Recent Event :
"The Golden Gate" concert performances Saturday January 19, 2008 at 6:00 p.m. (note the early time) at the Rose Studios, tenth floor of the Rose Building at Lincoln Center; and Sunday January 20 at 8:00 p.m. at South Oxford Space, next to BAM in Brooklyn. Come hear the complete first act (ca. 55 minutes) from "The Golden Gate," an opera in progress with music by Conrad Cummings and libretto from the novel in verse by Vikram Seth adapted by the composer. This performance is a production of American Opera Projects. Also on the program are excerpts of a new work based on the songs of a famous Soviet era dissident singer-songwriter. On Saturday you can stay for the second show, a concert performance of Steven Schwartz's new (and first) opera "Seance on a Saturday Afternoon." Tickets are $20 ($15 students & seniors). Call AOP at 718.398.4024 to reserve, which is highly recommended as both shows could sell out.
More Thoughts Along the Way:
January 21, 2008 – Wow! It feels like a year ago that I left for that last rehearsal. Ned Canty did miracles in 35 minutes of staging, giving the singers just enough of a structure to let their acting instincts fly. Chocolate chip cookies provided generously by Bunny's Bakery cut through lots of the last rehearsal tension we all felt. The space at Lincoln Center was gorgeous to look at and sounded great. Rehearsal done by 4:00, just two hours to pace around outside and get a coffee and try to meditate away my nerves before the 6:00 curtain. Total sell-out crowd, the room packed, and pretty much a who's who of New York opera and musical theater. An electric buzz in the room, not just me. The first piece, Unruly Horses, was passionate and funny in equal measure, and got a deservedly warm response. I moved to the back of the hall for Golden Gate so I could sort of watch how the audience stayed with it or not. The performance knocked my socks off. Yes, there are some fluctuations in focus, a couple of moments I need to figure out how to make sharper, but the 55 minutes flew by. The audience seemed to make an awful lot of noise at the end, and the response afterward, including from some of the movers and shakers, was way more than polite. After a dinner break we all went back in for Stephen Schwartz's Seance on a Wet Afternoon, which will be coming to an opera company near you very soon, I predict. Skillful, dramatically riveting, perfectly paced.
Sunday's show was that much more relaxed and nuanced from the wonderful cast. In ten degree weather outside we had a warm and very attuned audience, who kept asking these really fascinating questions during the post-performance talk-back. They kind of wouldn't let us go, like they all had more to say.
I think the act works great. The next three weeks I'll be meeting with my wonderful team of advisors, tuning up the act two libretto, then it's back to house arrest to finish act two by mid summer.
If you don't see too much of me here for the next couple of months, don't worry. I'm keeping busy! Thanks for being along for the ride.
January 19, 2008 – I'm just about to leave the house for the final rehearsal before tonight's showing. Monday's and Thursday's rehearsals were solid; Thursday I got to hear the first complete runthrough of the act. I'm still not sure whether the fourth (of five) scenes is tight and focused enough. The performance will be excellent, I'm just not sure the story is moving right yet. We'll have twenty minutes this afternoon to work out whatever staging there's going to be, mostly when people stand up and sit down. I'm nervous and excited, even though the only thing I have to be nervous about is whether I trip taking a bow at the end.
