Here’s a picture of me and Benjamin at a rehearsal:

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

The world of ballet is kind of unknowable for me; even though I’ve written four or five of the things, I still never quite know how to navigate the intense etiquette in that community. For instance, on first night, everybody’s meant to take a bow — lighting designers, costumers, composers, everybody. So you end up with all these gorgeous bodies onstage and then a bunch of us lumps, trying to figure out how not to fall into the orchestra pit. Meanwhile all the dancers are wearing Kabuki/Tammy Faye makeup and we’re sitting there with puff pastry on our lapel. It’s odd.

The City Ballet orchestra is funny to me: they’re kind of the Most Entrenched orchestra in terms of unionization in New York, I’d say. They are also a sort of national treasure: New York is, and always should be, I think, a place that does dance with live orchestral music because it is fabulous. There is not a thing better, in fact, than going to see that Nutcracker. I remember a few years ago I supported, as a member of the musicians’ union, their contract renegotiation, which argued, I had thought, that they should be allowed to miss a rehearsal for something like Nutcracker, which they’ve played ninety million times before, as long as they hired a substitute for themselves, and came back and played the show. This is, fundamentally fair; while the dancers need to relearn the piece afresh each year on their bodies, the music for that piece hasn’t changed around in a century or two. I’m not sure if this approach is quite right for a new piece, though; the practical reality of the situation is that every time I looked into the pit it was Totally Different Human Beings playing major roles. The concertmaster and many of the strings remained the same, and we sort of built up a rapport, and those who stayed around got really comfortable with the piece, which is the fun (and perhaps the point?) of rehearsal. Between the the first rehearsal and the first show, we had like three different English horn players? The principal second violin — a big part in this piece! – shuffled around, the harpist (also important) was different. It’s a strange universe, orchestral musicians; I’m not sure I’d like to play a show for which I hadn’t been at a rehearsal. I do like the idea, in a weird, abstract sense, of writing music in which any one participant can hand over her part to another person, like a relay race…although that isn’t quite what I had intended in this piece! City Ballet employed a very good trick which is that they have one arts administrator who is so lovely and friendly one feels terrible cussing him out about Nancy Drew and the Case of That’s Totally Not The Same English Horn, and then somebody else who’s actually more in charge who is a Person Invisible, as in, secret doorways and smoke, and hallways of mirrors, with whom one never quite gets a proper audience. If I write another ballet for them, which I really hope I will, I’ll make the orchestral parts deliberately modular, or maybe even change them each day, so there’s a sense of always being somebody else’s substitute. It’s like that dream where you turn up expected to give a talk about something you don’t fully grasp; sometime there arises a gorgeous spontaneity, perhaps even more gorgeous than what would have resulted through months of preparation. All of this having been said, the orchestra sounded great on opening night and I am excited to see how things develop over the run. I suppose the reason I bring it up at all is just because it’s so foreign to how I normally make music, which is by making things for specific people rather more like a choreographer would.

By the way, google this stuff about the strike in 1999; it’s really really interesting and complicated.

All of this has gotten me thinking about these giant systems that run large arts organizations, and, in turn, about the people who steer those giant ships. I’ve had, in the last few weeks, a real frustration with Out-Of-Office messages. I feel like it’s a form of modern rudeness and laziness combined and, actually, lying that messes with the arts. In my experience, a lot of thought, work, and important corrections happen in the arts between, let’s say, noon on Friday and 11:30 AM on Monday. In a lot of places (*cough* London), those are Drinkin’ Hours, and it is Simply Not Possible to get anybody in a large arts organization on the horn between those times. Maybe you can reach somebody’s very private cellphone, whose number you took down in a fit of drunken gregariousness, but nothing else. The thing that kills me, though, and the thing that happened last week (but also a bunch over the last few years) that drove me basically to the point of feces-smearing insanity was this:

Monday’s a holiday.
Friday’s therefore, an “unofficial half day”
People finish their work twelve seconds before leaving, rushing and misspelling everything.
People post the work on their way out of the door with they coat on.
People turn on an autoresponder being like “call me Tuesday, I’ll be checking email sporadically.”
Their work is nine kinds of fucked up with typos from here to there.

