Posts by Nick Norton
The Industry has a new trailer for HOPSCOTCH, and wants you to drink with them at Würstkuche on Sunday
We’ve been covering The Industry a lot lately, but that’s only really because they’re up to a lot of awesome stuff. And their fundraising model involves getting Würstkuche’s downtown location to donate at least 10% of income from 6 til 10 pm this Sunday, March 22. Plus artistic director Yuval Sharon and co. will be there, presumably drinking beer and eating sausage and fries.
I’m gonna come out and say it: Würstkuche’s truffle fries are the best fries in LA.
In addition, they’ve just released a trailer for the opera, which premieres in fall. Check it out.
UPDATE:
Here’s a picture of the aforementioned truffle fries.
Interview: Jack Curtis Dubowsky on The Golem
On Friday evening at HM 157, the Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble presents a new, live soundtrack to the 1915 horror film The Golem, considered by many to be the first horror film ever made. We got a moment to talk with Jack about his work and this project. Check it out.
So tell us about your show this Friday.
We were looking at dates, and noticed that there was a Friday the 13th in March. So we thought, that’s a great date, let’s do that. Then the natural thing to do was, let’s do a public domain, silent horror film, to celebrate Friday the 13th. And then of course, the venue. HM157 is such a cool venue, and they do all kinds of great stuff. Live music, films, Halloween parties. They are a real arts community and a real Historical Monument.
We will have Alicia Byer on clarinet, Michael G. Bauer on alto sax, Jeff Schwartz on double bass, and myself on keyboard.
What attracted you to scoring silent films, and The Golem in particular?
I’ve been doing live music to films for years: experimental films like Jean Genet’s Chant D’Amour, animated films by filmmakers like Samara Halperin, even my own films. One great thing about silent films is that they were made to have music accompany them (check out Rick Altman’s book Silent Film Sound), and if you watch a silent film a few times, you can pretty much figure out where the music was intended to go, and what it was intended to do. They also have intertitles, so you don’t have to worry about obtaining a print with a clean, isolated dialogue track. You create the entire audio track. The other reason is that unrestored copies of the films, if old enough, are generally public domain. You can’t put on an unauthorized public performance of a film that is still under copyright. I emphasize it must be an unrestored version of the film. Restorations are likely under copyright because of the work that has been put into the film.
The Golem seemed like a great film to do; it has depth and complexity, and people have heard of it, without being too familiar with it. While some laud The Golem (1920) as a precursor to James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), The Golem is also about technology and violence. The Golem is basically a weapon. Once that weapon is unleashed, it can’t be controlled. That resonates with our nation’s fixation with technology, violence, and military solutions; when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The Golem was made shortly after The Great War, and while it’s set in the 1500s, you can feel the shadow of WWI’s out-of-control militarism.
Another facet of The Golem is the portrayal of a Jewish community that was not assimilated into the white European establishment; the Jews are portrayed as likable, superstitious, irrational, magical people with silly hats. The way the Holy Roman Emperor deals with the Ghetto and the Jews, by decree without cultural understanding or appreciation, eerily foreshadows not only WW2 but also the way the West currently deals with the whole Middle East. And in some ways, The Golem is like a giant, out of control drone; he’s made of clay, he’s not a man, but he is able to do the dirty work. Who has the moral responsibility for his actions?
You also, if I understand correctly, are a film music scholar. How does this inform your composition?
I worked in film for many years. I was an assistant engineer on Eliot Goldenthal’s score for Alien 3. I worked for many years in the in-house music department at Pixar. I also scored a handful of independent films, including most recently Jim Tushinski’s documentary I Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole (2013). Film music was my entrée into teaching and academia. I had knowledge and expertise ‘from the field,’ as they say. I’m not sure how scholarship informs my composition; I always thought it was the other way around! I thought that being conservatory trained as a musician and composer meant that I brought something interesting to film music scholarship. Because there’s lots of people dabbling in film music scholarship who are trained in other areas, like philosophy or English or media studies. That said, if you know the rep, if you know the canon, it just adds to your bag of tricks. A composer should study everything. If you want to write operas, you need to study dramaturgy. If you want to score a film, you need to understand picture editing and be sensitive to that. As well as drama and acting and cinematography.
