My clarinet/piano piece American Standard will be performed in London next week…
Peter Furniss (clarinet) and David Leiher Jones (piano) will be holding a recital to celebrate the recent Clarinet Classics CD release, Time Pieces, 60 years of American music for clarinet and piano. The recital will take place on Wednesday, 24th October at 7:30pm. The Warehouse, 13 Theed Street, London, SE1 8ST.
Sculptor Georgianna Krieger (ahem, my wife) is among the many San Francisco artists presenting their work throughout October as part of ArtSpan’s annual San Francisco Open Studios. The city is divided into four sections and artists in each section are open over four weekends in October.
Georgianna’s work is on display this weekend, Saturday and Sunday 11am-6pm at Fort Mason Building C, room 375.
Here’s more information, including a downloadable map to artist exhibits.
It will be worth your while to see writer/performer Amanda Moody’s latest music theater piece D’Arc, Woman on Fire, music by Jay Cloidt, at Footloose & Shotwell Studios.
D’Arc offers a surreal inquiry into the costs of dreams, lived and unlived. Weaving the threads of the Dark Ages with our own dark times, D’Arc depicts a present-day intercession by Saint Joan of Arc. We meet Joanne. Home alone, she fixates on letters from her daughter who vanished while working abroad in a war-torn region. Raging against loss, Joanne begins to receive bizarre visions through the cold flame of her television set. It is Saint Joan, burning through the TV twilight to answer her grief. Relating tales of her own battles and trials, Joan teases and admonishes Joanne, disrupts her obsessions and challenges her to listen anew to the call of her own life.
Jay Cloidt’s haunting music drives this D’Arc night of the soul. Integrating Moody’s mercurial vocalizations with acoustic and processed cello, the composition features original songs, underscoring, and sound design. His composition spans 14th century hymns, post-Romanticism, aggressive electronic music and heart-thumping gospel to evoke the strange dream of Joanne and Joan’s collision-course.
I haven’t seen it yet, but I can vouch for Amanda as a really interesting dramatic writer, and a powerful performer.
Sometime last year I struck up an email correspondence via this blog with poet/librettist Karren Alenier, whose opera with composer William Banfield Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On was premiered in 2005 in New York by Encompass New Opera Theatre. Karren has written a very entertaining book about what it takes to see an opera project through from concept to production.
As someone with a new opera idea in the pipeline, I’m keenly interested this topic and Karren was kind enough to let me read an advance copy of the book. I’m not a critic, so I’m unable to offer an in-depth review, but I thought I should at least call readers’ attention to it.
The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas uses Karren’s own project as a frame of reference throughout, but she also wisely sought input from other professionals in the field, including the likes of Placido Domingo, Mark Adamo, Libby Larsen and Ned Rorem. Every aspect of making a new opera is discussed: collaboration, finding an audience, finding a commission, working with singers, working with directors, critics and more.
As far as my own project is concerned (it’s a secret), reading this book has given me a good picture of the various ways to pursue it, and what to expect if and when I do. My favorite chapter title: “Hubris, Vanity, Rejection”.
What’s really fun about this book is the structure. Karren’s own opera is a result of many years studying the work of Gertrude Stein, and the book is organized in what might be described as a “cubist” way. In a sense, it’s really two books in one: one is about her own background leading up to the creation of her opera and its production, and the other is a more general look at the world of American opera. But, the two books are presented simultaneously in layers.
Any composer or writer who is not already intimate with the vagaries of the American opera world would surely learn something from this book, but also the tone of the book is light and sharp, and so I imagine it would be enjoyable for anyone who is peripherally interested in the topic. The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas is not yet in stores, but it’s available now from the publisher’s web site.
Over the weekend we rode out the rest of the Budapest heat wave in an idyllic town (village? jury’s out.) in Slovenia, where my old friend, conductor Steven Loy has lived for the past ten years. It’s a heavenly place, particularly after two 100-degree weeks in one of Budapest’s more polluted and noisy districts.
Not only that, but Steven and Slovene composer Urška Pompe have a delightful daughter just about Philo’s age, and it was great to see them become friends.
This town we were in is about forty minutes north of the capital city Ljubljana at the edge of the mountains and near much natural splendor, such as Lake Bled.
Ljubljana itself is a very charming city I would like to see more of. I had an unexpected opportunity to walk around for about two hours…
…because we stayed an extra day so that I could go see Steven conduct a concert of new music presented by the new music ensemble MD7. This is an interesting ensemble indeed, founded by Slovene composer Pavel Mihelčič. They only play music written expressly for them, and the instrumentation is as follows: flute, clarinet, trombone, percussion, piano, viola, cello. It’s actually a pretty good combination. A little weird, but not bad. I wonder about the trombone, but it worked well in the pieces on this concert. Highlights were “Pas de Sept - Hommage à Stravinsky” by Belarus composer Dmitri Lybin and particularly for me, “The Team from the Flower Shop” by Slovene composer David Beovič.