Right? Do you all know this trick? And then you’re like okay. It’s a couple of problems, incompetence in spelling being only one of them. What is “sporadic email checking?” There are very few places in the world where you can’t be actually checking your email. And none of them is a weekend trip from London away. (Actually, there are strangely some corners of London and New York where my internet on my phone doesn’t go, for instance, 110th and Broadway, a block in Dumbo…) Plus, you have like four blackberries; I’ve seen you rudely checking them at inappropriate times. I had a sick mother incident involving hospitals and such a year ago, and believe me when I say that after a few hours of that, the way I can reconnect with the world of the living is to check the shit out of my emails on my iPhone in the waiting room! Yes god. Those were some GOOD emails, if I recall correctly. Also the argument, “What, people don’t get to relax?” My argument: “Not if they’ve misspelled something.” I’ve taken, like, two vacations ever in my life where I didn’t bring work, and even then, somebody sends a Facebook message talmbout “why is there a staccato note tied to another staccato note” and I, at that time, found the internet in Cambodia and logged up onto the server and find the file and answered the question.

The other thing is that it’s not Vacation we’re talking about here. I understand Vacation. I’d prefer an out-of-office thing to say, “My ass? Is going to Phuket surfing for ten days, and I won’t be checking my email. I will contact you upon return.” And do you know what? Truth-telling people who send those kind of auto-responders tend to be so awesome at their job that if something is relevant, they will fix it from Thailand anyway. It goes without saying that those truth-tellers have seriously advanced in the backstages and upstairses of the world’s great concert halls and opera houses, and are going to be running the things by the time we’re all middle-aged. I like feeling that people who run the arts are colleagues — and I mean that from stage managers to set-builders to administrative assistants to box office all the way down and around. (Making operas has really brought this together for me). If we’re all colleagues, we all have to be as committed as possible to getting the best work on that stage, and for me, that involves a little bit of artistic fugueing of the obligations of a 9-5, what a way to make a living, etc. Plus also people who put out these autoresponders are never the speediest emailers anyway; it’s not like one expects them to be instant messaging one all day. Guh. Don’t be those people! Let’s all own this thing together and put in as many extra hours as we can!

Okay /rant.

Gait, this piece I’m writing for the National Youth Orchestra is slowly taking shape. As I’ve written about before, it’s a piece that deals with the way animals move. I started thinking about horses, and have moved on now to insects and humans. Do you know that there are scientists who study the way spiders run? It sounds like a bunch of harps in my universe, by the way, which seems just about right. We’ve entered now the slithering undulating gaits of millipedes (clarinets) and stick insects (bassoons, I think?). I’m going to write out some kind of embarrassing Peter and the Wolf style material and then highly stylize it so it doesn’t end up sounding like a bestiary audio-tour; this stuff is pre-compositional, not compositional, if that makes sense. It means that you invent music that gets thrown out later, as an exercise, in order to teach it to yourself, and then you really compose with it.

I’ve gone down an internet wormhole about human gaits: autistic gaits, Parkinsonian gaits. The son of a friend of mine took his first baby steps the other day, my block was renamed after a friend of a friend who walked with two canes. All of these gaits are going to find their way into the piece in hidden, subtle ways.

As luck has it, I will be writing much of this piece in Australia, where I’m told that every insect and creature that walks is going to attempt to kill me. Wombat gait:

And! Bedroom Community have released a new album of mine: Drones & Piano. It features the wonderful pianist Bruce Brubaker and my constant collaborator Nadia Sirota making the drones. This is one in a series of drone-based pieces I’ve been writing for the last few years. There exists a drone piece, now, for violin, viola, piano, soon one with cello, soon one with marimba. They’re exciting for me, because as a kid I used to sort of obsessively hum over a vacuum cleaner, or industrial noise (fluorescent lights), ambient noise (the throb of a subway station or elevator) and these are stylized, emotional versions of the same. We’ll be releasing them over the course of the next year or so, so keep watching Bedroom Community and this space for more!

