Nico
Muhly,

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.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Happy Pentecost, everybody. I love Pentecost. Four years ago, I wrote the following on this space, which I think sums up my whole feelings about the holiday:

Happy Pentecost, everybody. Pentecost is a really exciting moment in the year because it is all about language. Liturgically, what’s going on is a mirror to the Tower of Babel: a moment of linguistic comprehension through confusion, a bright flash. In the Hebrew Bible, all of the people on earth speaking the same language is an affront to God; in the New Testament, foreign (in the corporeal sense) languages become a temporary point of connection between strangers.

One of my all-time favorite Pentecost motets is Thomas Tallis’s Loquebantur Variis Linguis. I’m including a recording here, as well as a link to a piece I wrote (called So to Speak ) that uses the same theme.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Thomas Tallis’s Loquebantur Variis Linguis
The Cambridge Singers / Rutter
Buy the whole album here

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Nico Muhly So to Speak
The Juilliard Orchestra / Milarsky

The thing that excites me so much about this Tallis are these little licks at the end of the phrases; when done right, you really get the effect of flaming tongues. I tried to get at the same grammatical hysteria in So to Speak. I once rode on a plane to Grand Rapids, MI, next to a girl about my age who was just getting back from missionary work in Nigeria, where she claimed to have engaged in True Spiritual Warfare (her emphases), and also claimed to have spoken in tongues, at that time. What was touching and beautiful about her story wasn’t the fact that it was totally crazy but was instead that she articulated that her glossolalia was her profound and only connection to other people of faith (who were missionaries from places where English is not spoken). I will add here that in addition to the gift of tongues, she got some pretty awesome braids.

Okay now flash forward to today, Pentecost 2011! I went, this morning, to Westminster Abbey to hear them get their tongues united. They did Loquebantur Variis Linguis as part of a complicated procession around the space, so, one heard the voices without seeing the bodies. Delicious. Then, the anthem was Bach’s Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf which is a big imitative counterpoint back-and-forth crazyspace for the first bit, and then it resolves into the most gorgeous and simple chorale. I love this piece so much particularly because I have about nine recordings of it, each one in a totally different tempo. Fabulous.

We are ten days from the premiere of Two Boys. There was a fun little thing: it’s a YouTube video here, and a sassy little retort here. There’s a microsite here. There’s me being in a debate about the nature of things here. There’s a half an hour of me and Craig Lucas talking about everything under the sun. Go nuts!

I’m having a slightly fun time reading all the advance press in anticipation of not being able to read the reviews; it’s just too awful to think about. I think for my sanity I need to wait until it’s all done to really get involved, if at all. While I’m usually ambivalent about this stuff, I observed something that is almost universally true in England. When I ask somebody, “oh, how was Simon Boccanegra,” the answer was never to that question, but instead, “It got 3 stars!” or “It got 4 stars” or “The critics hated it.” It’s outrageous! That’s not what I asked! This happens, though, across the board with people involved in the arts, and it’s a curious business because obviously I could have googled the reviews. Instead, I ask because I wanted to know what you, nice lady, or you, kind sir, your own self thought when you went there. How were the notes, how were the rhythms, how was the singing, how was the story, did it work for you, did you have a nice night at the theater? I want details: I want to know what the production set out to do and whether or not it did it. I want to know how the cor anglais solo was in the Faust (excellent, apparently!) and I want to know if the lighting was generous to the mouth. I feel like that’s a much healthier way to see any art. You go in with a kind and generous mind, and try to figure out what the thing is trying to do and whether or not it did it well. Really, it’s not unlike a restaurant in that way.

For me, the worst thing anybody can say about anything is that it’s overrated or underrated, because what that implies is that the rating has anything to do with the thing itself. Yelp is filled with this kind of skewed logic, where essentially what’s not being discussed is the food, the texture, the mouthfeel, the drinks, but instead, some imagined disparity between press/buzz/hype and the bibimbap itself (have you noticed, also, that yelp reviews always begin, “my fiancée and I went here the other night”?) The other direction is worse, too, where you say that so-and-so is such an underrated cook or composer or guitarist. The problem is that it very quickly bestows a sort of moral probity on not being in the press, or not being known by many people. The worst example of this is indie rock, I would say, and it has been endlessly ridiculed. It comes up in classical music, too, though, where a lot of people are obsessed with talking about the fact of John Luther Adams’s press or lack thereof, rather than taking that time to really listen to his (unbelievably gorgeous & powerful) music.