What’s the focus of your research? What will you be presenting at EMP in April?
I’ve never presented at EMP before. It’s a popular music studies conference. So my presentation at EMP is a little different than my usual work. The cool thing is our bass player, Jeff Schwartz, who’s big on the improv scene here in LA, will also be presenting at the conference, on improvisation. I’ll be presenting on the work and history of Martin Lee Gore, principal songwriter for Depeche Mode. My presentation challenges expectations of what is “queer” and shows how otherness informs creative work. Here’s a link to my abstract: http://www.empmuseum.org/programs-plus-education/programs/pop-conference.aspx?t=zdubowsky#Tabs
What else is on the horizon for you?
I’ll be presenting at two other conferences in March and April: SCMS, The Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and PCA/ACA, The Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association.
I am working on finishing my monograph, Intersecting Film, Music, and Queerness, under contract to international academic press Palgave MacMillan for their Film, Media, and Cultural Studies series.
I’ve also been working as a music editor. I’m a member of the Editors Guild MPEG Local 700. So I feel like I have a lot of irons in the fire.
Anything else you’d like to add?
I grew up in LA and I only moved back to the area in November of 2012. So it’s been really amazing to see how much things have changed since I left in 1991 or 92. It’s still very car-centric, but there are a lot of people doing interesting things. The way the new music scene has grown, in both audiences and players, is really amazing. There’s a lot of people who are doing things just because they are interesting, people who are not trying to be a rock star or famous person or something. That’s what kind of aggravated me about LA in the 80s: it seemed to be all about pay-to-play and becoming famous. I’m not really sure where things are headed culturally or musically, but it seems like LA has a growing new music community and that’s a good thing. There’s also venues that seem to be not grounded in one particular genre, and that’s good too. I think cross pollination is a healthy thing.
Catch the JCDE this Friday at HM 157. Full details on the show are at http://www.hm157.com/calendar. More on Jack and his work is online at jackcurtisdubowsky.com.
WasteLAnd tonight, wild Up + Pacific Symphony tomorrow, LACMA Sunday
If you’re in LA and haven’t yet heard about WasteLAnd’s program of Ferneyhough, Lutyens, and Griffeath-Loeb at ArtShare this evening, what are you doing?! Starts at 8, is $10, GO.
Tomorrow evening wild Up joins the Pacific Symphony for the next show in the Santa Ana Sites series. Looks like it’s gonna rock, with what is, as far as I know, the first performance of Johnny Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver in the LA area, along with music by Andrew Norman and others. The LA Times has a big thing on it here: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-critics-pick-a-new-music-cornucopia-20150226-column.html
I just heard about a show at LACMA on Sunday that sounds really cool, and is free. Pianist Nadia Shpachenko emailed me in excitement about the beginning of her collaboration with composer Harold Meltzer, who has written a piece for actor and piano trio to be premiered at LACMA’s Sundays Live this weekend. There’s a second performance two days later out at Cal Poly Pomona. In addition, Piano Spheres has commissioned a piece from Meltzer for Schpachenko’s Satellite Series concert at REDCAT next season. This is looking to be a fruitful collaboration indeed.
Full details for all of these shows are available, as always, on our calendar page.
First Take: Artistic Director Yuval Sharon
All week we’ve been interviewing the composers for wild Up and The Industry’s First Take 2015, taking place tomorrow (February 21) at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. Today, in the last interview of our series, we’ve got The Industry’s Artistic Director, Yuval Sharon.
Before we get into it, I want to publicly thank both Yuval and wild Up’s Christopher Rountree, and all of the musicians and staff of both organizations, for putting First Take together. What you guys do for composers ,and for the music and arts community in LA, is amazing, and inspiring. Thank you.
Here’s Yuval.
The Industry’s Yuval Sharon
First off, congratulations on the Götz Friedrich Prize and the numerous other awards and nominations you’ve been receiving. You’ve been getting more and more attention internationally, and that must come with invitations to collaborate and create. Has it been challenging to balance that with what you want to do with The Industry?