Then, off to Eindhoven to put together the proper premiere of Planetarium. The physical structure of the piece is this. At the front of the stage is Sufjan, center, with two keyboards, a drum machine, four thousand pedals, and some vocal microphones. To his left is Bryce, with some guitars, five thousand pedals. Then I’m on the other side with a piano, a celeste, two keyboards, and no pedals aside from those attached to the instruments. Then, behind Sufjan, a drummer, James (whom everybody told me was raw vegan just to mess with my head) playing a standard kit augmented with MIDI-controlled pads. To his right, a string quartet, and on the other side, seven trombones. Hovering over the drums is a sixteen-foot inflatable orb covered in a sort of skin onto which various images are projected. There are also what look like prison lights surrounding the musicians. If you want to see videos of this, they’re all over YouTube; the ones I’ve seen are, I think, the handiwork of Sufjan Superfjans and therefore tend to be very close-up footage of his eyeball but you can hear relatively well.

One of the challenges we faced putting this together was imposing the “vision” for the piece onto pre-existing ensembles. Ensembles who are used to playing with one another are their own ecosystems: delicate, specific, and temperamental. To have three strangers, essentially, come in with a giant puzzle always feels, at first, abstract, and the whole piece doesn’t really ever gel until the adrenaline of performance emulsifies all the issues into submission. In that regard, we almost had too much rehearsal time! The Navarra String Quartet & the New Trombone Collective were great. One wonders what happened to the Old Trombone Collective; I had a mystic vision on stage of the Old Collective dragging their natural horns and shawms and sackbutts, serpents and bombards through a rainy Dutch town, on their way to terrify some children as part of a Flemish Mystery Play while these seven young handsome men adjusted the levels of the drum machine in their ears onstage at the Barbican.

I don’t know if anybody else has had this experience with musicians. Do any string quartets play from memory? I have this weird sense that music — especially standard rep — should be either sight-read or memorized. Like, if I were to play Bach in public I feel like I should either have it so internalized and have the interpretation be sort of the performance, or, I’d rather practice just some technical things and then have the performance be a public reading, in a sense, to see how quickly the brain reacts under pressure. Sometimes those decisions are the best ones. There is some music that I only want to hear memorized — a Beethoven piano sonata, for instance — but then other music where I feel the real thrill is hearing it navigated. Much choral music is this way, especially when done in its proper liturgical context. You have a few short hours to rehearse the week’s music, and during festive or solemn seasons, this can be a lot of music. I don’t think one ever hears, for instance, over-rehearsed music in Holy Week; on the contrary, the thrill of passiontide is heightened by a vertiginous Allegri, to say nothing of a Crux Fidelis that could fall apart at any second. In that kind of music making, one combines the skills of “knowing” a piece through what essentially is cultural context and sight-reading, bringing to bear all of one’s experience and education in a very quick, almost athletic event. It’s a quick run over sharp stones, and it’s heaven to watch.

I was chatting with a dancer friend (Australian, but living in the Netherlands) about what he thinks is a specifically Dutch rehearsal technique in which there is a lot of discussion about what everybody is doing. The gestures are planned in advance and there is the luxury, I think, of the time for everybody to chime in and have some subtle variation on the plan. I’ve found this to be very true; I put together a project with Teitur and the Holland Baroque Society a few years ago, and I sat in on them rehearsing a piece of renaissance music and it was maybe 50/50 talking/playing. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if they had to just go right out on stage and play immediately after maybe twenty minutes’ rehearsal; with musicians as good as they are, it would probably be really fun and interesting! ?

Anyway, that’s just a strange musicianship aside. I have the pleasure of having as much time — within reason — as I want to have an internal dialogue (or a collaborative one) about how a piece is going to go, but then when it comes time to write it, the writing itself is very fast. Then the editing takes forever. So I don’t know what I’m talking about, really.

On travel. One of the great pleasures about traveling with Bryce — who tours and flies about maybe twelve times as much as I do — is seeing him navigate the sometimes-at-cross-purposes itineraries of group travel and personal soothing. It’s a trick involving immediate location of the gym/sauna, and barring that, taking a wholesome trot around the town no matter how doomed. For instance, it never occurred to me that taking a run in Eindhoven in the rain would be a good call, but it was, indeed, the best call. I love watching expert travelers. Airports are, for me, still charged with a romance and melancholy that is hard to pinpoint. I love the fact that some people are there as business commuters and other people are in the middle of long, life-changing decisions. I love looking at all the places you can fly nearly simultaneously: Agadir, Taipei, Durham, Ashgabat. For some people, the airport is an extension of the office and for other people, it’s the gateway to an entirely new chapter in their lives; transferring planes in Minneapolis last month, I saw a group of four bubbling, excited girls who were about to go do missionary work in West Africa for three years, and there I was, popping back from a quick trip to Winnipeg.