In advance of the upcoming premiere of his harp concerto, Mark Adamo (seen below in a recent photo, pre-haircut) has written a fascinating description of the challenges involved in writing such a thing, and how he approached it. How do you get beyond the clichés and build something where the harp isn’t just adding some attack to the clarinets or providing noodledy-noodley filigree? How can the harp “own” the material?
Whether or not you have any interest at all in the harp as an intstrument, this is a worthwhile thing to read. It’s a great example of how a smart composer starts a new project by asking questions. Mark’s approach here reminds me of thorough advance work he puts into his stage works. (More on that here.)
1.) Since the harp is, by design, more impressive spelling out harmony than theme—but I want a theme with a real authority on which to organize the piece—can I come up with a melody that’s all harmony and all line at the same time, and yet is still versatile enough to express whatever I need?
2.) Are there unusual technical or timbral resources the harp can muster that are theatrical (read: loud) enough to hold their own in an orchestral texture? Can I design a movement to ask a question to which these timbres would be the answer?
3.) And how do I make this piece not just an orchestra score which happens to have a very large harp part, but a true concerto: one which sounds as if all of its gestures and materials are generated by the soloist? In other words, how do I keep the orchestra, with its limitless melodic potential, from upstaging the harp?
Mark’s Four Angels will receive its premiere at the Kennedy Center on June 7 – 9, 2007 performed by Dotian Levalier and the National Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin, conductor.
One of my earliest pieces, American Standard for clarinet and piano, is included on an upcoming CD of American works for clarinet and piano on the British label Clarinet Classics.
Performing on the recording are clarinettist Peter Furniss and pianist David Leiher Jones, both good friends since our Budapest Liszt Academy days a really long time ago. (They taught me all about Marmite and how to curse properly in English.) American Standard was originally written for Peter, who’s performed it numerous times around the world.
The disc also includes a magnificent performance of the Bernstein Sonata as well as works by Victor Babin, James Cohn, Robert Muczynski and Richard Dudas, another Budapest cohort.
The release is scheduled for June, and I will, no doubt, crow about it again here at that time.
If you’re in the Bay Area, please drop by my wife’s Open Studio this weekend. She’s a sculptor who works in bronze and, more recently, cast glass.
It’s all afternoon both Saturday and Sunday. Details are here, and here are galleries of her work: Sculpture, Drawings
This is part of the annual San Francisco Open Studios organized by ArtSpan.
Also, we’re literally a five-minute walk from the spectacular new de Young museum which opened last year in Golden Gate Park, so make a day of it!
Here’s an early review of Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata which has just opened at New York City Opera.
This is from Steve Smith of Time Out New York:
It was hard to come away from tonight’s premiere without a sense of renewed faith in the possibility that contemporary opera can deal with both the baggage of genre history and the demands of a contemporary audience. Adamo, in only his second big-stage piece, neatly proves that it can be done — and with a show that’s genuinely entertaining, to boot.
I say “hooray!” to Alex Ross for recognizing Mark Adamo as one of “the best opera composers of the moment”. (I disagree about Adams, but that’s a whole other thing. Ad�s I don’t know from Adam’s off ox.)
Mark is a brilliant guy. If you have the slightest interest in opera or any music for the stage, please read this interview with Mark on NewMusicBox. You’ll see that, not only is he popular and successful, but he actually knows what he’s talking about.
I still think of myself as primarily as a theatrical composer, even when I work on concert pieces. So, I’m pleased that Mark saves me the trouble of saying this, which I’m not smart enough to explain so clearly myself:
Sonata allegro form, if you’re going to put it in 19th-century terms, is a theatrical form. There’s a great overlap between the Aristotelian theory of protagonist, antagonist, conflict, denouement, and principal theme, second theme, exposition, development. So the development of opposites in relation to each other to make points and to sculpt an experience I think is common to both endeavors.
On having to work with parameters when composing for the stage, as opposed to concert works:
There’s a kind of hyper-rhythmic and strutting and exhibitionistic quality to Lysistrata, for example, that there was really no place for in Little Women, and that wasn’t because you couldn’t put it in opera, it was because you couldn’t put it in that opera.
Since Mark writes his own libretti, he was asked the very unfortunate but inevitable question: which comes first. His answer….
The acting. Really knowing how you would play the scene physically in space. The way that I outline it up front, generally it’s sort of a four-part process.
Then there are two fascinating paragraphs where Mark describes his process. I can’t quote all of it, but it’s about a third of the way down the page.
I’ve known Mark for about 20 years, and we’re very much cut from the same cloth. Basically, we both wanted to be Stephen Sondheim when we grew up, and we both ended up following a different path.
(aside)
OK. I admit it: I still want to be Stephen Sondheim when I grow up. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.
(a beat)
…and I don’t think I’m going to be Sondheim either. Fnar fnar…. get it?
Anyway, sorry for namedropping. Nu, it’s a blog. I shouldn’t namedrop? Just read the interview.
