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Posts Tagged ‘opera’

First Take: Anne LeBaron on LSD: The Opera

On February 21, LA’s The Industry and wild Up present the 2015 edition of First Take at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Arts. Excerpts from six new operas will be performed throughout the afternoon, which starts at 1 pm and runs until 4:30. The event is free. Over here at New Classic LA, we’ll be featuring an interview with one of the composers every day at noon this week, and an interview with The Industry’s artistic director, Yuval Sharon, on Friday. Today, we begin with Anne LeBaron.

Anne LeBaron (photo by Steve Gunther)

Anne LeBaron (photo by Steve Gunther)

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

LSD: The Opera is a multidisciplinary interrogation of the powerful cultural, political, and spiritual ramifications set into motion by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann’s 1943 discovery of lysergic acid diethylamide. Unveiling obscure and extraordinary LSD-related friendships, networks, and operations that would contribute to an agitated period in American history, the opera unfolds in a panorama of dramatic events, encompassing scientific discoveries, murders, CIA classified experiments, festivities, and extraordinary meetings of minds. Characters include Albert Hofmann, Sid Gottlieb, George Hunter White, Aldous and Laura Huxley, Timothy Leary, Richard Albert (aka Ram Dass), Phil and Katherine Graham, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Cord Meyer, and Allen Dulles. A chorus (performed by instrumentalists from the Partch Ensemble) depicts groups of prisoners, divinity students, drug addicts, reporters, CIA trainees, and the Georgetown Ladies.

Once LSD was unleashed from Sandoz Laboratories, it became a much sought-after experimental drug that held promise as a weapon of mind control, coveted by the CIA and other intelligence agencies in the U.S. Simultaneously, psychiatrists were discovering how powerfully curative it could be in therapeutic settings when all else had failed. Yet LSD remains vilified as a negative force behind the social and political upheavals of the 1960’s. This opera seeks to present LSD from its origins, to its potential as a valuable tool for use in medical and carefully controlled settings. My wish is for LSD: The Opera to premiere in 2017-2018, coinciding with the 75th anniversary of its discovery.

The three scenes performed for First Take commence with the first acid trip ever experienced, now celebrated annually as Bicycle Day. Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who first synthesized LSD on April 19 in 1943, intuitively returns to his abandoned research with LSD-25 when he ‘hears’ LSD (a soprano trio: Lysergic, Saüre, and Diethylamide) calling his name. He ingests a tiny amount in his laboratory. Riding his bicycle home, accompanied by LSD, he hallucinates during the journey, crash-landing at his house. Desperate for an antidote, he calls out for milk from his neighbor, Mrs. R., who arrives (played by Lysergic, Saüre, and Diethylamide, bearing two bottles of milk. Albert hallucinates her visage as that of an “evil, insidious witch.” She commands him, “Drink!” (In the full version of the opera, Hoffman’s bicycle will serve as a recurring metaphor of the centrality of LSD to the large cast of characters in the opera.) The second scene, MK-ULTRA, opens with the despicable George Hunter White (hired by the CIA to direct Operation Midnight Climax), who in turn introduces the notorious Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA’s secret mind-control project MK-ULTRA. (Earlier in this scene, which we don’t represent in this performance, they have both taken LSD.) In a conference room with a flip board, Sid enthusiastically unveils the new LSD-fueled MK-ULTRA project to a group of CIA trainees, fervently trumpeting its patriotic value. In the third scene, Huxley’s Last Trip, Aldous Huxley, on his deathbed, asks his wife Laura to inject him with a dose of LSD to ease his suffering. She goes to retrieve the LSD, in an adjacent room, and is surprised that visiting friends are intently gathered around a television set while her husband is dying. Then, shocked to discover that they are watching the breaking news report out of Dallas, just after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, she decries the madness of it all. Returning to Aldous, she gives him the LSD injection and sings of the Clear Light, ushering him into his final trip.