So! Check out Two Boys if you’re in London. A lot of people have worked very, very hard to make this thing come alive, and it’s humbling and obscurely touching to me to see how herculean a task making an opera is. I’ve just come back from the Coliseum, where the sets are being reconstructed after we left our rehearsal studio; there were eleven men wrestling this giant tower into place and another six or seven off to the side with buckets of paint and giant pieces of metal. In the north of the city, the video and projection designers are editing hours of footage; I’m gnawing my teeth in Villiers-Street in anticipation of the first sitzprobe in 12 hours. I love this civic vision: everybody doing what they ought to be doing in the right place, all in service of this giant piece of theater. So you’ll come!

This has been a scarily exciting past two weeks. I’m still in London, still doing preparations for Two Boys, which becomes more real every day. There are posters for it in the trains! That’s something I’m kind of not quite used to. . This poster was the result of many weeks of haggling about fonts and images and blah blah blah; even still, looking at it gives such a strange impression of what making an opera is. There are hugely important people left off of this image: the librettist, most importantly, but also, the conductor, the cast, the assistant conductor, the designers: all people who, much more than I, have been living and breathing almost exclusively this piece for the past years, months, and weeks. All of this in addition to the people from the Met and the ENO who have been supporting the project from the sides and from its interior for years! The poster is the tiniest framed window into the world that contains hundreds of people all working very hard to make this piece come alive. I’m also a little unsure, on second glance, about the idea of “secret online world,” because surely it’s the opposite of that: deceptively public. But whatever. I’m a noodge. It’s a nice image and I’ve been really happy to see it in the tube and around town.

The process — which will be obvious to those of you who make operas all the time but which is new to me — is very fugued at this point. In one corner of London, the director and the singers & actors (we have thirty non-singing actors shuffling about the stage) are going through the piece scene by scene, interrogating the text, interrogating the notes. In another neighborhood, the orchestra rehearses with no singers, figuring out any scary mistakes I’ve made (did you know that despite having proof-read this thing thrice, I still had an entire section in the 2nd clarinet placed five bars early?) and negotiating a quick change to contrabassoon or tenor drum. Elsewhere entirely, the chorus is memorizing all the hocketed text at the top of the second act. It’s either very easy or very hard. I have observed one thing that I’d like to correct in a major way. Nobody in England knows who Meredith Monk is. There is a roaring lacuna where her music should be, and not just her music but her techniques; it’s a relatively common reference in my universe and one I’ve found to be completely lost on a lot of otherwise very up-2-d8 people here. So, here’s a starter package – one old, and one relatively new:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Meredith Monk Memory Song from Do You Be?

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Meredith Monk from Facing North

Okay so, Meredith Monk. I think Hocket should be a required piece for all singers. Grab your friend and git r done. Composers in school, I will point out, have to perform a lot of exercises that don’t always engage with what our future music will sound like — twelve-tone pieces with fully serialised dynamics, piece for solo ratchet. Any sort of stylistic extension, though, will make the muscles stronger, and who knows; in ten years when some crazy gay from New York is begging you “More rhythmic! Think Meredith Monk! Relaxed but Intense!” you’ll remember that hellish week when you and your homegirl learned Hocket. Yes ma’am. Composers: do you ever feel like you want to make a little mix-tape of “necessary list’nin’” before people sing or play your work? One thing I always think is interesting is how crucial Wagner is to play Adams…? Maybe he’d disagree, but I feel like the tropical storm section from Nixon requires a stylistic awareness of Glass’s Satyagraha that slowly morphs into Das Rheingold.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

John Adams Tropical Storm from Nixon in China

I think most composers have these kinds of strange connections that resist their normal press narratives or, for that matter, the oppressive linearity of the way musical history is taught. There’s this idea that you can draw straight lines like, Schönberg -> Babbitt -> Carter -> Jonathan Dawe or whatever, but the reality is always going to be much more complicated. Like a big messy family, influence skips generations and comes, oftentimes, through surrogates: oftentimes one has less to do with one’s biological auntie than with one’s friend’s older, wacky sister, for instance.

The other big exciting thing this month is that Seeing is Believing, the Aurora Orchestra‘s wonderful album featuring my music, has been released in the UK. It’s coming later this month to the US so I’ll remind you all again about that one. I’m enormously proud of this release; the playing is superb, the programming of the disc is elegant, and the Byrd and Gibbons arrangements make me happy in a way that only music by other composers can! And yet, I get to feel involved.

Here is a video of me talking about it. Something is gefuckd with my ability to embed YouTube onto my site right now; I’ll try to get this fixed and then will repost here.

Here is the product page on Decca.

Here is a picture I took at sparrow’s fart o’clock in the morning at Aldeburgh, by where we were staying. Working in Britten-land, and having John Rutter produce this album that has so very much to do with English choral music was one of the highlights of my professional life. Also I saw sea-birds.