January 12, 2008 – First rehearsal last night, and to my surprise they wanted me to be there. It's great to see Grant Clarke and Joshua Bouchard, the John and Phil from the Manhattan School production last year; Caroline Worra, who did Liz the very first time any of the opera was performed, a year and a half ago; Daniel Neer who sang and acted with amazing presence for my composing opera class in the fall and who will be a dynamite Ed, and Jessica Miller who looks to have just the right ferocity and vocal nuance for Jan. I sat behind the singers so they couldn't give in to the temptation to look at the composer to see if he looks happy. Working on the first half of the act felt like coming back to an old friend with a fresh look; the second half felt brand-new. I've been worried about the shape of that second half, but the initial impression from last night is that it balances out fine. After the reading we did in September I knew I needed more moments for Jan in the second half, and I wasn't sure whether I'd been able to find enough of them. I think I may have succeeded there. Still, I'm being very Bhuddistic about it, deferring any thoughts of revisions until at least next Thursday after two more long rehearsals. As always, Steve Osgood feels like my mind-reader, giving notes and suggestions at the same moment they occur to me. Chairity Wicks is a poet of a pianist. And we're blessed with the presence of Kathryn LaBouff, the highly respected diction coach for Juilliard opera. There is an even better chance, thanks to Kathryn, that all the words are going to be heard without supertitles.
By the way, Caroline Worra was one of three singers in a remarkable evening of one-character operas by Lance Horne on Wednesday night at the Zipper Theater, with libretti by Mark Stephen Campbell. What a singer and actor she is, and the pieces were better than first-rate.
January 9, 2008 – Yikes! Where have I been since March 20 2007? Here's the short answer:
April and May – many meetings with opera and music theater professionals to help chart the production future of the Golden Gate. Big question was (still is) whether it's a better fit for an opera house or a theater. So many people who came to the Manhattan School showing in March felt the piece just had way more immediacy than an opera-house piece; some felt it could have the kind of beyond-opera-audience appeal that could support an Off-Broadway run. No clear answer, and anyway after a couple of months it was clear enough that the one thing I needed to do was finish the damn thing. At the same time, Juilliard students were outdoing themselves with their final two pieces for the year, a duet for tenor and bass singers with piano (they share a memory, they have a conflict, they resolve to put aside the conflict in favor of unity in pursuit of a common goal) and a duo for flute and guitar (a melody slowly emerges from running sixteenth notes with lots of metric options). For the fourth year in a row, class members organized and produced their own concert at Don't Tell Mama's in the theater district. They even had a little money left over after paying the instrumentalists and the fee for the space. Way to go!
June, July and August – house arrest to finish act one of Golden Gate. Long bike rides every morning up and down the Hudson River Park, followed by five or six hours at the composing desk. With Steven Osgood's help, I set up a private reading for the first week of September, which gave me an August 15 deadline to deliver the score to the singers. Made it barely. To celebrate, rode all the way across the George Washington Bridge and through the Palisades. Robert at singer-songwriter camp the week I was finishing; no fiddle and dance camp for me this summer, but a happy three weeks in July teaching music to the high-schoolers in Juilliard's Summer Dance Intensive.
September – Steve and singers did such a great job with the reading, which made really clear how much I had to shift around and revise the second half of the act. On the Juilliard front: in addition to the composition course I got to begin teaching a one-year Composing Opera course, which has been a delight. Seven class members, all on a very high level (more than a few composition MA's among them), and four solo pieces in dramatic forms: aria and cabaletta for soprano, passacaglia lament for mezzo, romantic aria for tenor, mad scene for baritone.
October and November – house arrest again to revise the second half of the first act. Delivered on time in December. Revisions are a lot harder for me than doing it the first time. I have to enter into the same mental space I wrote the thing in, get all the notes back into my head, and tackle whatever the problem was that certainly didn't have an obvious solution the first time or I wouldn't be revising.
January – first rehearsal is this Friday. As usual I'm pawing the ground I'm so anxious to hear how they're doing. I promise to report.
Past Events:
"The Golden Gate" semi-staged workshop performance, Sunday March 18, 2:30 p.m., Manhattan School of Music. Come hear and see the first two scenes (ca. 30 minutes) from "The Golden Gate," an opera in progress with music by Conrad Cummings and libretto from the novel in verse by Vikram Seth adapted by the composer. This semi-staged performance is a co-production of American Opera Projects, Opera Index, and the Manhattan School of Music Opera Program. Also on the program are two additional operas in progress from American Opera Projects and Encompass Music Theater. Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door; call 212.721.9828 to reserve.