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

I’ve always loved the medium of voice, and so naturally gravitated to opera. I’ve written several works for mixed chorus as well as male chorus and women’s chorus, along with settings of poetry, sometimes with unusual instrumentation such as that for Breathtails. This is a recent composition, a collaboration with the poet Charles Bernstein. The piece is scored for baritone voice, shakuhachi, and string quartet, and has been performed in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. I wrote an essay for Current Musicology about our process: http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:176447

LSD: The Opera follows my sixth opera, Crescent City. Earlier operas I’ve written include Sucktion; Pope Joan; Wet; Croak: The Last Frog; and The E. & O. Line.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygwSDJSrBdw]

Does/did your composition process change at all when writing for this medium?

My process changes for every piece I compose; in other words, the conception, scope, and context of each piece determines the process. However, writing for voices in an operatic medium provides an extremely rich palette of colors to draw from.

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

SongFest, the premiere art song festival in the U.S., held each summer at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, has offered a commission supported by the Sorel Foundation. Very excited about fulfilling this commission! I’m still deciding on the text to set for two singers and piano. The premiere is scheduled for June 21, 2015.

Check back tomorrow to hear from Jason Thorpe Buchanan about his opera Hunger. Full details for First Take are available at http://theindustryla.org/projects/project_firsttake15.php. More about Anne is up at annelebaron.com.

Interview: Joel Feigin on Twelfth Night

On January 30 and February 1, UCSB’s Department of Music will present the West Coast Premiere of Joel Feigin‘s opera Twelfth Night, based on the play by Shakespeare. The opera will be produced by Benjamin Brecher and directed by David Grabarkewitz, with Brent Wilson as music director. Full disclosure: Joel is a good friend of mine, and I study composition with him. With that in mind, I felt we could dig a little deeper into his work than the usual “what’s this piece about?” I heard the opera in Chicago in October, and it’s definitely worth driving out to Santa Barbara for, especially if you’re a fan of the play.

Tickets and event details are on UCSB’s website at http://www.music.ucsb.edu/news/event/532. Here’s our conversation:

Composer Joel Feigin

Of all of Shakespeare’s works, what attracted you to Twelfth Night to opera-tize?

Any play beginning “If music be the food of love, play on—give me excess of it…” is just begging to be turned into an opera!  What more could you ask for?  “music”… “love”… “excess”…

And I love the play and I love Illyria, and I love all the gender-bending—women and men falling in love with a girl dressed as a boy—and in Shakespeare’s time, it was even more extreme:  a boy dressed as a girl disguised as a boy in a love scene with a boy dressed as a girl—

Auden said that “a credible situation in an opera is a situation in which it’s credible for the characters to break into song as frequently as possible.”  By that standard, Twelfth Night is perfect—it’s in a place we’ve never heard of, and the only half-sane person in it is a Fool.

How much did you need to alter the source material?

The difficulty in converting a play into an operatic libretto is that it takes at least three times as long to sing something as to say it, quite apart from fun stuff using long notes or melismas.  But the time it takes to effectively unfold a story acted before an audience is likely to be fairly similar no matter what the medium.

As result, the libretto of a two hour opera needs to be something like a tenth the length of the play, a mere scaffolding. I was very lucky to work with Elizabeth Harr, a contralto who had sung with New York City Opera, and who had had dramatic training in England. My first attempt to turn Twelfth Night into an opera libretto would have taken twelve hours to perform and would have been horrible!  With Elizabeth’s help, I cut the text mercilessly: the hardest aspect of writing the work was destroying some of the greatest poetry ever written in any language.  After lots of cutting, I realized that my draft of the first act was a third longer than I wanted.  Shortening it to an hour demanded sacrificing still more wonderful poetry—and it turned out that almost all the compositional problems I had encountered arose out of unnecessary words in the libretto.

Could you talk a bit about your love of the opera genre?

