Did everybody read Danny’s good take<\/a> on the recent Guardian article<\/a> about John Adams? It’s an interesting situation. John Adams wrote this piece called I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky<\/em>, which is, I would hazard a guess, his least “popular” piece, and I use the word popular in all senses of the word, inasmuch as I have never met anybody who really knows what to do with it, aside from Peter Sellars, who would probably know what to do with a turnip dressed up as Miss Havisham singing arias from Turandot<\/em>. In any event, it’s happening in London this summer, like, a million times, and so the Guardian sent a dude to New York to be loosely dismissive, and he ended up writing springloaded sentences like:<\/p>\n
I mean, surely, it’s the hope of music reviewers that they’re reviewing to a full house, right? If you review a restaurant, you want to review it at its top form, with the kitchen at full capacity, and the waiters in that ecstatic, sweaty bliss of business. In that spirit, I read with a certain degree of joy and a certain degree of anxiety Anne Midgett’s article about Moby-Dick<\/em> + its relationship to other new opera<\/a>, including my own, in the San Francisco Chronicle. <\/p>\n
The offense I’m taking here has more to do with the idea that asking for editing help is a kind of Rom-Com Formulaic Groupthink. I’ve always advocated for editors in classical music<\/a>; I’ve blogged about this a million times before and I wish I had somebody to whom I could send my music before it gets performed who would look it over and say, you know what, this is brilliant, but you need to cut, like, forty-five seconds here, and this entire middle section here. I’m getting better at doing this myself, because in concert music no such person exists, but in opera, we are very lucky because there are people whom you can ask if something is too long, too short, too racist, too sexy, not sexy enough, too much crotale, not enough crotale. It’s just the composer’s responsibility “\u201d not chore or forced groupthink agenda “\u201d to ask. I trust the genre to provide me with the people to help me participate in the wonderful history of opera, and, with any luck, to innovate cleverly, venerate respectfully, and make something that everybody will enjoy. <\/p>\n
I should add here that since she wrote it, I had a very polite email exchange with this journalist, and she posted a very good Q + A with Peter Gelb here<\/a>, and the whole thing feels slightly calmer. I guess all those liberal arts just get my knickers in a twist when I read about binaries in the way people think about Art. Gelb says it best:<\/p>\n