Another treat: on the Sunday after the premiere of Two Boys, Jamie McVinnie and I are going to play a four-hands organ recital at Westminster Abbey for about forty-five minutes, and we will be joined by Nadia Sirota. Info here, but what more information do you need? It’s in the Lord’s House, just after tea.

I’m doing a huge pile of press about this opera, which has been actually sort of fun this round. The one vexing thing I always get asked is how closely the story in the opera relates to “real life.” I like this question because it reveals so much about the interviewer’s relationship to “real life” and also, to a certain extent, to art as something distinct from “real life.” The other funny thing here is that I don’t think they have Law and Order: SVU in the +44, which, for me, is the gold standard of having a thing be loosely based on something from “real life,” but stylize it intensively enough (and set it all in Manhattan) so you end up with something that is, and is not, about real life. Another slightly more poetic variation on the same is Salman Rushdie’s Shame, which is, and is not, simultaneously about Pakistan. He offers “Peccavistan” as a complicated pun-on-a-pun (Sir Charles Napier messaged London the word “Peccavi,” meaning “I have sinned,” here, though, a homonym for “I have Sind.”) There is also a very alarming amount of legal fussy fuss about the relationship of the story that we will see on stage in Two Boys and, again, “reality” as a distinct space from theater; the fussy fuss is different in America and one wonders if it would be different again in, say, France, or Russia, or South Africa. Or Pakistan.

So, our first week of putting together Two Boys in London is over, sort of, and the whole thing has been surreal and wonderful. I’m still unaccustomed to the number of people working behind the scenes on a production like this: there are a few dozen in the rehearsal room and then another few dozen back at headquarters all basically putting together a piece of music I started sketching on a Delta Shuttle tray table three years ago. It’s weird to go from that to this:

or, stranger yet, to go from a little scribble that says “chorus enters?” to:

It’s very moving! And that’s just a third of them! I am trying to be avuncular rather than mommie dearest with this project, so I’m coming in for a bit of the day and spending the rest of the time hiding out. I have observed something about singers which I would love to have some feedback about: they seem really freaked out about making mistakes in front of “the composer.” I don’t know many musicians who feel this way; in fact, most people I know — and I include myself in this — prefer to present the composer a semi-molded thing, warts and all, that then, with collaboration, becomes something more polished.  Singers seem to want to take it a little bit farther, and definitely under no circumstances want to sight-read in front of the composer.  Any thoughts on this?

Last night, I went to the opening night of the ENO’s new production of Britten A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You guys, I loved it so much.  I love this opera anyway (read my somewhat complicated discourse about it from a few years ago, which, if you can bear my screed at the top, yields some lovely performance practice examples at the bottom) but this production was something very severe, rigorous, and special.  The director, Christopher Alden, has imposed (or, rather, teased out) an additional narrative from the opera (which itself is a simplification of Shakespeare’s original).  This additional narrative is, essentially, that Oberon is a paedophile schoolmaster, and that Puck, who had once been his favorite, is being eclipsed by the Indian Boy/Changeling.  The staging makes a few things very explicit and allows other things to be registrally hidden; in one moment, Puck is essentially trying to regain Oberon’s affections in a twisted, 14 year-old way that’s simultaneously ragingly emotional, sexual, and very sad.  It’s a failed embrace met with absolute coldness by Oberon’s unforgiving countertenor, and I found myself chilled and incredibly moved.  An additional layer implies that Theseus himself — who observes the entire opera, loosely, grimacing and making assorted moues as he watches Puck — was himself subject to this same attention from Oberon in the past.  The programme the ENO provides makes this more explicit, quoting at great length this article from 2001 (without counting words, it seems like they quoted about 95% of it, leaving out a few choice tidbits like, “I hated the taste of his semen,” which I suppose is for the best, but I do enjoy the image of a dutiful ENO employee expurgating the original article with a razor blade and a loupe or something), as well as a slightly more nuanced article by John Bridcut, whose 2006 book Britten’s Children is a fabulous (and just the right length) exploration of Benjamin Britten’s own relationships with teenage boys from when he was himself one through his death.