Music has special powers that affect the structure of the drama.  Action tends to split up the ongoing flow of music, as the characters react to different events unfolding onstage.  But music develops its full power through a more continuous flow, which has tremendous power to express the feelings of the characters.  Therefore dramas with music tend to lead up toward sections in which the music can flow continuously for a while, as the emotions of the characters are expressed with a passion difficult to achieve on the spoken stage: for sheer visceral impact, the most magnificent speaking voice pales compared to a great soprano singing over an orchestra.  Music also allows characters singing simultaneously to be understood, whereas speaking actors can speak only one at a time if they are to be understood.

For example, the climax of Twelfth Night is the reunion of the twin brother and sister.  Many people are on stage, and several of these have had complex relations with one or both of the twins. In the spoken play they can only speak one at a time, but in an opera, they can all sing at once, and their varied reactions can be expressed both simultaneously and with more completeness.

After a recent conversation with a dear composer friend, I realized that what I love about opera is precisely what he disliked about it: the sheer power with which feelings can be expressed by the operatic voice.  For me, this power was a much-needed reassurance that we indeed could assert our needs and desires in spite of everything.  For my friend, this assertion was simply false: for him we have no such power. Some reassurance that we can have this kind of power is what I love.

This opera has been through enough challenging situations in its short history to write another opera about. Could you talk about some of the challenges of getting an opera produced?

When people say to me “it must be very hard to write an opera”, I always answer, “No, it’s easy.  What’s hard is getting it produced.”  The reason is money—opera is the most expensive art form using music, and is therefore most susceptible to fluctuations in the state of the economy and to the tastes of patrons.  The less money there is, the more opera companies just want to do Traviata, Boheme, and Carmen, and absolutely nothing else!  I know a fine music director of an opera company who had to fight with his board to do Rigoletto and Cosi.  For composers, the smaller the orchestra you have the better. The fewer singers you have the better. It’s better to have a predominance of female singers—there are a lot more of them around.

Twelfth Night is really bad on all those counts. Shakespeare is a mixed bag—he’s classy and prestigious, which can be good on big anniversaries of his birth and death, but it can also drive people away.  Doing Shakespeare also prompts the concern that operas in familiar, contemporary settings are likely to be more successful and “relevant” and therefore bring in more people.  Actually, I think they’re much harder to pull off.  It is more credible for characters to break into song in a time and place that’s strange than a time and place that are familiar, since we know perfectly well that the people we know usually don’t break into song.

The greatest commentary that has ever been done on the art form is the Marx Brothers’s Night at the Opera. It’s when it’s ridiculous that opera becomes sublime.  I have a fantasy of doing The Trojan Women and being asked why I wanted to do a play that’s 2500 years old.  I’d answer, “I want to be sure I’m up-to-date.”

You’ve spoken before about being pressured to write in a modernist style while you were in school, and finally, when studying with Roger Sessions, deciding to write for yourself instead of doing what your other teachers were saying. Do you think that that pressure to write in a certain way still exists?

I think that this was the experience of my whole generation of composers. The problem here is that it wasn’t exactly that I “decided to write for myself”— that doesn’t quite say it. What many of us rejected was the rigid ideology that there’s any one “right” way to compose music at any particular time.

The idea that only one kind of music should be written still exists to some extent in some places, but much less than it did.  But the problem that confronted my generation is something that arises all the time in different guises– we all want security, none of us have it or can have it, and it’s very comforting to feel that what we’re doing is exactly what “history” demands to be done.  Modernism began as a rebellion but then it became ossified—it became the “only way to go”, which is the exact opposite of rebellion.  But “new or old” is something little and “music” is something big; “new” isn’t the essence of what music is: the essence of music is silence—and part of silence is vibration, every vibration—old or new doesn’t matter.  What does matter, for the kind of music I’m interested in writing, is that the music we make needs to come from the center of who we are, or from as close to that center as we can get.  And this center is neither old nor new.

I think it’s important to consider the very real differences between science and political science on the one hand, and some kinds of art on the other, especially since, starting around the beginning of the twentieth century, science assumed a prestige that “art” didn’t have any more, and part of the reason is that it was very clear why science or political science needed to be done.  If the best measurements of the perihelion of Mercury don’t accord with your best theory, it’s clear that you need to figure out what the problem is.  If the disparity of wealth and poverty becomes very wide, something needs to be done to prevent very dangerous problems from arising in that society.