Thank you! I feel so fortunate that the work I have been doing has been recognized so widely for opening up new possibilities for opera. I have to say no to a lot of projects now based on the all-too-limited amount of time in a day, and that is sometimes hard. But dedication demands sacrifice, and I am so devoted to the mission of The Industry that there’s no regret on my part when I have to pass on opportunities that would keep me from The Industry. The ones I do take on are selected very carefully and with an eye first and foremost towards my artistic goals with The Industry. On the other hand, as the company is growing, I am starting to have a stronger support structure that can help me focus mostly on the artistic aspects of The Industry, and this is an enormous benefit. Hiring Elizabeth Cline as Executive Director last November is a major step in that direction, and I am so excited to see where we steer this company together in the years ahead.
In addition to providing composers a place to try out new ideas in opera, what goals are you pursuing with First Take?
First Take gives me so much hope for the future of opera. The six projects we are showcasing this year are astonishing as singular expressions, but the cumulative effect of all six is overwhelming. I want that excitement transmitted to our audience, and also to each of the composers on the program, to show them how much their work matters and how strong it is. Composing must be such a lonely exercise, especially when you are still finding your voice, or trying something that doesn’t fit in a standard operatic box.
Beyond that, the composers will receive high-quality audio and video documentation of the performance to assist them in getting their works fully produced. These are essential tools for composers; I hope, too, that as the First Take program continues (we expect to continue a biannual schedule) that it becomes more and more of a stamp of approval for other companies.
What’s your musical background? Did you come to opera through theatre or as a musician?
I studied piano for most of my childhood and teenage years, and I sang in high school choruses. I stopped playing or singing when I went to UC Berkeley, but that’s when my love for opera really developed, as well as an interest in musicology and the interpretation of music. Now I only sing in the car — but I love doing that!
Even though I had that musical background, it wasn’t until I thought of opera in relation to theater or cinema that I finally got into it. My dad took me to the opera in high school and it just seemed like a weird, outdated ritual, happening too far away to have any visceral impact on me. It was a fun night out with my dad but not something I could take seriously. When I went to school, I started missing the experience and started thinking about opera’s theatrical possibilities.
A scene from The Industry’s production of Anne LeBaron’s Crescent City
What is it about LA that made you decide this was the right place to found your company? Have we lived up to your expectations?
Finding a creative home is a highly personal choice and depends more on your own goals and aesthetic concerns than external factors. For some people, New York feeds their creative spirit; for others, it’s Detroit, or Seattle, or Miami. I had a hunch that the artists and audiences that make up LA’s community would be the right one for the work I wanted to create and foster. I am constantly astonished by how easily The Industry has managed to establish itself in the cultural fabric of the city. The community here is one I feel completely aligned with and excited to create work for and with. That’s a powerful feeling that gives me the faith to push to ever new limits.
Got any new tidbits you can share with us about Hopscotch?
Only that it is the craziest adventure I’ve ever undertaken, and I am both terrified and exhilarated by the last year-and-a-half of development. It’s also the most incredible experiment in collaborative creation I’ve experienced, and I am pretty sure the composers and writers would say the same. We can’t say a lot right now, but there will be a LOT to say come October. Basically, you just can’t miss it.
He’s right about the just-can’t-miss-it-ness of both Hopscotch and First Take. Come on out tomorrow. Full details are at theindustryla.org/projects/project_firsttake15.php. For more on Yuval, visit YuvalSharon.com.
First Take: Andrew McIntosh on Bonnie and Clyde
Andrew McIntosh
If you’re in new music in LA, you probably know the name Andrew McIntosh. His skill as a violinist and violist is invaluable as a member of the Formalist Quartet, wild Up, and others. He’s a co-founder of populist records. And his music, as a composer, is gorgeous. He’s also the final composer on our series of interviews about The Industry and wild Up’s First Take, which takes place this Saturday at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. You can read all of the interviews at newclassic.la/firsttake. Here’s Andrew, on his opera Bonnie and Clyde.