The reviews have been exactly as you might imagine, and my conversations with people about it have been absolutely as you might imagine; there is a kind of great review of it that I basically agree with entirely except for the point of it, which I suppose I almost, to a certain extent share; a beautiful moment happens when we realize that Theseus is, in a sense, grown-up Puck, and that before he marries Hippolyta he has to confront his having been passed-over by Oberon; this is something with huge resonances in Britten’s Children and I think everybody should just go buy it and read it right now anyway.  The other point this review brings up is the severity of the production to  completely deny us the restorative and playful benediction of the ending.  May I confess that I have always found the last few bars of Midsummer to be a little bit “That’s all, folks?”  This production went against the grain of the text(s), but lord hammercy, to hear this angry boy read these lines:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
[...]
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

…after all the innuendo, cardigan brokebacking, and that heartstoppingly amazing final chorus with the boys and the countertenor and Tytania’s toe-curling descant, I kind of didn’t mind how off it was, or at least different from the nine thousand versions we’ve seen of it before. Insert aside here about authorial intent…but really, there is a home in the world for “traditional” readings of this work (both the Shakespeare and the Britten, and I own, have seen, and will see many, many more of them), and this production doesn’t imply that its reading is the correct one; it’s just a beautiful, moving, severe interpretation.  It’s been a long time since an opera has arrested me in that way, and I’d like to think that when I’m dead, somebody could use something of mine to make a similarly powerful gesture.

Another kind of funny aside was that one good friend, whom I will not name because I adore him, began his litany of complains against the production with the fact that it had started in two minutes of silence as Theseus prowled across the stage.  Something that I find especially strange about the English opera world — and let it be said that I actually know nothing about this, this is more of a general impression from my limited experience — is that even the smallest, like, Tesco-wrapped, overly-curated galangal root of European, regie-ass production is still too spicy for some of these people.  Straight theater-goers (and fans of new music) in London seem way ahead of the curve, where it’s like, Sarah Kane 4.48 Psychosis every two seconds and Black Wartch and really kind of outrageous Shakespeare productions and all the Gerald Barry you can shake a scepter at but then two minutes of silence at the head of the opera is offensive? The point is, it seemed odd that a little silence with a prowling Theseus ruffled the feathers; I hesitated to tell my friend that I, in college, provided incidental music for a production of the Shakespeare Midsummer in which all of the court’s proceedings were conducted in Medieval Korean, the faeries were suspended in sex slings the entire time, and the audience was gender-segregated into groomsmen and bridesmaids (and do not think for a moment that this reinforcement of the gender binary was not mise en evidence by several theatergoers).  

The other great thing about last night was Sir Willard White, holy shit. He was so amazing as Bottom, I was losing my mind. During his transformation, he removes his shirt, which is technically fascinating because we got to watch exactly how it is that he controls his diaphragm. It’s something extraordinary; the flesh is suspended over the muscles in a very revealing way. I’d urge any singers out there to do more work shirtless, or videotape yourselves and get involved. It was like watching a Mark Morris rehearsal on his abs. Also does everybody remember how great Willard White is in El Niño? There’s a little three-minute nugget in the first part that I steal every two seconds; this business with the low low piccolo is really perfect at doing stillness with potential energy.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

John Adams El Niño
Se Habla de Gabriel

WW starts a minute or so in. Listen to how good those string drones are!

Hey guess what? I moved to London again; this time for a few months for a few reasons. One reason is that my first opera, Two Boys, is going into production at the English National Opera next week. Then, the delicious Aurora Orchestra is releasing a bunch of my chamber orchestra music on Decca, including some arrangements of Byrd and Gibbons. So, Aurora did a mini-residency at King’s Place, and generated two nights’ worth of music, and made this gorgeous programme for it which was, in part, inspired by Nick’s genius design of this very website. We had an album release party afterwards, at which my new friend Luke Ritchie played, as well as Puzzle Muteson, whose album is coming out Imminently. As is mine, for that matter — UK people can pre-order it here and I think the rest on Amazon. Then the next day, I had the enormous privilege to introduce David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion at LSO St. Luke’s, and then I made a little introduction to Owen Pallett at the Barbican, and played a series of polyrhythms with the Clogs. My fingers are getting tired of finding all these hyperlinks! It was hyper-linked: a free-wheeling, exhausting weekend, and the attendance at the Reich Marathon (as well as, I should add, my own competing Saturday night concert — a heartbreaking scheduling problem for all involved because I wanted more than anything to hear 2×5 live; as I’ve mentioned, on the CD it sounds like something has gone awry in a later, possibly hidden, world in MarioKart) is a testament to the hunger London audiences have for not just Reich’s music but for the music that has come out of it in a variety of iterations. It was great. London people were mad appreciative.