There are a lot of good reasons to write music, and what “needs” to be written will be quite different depending on its motivation.  Some kinds of art are fairly analogous to science or political science. It’s necessary and wonderful to explore new sounds or new ways of organizing sounds.  That becomes closer to a scientific or technological model: here’s something new—what is it?  What can be done with it? Or, if your motivation is to change the direction of society, you need to make music that will be effective in helping reduce the gap for rich and poor, or to end war, or whatever you hope to do.

But to write music only to write music is less clear, less familiar to our present world.  What do music do any of us, personally, with all the causes and conditions of our life—need to write?

Sometimes what you need to write makes some kind of historical sense—for example, young composers using their experience of rock and other genres of so-called popular music.  You play in rock bands—for your music not to be influenced by that would be crazy, and for you to deliberately deny that experience would be suicidal for you as an artist.

But for someone else, depending on the causes and conditions of their lives, if they grew up on Beethoven, it might be suicidal for them as an artist to feel that they had to use rock, let alone only rock, in their pieces.  Very few people today grow up on Beethoven, so very few young artists are likely to have that experience.  But if they do, they need to be true to their experience.  The point is to be true to your own individual experience, the causes and conditions of your own life; that is where you’ll be able to connect with the center of other people’s lives; that is where your music might come to be important to them—how they might come to love it—however few there might be.

With all that in mind, why do you write music?

All the things we’ve been discussing are excellent reasons to write music. But to make any one particular reason the “best” reason, let alone the “only reason” is a big trap.

What happened with Sessions was not exactly that I “decided to write for myself”—I’m not clear that I “write for myself.”  I write what I hear in my head—that’s all.

Mario Davidovsky tells a wonderful story from the early days of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.  One day a woman came and said that “she heard sounds in her head” and everyone said “wonderful!  You’re in the right place”.  Half an hour later, they had to take her to the mental hospital.

The best answer I ever got to the question “why do you write music?”—which I ask my students—is that “it’s a mental disease.”

Where did the sounds in this woman’s mind come from?  Where do any sounds come from? Where does anything at all come from?  They’re just there—there’s no answer for it. That is to say, they are the tao—they are an offering of the tao.

If someone is crazy enough to feel that a sound inside their head is worthy of offering to others, and if they are crazy enough to undertake the strenuous training without which it is impossible to offer it at least somewhat undistorted, then they are undertaking the business of being a maker of musical offerings.  A maker of offerings can only “just offer”—for me, an offering is made in the hope that it will be of value to others, but there’s no way you can be sure of it, and to be concerned about pleasing any particular audience—such as a subscription audience, or a composition professor, or a self-appointed new music guru—is just a distraction from the task of doing a good job. Talking to Sessions, it became clear that, at least for me, it just didn’t make sense—it was crazy.

The offering someone might need to make from the center of his or her being could very well be an offering of a new sound or a new method. The offering someone might need to make from the center of his or her being might very well be an offering of bearing witness to injustice.  As long as it comes from the center of their being it seems to me akin to what I am trying to do.

How does this affect your teaching?

It influences my teaching a lot, in that I don’t want to pressure my students to write any particular way at all.  I want them to write what they want to write. It’s hard, for the teacher, because students sometimes do ask what to write, (and sometimes, even as they’re rebelling, they’re asking what to write), and as a prof you’re always supposed to have an answer for everything.  But it’s impossible for the prof to know—only the student might be able to answer the question of what they need to write—and then it’s the koan of their life.

I’m often surprised by how many composers and performers in our area practice meditation – and was thankful for the lesson in it you gave me. From what you’ve already said, it would seem that your Zen practice is a huge influence on your composing.

I spoke of music coming from “the center of your being.” What is this “center?”

We can only find the center of our being within the causes and conditions of our own lives, and it is only when we know our stories so intimately that they fall away that the “center” is clarified.