Describe the work you’ll be presenting at First Take.
In creating Bonnie and Clyde, our goal was to start from what is known about the infamous couple and work our way backwards through the stories of people around them who left first-hand accounts. Melinda Rice, the librettist, has done incredibly extensive research, sifting through biographies of family members, police officers, government officials, and friends, as well as historian’s accounts. Together with Berlin-based artist Claudia Doderer we’ve designed an experience that functions like a gallery of images of Bonnie and Clyde, filtered through the subjective eyes of the people around them. In a way, Bonnie and Clyde are not illuminated by this opera, but are left open as characters that the audience can find for themselves. In portraying this story, there are a few questions that are explored. What is it about their lives that has come to symbolize freedom and love in popular culture, when the actual lives that they led were extremely unglamorous, tedious, and full of poverty and tension? Since the accounts that have been left behind are sometimes contradictory, how do we attempt to portray a factual representation of important events in their lives? Why has our society been so fascinated be them, even 80 years after they lived? Is there something universally human about their characters that makes us identify with them?
Musically, the score reflects Bonnie and Clyde’s lives on every level. The shape of each layer and corner in the music is a reflection of the tension, the openness, and the unexpectedness of their lives. Bonnie and Clyde are embedded in the score in other ways as well. Clyde played the saxophone and a large feature of the orchestration is a pair of antiphonal saxophones (although I didn’t know that Clyde played saxophone at the time that choice was made). A classic American steel-string guitar is also prominently featured in the orchestra, as are piano and vibraphone. The only thing Bonnie was afraid of was thunder, and their deaths are represented by the use of thunder sheets. The passage of time can be felt on multiple levels as well, often with a layer that is moving very slowly underneath layers that move at more active pacing, with voices sometimes floating on top in yet another layer of time. I think that this might have been my subconscious way of expressing the constant tension between open field and city that defined their daily existence.
What’s your background in writing opera, or for voice?
This project is the culmination of several years worth of attempts at translating my musical language into something vocal. It is certainly a different language than my comfort zone of instrumental writing. That instrumental relationship to sound has developed during 25 years of playing the violin, and it’s difficult to transcend that. Writing for singers feels naked and vulnerable, and I am in awe of the power and depth that words and human voices bring to music.
I have immersed myself in the land of performing with singers very heavily over the past few years through the work that I do as a period instrument baroque musician, working with Bach Collegium San Diego, American Bach Soloists, LA Master Chorale, Tesserae, and other early music ensembles. Also, during my undergraduate degree I spent two seasons as a violist with the Nevada Opera. I derive a lot of inspiration from studying and performing old music, and the performance aesthetic around it as well. In general, the performers tend to have common interests in creating something that is highly emotional through the use of subtlety, nuance, color, and shape; interests that I also share. I first met several of the singers in Bonnie and Clyde through working in the early music community and I am incredibly happy with the entire cast of Bonnie and Clyde.
I also just recently invested a huge amount of energy into another Industry project (Hopscotch) writing for another singer that I met through the early music community, Estelí Gomez from Roomful of Teeth. Every aspect of the vocal writing was written specifically for Estelí’s remarkable voice and unique talents. I find it incredibly helpful to have a specific singer in mind and write for that particular person when I’m writing for voice. It definitely changes what comes out on paper.
Does/did your composition process change at all when writing for this medium?
I don’t know that it changes my process very much, but I feel changed as a person. I still use a pen and a ruler and start with drawings of the forms of the works on blank paper, finding patterns and symmetries in the content of the material and making maps of the harmony (more or less my typical process). The only significant difference in process is that now the very first step consists of writing out the text several times by hand. I have to write it myself on paper in order to internalize the rhythm and flow of the words.
It is hard to describe exactly how I feel changed since the change is still quite new and also ongoing, but I feel that working with words and voices has unlocked something in my writing that I have been trying to find for a long time. It’s actually quite emotional to hear music that I composed come directly out of other humans’ voices – more so than hearing it through the filter of an external instrument. I don’t know where it will lead, but I have a feeling that all the work I’ve been doing with singers over the past year will have a significant impact on the future of my writing.
