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First Take: Marc Lowenstein on The Little Bear

The 2017 edition of The Industry and wild Up’s First Take is right around the corner. On February 24, the world’s most audacious opera company presents scenes from works-in-progress by six composers. Full details on that are up at theindustryla.org/projects/first-take-2017. Over here at New Classic LA, we’ll repeat our tradition of one composer interview per day in the week leading up to it. You can read all of the interviews – including the 2015 interviews – at newclassic.la/firsttake.

Today we’ve got composer, conductor, and Industry music director Marc Lowenstein.

Describe the work you’ll be presenting at First Take.

The work I’m presenting at First Take is an excerpt from a new opera called The Little Bear. It’s an opera about the power of children’s stories and what those fairy tales can reveal about the psychology of time, change, loss, and love. So it’s a family opera: not really a children’s opera, though hopefully understandable by older children. In this wonderfully re-invigorated era of new operas, I’ve noticed that there are not many works being written about or for families and I am very drawn to the subject and the challenge it presents in bringing those themes to the operatic musical stage.

What’s your background in writing opera, or for voice?

Marc Lowenstein. Photo by Eron Rauch.

Marc Lowenstein. Photo by Eron Rauch.

I grew up as a singer and later became a conductor and a composer and finally a teacher as well. So, I’ve always lived in and around the operatic world. I wrote an opera about ten years ago based on the movie The Fisher King, and it was a good learning experience. Someone somewhere once said something like “everyone should be forgiven their first opera” and I still feel fondly about that one, and think of it as a learning experience. And I’ve always been interested in new operas, and feel very fortunate to work as Music Director of The Industry with Yuval. At The Industry, I’ve worked with a wonderful array of composers with different approaches to opera and I love seeing wildly differing effective ideas of how to bring music and drama to life in our present day. I particularly enjoy seeing other composers frame their individual voices in this world of amazingly diverse musical styles, and I’m enjoying the process of finding the right compositional voice for The Little Bear.

Does your composition process change at all when writing in this medium?

Not really. A lot of my non-operatic music is in fact a bit operatic. One thing, though, about writing opera is a slight uncertainty as to how all the pieces really do fit together in real life: in an actual, staged opera there seems to be a need for some accommodation for how dramatic storytelling contributes to and shapes the perception of musical time. That is a fun conversation to find oneself in the middle of, and one great thing about First Take is that it can show you relatively early in the process what in that dialog is merely theoretical and what might actually work.

What else are you working on that you’d like people to know about?

I’m already expanding the Little Bear a little bit for a concert at REDCAT on April 6th that will also include a solo cantata for Jodie Landau and the premiere of a cello concerto for Derek Stein. And then there is the rest of The Industry’s exciting 2017 season that will include Lou Harrison’s Young Caesar with the LA Phil Green Umbrella series and the premiere of Andy Akiho’s and Yuval Sharon’s Galileo in September, two projects that I feel particularly passionate about!

Check back tomorrow for our next interview, and get your First Take tickets at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/first-take-2017-and-second-take-bonnie-clyde-tickets-27916364598.