And when the center is clarified, weird things become possible.  Stravinsky can say that he was “the vessel through which the Rite came.”  Homer can ask the Muse to “sing to him of the man of many ways…”

When composing is actually happening, it is Zen practice.  I could never have continued composing without Zen—it would be too hard and too painful.

The only sensible reason to make anything is that it fills a useful purpose.

So what is the purpose of music that is there only to be itself?

There is silence.  Within the silence there are vibrations. That is music.  Just music, just itself.

Music that is there only to be itself must be listened to in silence. This “silence” is an openness and readiness of the mind. The sounds of shuffling and snoring and yawning that pervade most concert halls are not silence.  Spontaneous applause, even as the music is being played, does not necessarily spoil silence.

Silence is simply “just this” vibration at “just this” moment.

There are 84,000 moments in a second.

“Just this” vibration at “just this moment” …

“just this” totally new vibration at “just this” totally new moment…

“just this” …

“just this”…

That is music.

That is music as an offering.

There is no reason for it.

It just is.

What do you hope listeners will come away from Twelfth Night with?

I hope they’ll love it.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Thank you!

More info on Joel is available at joelfeigin.com.

The Industry announces First Take 2015 composers, details

LA opera powerhouse The Industry just announced the list of composers who have been selected for their 2015 First Take event. The afternoon opera-thon gives first readings to new pieces and, if I’m not mistaken, one is usually chosen for The Industry to produce. 2015’s will be at the new Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 21 at 1 pm, with wild Up serving as house orchestra.

The composers are:

Anne LeBaron

Andrew McIntosh

Jason Thorpe Buchanan

Nomi Epstein

Jenny Olivia Johnson

Paul Pinto

A more detailed post about the project is up at http://theindustryla.org/projects/project_firsttake15.php

The Industry is also holding open auditions for singers interested in First Take and Hopscotch. Interested singers should submit their resume, headshots, and performance sample web links to auditions@TheIndustryLA.org.

Last day to vote for The Industry’s Hopscotch for #LA2050

The Industry, Yuval Sharon’s visionary opera company, has announced their next project. Hopscotch will be a mobile opera that takes place simultaneously in 18 cars driving around LA, with audiences either riding along or watching from a central hub. Six composers are involved, and, importantly, they’re in the running for a $100,000 grant.

You can help them out by casting a vote in their favor at http://myla2050create.maker.good.is/projects/HOPSCOTCH. There are just a few hours left.

Here’s a video that The Industry posted introducing the project.

Interview: Composer Don Crockett on The Face

Seems like all the buzz in town this week is about the upcoming premiere of Don Crockett’s opera, The Face, this Saturday at the Japan America Theater. A summary, which I’m entirely lifting off of the opera’s official site, certainly promises a lot to look forward to:

Set in Venice Beach, THE FACE is a deeply compelling story about the price of fame, desire and creativity. The central character, a once famous poet named Raphael, struggles with the recent loss of his lover/muse, while juggling the demands of a movie being made about his life and his increasing notoriety. The narrative is both passionate and raw in its candor, offering an insightful view of the human condition as experienced by an artist/poet.

THE FACE is a multidisciplinary chamber opera (featuring music, film and choreography), which was conceived of and created by USC composer – Donald Crockett and USC poet David St. John. The artistic team for the production includes the innovative Parisian stage director/film maker, Paul Desveaux and renowned European choreographer, Yano Iatrides.

THE FACE features an exceptional international cast including acclaimed British tenor, Daniel Norman as Raphael, American lyric baritone, Thomas Meglioranza as the movie producer Memphis, mezzo soprano Janna Baty as the director, Infanta and the talented young Australian soprano Jane Sheldon as the actress Cybele.

As you may have guessed, I got a chance to talk to Don about what’s on tap. Here’s what he had to say:

First off, congratulations on the project. I’ve only been hearing good things about it and can’t wait to hear it for myself. Tell us about the opera.