What else are you working on that you’d like people to know about?
I recently completed a 40-minute commissioned percussion quartet for the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, which will be premiered at Zipper Hall on April 10. They are exquisite musicians, and it took me over two years to write the piece, so I feel quite invested in this performance!
I’m also working on a small piano concerto for Richard Valitutto and wild Up, which will be premiered on April 26 at UCLA, as well as a chamber piece for MUSA Baroque in San Francisco, and of course Hopscotch, the upcoming collaborative Industry project.
Check out more of Andrew’s music at septimalcomma.com. Full details on First Take are up at http://theindustryla.org/projects/project_firsttake15.php. While Andrew is the final composer in this year’s First Take series, there’s still one interview yet to go: The Industry’s artistic director, Yuval Sharon, who will be featured here tomorrow at noon. See you then.
First Take: Nomi Epstein on TRANSLATION
All week we’ve been posting an interview a day with the composers on The Industry and wild Up’s First Take event, taking place on February 21. Most of those composers have written operas. Nomi Epstein, today’s guest, seems to have broken opera down and potentially created something entirely new.
Composer Nomi Epstein. Photo by Marc Perlish photography.
Describe the work you’ll be presenting at First Take.
TRANSLATION: a conceptual chamber opera is a work which distills the conceptual material of opera- a complex layering of translations-while dismissing the tradition of opera’s expressivity, dialogue, and narrative/dramatic structure.
The topic of translation has been important in my work since 2007 when I began dissecting the compositional process by looking at how an idea for a piece materializes or translates itself into an actual sonic piece of work (i.e. the various steps/types of translation this idea takes in order to get to its sonic point). I am fascinated by how the end point is so far from the beginning, clearly demonstrating distortion of the initial idea due partly to translational processes the composer can’t control -the brain processing and translating material/ideas into other formats, the interaction between the performer and the score, the sonic realization, the listeners perception, and what we can control- the type, specificity and character of notation.
When something is translated, it changes language, (be it spoken, structural, temporal, media type), and distortion is unavoidable. TRANSLATION raises questions regarding the nature of language, representation, perspective, (mis)communication, imitation, human thought process and the ontology of the individual.
Inherent in the process of translation, or changing one language into another, is some degree of loss of content, metaphor, or marker from the original language. In opera, a plot is translated into a durational structure containing text, sonic language (instrumental and vocal), characterization, scenery, casting, costumes, and acting, each attempting reinterpretation, communication, or translation of this original idea. Each of the choices the composer/librettist makes in how to notate and characterize the plot is a way of communicating or translating the initial idea, and translational processes follow on the part of the performers while changing the written (score and libretto) into the sonic.
In TRANSLATION there are also multiple translation layers. These layers can be perceived aurally and visually through a complexity of distorted relationships that the individual and group performers must navigate both from score directives, and performative means. The score challenges the performers to attempt their own forms of translation, but within very strict confines or structures that I have given them.
The most evident type of translation in this work is found between members of the ensemble. Individually, each performer will explain/define her/himself to the group of performers (albeit abstractly), after which the remainder of the group will attempt to read/understand the individual. While defining her/himself, each performer uses a language, whose syntax is created by the composer, unique to her/himself including the specificity of the voice/language, and the perspective of first person, among various other musical parameters. When others try to “know” this performer, they each must translate information using their own tools, interpreting their findings, and realizing them sonically.
What’s your background in writing opera, or for voice?
Though I haven’t written an opera before, I’ve written a lot for voice, and also several large scale structures.
Does/did your composition process change at all when writing for this medium?
No. For several years I’ve been focusing on translation as a structural inquiry and as pre-compositional thought, and have also worked with text score notation.
What else are you working on that you’d like people to know about?
Right now I’m working on a trio for Sonic Hedgehog, a US/European ensemble, a text score for my ensemble a.pe.ri.od.ic, and a large ensemble work for this year’s Dog Star Orchestra.
Here’s a solo piano work of Nomi Epstein’s, recorded by Eliza Garth.
