JCHRants

Mock ( “How’s The Opera Doing” Post)

05.13.2011

I keep getting asked how the opera is going. Actually, I’m getting asked less and less because interested parties are sick of waiting. But Detroit proceeds apace. What strains credibility is the lack of audio samples. And that, Dear Reader, is the point of this post.

JUST ME AND THIS LI’L OL’ GUITAR

There is this myth and legend—which used to be true—that songwriters sat down in a room with their geetar and the producer and performer say, “Now that’s a song! Sign that boy up!” But that ended decades ago.

But I, in all my naivete, still feeling twenty years old, that we were back in the age of Hindemith and some old Germanic types with white flowing beards and a monocle, perhaps. I present Herr Professor with a large sheaf of score papers and he hears the score in his head, humming softly at certain particularly cantabile passages. Boy, what a moronic idea.

Today’s music societies are largely technically uneducated. I don’t mean that the way it sounded. Back in the day of Herr Professor, people who sat on ‘the board’ would be people who played Schubert beautifully on really nice Steinways in their personal music room. Nowadays, the sponsor still has a music room, but what gets played is the 7.1 Home Theatre system. So when you submit your work for a competition or to a group, you must give them as realistic a ‘demo’ as you can muster. It’s no longer just a courtesy, but also a necessity. It’s also something of a diss if you don’t; it shows a lack of courtesy that you haven’t taken the time. (What I just wrote probably doesn’t apply if your name is Phillip Glass or have a Pulitzer Prize on your mantel. And if that’s the case, you’re not auditioning anyway.)

Aside: It’s worse for aspiring singers. If you wanna get a face-to-face audition, at minimum, you gotta pay for (get this) a super-nice mock-up orchestral backup for whatever aria you wanna showcase. Far better: hire a real orchestra for the job. Best of all? Hire the real orchestra and a pro videographer to document your stage presence. There are guys who specialize in providing all these services to budding artists. All ya gotta do is get yer parents to do that 2nd mortgage to finance your road to The Met.

BACK TO MY MOCK-UP

So the past few months I’ve been knocking myself out doing something that is akin to being the movie director who also is charged with developing the film. I’m spending a ton of money on the softwares necessary to do these mock-ups and then learning how to use these softwares—which is not trivial. It takes months and months and months to do these mock-ups. And here’s the funny part–these mock-ups are not derived from the score. So after spending several months income and several months of labour -learning- to use these programs-which are in no way a part of the composition or the ultimate performance, then you have to get to work.

In other words, it isn’t like you stick the score into the Score-O-Matic 5000 and you get a mock-up. You basically end up doing -another- whole ‘score’. If this were a novel, the mock-up would be the equivalent of doing a translation into another language in order to get the book published in the original language. If you take my meaning.

OK, I’m sounding snippy. But I’m as anxious to get something out there as y’all. And speaking of translations, remember that there are also -songs- that I’m supposed to be working on for album release. Remember when I talked about ‘re-purposing’? Yeah, be careful what you wish for.