The Face got started about seven years ago when I approached poet David St. John about a possible collaboration on an opera. I had set his poetry in 2003 in a piece for The Hilliard Ensemble, and I very much responded to his language. David suggested his novella in verse, The Face, a collection of 45 poems with several possible narrative threads. I agreed that this was a great choice, and off we went. David constructed a narrative through-line in eleven scenes. He asked me to highlight lines of text in the novella which particularly spoke to me, and he always included them in the libretto. He was also very flexible about text order, repetitions, etc., which is a composer’s dream situation with a librettist.

The opera itself concerns a central character named Raphael, a once-famous poet struggling with the death of his lover and muse, Marina, who appears only on film (Raphael’s “home movies”) in the opera. A movie director seeks to make a movie about Raphael’s life, assisted by the producer, Memphis, the devil himself. The young actress Cybele is cast to play the role of the lost Marina. Raphael agrees to the deal, a Faustian pact, and filming begins. Intense emotions swirl around as the characters become involved with each other, and Raphael’s confusions and struggles continue. He finally reaches his low point, a dark night of the soul, before he can move on with some sort of reconciliation, a sense of rest. Through it all the producer, Memphis, observes and manipulates as a devilish master of ceremonies.

The Face has four singers, a silent role on film, and an ensemble of eight instruments: flute (with doubles), horn, percussion, guitar (classical, electric, and steel string acoustic), piano, violin, cello, and bass. It is in one act of eleven scenes, lasting about 80 minutes.

You’ve got a pretty long list of collaborators for this production, including contingents in France and on the east coast. What influenced your choice of teammates? Are there any new names or long-time friends working on this with you that you’d like to share something aboout?

In addition to David St. John, I am working with a French directing/lighting design team and a Boston-based new music ensemble. I had heard about the French artists from a soprano I knew in Los Angeles who was working with them. On a whim, I decided to travel to France to see their work, and I was strongly compelled to get them on this project. Yano Iatrides, director choreographer, Laurent Schneegans, lighting designer, and Amaya Lainez, assistant director, came over from Paris for the project. They have created a wonderful and quite amazing theatrical experience, with their colleague, stage director Paul Desveaux, who created the theatrical concept.

I have worked with Firebird Ensemble and their director, Kate Vincent, on several projects in recent years, and Kate decided to take the opera on as a project for Firebird Ensemble’s 10th anniversary season. It has been great to work with them, and this all creates a certain freedom when outside of the traditional opera house. Definitely a challenge as well, as Firebird doesn’t have the infrastructure associated with an opera company. They have done wonderful work as well.

Can you discuss what it was like to work with him to turn the novella into a libretto? Was there much back and forth between the two of you in the process?

In addition to what I mentioned above, we had numerous exchanges about how the characters would be fleshed out. We were essentially mining the novella for passages that would work for the opera, and creating clear characters out of this more vague (and beautiful) poetic landscape. Our working relationship has been very cordial throughout, and I now count David among my close friends.

The instrumentation you mentioned above sounds like an enormously fun combination to write for.

From the beginning, I imagined this work as a chamber opera with a small group of instruments. I chose them to offer a great deal of color possibilities and to suggest a certain heft of sound when needed. I viewed this as singers with a new music ensemble from the beginning, so having Firebird Ensemble be the “orchestra” in the work seemed a perfect solution. We also were able to bring Gil Rose on to the project as music director, and he is a very well-known champion of new American music, particularly as the music director of Boston Modern Orchestra Project.

As a teacher and department chair in one of the most prestigious music schools in the country, I imagine you must see a huge amount of diverse work coming through from students and younger composers. I know it’s a bit of an extreme generalization, but have you noticed any trends among you students’ work over time, or in recent times in particular?

A wide range of styles continues to be a hallmark of students who come to USC, and I am aware of this in recent American music in general. Looking toward European composers for ideas as well as a strong interest in melding “classical,” “vernacular,” and “ethnic” musics continues to be a common thread.

What’s your take on the new music scene in Los Angeles?

I think it is vibrant, and that there’s lots going on. It helps that the big institution in town, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has such a strong commitment to new and recent music, which they perform at such a high level. There’s always more going on than one (or I, at any rate) can get out to hear.