B & S and I were totally those people in the airport with nine extra bags, all of which weighed as much as bodies, too many carry-ons, instruments, etc. I’ve been saying this for years, but the airport (and really most nodes of transit) need to have a “bullshit” line and a “not bullshit” line. We have all been in both situations. Sometimes when I fly to London I’m flying to London for five days and I have printed my ticket out and I did everything right and I have no bags to check and I just wanna go. Other times? I’m going there for four months, I have essentially a steamer trunk filled with suspicious-on-xray electronics, two computers, a one-way business class ticket requiring miles to upgrade, a boston terrier, a box of 150 cd’s, a series of medicines suspended in liquid, and an arabic dictionary. That’s the definition of a bullshit line. And when I’m that lady, nothing makes me more anxious than the hateful glares of the people behind me in line as they check their watches and sigh exasperatedly and mutter about my clothing in German. To maintain the dignity of everybody involved, it would be nice to have a somewhat private place in which to be a mess.

This morning I saw something extraordinary in the train station. It’s three little mini supermarkets in the Amsterdam Centraal station. The entire structure of the thing is basically grab-and-go: a sandwich, a little dish of hummus, sparkling water, coffee, the newspaper. This woman, this morning? I think decided that she was going to take this opportunity to do her grocery shopping for the week, the opportunity being morning rush hour in the busiest railway station in the Netherlands. When I say that she bought ten cucumbers, I am not exaggerating. She bought what must have been the equivalent of a half-kilo of gouda, but she attained this amount by buying twenty-five small plastic-wrapped packages of pre-sliced cheese. Numerous large-format sparkling waters, several loaves of bread. I was actually so transfixed by her decision that I stuck around and drank my coffee and watched how she was going to make this happen. Obviously, she wanted to pay in coins, and obviously, she didn’t have quite enough (and were those Swiss francs I saw in there?), and naturally, her debit card magnetic stripe wasn’t quite happening — she made a strange gesture indicating that perhaps the checkout woman should wipe the stripe with the bottom of her hijab! — and the whole procedure was the sort of epitome of ordering against the menu of a specific place and situation. Did I mention that she then tried to pack all of these things right there on the floor into her rolling luggage which required the displacement of some of her ointments and shampoos onto the floor? And that she was on the phone during this entire transaction, which, in total, took the better part of a quarter of an hour?

[An aside: in a silent train car, what must one's psychological makeup be to think that it would be totally fine to noisily eat two entire apples? I mean I suppose it is fine; the train is still going to get there, but like...?]

This year, I’ve been amping up, as sort of an experiment, my media intake and restrictions simultaneously. I’m reading a lot more newspapers, but I’m reading less and less about the arts. A few years ago, after a particularly nasty round of press in the UK, I decided that I would be a happier person if I didn’t ever read reviews or, for that matter, previews, of my own work. And believe it or not, I’ve stuck to it. I insist on having all press archived on this site — especially the bad press! — so that in, like, 10 years, I can print it out and Jamie and I can sit around the table at the St John and laugh about everything. The thing is that if you get a great preview, the review ends up being a review of the preview, do you see what I mean? (I imagine that the other side of things is that if you get no preview, then they call you underrated and under-the-radar until you become so on the radar that the first cycle can work; being nice is really just a pre-rinse cycle). So if you roll up into London and they’re like “oh yay, Nico, he’s great!” then the review would be like, “This fat faggot from America think he allllll that and we are going to show him what time it is right here in ink!” And this can happen in the pages of the same newspaper, and will very rarely have anything to do with “were the notes and rhythms good” and will instead be like “we don’t like being told what to like.” Which is understandable. So, if we can all acknowledge that the entire arts section is essentially a review of its own self, and, to a certain extent, of the PR people/strategies at various arts organizations, why do any of us read it? How much time do we spend agonizing over (or railing against) this perpetual motion machine? This year, I made a little experiment to just not even read it at all, about art, music, dance, or really anything I care about. I haven’t given up restaurant reviews but I did try, along with various other solemnities, for Lent. And I have found that I am happier, healthier, and much more eager to be writing music and listening to music by others. I highly recommend this trick. Don’t read the good ones because they become fuel for the bad ones which you shouldn’t read either. Not reading your friends’ reviews will save you the chore of feeling like you have to write a letter to the editor, or…that tiny, tiny feeling of relief that it is not towards your own ass that such ill-will is being printed.