Thoughts Along the Way:
March 20, 2007 – Still floating from Sunday. The performance so exceeded anything I thought possible in the limited time we had. Did I say something a couple of weeks back about realizing that writing an opera is giving a gift to the cast and production team? Guess what – they give the gift back to you, with interest, at the performance. They gave me a piece so much more detailed, so much more emotionally nuanced, and so much more beautifully musically executed than I ever expected. Plenty of practical things learned: where the audience laughs (lots of places, but not necessarily where I thought they would); the actual dramatic topology of what I've written so far – where the high points are (end of scene 1), where the valleys are (not sag spots, but quiet times that allow for the windup to new high points, surprisingly including the end of scene 2); and where the audience catches every word and where they don't. This last is of particular interest. The composer Emma Lively was telling me today that it's the difference between an American opera and a piece of completely sung theater: if it's American opera, you assume there will be surtitles and you write as big and as high as you like; if it's completely sung theater then it really matters not to have surtitles and for every line to be heard, even for the soprano. I think we had between 70 and 80 percent intelligibility on Sunday; I need to go for at least 95. Opera America is doing a panel next week about composer and librettist in the rehearsal process. I have one conclusion to draw from this production: trust your collaborators and stay away until the very end. I'm sure I would have freaked out with some of the astoundingly inventive approaches Caren took if I'd seen them when she was first trying them out; seeing them fully realized it was incontrovertible that they were brilliant solutions. That's all for now; maybe some news of my Juilliard class later this week. Thanks for following the road to March 18th!
March 16, 2007, 6:45 p.m. – I'm speechless, sitting on the F train going to Robert's house. At noon I watched Caren work with six-year-old Jackie as Paul and bass Joshua Bouchard as Phil, Paul's dad. Caren's a mom of a five-year-old. She, conductor Steven Osgood (father of a three-year-old) and Joshua worked so beautifully with Jackie. I'd been totally ready for a grownup to do the role, but with Jackie the emotional stakes are so much higher, you feel her liveliness and vulnerability so acutely. Then lunch break and pizza for everyone, the first chance to get to know the cast a little. Then two complete runthroughs. Like I say, I'm speechless. I don't think a composer could dream for more. Grant Clarke as John – handsome, stiff, prickly, but so vulnerable underneath; Yoosun Park as Liz, radiantly beautiful, peaceful and self-assured; Joshua as Phil, as emotionally open as John is closed; Margaret Peterson's Jan – all passion and anger and John's perfect match in prickliness; and Jeff Nardone's Ed, all desire, affection, and confusion. Ray Calderon, Colette Boudreaux, Jorell Williams, and Shelly Wade – covers for Ed, Liz, John, and Jan – are as much part of the stage action as the principals. Charity Wicks on piano, always part of the action, lyrical one moment, rocking out on the nine-foot Steinway the next. I know I wrote the music and arranged Vikram Seth's words, but I'm so taken up in the experience of watching that I forget I'm anything but audience. I'm so not nervous. When we were all done I told the cast that whatever life the piece has after this, they created the roles for the first time on stage, and the roles will always belong first to them. Paul Rudnick once said about screen writing that you have to be careful what you put on the page. In Addams Family Values he wrote one sentence: they have dinner in an elegant, decaying French restaurant. When he arrived on the set, there was a couple of hundred thousand dollar's worth of very elegant, very decayed French restaurant, all because of one sentence he wrote in the screenplay. There's no couple of hundred thou here, but it's like that – the sheer complexity of the logistics, even in this no lights, no set staging: the beer bottles, the concert programs, the sweater and tie, the telephones, the blanket with the Last Supper on it. What a strange undertaking an opera production is. Lucky me! Tomorrow is a day off, then our one single crack at it on Sunday. Yeow!