Thank you!

For complete details and tickets, visit www.thefaceopera.com.

Interview: Julia Adolphe on Sylvia

Julia Adolphe’s chamber opera, Sylvia, for which she wrote both the libretto and the score – and let’s be honest, she produced it too – was, in a word, killer. With lush writing for what could be sparse instrumentation, strikingly effective (and pretty damn clever) storytelling, and great performers (I was especially impressed by Matthew Miles’ handling of a challenging tenor part), Julia seriously hit her mark. (Full disclosure: she’s a friend, but so is pretty much everyone I talk to on here). I had hoped to talk with her about the opera shortly before its run at the Lost Studio Theater a couple of months ago, but she was so busy running things that we weren’t able to get it together in time. The good news: we held off until now so that I could use this opportunity to tell you that the entire thing is being broadcast on Sunday, July 8, at 7 PM on Kinetics Radio. Also, Julia’s band is playing tonight at Bar Lubitsch at 9. Listen in, and read on:

Sylvia is an opera set in psychodrama therapy, dealing with the repercussions of a young Jewish woman’s affair with a much older man, who is a family friend, and both of whom are descendants of holocaust survivors. This is heavy stuff. How did you go about approaching such a big, and perhaps sensitive, topic?

The story of Sylvia has been in the back of my mind since I was sixteen years old. It is based on a true story, on the experiences and struggles of a close childhood friend. It took me many years of sifting through the content to find the appropriate outlet, format, and structure to communicate such difficult and complex material. I wrote my first version of Sylvia when I was eighteen. At that time, the plot focused on how Sylvia’s past sexual abuse impacted her relationship with her boyfriend. It was mostly a play, with musical moments appearing alongside poetic dialogue. I did not realize at the time that I was trying to write an opera. Nor was I ready to really deal with the content head on. By emphasizing Sylvia’s current relationship with her boyfriend, I was leaving all of the dramatic, emotionally explosive material in the past, alluding to it but never exposing it. The character of Nathan, the family friend who abuses Sylvia as a teenager, was never mentioned by name and was not a character in the play. (He is still not mentioned by name in the chamber opera until the very end).

As an undergraduate, I concentrated on expanding my musical language. I continued to rewrite the story, this time introducing a scene where Sylvia attends psychodrama. When I showed this draft to Dr. Stephen Hartke at the beginning of my Masters program at USC, he seized on the idea of psychodrama as the framework through which to tell the entire story. I began researching psychodrama extensively and found that there were fascinating parallels between the goals of psychodrama and the goals of opera. Both seek to open the creative mind, to provoke new thought patterns and solutions, and to evoke a collective memory. Both are larger than life and engage the wildest parts of our imaginations. With the psychodramatic format as my guide, the structure of the opera fell into place. I was able to move fluidly through past, present, and an imaginary future. Finally, it became clear to me that my friend’s background as a second generation Holocaust survivor, and my own identity as a young Jewish woman, could not be left out of the story any longer.

I only know you as a composer and singer, but for Sylvia, you’ve written the libretto. A few questions here: is it based on anything? And what’s your writing background like? Did you study literature or theatre formally at any point?

I did study English as a double major at Cornell. From age nine to thirteen I was in a youth theater company in New York City, so yes I do have a theater background. I did theater in high school and always loved its collaborative nature. That was one of the main reasons I wanted to write an opera: I missed collaborating. I loved that magic you feel in a theater when you’re making something new.

What was the experience of working on this like? Did you establish an emotional connection with your characters?

I had the opposite experience, actually. I came into this project extremely attached to the characters for they were real people to me. I had to cast aside all of my personal opinions and write what was best for the opera. The greatest challenge was overlooking my personal contempt for the man who Nathan is based on. I was forced to identify with him, to make him three-dimensional, to delve into what motivated him and how each person has the potential to get to that point where they abuse another. Again, the psychodrama helped: Nathan as a person doesn’t really exist in the opera; he is conjured up and embodied by the doctors and the patients in the therapy session. The fact that the four singers take turns portraying Nathan, showing him in different lights, helped me distance myself from him a single, threatening entity as well as demonstrate how we all have the potential to slip into the role of abuser.