That having been said, I am having a harder time weaning myself off of music blogging. I am weirdly, actually, judging a music blogging contest right now!? But Lord, have mercy. I always forget about how crazy everybody is. We should all be ashamed of ourselves for participating in any of these online comments threads. I’m ashamed of myself for reading them and even more ashamed that I’m blogging about it. I remember I lost my mind a few years ago when Sequenza21 had an entire Uptown-Downtown argument in the comments thread (if you don’t know what that is, count your blessings; it’s essentially #shitoldpeoplesay). I lost my mind a few months ago when that Justin Davidsdóttir wrote some dumb thing about Philip Glass and then all of a sudden everybody and their mom (in one case, literally) got on Facebook and mouthed off, circularly and ad infinitum. Why did I read that!? I may never know, but it’s hours of my life I will never get back. I want to invoice somebody. I could have written several bagatelles in that time! And now there is this new hellery, and its attendant comments insanity. Who wins in a situation like this? Nobody. Even people who are not involved end up implicated in battles they never wanted to fight. Then you get the comments akin to those left on Toni Tony Toné Tomassini’s like, desert-island hit-generating non-contest: “Astonishing in their absence from this discussion– and evidently banished from any reckoned aesthetic importance in so-called 21st century music” — see! It’s astonishing! Banishment! Astonishment! Importance! Banishment! Astonishing! Je sues é, tone, NAY, girl. I can’t even. We all need to humble ourselves before each other and listen to the Tallis Scholars and prepare for Whitsuntide and read more about North Korea and the Navajo Nation and the history of Singapore and Saint Ambrose and pickling techniques and call our grandfathers and write thank-you notes and buy stamps for the same notes and compliment our friends’ babies and go to Evensong. Composers! Next time you find yourself tempted to get involved in some online tautological wormhole, grab some manuscript paper, and quickly set the following text for SATB voices, and send it to me. Let’s release a disc.

Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place?
He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.
He shall receive the blessing from the LORD, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. -Psalm 24, 3-5, KJV version, obvz

It’ll be the Back 2 Tha Tabernacle: Online Displacement Psalm Setting Double CD Set. And we’ll donate all the money to something awesome and have a campari about it.

[One final thing, though, and I hope that some people will join me in this; can we stop saying Indie-Classical? At least about me, for starters? The next person who says that has to come over and sight-sing through my complete unrecorded liturgical music from high school which consists of multiple Te Deums and Jubies-late, sets of responses, to say nothing of a fifty minute long Reproaches and then we're going to solfège Ockeghem together, transposed with clefs, followed by luncheon, and then at the end of all that we can talk about "Indie."]

Getting real during the workshop:

Is this ur photo? If if is, email me and I’ll credit you!

I went to London for the premiere of my cello concerto, alongside Owen Pallett’s wonderfully detuned violin concerto, with Olly Coates, Pekka Kuusisto, and the Britten Sinfonia. Nadia and Sam and Thomas came along and we did a kind of abridged version of an 802 Tour set, which concluded with Owen, Pekka, Tom Gould (for whom I wrote Seeing is Believing), and Olly joining us for a few songs, which is a sort of string playing dream team.

Owen’s piece is one of these things wherein a third or so of each section of the strings is detuned a bit, so it has the effect of creating a blurred, melting sonority. The trick is to deal in the sorts of harmonies that melt slightly into one another; I imagined, while listening to it at its first rehearsal, the kind of first steps of defrosting something in a microwave, where the edges begin to assume a different color. It’s always weird to hear Owen’s violin writing played by other people, but Pekka is so batshit genius insane that it completely worked.