Recordings of more of Nomi’s recordings are available at nomiepstein.com/Sounds.
First Take: Paul Pinto on Unintelligible Response
NEWS FLASH: we just found out that the Silverlake Neighborhood Council is hosting an open rehearsal with wild Up and The Industry tonight at 8. Full details are at http://silverlakenc.org/events/?mc_id=1811. Okay, here’s today’s interview.
Paul Pinto is next up in our series of interviews with the composers for The Industry and wild Up’s First Take 2015. You can read all of the interviews at newclassic.la/firsttake. I’m particularly excited for Paul’s work, as I’ve always found what happened to Thomas Paine after writing Common Sense totally fascinating. Apparently Paul follows Paine into the afterlife. Read on.
Composer Paul Pinto
Describe the work you’ll be presenting at First Take.
Unintelligible Response is one scene of a large opera-in-progress I’m developing called Thomas Paine in Violence. Broadly, the piece centers around the last few moments and made-up afterlife of the American Founding Father, pitting him against the noise of the modern American media landscape. In this scene, Paine’s Spirit, portrayed by Joan La Barbara is in a timeless, placeless radio station. She has just come off the air (whatever that means) and is having a rather colorful dispute with her peers in the control room (the instrumentalists), and the voices in their heads (the manchorus).
Here’s another excerpt from the opera, titled Radio Edit:
What’s your background in writing opera, or for voice?
I’m a singer, but I guess we all are. I’ve used my voice a lot in performance and I almost always begin a composition from the voice – even before I was writing my more “theatrical” tunes. When I was in undergrad and grad school, you know, I wrote some pretty mediocre operetta and songs (who hasn’t) while I was obsessed with music that was in the tradition of Britten. But I was a shitty storyteller, and for me, English just didn’t need to be performed that way anymore. So when I discovered Samuel Beckett, Harry Partch, Robert Ashley and some other fabulous experimenters, I started to care a different way about the English language, and specifically how to set it. So with the collectives thingNY and Varispeed, we started to create work together that experimented with text and sound. After eight years of collaboratively-written stuff, and a lot of shorter compositions, I turned to Thomas Paine and his fucked up afterlife to try to say something in my own style.
Does/did your composition process change at all when writing for this medium?
Not really. I started with a bunch of text, as usual, and sang it aloud a bunch of times, recorded it, listened back, did it again, etc. etc. Lots of edits later, I have a libretto, I have the timbres I want to work with, and I have pulse, a pace and a style. That’s, like, 70% of it. The last part is putting the notes in (probably 5%) and figuring out how to communicate it best (the most grueling and painful final 25%).
What else are you working on that you’d like people to know about?
Loads! But I don’t want to go off message. I’ve decided to write this opera with malleable scenes and versions, so that I can tour with it in bits, solo, or with one or two others while I’m still writing it. So there’s plenty more scenes and segments. I’m so incredibly fortunate that it’s been picked up by HERE, a producing partner in New York, so if anyone ever ventures out there, I’ll probably be doing something Paine related. Come say hello.
Coming up soon is thingNY’s new opera This Takes Place Close By and Varispeed and Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives Jersey City and Perfect Lives Philadelphia. If you enjoy some of this work, I have a mailing list. You can sign up at www.pfpinto.com.
Paul nailed the usual link to his site that goes here for us! What a sweet guy. Tomorrow in of our series of interviews with the composers on First Take we’ve got Nomi Epstein. Complete details on First Take 2015 are available at http://theindustryla.org/projects/project_firsttake15.php.
First Take: Jenny Olivia Johnson on The After Time
Next up in our series of interviews with the composers for The Industry and wild Up’s First Take is Jenny Olivia Johnson. You can read all of the interviews at newclassic.la/firsttake. Here’s Jenny!
Composer Jenny Olivia Johnson
Describe the work you’ll be presenting at First Take.
