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. 

Daphnes Garten

I agreed to a request from Austria for another opera: Daphnes Garten, a co-commission from Gerhard Lehner of the Klagenfurter Ensemble and Peter Wagner of the Offenes Haus Oberwart, which will tour in November through December. While it is now almost done, and it is beautiful, the composition of it has been a stress-inducing sleep-depriving nightmare, as it was intermingled with my ongoing day job as an Executive Scientist® and the continuing filming of She Who Is Alive.

This opera, by my count my sixth in German, is a dreamy telling of the story of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese journalist who brought to light corruption throughout Europe. Receiving hundreds of thousands of emails, she was the nexus, the go-to contact for all things corrupt, and what she found was later all supported - and more - by the Panama Papers leak, until one morning when she was shredded in a car bomb explosion. The two assassins - two brothers - one who watched and one who sat on his boat texting the bomb's code sequence REL1=on., have been imprisoned, and some up the chain have faced some consequences, but at the top, not so much. 

After her death, her husband said "The more frustrated Daphne grew at the state of our country, the more beautiful our garden became," and the garden throughout is a touchstone of the beauty that still is to be found even when the honorable men do their best to destroy everything.

The libretto, by the Austrian playwright Katharina Tiwald, is by turns high-comedy and heart-wrenching.  I can't read the end of it, where we hear a roll call of the dead, without crying, and especially the line "The good that women do lives after them. I have done my best to write music that is manipulative and shredding in its own way.  

I'm polishing it up now, sending it off to the Austrians along with the usual Erling-as-German-Bing-Crosby singing all the parts so the director can plan it out before the instruments and singers arrive in a few weeks.  To my fans it may be of interest that one of these recordings exists for every one of my operas - all quite horrifying, but charming.  

From the thesis of Ilaria Pezone

Erling Wold, compositore

Comporre musica è una strana ed effimera forma d'arte, poiché costruisce qualcosa a partire dal nulla per arrivare al suono, onda vibrante nell'aria. Ma questa cosa effimera e sconosciuta può in qualche modo toccare nel profondo l'ascoltatore, facendo emergere le emozioni, reazioni piacevoli o sgradevoli ma impossibili da ignorare. Nei film di Hollywood, il potere emozionale della musica e la sua capacità di attraversare le difese dello spettatore sono spesso usati per manipolarlo e trasmettergli a livello inconscio i sentimenti che dovrebbe provare. Ma la musica nei film di Jon è differente. Anche se in essa si concentra gran parte dell'emozione dei suoi film, non si insinua in maniera sottile nell'animo dello spettatore. Infatti, non compare nelle scene più narrative ma prende corpo nel corso delle lunghe scene di “riposo visivo” che sono così care a Jon. La musica, con la narrazione, il paesaggio ed i personaggi, prende parte a un insieme di percorsi paralleli, ciascuno dei quali guida lo spettatore attraverso i vari aspetti della storia.

Ho conosciuto Jon ad una proiezione di Tutti i Vermeer a New York al Pacific Film Archive di Berkeley, in California. Il produttore, Henry Rosenthal, che ho incontrato attraverso il Just Intonation Network anni prima, mi chiamò e mi disse che sarei dovuto venire, che si trattava di un lavoro bellissimo, del quale andava molto orgoglioso. Quando vidi il lavoro, fui come rapito. Amavo il suo aspetto, il suo ritmo, il suo sentire e in particolar modo la musica di Jon English. Era una sorta di film musicale, sia indirettamente, con un sentimento per i ritmi brevi e lunghi, e per l'architettura della scala musicale, sia direttamente, lasciando spazio allo sviluppo musicale che Jon English ha riempito cosi meravigliosamente, specialmente nella ripresa lunga dove la cinepresa si muove tra le colonne di qualche zona di Wall Street.