March 12, 2007 – Break is over, everyone is back for staging rehearsals all week. I made it to MSM half an hour earlier than anticipated, stuck my head through a crack in the back door to Greenfield Hall, saw everybody on stage doing acting exercises, slipped invisibly out and had a coffee in the cafeteria until the time I was supposed to be there. Small tragedies for a composer: on my last opera, I did all the improvs along with the cast the first two days, then came that moment when the director said, "Conrad you can't continue, we're actually developing the staging now." Sidelined. So I'm wary of acting warm ups. Everyone was on break when I got back, warm greetings all around, and then the first complete sing-through off book and the first hearing of the lead baritone. All amazingly strong. They're sounding less and less like opera singers, more and more like singing actors with a story to tell and characters to be and language and music to have fun with. I had a short page of notes for Steve, then they started actual staging. I lurked at the back of the house, coat and hat and backpack on, unable to leave. Darn, they are really staging this baby! There's Golden Gate Park, there's the Chinese restaurant in the Mission, there's the red Frisbee, there's the beer and the rice! Then I started to feel really uncomfortable and figured it was time to leave. In fact, I felt like my clothes were being taken off and new ones put on me. That's because, try as I do not to, I'm always imagining a staging as I compose the stuff. Caren's staging is fantastic, vastly better than anything I could have thought up, but it's DIFFERENT, it's clashing with what I'm used to imagining. Talk about feeling naked. Time to leave. I don't want to see the process, I'll wait to see the result. Letting go, letting go, letting go.
March 2 , 2007 – The final music-only rehearsal today, then the singers take a one-week break, and staging starts a week from Monday. We worked for two hours with everyone except the baritone who was stranded by the subway flood. Did an almost-complete run through at the end. It's really, really hard to accept how unnecessary I am right now. It just never occurred to me before that writing an opera is making a gift, giving the entire team that's going to stage it, from principal singer to conductor to stage hand, an opportunity to do the thing they love best in a new environment with fresh challenges. The couple of times I opened my mouth either didn't help or were matters Steve was about to work on right then anyway. Frankly, it's hard to believe anyone will be applauding me when the performance is over because I feel so invisible now. But. . . not entirely invisible: who else is going to do the last-minute rewrite or the extra twenty seconds of transitional music or the new and better approach to the high note than me?
Talk about an opera as a gift: Juilliard Opera Workshop's production of The Mother of Us All tonight. All undergraduates, a masterful staging by Ed Berkeley, and complete honesty and commitment from every singer. I wasn't the only one laughing with delight and then getting all choked up. Reed Woodhouse summed it up: "The opera is about America being challenged to live up to what it says it is. That's what makes it alive in any decade it's produced." The right to vote, the right to marry. Current as you could wish.
March 1 , 2007 – First musical rehearsal of "The Golden Gate"! Actually, first one they let me come to, which is fine because singers need to get comfortable with just singing the stuff and a composer sitting in the corner never ever made a singer feel comfortable. But there are holes in my floor from where I've been pawing it the last four weeks, waiting. Today was with the bass and tenor, singers Joshua and Jeff, characters Phil and Ed, including their boy-boy love scene. It's spooky how well Steve Osgood reads my mind, and it's that much clearer why I don't have to be there all the time. He gets the music, the style, the intent, and he's so technically and psychologically attuned to the singers that they get it too in short order. What a luxury for me! I think the chemistry between the two guys will be fine – they seem to be forgetting who they are and getting very much into who they need to be. Mastering the dramatic specificity of the music seems to be the route to becoming the characters. Weird to think that so much of the character and interpretation is set by the end of the musical rehearsals, before anything happens with staging. Actors would never ever work this way.
February 28, 2007 – Actually seeing Eugene Onegin onstage might be a good idea considering that "The Golden Gate" is closely related to it and even shares some musical material. What a production at the MET (standing room for Act I, fabulous orchestra stubs pressed into our hands at intermission). Onegin is such a dark hole of a character. There's no sense that he has a life ahead of him at the end. Moving without pause from the duel to the ball as this production does is blood-chilling.
