UPDATE:

I really enjoyed Rigoletto. It is the kind of Verdi that engages me. Aida, for all the adoration that people pour on it, hits me as dull. Rigoletto and La Traviata have the right amount of plot and scene separation for my brain. I’m a fan of segments. I think this is why Germanic operas are a bit lost on me.

The production was solid but I don’t really get anything out of the “update” to a Rat Pack era casino. There didn’t seem to be any reason for it, other than adding a stripper pole to the Duke’s bedroom in Act III. The Peter Sellars stagings of Mozart provided a very interesting context for the operas. Don Giovanni shoot up heroin, for example, makes a statement. But was great understanding of the story achieved by putting this in a casino? And updating the subtitles to include 50s slang? The story is simple enough as it is and it communicates in any setting. I didn’t find this staging particularly insightful.

I have GOT to get some comedies happening on this blog. I’m growing tired of all this morose tragedy. Wagner’s 200th birthday is this week, though, and he is not known for comedic flair. I suppose I could watch Meistersinger but it really doesn’t appeal to me. We will see what happens.

Some disclaimers: I’m not a fan of late-Romanticism. I appreciate it, I understand what people like about it, I know how the music “works,” etc. But it does nothing for me. I do not listen to it for pleasure. I don’t think the music is bad; it just doesn’t appeal to me. Like bacon. Bacon appeals to a lot of The Internet and I would sound pretty silly if I sat here telling you that bacon doesn’t taste good. As a vegetarian, bacon does not appeal to me.

What I can’t quite put my finger on, though, is WHY Elektra was so unappealing. Especially because I like Wozzeck. And this was the Vienna State Opera with Abbado, the same company that did my favorite production of Wozzeck. But there is something about Strauss operas that just irritate me. Everyone talks so much about the importance of Salome; so I study Salome, I listen to it, I watch it (a few times with different productions), I read about it. I can see why it was influential but it just doesn’t sound interesting to me.

So maybe I like Berg more than Strauss because Strauss “didn’t go far enough” in terms of breaking with tonality? So I decided to try Elektra which has a reputation for Going Farther than Salome. I understand German Expressionism, I get the imagery they were interested in, I know this is the stuff that launched the Second Viennese School (whose music I like). Elektra seemed to embody every possible stereotype that makes opera seem silly. This stage is DARK. As in, you can hardly see the people on the stage. The music is full of anxious activity but without focus. It reminded me of being in a car with someone who fills nervous energy by talking all the time.

So no, this was not something I enjoyed. I get why Strauss wrote it, I get why composers would be into it, I get why orchestras would be excited to play it, but I don’t get why singers would want to sing it. I’m really glad I’m doing this My Year of Opera. Not only am I learning a lot about the rep I’m seeing trends in my own tastes. Clearly I need to spend some more time with German opera to see if I can engage with it.

I’m planning a few “gimmick” months this summer. Instead of just randomly grabbing operas and seeing what happens, I’m coordinating a few themes. I think June with be “Shakespeare Month” where I watch 4 different Shakespeare operas (Adès’ The Tempest, Verdi’s MacBeth, maybe I Capuleti e I Montecchi, and Kiss Me Kate). I might do a Wagner month, too. I’m also curious about the same stories done by multiple composers. Romeo and Juliet, sure. Maybe Faust? I could probably pull together a Faust month…

I’m a big fan of Handel and this opera is the perfect demonstration of why. The music is vibrant and lively and just all around great to listen to. The man can write a hell of a melody. Bach may have been the King of Counterpoint but Handel was Emperor of Tunes. Yes, the constant da capo issue makes each aria about 4 minutes longer than they “need to be” by today’s standards but it didn’t really bother me. What I thought was funny was the disparity between the amount of libretto to the amount of music. The librettist writes 3 sentences, Handel makes 6 minutes of music out of it. Hell, give the guy an open vowel and he goes to town for a solid 90 seconds.

The story goes from zero to severed head in, like, nothing flat so there is that. Who says Baroque opera is boring? This plot was pretty exciting. Ptolemy reached levels of “Salome Crazy” at times. I’m pretty sure “Salome Crazy” is a real opera term. It is in this household, anyway. Anyhow, this is a long opera but it never felt bloated or unnecessary (other than the da capo convention, of course).

The production and staging were brilliant, in my opinion. I loved the “British Colonial Period” dress, the action on stage (great bookends of the cleaning crew at the start and end of the opera – yes, I just reiterated what “bookends” means), lots of dance, and just lovely to look at. Cleopatra was clearly having more fun than everyone else – and shouldn’t it be that way? And the makeup was so good it took me a while to believe that Cesare was being sung by a soprano.

Come to think of it, there is only one low voice in the whole opera: Ptolemy’s thug who delivers that severed head. Other than this one baritone, everyone was in the higher vocal range (all the other male roles were either countertenors a trouser role). What I also found interesting was Handel’s use of the orchestra. We don’t think of Baroque composers and orchestration very much but we should. Handel used a lot of different colors to set each aria which kept the overall consistent texture/tempo issues from getting stale. I don’t know how many of those choices were made by the ensemble instead of Handel but my money is on the big G. F.