The After Time has many origins. In 2001, while remembering a series of suspicious suicides at my alma mater, I began drafting a darkly comedic, Law and Order-style opera about a series of collegiate ballerina suicides that all end up being connected to an underground sex club. Then two things happened in my real life: I lost a close college friend to suicide in 2002, and I witnessed a stranger’s suicide in Bobst Library at New York University in 2003. These events forced me to rethink my project, but more importantly, they forced me to confront my suddenly acute feelings of loss and disorientation.
Traumas are rarely explainable. They don’t easily conform to straightforward narratives. The After Time, which is cast in spare, electronic fragments against a backdrop of blurred VHS clips, is a meditation on this aspect of loss.
What’s your background in writing opera, or for voice?
I came to opera composition from both a noise-rock and a classical-composition background. I desperately wish I could sing, but the closest I’ve come is screaming not-so-accurate vocal covers of Liz Phair and Courtney Love in a dyke bar with my band a few years back. I’ve always been interested in writing vocal music (sometimes awkwardly called “art song”), and I usually write my own texts, so I found that in writing my songs I also had these weird, sort of fragmented emotional stories to tell. A mentor of mine saw an orchestral song of mine and used the term “kind of an opera” to describe it, so I began exploring what it would mean if I started calling what I do “opera.”
Does/did your composition process change at all when writing for this medium?
Once I started using the word “opera” to provisionally describe my work, I started finding myself arguing with or modifying my understanding of what the genre is in ways that I think have been productive. I often start by imagining a series of scenes, and then either strictly adhering to that format in ways that change the musical idea, or completely ignoring the need for a scene change, and letting scenes bleed into each other in strange ways. I think the stringencies and histories implied by the term “opera” have enabled me to think more experimentally than I otherwise might, merely because I often find that the stories that interest me most are ones that disrupt normative narration.
What else are you working on that you’d like people to know about?
One of my current passions is sound installation. I recently created an interactive piece for touch-sensitive bell jars, LEDs, and digital audio—”Glass Heart (Bells for Sylvia Plath)”—which was exhibited at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in 2013-14, and is scheduled for exhibition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 2017 as part of a special show on Plath.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/113711828]I’m also recording my first album, “Don’t Look Back,” which is a set of emotional chamber songs about adolescents and traumatic experiences. “The After Time” will actually be on that album! I ran a Kickstarter campaign over the summer for the album–more information about it can be found here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1193718748/jenny-olivia-johnson-dont-look-back-debut-solo-alb
Learn more about Jenny at jennyoliviajohnson.com. Come back tomorrow for the next installation of our series on First Take, an interview with composer Paul Pinto. Complete details on First Take 2015 are available at http://theindustryla.org/projects/project_firsttake15.php.
We now have a Facebook page
Even though Facebook won’t let me capitalize LA, please come say hello over at http://facebook.com/newclassicla.
Thanks!
First Take: Jason Thorpe Buchanan on Hunger
For part 2 of our series of interviews with the composers for The Industry’s First Take event, we caught up with Jason Thorpe Buchanan to discuss his opera, Hunger. Click here for part 1, and an overview of what The Industry are up to with this project.
Composer Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Describe the work you’ll be presenting at First Take.
Hunger is a multimedia opera in four parts with a libretto by poet Darcie Dennigan that is loosely based on the novel Sult by Norwegian author Knut Hamsun, which was a sort of precursor to stream of consciousness writing. The protagonist is a starving writer whose body and mind are gradually deteriorating, and this deterioration is incorporated into the text, music, electronics, and multimedia through fragmentation. One of the things we’ve been exploring is the idea of disorientation – the oscillation between intelligibility and unintelligibility, which reflects his state of mind, but also allows for a focus on a sort of filmic subtlety and claustrophobic or “internal” quality, similar to Hamsun’s writing in that you are really taken inside of his head. I’ve become extremely interested in constructing a situation that suggests multiple narrative threads without actually confirming any single scenario; a process that causes you to continually re-evaluate the situation with each piece of information you receive. There is purposefully a great deal of ambiguity, things left up to the participant to decide for themselves and use their imagination. For me, this is much more interesting and engaging than how narrative is typically treated in opera. For FIRST TAKE we’ll be presenting Part III for the first time in its entirety, and the first time with electronics.