February 27, 2007 – These Tuesday nights are getting out of hand: tonight thanks to V. and E.'s amazing generosity and connections, we got to see "A Chorus Line." Sure, saw it twenty-five years ago, but it's still so good. The famous songs that have been endlessly sentimentalized are anything but in their original setting – tough, clear, and honest. It's remarkable how fast you forget which eight get chosen and which don't, because they're all stars in the finale, which is how life ought to be.
February 26, 2007 – Blair McMillen (piano) and Yonah Zur (violin) played the HARMONIC GROUNDSWELL pieces (see below) like a single angel. Little whiffs of my figured bass at the start of some of the pieces but completely original dramatic impulses and some absolutely shocking continuations. Now it's on to CONCERTO GROSSO BIZARRO for trumpet, trombone, clarinet, bassoon, violin, and cello – bizarro just because the combination of the six is so outlandish and because there have to be soli passages with combinations like trombone and violin or bassoon and trumpet.
February 24, 2007 – Olga Neuwirth's opera "Lost Highway" at McMillen Theater, the exact opposite of "Company": everything about the subject – the David Lynch movie – is blurry and uncertain, and you never know exactly whether you're hearing direct sound from the orchestra, real-time processing of it, or pre-recorded material. The uncertainty works perfectly in context, and the show, by my honorary alma mater Oberlin Conservatory, put many a New York experimental opera production to shame. Sound design by Tom Lopez was nothing short of magical, same for direction by Jonothan Field.
February 20, 2007 – Another amazing Tuesday night, this time "Company" on Broadway. As life-changing as "Sweeney Todd" was. Having the actor/singers also be the orchestra has such a powerful effect. They're not in a world you're observing from the outside; they're presenting their world very directly to you. And there's never any doubt about whether you're hearing a real instrument or a sample.
February 15, 2007 – HARMONIC GROUNDSWELL part 2: everyone in my Juilliard class chafed at the idea of taking a figured bass part I'd written for them and making it into a short piece for violin and piano. But darn if each of them didn't come up with a completely individual, radically different from each other piece. It's like they squeezed the same fruit and each one got a different juice out of it. If you looked closely you could see that they shared a common kind of background trajectory. That's the secret of harmony I guess, it's the emotional skeleton behind the music.
February 13, 2007 – The incomparable Judy Collins opened tonight at the Cafe Carlyle, voice as pure and flexible as ever, performance a model of honesty and penetration. Russell Walden at the piano played like a poet. Everyone in the audience looked famous. Robert, my partner, was in heaven. Major thanks to Julia Cameron and Emma Lively for encouraging us to take the plunge and join them.
February 8, 2007 – HARMONIC GROUNDSWELL: not a new big orchestra piece, but what happened in my Juilliard evening division composition class last week. Everyone wants to learn harmony over again, now that they're actually using it for something.
February 4, 2007 – looks like we have the right tenor and bass, and it's going to be a splendid cast. It was exciting to hear Steve sing through both scenes, conducting Charity at the same time while Caren and I listened. Everyone seemed pretty excited when it was over. Now I have to sit tight while the cast learns the music. I won't get to hear any of it before the week of February 26. It's hard to wait.
February 1, 2007 – heading up to Manhattan School of Music this afternoon to meet with American Opera Projects Artistic Director Steven Osgood, MSM stage director Caren France, and Charity the pianist/coach to go over the score for scenes 1 and 2 of my new opera, The Golden Gate, based on Vikram Seth's novel in verse. AOP and MSM are co-producing a semi-staged workshop performance of the two scenes on March 18 at 2:30 p.m. at MSM. Three out of five roles are cast, wonderfully; we're still looking for the right tenor and bass. All singers are currently in MSM's masters program in opera or are recent grads. This is great since the characters in the opera are all in their mid twenties and the singers will be too.