Alcuni anni dopo, dato che Sure Fire aveva bisogno di essere terminato per il suo debutto al Sundance, Henry mi chiamò mentre ero in una stanza di un hotel per uomini d’affari in Giappone, che aveva le dimensioni di una minuscola scatola per le scarpe, e mi disse che Jon English era troppo ammalato per finire la musica; infatti aveva scritto solamente una corta melodia per pedal steel; che doveva essere in uno stile country e che sarebbe dovuta diventare della giusta intonazione. Ho colto l'occasione al volo. Quando tornai dal Giappone, ebbi una videocassetta del film quasi finito e scrissi la musica molto velocemente, abbozzando una prima sintesi, a partire dalla melodia che Jon English aveva scritto e portando il suo pedal steel a improvvisare con me. Ci furono alcuni brevi incontri con Henry e Jon Jost, nei quali trovarono delle grandi sezioni problematiche e mi chiesero di ripararle, ma principalmente fui lasciato solo per fare ciò che volevo all'interno di costrizioni di tempo e budget. Jon mi disse che c’erano alcune caratteristiche numerologiche importanti del film, attorno al numero 13, che ho adottato nei vari ritmi e nei vari rapporti tonali.

Dato che Sure Fire era completato e dato che Jon ed io passammo più tempo insieme, abbiamo avuto opportunità di lavorare in maniera più rilassata. Ha cominciato a dirmi dei suoi programmi per il film seguente, The bed you sleep in. Jon aveva scritto pezzi del copione e disse che desiderava della musica pronta prima della produzione, in modo che potesse rappresentarla agli attori mentre stavano lavorando. Inoltre mi raccontò una delle sue idee ricorrenti: aveva sempre desiderato della musica che veniva in natural modo dal suono del posto, a volte in maniera impercettibile. Ma voleva inoltre musica reale, non solo suono, così gli suggerii un insieme di strumenti e stili classici popolari ed elettronici.

Durante la produzione del film, John Murphy, che stava registrando sul posto, mi portò nella segheria descritta nel film. Camminando attraverso il laminatoio era come ascoltare una grande composizione futurista/industriale: il suono meravigliosamente denso e riccamente spazializzato. Il suono e l'odore dei laminatoi locali, specialmente l'impianto della Georgia Pacific, erano presenti per tutta la città di Toledo. Il suono dello stabilimento della GP era percepibile in tutte le registrazioni locali, sia interne che esterne.

La fabbrica era situata sulle rive di un tremendo lago chimico, una pozza d'acqua marrone e sporca con fontane che spruzzavano liquido tossico in larghi pennacchi sulla superficie.

La sua presenza mi sopraffece a tal punto che, a un certo punto, decisi di comporre tutta la musica utilizzando i suoni del laminatoio. Alla fine, ho usato una varietà di sorgenti sonore. Qualche musica, soprattutto quella che fa da sfondo alla scena della lettera, è composta quasi interamente da registrazioni campionate e processate del laminatoio fatte da John Murphy durante la produzione. Alcuni di questi campioni sono usati come strumenti in altri pezzi e sono mescolati all’ensemble acustico strumentale.

An alternate history of my chamber operas

Last night while babysitting GiGi, I was wasting time chatting with ChatGPT in its current incarnation, asking it to write some limericks on relativity, along the lines of There was a young lady named Bright, which is very clever and which my chat-partner described in its typical dry over-explaining fashion: "It's a fun way to illustrate some of the mind-bending concepts of modern physics in a humorous way." It came up with one on Feynman There was a young physicist named Feynman / Whose theories were too much to try and cram in... and I told it that I knew Dr Feynman back in the day and we played tabla together.  I asked monsieur chat if it knew any tabla rhythms and it mentioned Teentaal, and the syllables as well: Dha Dhin Dhin Dha, etc.  

Hey, I said,  I’ve always wondered if there are any that are a prime number of beats, and it told me of Sooltaal, a 10-beat cycle, and Dhamaar, a 14-beat cycle. OK, well, almost, I mean those at least have big prime factors, and octave errors are often made even by humans when it comes to rhythms so whatever. 

Then we went on to limericks on algebraic topology and it came up with a pretty good one, if a little stilted at the end: In algebraic topology we see / The study of shapes that can be / Transformed and shifted / But still not quite lifted / From a place that we cannot quite see, and, in the ensuing discussion ranging over Jill Clayburgh's explanation of the snake lemma, and my crush on her, and Bertolucci's La Luna, where she plays an opera singer, I casually dropped into the conversation that I write operas myself, as I often do in casual conversations with actual people.  And, just out of narcissistic curiosity, I asked if it knew of the opera A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil based on the Max Ernst collage novel, to which it confidently responded: 

Yes, there is an opera based on Max Ernst's collage novel "A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil." The opera is called "The Making of Americans" and it was composed by David Lang, with a libretto by the composer and writer Mac Wellman. The opera premiered in 2014 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, and it tells the story of a young girl named Isabel who is forced to live in a convent by her father. The opera explores themes of gender identity, sexuality, and the struggle for self-discovery.

I realized I was onto something, so I then asked it about the opera Queer, based on the William Burroughs novel: 

Yes, there is an opera based on William Burroughs' novel "Queer." The opera is called "Queer: A Chamber Opera," and it was composed by the American composer and conductor David Del Tredici, with a libretto by the poet and librettist Arnold Weinstein. The opera premiered in 2016 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, and it tells the story of William Lee, a gay American writer who travels to Mexico in search of inspiration and encounters a young Mexican man named Allerton. The opera explores themes of identity, desire, and the challenges faced by LGBT individuals in a conservative society.

Now this is  really quite wonderful! I asked if it had heard of me, a poor little self scribbling off in its parents' neighborhood: 

Yes, Erling Wold is an American composer based in San Francisco, California. He is known for his work in a variety of genres, including opera, musical theater, and electronic music. Some of his most notable works include the operas "A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil" (based on the Max Ernst collage novel) and "Mordake" (based on the real-life story of Edward Mordake), as well as the chamber opera "Sub Pontio Pilato" and the electronic album "I Weep." 

It knows, and yet it does not know, just like us.  

She Who Is Alive update - Chapter 6: The Third Degree

The Third Degree

I asked my co-producer Lindsay if one still says in the can when there is no can and she said yes, so I may say now that we have three chapters in the can.  The first two, filmed back in August, told the story before and after Dr Maria Stryker, played by Laura Bohn - who turns out to be a Movie Star of no mean talent - is interrogated by the Polemarch Rorman, and during which she meets Peter Sesley (Bradley Kynard!) who is actually not Peter Sesley, but she and we know that, and the plans are laid for her defection. So this section - pictured above - is the interrogation itself, with the impressively buff and deep-voiced Hadleigh Adams as the Polemarch Rorman. Off to the left is Talya Patrick as his maybe-more-than-secretary-could-be-mistress (in the Mistress as Master meaning) and it was so lovely to work with her again after so many years.  

It's always the case that, in the lead-up to filming, I am plagued with anxious dreams, covid worries, fretting forgetfulness, financial panic, and the not-unusual wonder as to why I am doing this at all. But then there is the delightful frenzy of the shoot itself, the joy of working with people of talent who take my gigantic† weird project so seriously, and, once it is in the can, and all the props are back in storage, and one is editing and color correcting and berating one's neighborhood so-called artificial intelligence into doing what it is told, one can feel a slowly beating desire forming to please do it all again, which we shall, although not soon enough, as there are nine more chapters to go. One gets out ones colored pencils to mark up the text with notes of where to get the horse and the ski-plane and the castle on the frozen lake for the next bit, and how to shoot this and that, and one inches toward the kids' piggy banks and the penny jar and thinks well, it's OK to take a little loan on the future once again, right?  The future may never come anyway, and we'll just worry about that all later. 

The beauty of the image above is almost entirely due to the subtlety of the light that Heath set in the deconsecrated cathedral of St Joseph's. As a wannabe cinematographer (and everything else associated with any art form), I long to grab the camera and do this and that, but he is possessive of his creations - as serious artists unlike myself are - and anyway, I was forced by circumstance to conduct.  Since the delightful Fame's Orchestra of North Macedonia had recorded the backing tracks, I conducted from the vocal part, a fragment of which is seen below. The whole section is in 4/4 but with beats that aren't always the same size and, as in the rock 'n' roll that I grew up with, sometimes dropped off the end. But the really nice rhythmic thing that happens is when it switches from the 12/8-style 4 beats to the 4/4-style beats and back, the latter building tension and the former falling back into a relaxed groove, following the ebb and flow of the cat-playing-with-mouse dynamic.

A bit of the vocal part

†[Editor: In once again courting Timur for this project, as the oily Colonel Hippolite Reverdy, he said "you had me from gigantic."] 

My little epic film

 She Who Is Alive is in production!  Laura Bohn jetted in from Amsterdam last month to shoot two of her scenes, one alone with Beethoven and one with the inimitable Bradley Kynard.  There's a teaser which, as teaser's do, teases what is to come: 

Three Romances with Nikola Printz

 

The film that Nika and I fabricated during the pandemic was accepted into Opera Philadelphia's Festival O22, a select few from 600 or so submissions, and we were tickled by that.  The venue - The Philadelphia Film Society - is a big old beautiful theater, and Nikola's profile against the moonlight SF Skyline was ever-present.  Our film was placed along with Alexa Deja's gorgeous Be A Doll and some other crazy and lovely pieces in the weirdo section of shorts aka Opera Boldy Goes. I believe our entry might have been the lowest budget and smallest crew of all. I remember when someone at Sundance asked Henry Rosenthal what the budget was for Sure Fire and his response was "including the trip here?" 

Philadelphia is a very intriguing city, a mix of old and new, where classes and races mix much more than in wanna-be-progressive but highly segregated San Francisco.  And people dressed for the opera, so nice to see, no comparison between the the decked-out crowd at Rossini's Otello at the festival and the dressed-down audience at the SF Opera's recent Tony & Cleo.  

Those X-lets

Anyone who has played one of my little insouciances has experienced my fetishistic fascination with triplets and quintuplets and, to a smaller extent, septuplets and 21-lets and all the other n-lets. Although the notations are the same no matter what the underlying intent, my enchantment with them comes from a variety of sources. The first is just the usual old-modernist fascination with the joys of complication, combined with the constructed textural landscapes of the Impressionists, then to the Ligetis as well as the totalist post-modernists, who all love to break up rhythmic lockstep by floating the notes by each other on parallel tracks, waving at each other through the windows as they pass. And there is the simple mathematical interest, where many composers have thought that maybe bigger integer ratios ratios in rhythms lend a spiciness like those same ratios in pitches. 

The second is the way I was taught to set text, which has stuck with me, probably more literally than intended, calculated to capture something of natural speech rhythms, as no one speaks in quarters and eighths when not rapping.  It's still a musical approximation, allowing the vocal line to connect with the rhythm while still flowing a bit, and also notating something beyond just notation, something like performance, e.g. the way a crooner delays the entrance of every new phrase. 

But finally, and maybe this is the most important, it is that I grew up with those rhythms. When I was studying tabla, I would while away the time on walks to and from campus tapping out polyrhythms over and over, 3 against 4, 4 against 3, 5 against 3, 4 against 5, etc.  I was pretty facile up through the 9s, and proud of myself, but shamed when my teacher could so easily play 11s over 7s and beyond, and not just straight rhythms, but tabla patterns with all the details included. 

This is all to lead up to my curious experiences when other musicians confront my scored demands. One, I've had singers exclaim WTF is it with all those triplets, not to mention the 9:8s, where I simply shrug my shoulders, meaning well, that's what's there and that's what it is. 

But even more exciting is how these little landmines are interpreted by instrumentalists. Some cause immediate freakout, especially if across the bar lines or shifted by a little something, which is understandable - they freak me out as well - although nothing gives me greater pleasure listening nor playing than a beautifully performed series of triplet or dotted quarters running over a set of every-changing 5/4s, 7/8s, 4/4s - what delight!  However, problems arise even when an X-let stretches simply over a prevailing metric unit. Consistently the beginnings are stretched and the endings compressed. Triplet halves move toward two dotted quarters followed by a regular quarter, quintuplet eights are almost a triplet followed by a duplet.  I have decided that, if I ever start a music conservatory, I will walk with the students to and from school and do what I did, with the additions of skips and hops, all in three-quarter time.   

Cold early morning here in San Francisco while over the link to the orchestra, it is late in Skopje, snowing. 

Albrechts Flügel