What’s your background in writing opera, or for voice?
When I began studying composition, four of my earliest works were for voice – several sets of art songs & a choral work almost 10 years ago — so I’ve always worked closely with singers. During my undergrad I received a 2nd degree in Music Technology with a minor in Film, which involved many interdisciplinary collaborations including singers; two feature-length films as music supervisor, composer, & engineer. I spent a year in Germany on a Fulbright and while there collaborated with an American poet on a set of songs for soprano, baritone, & chamber orchestra. Most of my PhD coursework has also centered around opera or music theater, with my dissertation on the work of Georges Aperghis. Before starting Hunger, I actually hadn’t written any music for voice since 2010 so it was great to jump back into it. Strangely enough, I’ve just been commissioned for a choral work that will be written in the summer and premiered in November, so that will be an interesting challenge as well. I’m planning to work with again with Darcie Dennigan on the text and use the recording as germinal material for the electronics in Part IV of Hunger.
Does/did your composition process change at all when writing for this medium?
Absolutely, I think it changes fairly drastically with each piece, but the types of things I was thinking about when everything was planned, and the emphasis on fragmentation and deterioration, have definitely resulted in a process that is much more free than almost all of my other recent work. In Hunger I’ve allowed myself to react more intuitively to Darcie’s text, and I think the process has been much more enjoyable, but also challenging. I’m dealing with time in a different way; some sections contain events or checkpoints rather than a regular tempo or division, resulting in simultaneities rather than synchronizations, sort of like traditional recitative, but really taken from studying Boulez’ work Éclat. This allows the musicians to react spontaneously to one another, effectively ‘bending time’ around the singers who can then perform with greater freedom and intensity. Although the score is quite detailed, I am really thinking of it as a departure point that will cause another musical situation to take place.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSRjKcoRLWw]I’ve previously used quite rigid systems for both formal structure and the musical materials themselves. I try to sit and think about the sound itself for each and every moment, drawing from every combination I can imagine and then sifting through the sounds available to me. The flip side is that it is easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer number of decisions that must be made. In a work where you’re intentionally leaving a lot of space or ambiguity for interpretation by both the performers and audience, and dealing with multiple potential narrative threads, there really isn’t a “right” or “wrong” way to go about it, so that increases the number of musical decisions that have to be made. In fact, I think more and more that the issue I’m confronted with as a composer is that, if all sounds, actions, and compositional choices are more or less equal in terms of artistic merit, then that means that some choices become essentially arbitrary. In this day and age, when any artistic decision can be justified as equally valuable, what makes something more or less “good” than another thing?
What else are you working on that you’d like people to know about?
Well, Hunger has pretty much been my life full-time since September. We’re putting together a performance in NYC on the MATA Interval 8 Series with the [Switch~ Ensemble] and a really stellar cast including Lucy Dhegrae, Jeff Gavett, & Sophie Burgos, and there has been a lot of preparation for both of these performances with all of the technology involved. We’re also planning the New York and European premieres of the full opera in 2016/17 with Ensemble Interface. I’m just now starting on an orchestral commission that I received after winning Iron Composer 2014, which is for the BlueWater Chamber Orchestra in Cleveland and I’ll conduct the premiere on May 9th. It’ll be treated in a similar way to what I mentioned above regarding the choral work, as a sort of “digital overture” to Hunger so that the recording will provide germinal material for the electronics, augmented by the live amplified octet. Another commission to get started on is for percussion trio from Slaagwerk Den Haag in the Netherlands; two other works of mine will also be performed in September for Muziekweek as a nominee for the Gaudeamus Prize. Another project that’s been planned for ages but postponed due to my work on Hunger is for saxophone, electronics, and video, to be premiered at the World Saxophone Congress in Strasbourg on texts of Bukowski this July.
A website dedicated to Hunger, with lots of great coverage of its premiere in Darmstadt, is up at hungeropera.com. Tomorrow, we’ve got Jenny Olivia Johnson on her opera The After Time. Complete details on First Take 2015 are available at http://theindustryla.org/projects/project_firsttake15.php.