I was delighted to be able to see Proverb live, which I haven’t seen in maybe ten years. It is such a gorgeous and personal piece; it starts with a lovely tune, and makes a canon around it, and then a Reichean texture of hocketed mallets comes in. But then! The tenors sing a stylized figure straight out of the 13th century composer Pérotin. These elements work with, and against, one another in a satisfying, loosely erotic ballet, and Reich, at the end, adds a cryptic but so fucking satisfying coda. It drives me nuts how gorgeous this piece is, and how personal, and how committed to its style. The three do not always go hand-in-hand; Reich’s music is so fully devoted to itself, in the best way; watching his music live can put me in a historical or anthropological space, like watching an obscurely compelling Balinese ritual. Simultaneously, and more personally, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to write non-religious music with that level of commitment to process and style; I always bank on a capriciousness (a natural one, but you know what I mean), and listening to Reich’s music live, and David Lang’s music, for that matter, is always humbling and cause for many days of reflection, self-doubt, and remembered delight.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Paul Hillier/Theater of Voices

Wait you guys how come there is only one recording of this piece! ¡Escándalo! Everybody should record this ahora mismo and send me mp3′s; it’s nothing wrong with this recording, this recording is beautiful, but I’m shocked!

At the Decca/Aurora lovefest, by the way, I got interviewed by this unexpected magician called Neil — it was approximately four thousand degrees, so you can see me looking hot, but not as hot as this rabbit must have been:

Notice, by the way, the cool buttons on the top. That’s an amazing result of collaboration between three organizations who would not necessarily always be on the same page about cross-promoting things. I know very little about how classical music PR works but my sense is that this is the way to do it — always reference the next thing, even (especially?) if that thing is in a different venue or context. It feels more fluid and less random.

Also somebody needs to tell England about this old trick. If your venue is freezing cold before people come in, do not adjust the thermostat. This is good. When people come and start drinking, they will make it hot in there, and then you will wonder why it is so hot. It’s very much like resting steak. It seems counterintuitive (“I want hot meat!”) but everybody knows that you have to do it, except sometimes people don’t, and wonder why everybody thinks they steak is fucked up. The same applies to the Temperature up in here almost universally. My flat has an aircon unit and fans and a system of windows and shades; anybody who wants to come over and see how it do is welcome at The Campari and Dubonnet Masterclass in Ventilation and Temperature Regulation, weekdays, from 6:45 to 7:30, in my heezy. Closed on bank holidays, and for four random days on either side of the bank holidays, with auto-responders put on all forms of communication.

Now that all of that over, I have about four days before the opera really kicks into gear. I am dealing with the usual circular litany of miseries surrounding the gas bill one does not have being the obstacle preventing getting a proper (rather than a Terrorlicious Pay-As-U-Go) phone, as well as a bank account, in various combinations of inconvenience. Today, a man at the phone shop suggested that I move to a house in which my name was, indeed, on the gas bill! I sort of like the idea that one’s real estate choices would be informed, or even dictated, by wanting an iPhone on contract; it feels very now.

A highlight of my life was that 8th blackbird Bang on a Can played, together, Reich’s recent Double Sextet. It was ravishing; all the players figured out exactly how to control the vibrato to keep the sound alive but without sacrificing the principles behind Reich’s austere but ecstatic vision. Speaking of austere visions, I’ve objected before to people insanely not capitalizing the names of their music or ensembles or whatever. And as you all know I think Match Gurl Pash is the best thing in the history of time. But David, strangely, presents it without capitals. And you know what happened? People fucked up, because it’s confusing, and ended up capitalizing the piece but not capitalizing one of the textual sources, namely Saint Matthew, or, as they rendered it, Saint matthew. Everybody just quit it. It drives everybody nuts and makes any paragraph in which it appears look off-balance — not in any obvious way, but in that way that somebody who has done something a little bit too ambitious to the eyebrows always looks a touch off-center.

Some good news in the English food front: Tesco sells Hollow Vegetable!!! Ung CHOI! Xiàncài ??? ! I nearly peed:

In other, more alarming, retail news, look at the design of this substance meant to be used to hand-warsh one’s delicates:

St John restaurant has now opened up a third branch, a Hotel! It’s early days still, but I’ve now been a few times and the restaurant is heaven, as is the bar. The original bar at St John, which is absolutely the most gorgeous non-ecclesiastical space in London, if not the world (and, it should be said, photographs terribly, as the height and simplicity of the big shapes commingling in the head with the details of the small irregularities of texture can never come through in a photograph; it’s rather like Reich’s music in that way, where a simultaneous and real-time awareness of big shapes and small textures is the key to unlocking the vast emotional possibilities of what would otherwise seem like a severe, almost punitive space), wouldn’t work in a hotel, I don’t think, so instead they have gone for a nautical effect which works very well, especially because they stay open until loosely 2. Check out these lamb’s sweetbreads and a fennel, carrot, and barley thing in the background: