An Allegory of Now

When I first read She Who Is Alive, it seemed to be just the kind of craziness I love, in this case a wonderful insane neo-fascist world filled with the heady precognitions of those who purport to have the truth, and where those truths might actually be the truth. Such joy I felt contemplating such a ridiculous world, where up is down and sideways is the other sideways. Sure, I mean, we've always had believed-in craziness of many types - religions oft being my favorite source, one I could cuddle with at night whilst the children slept - and we've had, in the previous centuries, the upside-downiness of the Stalins and the Vatican and, well, now that I think of it, it actually happens an awful lot. And it now seems that it's back in fashion, like hair wraps and bellbottom jeans. And the kowtows have begun, the politicians polishing their rubber stamps lest they end up a person of interest or audit.  

So do we still laugh, like our buddy Daniil Kharms, who laughed while starving to death and force-psychiatrized, or do we scramble into our false bottom coal sheds, hoping to not be found by the side-looking radar pointed down at us by balloon and aircraft and (dare I say it?) some future generation linked-starlike space objects?  For now, I push this film along, knowing that it may be used against me, although luckily so far off their aforementioned radar that it seems unlikely I will be lined up against the wall.  But, if it happens that this happens, I will boldly smoke that last cigarette, refuse the blindfold, and at the last moment call on them to shoot straight, blow them a kiss, and strike off to meet our makers. 

Daphne recording

Almost all

My good friend Jay Cloidt has been mixing the Daphne recording.  He's mixed everything of mine since I think the Missa Notkeri Bulbuli.  It's sounding lovely.  I'm not sure what to do with these German-language opera recordings.  I feel a need to have them as beautiful documents of the music and the way I imagine the music, but I doubt my typical English-speaking fans will enjoy them as much as they could, and I don't have that many contacts in German lands outside of those that commissioned the operas. It's too bad one can't have subtitles floating in space while listening to an audio recording. 

Lost in translation

As the days grow cold and colder here in beautifully decaying Firenze, nestled into a particulate-laden Tuscan valley with the romantic Arno flowing just outside our window, I sit shivering at the dining room table, editing together the latest footage on my laptop and its elfin screen. With a squint and my magnifying glass I can see that it looks pretty good, thanks once again to Heath Orchard, my brilliant director of photography, and the acting skills of Hadleigh and Nikola and Bradley. 

We're getting close to some of the biggest and most difficult scenes: the discovery of the creature on the beach and the funeral of April's parents, the arrival by plane at Altar Barbus, the party, the impregnation by the coruscating alien penis.  Speaking of, when I hired Lola Miller for the April part, she pointed to that moment in the text (He climbs it and kneels between her legs and inserts his penis into her vagina) and asked "so how are you going to film that?"  Um cough I squawked, I don't know, maybe puppets, maybe a ball of light, TBD.

We are well past the 50% point, which gives me a certain perspective over the whole process.  The book is one thing, the opera already a strange translation.  When I wrote Daphnes Garten, Katharina Tiwald thought some of the sections were so odd, so different than what she had in mind - why is this part so happy? she asked.  We composers have total power to change mood and everything, sometimes I suppose subverting the author's original idea, however advertently or inadvertently.  But Robert has in general been happy with the music.  At one point he did say more Bernard Herrman so I did give him some.  

And then there is the film version of the opera which twists it all some more, which in that case isn't so much the difference between me and my intentions, but just the fact that, with film, there are a kabillion variables outside your control.  When you imagine music and write a score and have people play it, it's 95+%, but when you imagine a film - at least at my micro-budget level - it's more like 20%, or sometimes even 0%.  Even if the outcome is beautiful, wonderful, so much is improvised and in-the-moment, even more than with The Theater.

To wit, we had a big idea in the scene just above.  Heath was going to haze up the place like crazy and do some giant noir-ish shafts of light cutting through the space.  However, in filming the scene downstairs, the intense hazing set off the fire alarms, and the fire department came and wagged their fingers at us and said don't do that again or you will face the consequences of your actions - those consequences being at the least monetary and at the most - well, I don't want to imagine it. Probably being passed around the station house for boxing practice.  So Heath had to completely redo his whole idea, which - as often happens when one is faced with the pressure of disaster to come up with something else - ended up looking fantastic and allowed for the oddly unsettling reflections on the left of the screen. It was something like I imagined in my initial look-book, the imposing Mussolini-like space defining Sonja's power, but was it exactly like I imagined?  No, not at all.  The performance of a notated flute part is one thing; the realization of a stage direction in a screenplay is quite another. 

The self-updating teaser of the film

This teaser is slowly accumulating bits of the film as we go.  More details at shewhoisalive.org. 

Sonja Fleeing

 

Daphnes Garten Oberwart

Part 1: tschüß

Lynne and I said goodbye to the first run of this beautiful, tragic and true production by Peter Wagner. Martin Ganthaler, who played the bass in the attending choir, said it was the first performance where he felt he was taking a bow for someone else, in this case of course the subject of the opera: Daphne Caruana Galizia. The ovations were for her bravery and her strength, and when the piece ends with Katharina Tiwald's reworking of Mark Antony's "Here we are to speak of what we know, the good that women do lives after them" the tears that are shed are for her as well, and for her fellow martyred journalists.

