce is overflowing from the pan, the cat has gotten involved with the flour, some mysterious crust of roasts past has offended the smoke alarm, and the Bengali woman you said could have your house keys is knocking at the door. It’s been basically that for the last few days. Which is why it’s great that I have today off! Even though the mess isn’t my fault or problem, it’s still my responsibility both artistically and morally to be some sort of guiding spirit existing in collaborative motion with the director. All of this is to say: making an opera is really hard and I’m really happy to be here and I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck:

You can see our amazingly awesome set in the background. The set is by Michael Yeargen, but essentially what it is is a form of stylized stationery for Don Holder (who very graciously (?) skipped his own opening night at Espider Man to come and be with us at the first stage rehearsal) and the clever creatures at Fifty-Nine Productions. It’s the same lighting and projection team, incidentally, who are making Dark Sisters, the chamber opera, happen in a few months!

One of the things that is extra nervous-making about this endeavor is the orchestral balance. I’m a pretty facile orchestrator for the stage: I know how to make things blend the way I want them, I know what will pop out and what will fold in, etc. In a pit, I’m flying blind, a little bit. Orchestrating for a solo instrumentalist is one thing, but for a solo singer is another thing entirely, and when you add the idea of an orchestra pit into it, it’s a whole other set of issues. I’ve been, I think, 88% correct, but there are, of course, little things that come up, and then it gets into issues of expediency and efficiency: any change has to be transmitted first to Murray and Caroline on team piano, then Jamie, the wonderful assistant conductor, then of course to Rumon the conductor, and then from him on to the orchestra. It sounds small, but all these people are physically far from one another and it involves a small act of synchronized swimming to cut the horns from bar 617. I did, cheekily, manage to pencil in six more thai gong moments at the very end, which is, I am happy to report, very much saving the ending; what was once a sort of dirge has become a Balinese cortege; cut the violas, add the gongs, smooth out the tremolos!

Music talk: I think we need to have a big international conference on what a tenuto line means. I’ve always thought about it this way. For singers, they interpret it almost universally as “Stressed,” so you use it in that way to indicate a stress — but not an accent. For instrumental musicians, at least in my experience, it means to hold the note for precisely the full value. Then it gets hairy when you start adding dots on it or lines above it. In general, what I do is write what I think it means the first time in a score, and hope for the best, but some orchestras are really chatty and do the kind of Midwestern thing of Constant Commentary. Those of you who have vacationed with your entire families will know what I mean. “Oh, they have curtains just like at home!” “What did she say?” “She said they had curtains!” “What?!” “Curtains!” “Who’s Curtis!?” — transpose this to the orchestral context and you get, “Tenuto for the strings in 43 just means a full value, not an accent.” “So he wants it accented?” “No, full value.” “Not full value.” “Valkyrie?” “No, Val Kilmer. Bar 34.” It goes on and on down the stands; I want to start a variety hour called Who’s On First Position.

I want to talk about something insane for a little bit. I think a good indication of how stressed out I am is How Bugged I Am By Other People’s Small Mistakes & Technology. In general, I’m pretty zen. But when technology shit doesn’t work – like, the phone says you have 4 phonebars and you take a call from your mom and then it cuts out? – it can, in certain stressful situations, drive me completely crazy. This week was all about this image:

iPhone users, isn’t that the worst? You get an email you’ve been waiting for, and it’s like, nope! Nope, you can know that it’s there, but you can’t have it. It’s like christmas presents, but relevant! The biggest vexation last week, though, was about Dark Sisters, this chamber opera I wrote with Stephen Karam. The plot of the opera deals with a fundamentalist polygamist sect living on the Utah/Arizona border; so, loosely based on the FLDS, a sect that has been very much in the news in the last decade. The FLDS, like many similar groups, splintered off from the mainstream LDS church, the Mormons, around the turn of the last century. The opera treats this scenario not as a novelty, but as a reality for the six women and one man who occupy the stage. The opera, also, is about as un-judgmental as it can be; I always think that an oratorio is the time to be judgey, and an opera is for the audience to navigate for themselves. One of the biggest and most important things about this, for me, is to be very clear that we are dealing with one specific sect of polygamists, and not in any way with the mainstream LDS church. Anyway, I lost my mind when I opened up the internet one morning to behold this:

