Trying to be ‘original’ is a lot like that ‘buy low and sell high’ advice about betting on the stock market. It’s not as easy it seems.

We’re taught from an early age to emulate something (or someone) that ‘works’. Which makes sense. But that strategy simply leads one off course if you’re trying to find your own voice.

So how is the opera thing going? Not bad. Not bad. Glad you asked. Actually, the thing fairly well writes itself. It’s an odd thing, but it’s clear I wanted to write something about Detroit; that Detroit is the big catalyst of my entire life, since I got here. The real issues are always two:

Is it turning into just a series of songs?
Why the fuck didn’t I pay more attention in orchestration class?

The first issue doesn’t concern me now so much. I’ve moved along far enough where basically everything is developing out of the same four themes I’ve presented in the teaser medley. In fact, the worry now is that there is too much ‘unity’—that the end will seem like 400 variations on the same four ditties. Beethoven may have been able to take four notes and turn ’em into an hour of interesting ‘organic development’. But hey, he was Beethoven. (Which begs the question: would he have still been […]

Back in the day, there would often be three guys who wrote a broadway musical: the composer, the lyricist and ‘the book’. So for example, with Fiddler On The Roof you’ve got music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and book by Joseph Stein.

OK, so to laypeople (like me for example) the music and lyrics are pretty obvious but ‘the book’ may not be. The book is essentially all the bits that occur between the musical numbers. As followers know by now, I’m always looking for analogs between opera and Broadway and I think a good way to think of this is that the music/lyrics are the arias and the book contains all the recitatives. As with opera, the music/lyrics describe the characters feelings and the book drives the story. Or to put it in the context of Hollywood, the music/lyrics are the action and […]

I’ve started work on an opera called ‘Detroit’. Really.

No really. 😀

A Fearful Background

I have been wanting to do a large scale piece since I was in college. But frankly, I never had the material to work with. I remember reading how Brahms struggled so hard to publish his first pieces. He felt so unworthy and ‘unprepared’. And if Brahms felt unworthy? I mean we’re talking Brahms. Have you ever seen a picture of Brahms? Well, I just happened to have one in me back pocket…

I mean seriously. Unprepared? This is a guy who looks like he prepared just to take a dump every morning.

The thing is, the more that I’ve learned about writing music, the more I understand how he felt. Because the more you write, the more you realise how easy it is to cheat.

Look at most Hollywood film scores. Even the best ones tend to be weak these days. Why? Everyone learns in their first composition class how to take one or two melodies […]

The five or six of you out there who are following my recent rants on various ‘operatic’ themes know that something is up with Detroit. It ain’t like I’ve got a deep, dark secret about it. What it is, is more a matter of ‘packaging’ or rather approach.

I’ve written that, although I love opera now, the reason I didn’t love it in my youth (aside from all the fat people screaming in Italian) was that I didn’t know that it was already dead. And by ‘dead’ I mean, no longer a currently relevant art form. Oh sure, people still write operas, but people still try to finish Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Big deal. It doesn’t mean that these pieces have anything to say to me. This is tough talk as I know that Adams, Glass and Corigliano win all manner of fancy schmansy awards for long works about Einstein and Nixon and so on. How clever. But just between us girls? The last real opera; the one that will […]