But I must applaud all the performers: Janina's gorgeous Daphne, Michaela's wry portrayal of the voice, Marika and Johanna's beautiful blending, and Martin and Fernando's power and comedy. The comedy is so important in this piece. I couldn't think of another way to set the ridiculousness of the corruption and the denials of corruption, and the ineptitude of Daphne's killers.

I was so happy when Peter pulled the whole band out of the "pit" and forced them onto the stage to accept their due - thank you Davorin for navigating the score so adeptly. Too bad we had to bring down the fortissimi to not deafen all in attendance. Maybe next time, in Klagenfurt / Eisenstadt / Vienna.

Part 2: writing fast

As with Rattensturm, this piece had a short schedule, three-ish months from talking it over with Peter and Katherina before it needed to be in Davorin and the singers' dropboxes, along with all the attendant synthetic recordings, click tracks, parts and partiturs, and my own german-bing-crosby-mixed-with-teen-boy rendition of all the singing and speaking for Peter to use. Someday I should really learn some German.

But speed means once again theft, or at least accepting whatever first comes to mind, which sometimes turns out to be a chat-gpt-like interpolation between all one has heard before in one's own musical latent space. And I may have done a little more than usual in memoriam of my friend Mark Alburger, who died just recently after a mercifully short illness, whose style was based on troping the works of others, e.g. his Variations on Variations of Brahms on a Theme of Haydn. So, some examples in no particular order:

1. Scene 10 Übergriffig's opening, when I wrote it, seemed so familiar, and I puzzled over it until I realized it was in fact the opening notes of the I Spy TV series theme song.

2. Szene 09 Vom Meer: the opening is obviously taken from the opening of La Mer because of course.

3. Szene 06 I am from Austria: It's a short scene, and Peter said seems like it should be a scherzo. Always happy to have a starting point, and although maybe he was just indicating the literal meaning, I thought of the glorious 9th, and so in the pot she went. Curiously Martin was the only one who noticed, and he, being a bass, I prompted to sing the 4th movement of the aforesaid glorious 9th and I joined in until Michaela or maybe Martin looked at me like why do you know all the words and, strangely enough, when I went to meet Katherina's 8th grade class and she said, let's listen to some classical music so we know where we are with this composer guy, she played the European National Anthem and, when she saw me singing along, she mouthed toward me do you know all the words by heart, and I sheepishly said yes, which reminded me of:

4. When I first met Katherina, I told her I planned to set some of her words comically, and she said something about working in something Baroque. I think she said Baroque, although maybe it was baroque. Anyway, I loved my first composition teacher Robert Gross, who was a fine violinist and whose recording of the Biber Passacaglia I have also always loved, so in the pot she goes as well. It turns out that simple descending line is the basis of a lot of passacaglia tunes and chord progressions, including my own from Queer, and Philip Glass's I think Satyagraha, and some others, so I tossed in a bit of each.

5. The libretto starts with Daphne's death, so I wanted the piece to start with the explosion of the car, and I found a recording online of someone blowing up a car in the countryside - I believe for a sound effect - and it was preceded by bird noises, which I loved, as the birds brought to mind the garden of the title, and were such a beautiful and awful contrast to the Hackfleisch that follows. The birds reminded me of Messiaen, and two of the most beautiful pieces of all time are the two string solos in Quatuor pour la fin du temps, which consist almost entirely of major chords s l o w l y intoned on the piano while the string plays a chromatic melody above, sometimes resolving, sometimes straining against. I had been imitating this piece for some months in my not-often-enough piano improvisations, ever since Nikola Printz had talked about recording a vocalise of the cello movement, and recently I had a found a beautiful melody of my own, so into the pot it went as well.

The latest on She Who Is Alive

We have finished filming about a third of the She Who Is Alive^† opera film so far, the last scene filmed being the end of the movie, a behind-the-scenes shot with me as wannabe director seen here. The wonderful Laura Bohn, an actor so utterly fantastic in the piece, bravely agreed to go up in a plane that the pilot Chris Prevost has been flying for forty years and which has coughed and sputtered reliably into life since the nineteen forties. 

The light was surprisingly favorable, and we were able to do many film-y things: night-for-night, evening-for-dawn, day-for-night, etc. And those wonderful shots of flying in a plane when it is not actually flying at all, the wind whipping the hair of the actors as they sing amiably to each other over a deafening roar. Actually, I should point out that Laura hadn't quite decided to go, but the sun was setting (aka rising) and Pilot Prevost suddenly took off with her in the front passenger seat, almost blowing to the ground Heath Orchard and his very fancy 6K Sony Venice love-of-his-life camera in the surprisingly powerful prop wash. 

When filming, one is able to see the scenes again and again, and one soon notices that the adorable Bradley Kynard is really pretty creepy, and his character is the perfect spy/aggressor/victim, a foil against which Laura could be both seducer and stone-cold dealer of death. 

^†Dimmi pur, prego, s' tu se' morta or viva!" / "Viva son io e tu se' morto ancora - Petrarch

Daphnes Garten performances coming up

 

Premiere is at the OHO in Oberwart, link for tickets etc here: https://www.oho.at/programm/daphnes-garten

Travels next to Klagenfurt: http://klagenfurterensemble.at/produktion/daphnes-garten/

And some others early in 2024.