Stephen Karam-Nico Muhly Mormon Opera Dark Sisters Sets New York …

So I lost my mind. I opened up twitter and facebook, and all the opera companies who commissioned the piece (!) had re-tweeted merrily. I was in the middle of insane Two Boys stuff, and of course the phone wasn’t working and I had one fucked up bar of internet, but I managed to send out an SOS. Child. The next time I checked, look at the correction:

Stephen Karam-Nico Muhly Opera About Fundamental Latter Day Saints …

Well, fuck me. Who wrote that? That’s the thing that I’m really interested in. The headline has been finally corrected, but it’s that second stage that I’m interested in. It reminds me of when you ask a dog to lie down, and they do that weird half-thing, and you’re like, no, all the way down. Some human being in one of these opera companies or in the PR companies that they employ, typed the word “Fundamental Latter Day Saints.” Now, if I wanted to be a real crazy harpy faggot of grammatical abuse, I would demand that they put a hyphen in between Latter-day, but I think these people have had enough torture for this week. But I am curious to know the identity of the person who typed Fundamental. Is it an example of having been told to do something and mis-hearing it in a game of telephone? Is it an example of a last-minute rush out of the door at 4:45 PM on Friday, the last few keystrokes before whatever it is that arts PR people do on the weekend? Amanda? Anyway, the forensics of mistakes are really interesting to me, especially as they relate to nomenclature and grammar. I 4 C an ORATORIO coming up!!!

One more kind of cute Dickensian thing. The ENO is housed in an amazing building in London, the Coliseum. There is, predictably, a Roman Theme (right down to it saying SPQR all over every object), and there are Carved Lions every goddamn where and the whole thing is gorgeous. Apparently it boasts the widest proscenium arch in London? It’s pretty great. It’s also one of those palimpsestic structures that hasn’t quite figured out its vertical identity. Check out the way these elevator buttons work:

Like, it BASICALLY makes sense. Basically. But when I get into an elevator, like most neurotic people, I want to know how the hell do I get out of this building when the revolution comes? There was a building like that at Columbia University, where I went at, where basically the floor numbers corresponded to the distance from the actual street, which was, in some cases, four, five, or six floors below the main entrance. So you’d end up with adjacent buildings connecting in such a way that one would start out on the sixth floor and end up on the fourth, without actually mounting or descending stairs. I was so late to my very first big-girl seminar class on the West-African Novel it was mortifying. Speaking of which:

Anyway. At least there is this video, which I watch approximately 200 times a week.

What I like about this video — aside from the nineteen obvious things — is the site-specificness of it. It is a video that requires an understanding of Atlanta. A lot of viral videos — Leave Britney Alone, Friday, etc., are so popular because they apply to all of us, everywhere. This video, on the other hand, has to do with Atlanta, and with Language, and as such, is So Fucking Great. A few points to remember. The entire thing is an epistolary moment, from Funky Dineva to his friend Vanessa. This is important in the framing of the narrative; it’s like Conrad. The second is check out the voice change at 3:30 and how it transitions elegantly into the change, and then slams out of it at 3:49. Another thing: the feminizing and subsequent attack of sites of power and retail. This is something that comes up in anticolonial narratives during the Raj — attacks on post offices etc. In this video, we see it with Miss Concentra (the health-care provider) and Miss Lenox Mall, a shopping center. Get into it. Also I need a serious linguistics IPA rendering of what’s going on with the word “right there” at 3:15; it’s not the ATL-erhua thing of “thurr,” at all, in fact, it seems to have an additional flip at the end plus a stop.

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