Composers Represented:

• Berlioz (Les Troyens)
• Sondheim (Company, Into the Woods)
• Donizetti (L’elisir d’Amore)
• Rossini (La Cenerentola)
• Berg (Wozzeck)
• Whedon (Dr. Horrible, Once More With Feeling)
• Britten (Peter Grimes, A Midsummer Night’s Eve)
• Zappa (200 Motels)
• Verdi (Falstaff)
• Sullivan (Pirates of Penzance)
• Mazzoli (Song from the Uproar)
• Poulenc (Dialogues des carmélites)
• Massenet (Manon)
• Adès (Powder Her Face)

Composers With the Most Operas So Far:

• 3 way tie between Sondheim, Britten, and Whedon

Language Distribution:

• English – 10! (I’m surprised at this)
• French – 3
• Italian – 3
• German – 1

Number of Operas I Had Seen Before: 6

Number of Live Operas: 2

Longest Opera So Far: Les Troyens

Shortest Opera So Far: Once More, With Feeling

Biggest Surprise So Far: I like bel canto. And French opera.

Favorite Operas So Far: Dialogues des carmélites, Company (new) Pirates of Penzance (rerun)

Biggest Disappointment: Zappa’s 200 Motels

I’ve had a real hard time connecting to Adès’ music. It has been brought out a few times as “important stuff to listen to!” and “look what a great young composer he is!” and such. His music has never made a huge impression on me. It is always cleverly orchestrated but I couldn’t get anything past that. When I encounter music that I “don’t get” I usually put it on the back burner of my mind and try listening to it again. At some point, something usually clicks and even if I don’t like the music I have a sense of why the composer was doing what he/she was doing.

Having said all that, when I found there was a DVD to this piece I knew I had to see it. I think the case of Adès using popular  music is drastically overstated. Yes, it is sort of present some of the time. What I liked was how he got such great colors from a small number of performing forces. And some of the best “sound effects” moments came with knocking on doors, the masturbation scene, the seduction/bathroom blowjob scene (which was about as graphic as you could possibly make it without going into actual pornography — and now all the CMU students will race to the library to check out this DVD), etc. I also found the repetition of the word “Madam” very clever. It was a punctuation in the libretto that worked quite well.

At first, I didn’t really care about the characters. I figured maybe it would have made more sense if I was British and had that royalty stuff more in my cultural mindset. Nope. As the opera went along I found the Duchess to be a very sympathetic character (like Anna Nicole, hey, didn’t I just say that?).

The soprano part is a killer. The maid/friend/maid/lover part has some freakishly high stuff in it. But the aria “Fancy” was one of my favorite musical moments. And the way Adès makes the chamber orchestra sound like a phonograph at the end? Brilliant.

The DVD also had an hour-long documentary about Adès which I watched. I feared that it was going to be obsequious and precious but I was wrong. His music makes a LOT more sense to me know after I watched it. Adès is an introvert. The only person his music needs to make any sense to is himself. I spend a lot of time around extrovert composers who collaborate with lots of people, have outgoing personalities (personally and musically) and are interested in engaging lots of people. Adès is not concerned with these things. I can understand his music quite a bit more with that in mind.

I also found out I can rent his opera The Tempest from the MET website. I will do so and report back.

Another French opera and some references to nuns early in the first act (Manon is going to join a nunnery because she is a wild child at home) made me very skeptical of how the whole thing was going to play out. After Manon flirts with the old man and ditches her brother to run off with a guy she just met (did they steal that carriage or just tag a long?) I had horrible visions of what was going to happen to this girl. I figured she’d be an opium-riddled prostitute by Act 3 and by Act 5 she’d probably make Marion in Requiem for a Dream look like a cheery ending.

Speaking of which, this opera didn’t need 5 acts to tell this story. It got a little long. It goes to show how very, very little story can get spun into too long of an event. On the whole, it was a very chaste and polite version of “Anna Nicole,” which is an opera I really enjoy.

The music was very pretty, lots of strong ensemble moments and good melodies for the voices. It is a “singers’ opera” in my mind: I think singers love doing it more than people like watching it. The opposite pole on that spectrum would be a “composers’ opera” in which composers like it more than singers/audiences.

Am I right in thinking that there are other operas with the same plot? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen an opera titled Manon Lescaut out there somewhere. I’ll probably not see it (unless you all think I need to). I would like to see some of the same stories made into operas by different composers, though…

I transfered to the University of Kansas as a junior and my first semester there I enrolled in “Electronic Music I” which was a required course for all composition majors and taught by Dr. Mattila. It was a small class of maybe 8 students. The first half of the semester was on analog synthesis (we used an ARP 2500) and the second half was digital synthesis (DX-7). I’m going to point out that this was in 1994, FWIW. Our textbook was a coursepack: the ARP 2500 manual and the DX-7 manual. I remember almost nothing about class time other than a few presentations we had to given on various electronic pieces and composers. My students who are currently taking my spin on this very class will find that hauntingly familiar.