We had an extraordinary series of meals in preparation for the london concerts at St John Bread & Wine:

That is the divine conductor André De Ridder in front of a huge pie. It’s got pheasant and pigs’ trotter up in. I love the feeling of bringing a million people together to share large dishes; it’s a hugely satisfying social moment. This particular moment was, perhaps, slightly blurred by the presence of somebody’s random parsimonious vegetarian colleague; I myself try to know only the most opulent vegetarians and the most omnivorous thrifty folk — the other combination is socially untenable. However! The St John is so divine that we all, loosely, made it out alive, Parsimonious V included. Surely the definition of thrift is respecting the animal enough to eat its feet!

Nadia, Thomas, Sam and I went to Minnesota where we played at the Walker, crowd-sourced good eats on Twitter, and made friends with the mayor & his wife, who are divine. Is one called the First Lady of a city, or is there another, more obscure, term?

Today, in Eindhoven, I had the pleasure of reacquainting myself with this restaurant Usine, which is in the ground floor of what I think used to be the Philips lightbulb zone. We took our pre-production meeting there, and here is Sufjan and James, our drummer, with some snails and a specialty tong:

I love a specialty tong or forcep. When my grandmother died a few years ago, it was revealed that she had a sort of obscene collection of specialized kitchen things, tart pans of every imaginable circumference, copper faits-tout meant for what one can only imagine to be extinct fish, and innumerable salt cellars and mini pepper grinders. I have inherited a set of six mint julep cups with straws featuring built-in roughage strainers; I 4c a Moment in the summer on the roof in Chinatown! Everybody come over.

Normally, I start with a structure and then figure out the notes and the rhythms and all that stuff later. But for right now, I’m kind of stuck with this technical concern about how to make sure I’m using all the players responsibly. The other day, I rang up Philip Glass’s house and described to him this problem, and I mentioned that there were seven flutes, and he conspiratorially whispered to me that he himself played seventh flute in his youth orchestra in Baltimore! So, seventh flute, seventh oboe, seventh clarinet, seventh bassoon: I will be hollering at you.

So here’s what I thought of. Horses! People! Walking! Running! The great thing about horses is that they have four (arguably five, or three, whatever) speeds or gaits. The wonderful photographer Eadweard Muybridge (who died in 1904) photographed, famously, a sort of stop-motion version of the horse in motion:

…and then people have made other, slightly more rhythmic studies:

…and it gets better and better:

So, just as a kind of technical way to start generating material, these gait rhythms are fascinating. If you look at the running trot, that’s a pretty obvious rhythm, right?

But then things can get sexier and more complicated with a “lateral sequence walk:”

(I know flute 7 is missing some dynamics but I don’t want to give away the surprise. Hint: it’s sfp with a crescendo)

The point is, figuring out how to use each family of winds as a kind of creature with a specific range of locomotive patterns is enormously liberating just in terms of being able to construct a bigger narrative. What kind of monster hath eight legs, or twelve, or ten? The initial procedure, here, is to construct a sort of bestiary of the orchestra, and then we’re gonna figure out how to deploy it. There’s something circus-like about the Royal Albert Hall anyway, so this feels, at least for now, totally appropriate.

The other thing I wanted to talk about in terms of structure was having a dream-sequence in the middle of of the piece, sort of right at the heart. A few years ago, I had flown from New York to London to work on an electric violin concerto with Tom Gould (he was, I’m sure, in the NYO at some point), with whom I was staying in St John’s Wood. I’m pretty sure I took one of those disastrous overnight flights that deposits one at Heathrow at sparrow’s fart, and by the time one has navigated the Heathrow Express and the station and the other station and the rolling luggage on the street and the stares of the neighbors and turned up at the house… you can imagine. So, that night, after a rather committed moment at the pub, I fell asleep hard. Then, at what must have been 5 in the morning, I had a sort of feverish and confused dream about horses, and then I realized that no, it was actually horses somewhere near me. So I kind of shuffled to the window and saw something so surreal: a mounted army unit! In full regalia clip-clopping up Avenue Road! In the mist! It was completely bizarre and I thought that either it was the end of the world or I was asleep or something to do with the sleeping pill or who knows, but I went back to bed. Turns out, this is a regular occurrence, as the King’s Troop does a little drill up there all the time — or they used to until they moved in 2012. So, I think a sort of jet-lag fever-dream equestrian moment is going to figure into this piece somehow. The structure is still Shrouded in Mysterie but I will sort it very soon. Also the piece is called Gait, obvs, and I’m going to be sort of blogging its progress as I go along.