Were you working on the music and the libretto side-by-side, or did one come before the other?

The libretto came first. I did not start any of the music until I was completely satisfied with the libretto and could not imagine changing it. Then of course I started the music and ended up cutting about a third of the libretto. It became astoundingly clear to me which sections needed to go once confronted with the task of setting it all to music.

Tell me a bit about what went into pulling this all together. How hands on have you been in the production?

My role as producer began a full year before the performance you saw on April 14, 2012. Soprano Sophie Wingland had signed on as early as the fall of 2010. First, I chose the Lost Studio, an intimate black-box theater, as the venue. I secured a grant from the Puffin Foundation and a Subito grant from the American Composers Forum. I then selected the director Maureen Huskey, my co-producer Lester Grant, and booked my friend and colleague conductor Eric Guinivan, who is a very talented composer in his own right. We held auditions for the remaining three roles and were thrilled with our selection of baritone Mario Diaz-Moresco, mezzo-soprano Jessica Mirshak, and tenor Matthew Miles. The three of them were fellow Masters students at USC. I was very involved in the rehearsal process, perhaps too involved, but I had to wear a lot of hats since we were working on a tight budget.

How did you come into contact with Maureen Huskey? And what has it been like to work with her? Have you collaborated with directors before?

Maureen Huskey is a dream come true. The Dean of the Directing Program at CalArts put us in touch last summer. We began an email correspondence about Sylvia that transformed into long personal essays back and forth about the story’s content. Maureen had so many important questions for me that I had not yet answered. She had unbelievable insight into the characters, and she challenged me to think about them in a way I had not done before. Maureen brought the production to a whole new level. There was a tangible difference in the atmosphere once she entered the rehearsal process: she charged project with this fierce energy and excitement that brought the piece to life. Two of the singers told me that she was the director they had always dreamed of, and that she had changed them forever as performers.

Where do you see independent opera fitting into the scene here? Have you found an interested audience eager to hear this premiere, or have you had to fight to build one on your own?

I think as long as a story is compelling, engaging, and evocative, there will always be an audience, no matter the genre. As long as people can identify with the characters and change with them, even if only for the duration of the performance, the piece will be successful. I believe that independent opera needs to stop thinking of itself as a separate entity that is somehow more complex or higher than others. Opera is very simple: it’s drama, it’s music, it’s people, and the more inclusive opera becomes the greater an audience it will attract.

You’ve been in LA for a couple of years now, and (I believe) just finished your MM at USC. What’s next? Plan on sticking around?

I am actually staying at USC to get a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree. So I will be here for the foreseeable future!

Anything else you would like to add?

A full recording of Sylvia will be broadcast by Kinetics Radio, a station devoted to new music of all genres hosted by composer Thomas Kotcheff. Tune in at 7 PM PST on Sunday, July 8th to hear the performance!

For more on Julia and Sylvia, visit JuliaAdolphe.com and SylviaChamberOpera.com

This is a good weekend for independent opera in LA

This Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, you can catch three (THREE!) operas – two by local composers – at clubs around town, and let me tell you, you really should.

Friday, our friends (yeah full disclosure, but they’re great musicians whether or not we’re friends) in What’s Next? Ensemble are presenting a double bill at Royal/T in Culver City. The shows are Michael Gordon’s Van Gogh and Shaun Naidoo’s Nigerian Spam. Tickets are available here.

Saturday and Sunday, Julia Adolphe’s psychodramatic chamber opera Sylvia gets its premiere at The Lost Studio in Hollywood. Julia wrote the libretto herself, and it seems like pretty heavy stuff involving young love with family friends and memories of the Holocaust. It’s $5, and I hear Saturday night is already sold out. I’ll be there Sunday, so say hello. Complete details are at sylviachamberopera.drupalgardens.com, and we’ll have an interview up here with Julia sometime shortly after the show.

See you this weekend.