What I DO remember and what was the most significant and influential about the course was the studio time. We never had to compose a piece for the class, just create sounds. The students were paired up and for several weeks Ian Burns and I would sit in front of the ARP 2500 for about 2 hours a week, screwing around with the thing until we could get awesome sounds to come out. We didn’t fully know what we were doing but that didn’t stop us. I remember once we created an incredibly complex patch and then I asked “What if we ran this whole through (something I don’t quite remember what)” and Ian paused, then matter-of-fact-ly said “We’d invoke Satan.” Naturally we did it. Satan did not appear. Ian also managed to make a patch on the DX-7 that generated sounds Dr. Mattila couldn’t figure out. I’ll probably blog about Ian another time. He remains as influential in my musical life as any of my teachers.

I was the only student who took the “Electronic Music II” course the following semester. My task was simple: compose two pieces; one just for fixed media and one for performer and fixed media. Again, this is going to sound familiar to my current students. I had free access to the electronic music studio and each week I got a lesson with Dr. Mattila. I would talk about a piece of electronic music and then we would talk about what I was composing.

Remember that the first semester course never talked about recording any of the sounds we made. There were 2 reel-to-reel decks in the lab, a DAT machine, and 2 cassette decks which were all wired into a patchbay nobody other than Mattila understood. Other than the ARP 2500 I had the DX-7, an SY-77, and a TX816 with maybe a MC 50 as the interface? Somewhere along that semester we also picked up an ASR-10 sampling keyboard. I had no idea what I was doing.

None.

My first piece was made by inputting one idea into the sequencer and playing it back through the TX816. I’d record it onto cassette then play the cassette back and run the sequence again with new sounds, different tempo, and such. I did that overdubbing maybe 12 times then I played one pass live on the SY-77. I called the piece Stretto, of course, and had to EQ out all the high frequencies to get rid of the deafening tape hiss. The second piece I did in a similar way but I used the ASR-10 almost entirely. It was a setting for voice and tape on Louise Bogan’s poem “Sub Contra” which I fell in love with in a poetry class around that time. I make a color-coded score and everything. Iended up not liking the vocal part (nobody’s fault but my own) and playing both works as tape pieces on my senior recital.

In essence, a lot of my electronic music teaching is very hands-off. Largely this is due to Dr. Mattila. He let me play with the gear, figure out a way to work, and just encouraged me to explore and create. I saw the potential of the medium and made things happen in my own way. In my own teaching, I am hesitant to show certain techniques or software because I don’t want my students to blindly use the things I use. I encourage curiosity and play (or try to). We focus more on art than on tech and this is intentional. At some level, we all teach the way we were taught. Thanks, Dr. Mattila, for just trusting me to find my own way. It worked.

I didn’t know a lot about the story before I watched the opera. Something to do with nuns. The English was hard to understand but I picked up the big issues okay: nervous girl enters a nunnery and has a freaky conversation with the dying abbess. Nun things were happening. Then I grabbed a plot synopsis online somewhere in the middle of Act 2. That, of course, changed everything. Context matters.

Then came Act 3. Oh. My. God. Musically this opera was incredibly strong. Then the drama and the way the music supports the drama. The final scene where (spoiler alert) each of the former nuns willingly walks to their death and the guillotine. The way the choir of nuns diminishes to single voices is creepy and powerful and emotional and everything that opera is supposed to be. I wondered why the choir wasn’t really featured throughout the opera. I figured that hey, Poulenc has a bunch of nuns around, surely there will be big choir moments. Instead, he really reserves the choir for this perfect scene. A lot of choral activity before the final scene would have diminished its impact.

Here are a few of my favorite tweets from the experience. In chronological order.

• This is pretty much what I want my opera to sound like. There is a freshness to his harmonies but very singable.
• What is the conventional wisdom on why this opera isn’t done more? Too serious? Not showy enough? Too new?
• Wow. This dying nun has just gone ‘Salome Crazy.’
• These nuns are not the same order that produced Maria in the Sound of Music, I know that much.
• Since all these nuns are going to be beheaded, I’m going to self-medicate with cinnamon Teddy Grahams.
• Egads! What is that sound they are using for the guillotine?
• You’ve got to be kidding me.
• I think this ties with Wozzeck for bleakest ending ever.
• I need a drink. And a hug. And a puppy.

http://blog.finalemusic.com/post/2013/04/11/Finale-vs-Sibelius-Multiple-Staff-Sizes.aspx

I’ve been working with Finale since 1992 and I’m not interested in switching programs. I can make scores that look the way I want them to look; sometimes against Finale’s wishes. I spent about 10 minuts with Sibelius 7 and was able to do what this blog says “..you won’t see this in music created in Sibelius.” Maybe I’m some kind of savant of notation software? Or maybe I was just able to google the information?

I find the discussion of Finale vs. Sibelius to be as useful as debating what brand of eraser to use. You can make good and bad scores in both programs, it all depends on the user. And I’m hoping all those comments which were added correcting this oversite were sent to a moderator and weren’t deleted because they called the question.

UPDATE: all the comments are up, the author has admitted his ignorance and has deleted the post. But let’s not rest on a single victory. There is still much to do…