Last night I went up into Björk’s show at the Roseland. Everybody? You all need to get over there and bow b4 the queen. This show was Genius. It’s kind of a wacky concept: nature & art & music & technology all in this dance together, and it sounds like something loosely educational in the sense that your pipe-smoke-smelling sciencey uncle would take you to, which it kind of is? She’s using all these screens to illustrate the music, not just to decorate it, which is rare — unique? One of the songs has essentially a primitive midi data but highly stylized, scrolling in real time, so you can follow along and see technically how she’s amassing sound in the arrangements: a huge cluster of sounds announces itself and you see it, hear it, and feel it. It’s very smart, and should be mandatory listening for anybody who’s taken longer than four seconds to write/think/blog about that dumb article about why appoggiatura something something Adele something something else. So over that whole conversation before it even started. Unsubscribe. Find out when the Björk show is coming to your town, and buy tickets for yourself and everybody you know.

I swear to god if one more person emails me this idiotic Justin Davidsdóttir non-contest thing I am gonna fly to wherever it is that you are at and eat your liver with capers and gherkins and shit. Can we be real for a minute? The entire premise of this operation — and, I would add, much of what Snuggles has been up to in the past few years — is reductionist & dangerous. Check it out: emphasis mine.

Getting a handle on what’s happening in contemporary classical music is harder than it seems. Composers inhabit an artistic habitat that’s both globalized and fragmented. Some become known only in tiny enclaves scattered all over the world; others have sizzling reputations that stop at the Gowanus Canal. New York has a vigorous new music concert scene — the Ecstatic Music Festival has just gotten under way at the Kaufman Center, and it runs until March 24 — but its events are often too sprawling and uneven, or else too tiny and uneven, for a clear picture to form. Small-label recordings have proliferated, but it can be easy to miss the lone six-minute gem tucked in among an hour of middling harp music.

Now, I’m not even going to link to it because I’m so mad, but essentially, it’s two problems here. The first is: what clear picture were you hoping for, honey? We’re still alive, us composers, and are working and living and breathing, and making a taxonomic “picture” is not our responsibility or goal. It’s not even technically yours, but that’s the second point — all of this is just JD’s socially awkward penance for having written a bunch of reductive things (to which I’m not linking) about young composers a few years ago not having enough to rebel against (?) and now he doesn’t know what’s “going on,” surprise surprise. All that ish popped up again last week when he wrote a snotbags thing about Philip and got all the new music trolls out of the woodwork on somebody else’s Facebook feed. So while the intentions might not be evil per se, he’s trying to do that thing where you pump cement into an anthill: yes, you see the complicated architecture of what’s going on, but you kill the ants. I’m totally over it and I beg all of you to please not participate. Nothing good will come of it. In fact, I’m already partially regretting blogging about it but I got One More Email about it and thought I would explode right here, in the Land of Enchantment. To make up for letting anger get the best of me, I am going to read more about domestic desert fathers and I urge you all to do the same. I like the Cellarer’s pages with scriptural analysis. Also their picassa page is intense.

ALSO what harp music is he talking about that sounds awesome. An hour of middling harp music sounds precisely like what I need at this time. I’ve been listening to that Adès violin concerto Concentric Paths and am freaking out with how beautiful and great and smart and twisted and wonderful it is. I have to go to the airport, and I took a bath before bed while listening to that Adès, and something weird happened and now my hair is laid like that amazing picture they took of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed right after his capture?

I had dinner last night with a friend from high school whom I haven’t seen in about thirteen years. There is a very specific emotion attendant to such a reunion and I’m not sure what it is. There’s the obvious melancholy of one having once been much younger and looking slightly less like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and all the shaded, now-dulled distant romance of high school plus the idea that adults are somehow more connected by shared experiences than would otherwise be expected? His life after college was incredibly scattered — making my own life seem linear and prescribed (in an almost Davidsonian way!) in comparison. We’re talking studying economics but working in emergency rescue management, rock-climbing and Native American health data? Talk about non-concentric paths.

(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.

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!

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!

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

…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:

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.

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 (!).

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.

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….