The Saga of the Symphony

I'm not typically one to air my own dirty laundry but someone else's dirty laundry?  Hand me the clothespins!  And so let us start, first, with the underpants.  

And to that point, I have recently purchased some very nice (clean) underpants from an online shop who now sends me on a regular basis many photos of men in underpants much more well-packaged than yours truly. They are intriguing to me. I find myself wondering upon what the subject and object are musing as these photos are taken.  I wonder what is the promise made by this enterprise?  If one wears these somewhat revealing garments is one to take on the persona of the model, so sexy and languorous, or is should one fantasize oneself in the persona of the photographer, the male gaze upon the endowéd male? Is it hot in here? 

It was in the chilly January of this year, the year of our lord 2025, when Bryan Nies, who is one of my favorite musicians in the world, and who has conducted a few of my favorite operas - UKSUS, Certitude and Joy, Queer - asked me if I would create a version of C&J for his current orchestral position at Symphony of the Redwoods. Of course I said yes, simply because he asked me to, but also because the lovely and talented Laura Bohn had agreed to sing it, and because it would complete my hat trick of variants of the piece: the chamber opera, the orchestral version for the Sofia Philharmonic, and now this mini-cantata.  

I threw myself into the project.  Orchestrating is absolutely great fun, a delight.  To put on the powdered wig and play with a vast palette of old-fashioned instrumental sounds is something I have always enjoyed. It was also an opportunity to switch to Dorico from the poor orphaned Finale, a turning that turned out to be simple, and even shall I say blessed, as the program is pleasant to work with and has some modern features.  But rethinking the piece on its Lace Anniversary was a little more difficult. Looking back at an opera is like viewing a film of yourself performing tricks when you were three years of age. It's not you, it's someone else, but you somehow get to take credit for what this other person is doing. Anywho, I got into it, and it came out quite swimmingly.  It was to be a beautiful solo piece, with a large orchestral introduction, and Laura playing all the parts: me, the narrator, God, LaShaun, the psychiatrist, etc. 

But there was a shadow that came over the work, a difficulty, which in the end actually led to the piece being better, more beautiful, more fun.  Laura had talked to a friend of hers about the work who told her that it was not OK for her to sing the part of a troubled black woman as a white woman. Then Laura started running it by more and more people who also agreed with this, and then Bryan got involved, and I got a bit pissed off and petulantly said OK just do whatever you want, and once it's out of my hands it is out of my hands, it's not mine anymore, whatever, pfft. But what I also said was that focussing on the race of one of the characters is absolutely missing the point of the piece in a number of ways.  First, it is a piece about a person who is experiencing great religious joy (more on this later) not about a person who is in poverty or madness, second the idea that religion is seductive and destructive is a universal story across all times and peoples and cultures, third the character that Laura would be portraying is me.  It's all right there in the libretto:

COMPOSER AND YOUNG WOMAN

 (NOW LASHAUN)

In writing the libretto, LaShaun and I became one and the same. 

 

COMPOSER

I accept that she was 

 

COMPOSER AND LASHAUN

in communication with God,

 

COMPOSER

that He told her

 

LASHAUN

to kill her children.

 

COMPOSER

I am compelled 

 

COMPOSER AND LASHAUN

by her certainty and her great joy.

But they took me at my petulant word and went off and asked my buddy Talya Patrick, who was in the original production with Laura and her as alter-egos, if she would take on some of the role, turning the piece into a duet.  Of course I couldn't say no to that.  I love Talya. She's fantastic. My only request was that they didn't make it about race, that they focussed on the joy of religious faith.  It seemed like that was to be.  I happily re-restructured the piece to match the new circumstance, and in doing so it gained more light and was even lovelier. 

But then, when the concert was only a month or so away, after all plans had been made, taking children out of school and travel and hope and all, that the orchestra attempted one of those tricks where one pulls the rug or tablecloth away and hopes that everything is left standing, and cancelled the performance with a bare-bones email.  Let's take a look.

Dear Artists, 

We are writing to inform you of the Symphony of the Redwoods Board decision to replace the programmed piece "Certitude and Joy" with another selection for our opening season concert.  We have asked Bryan as music director to help with this program change.

We acknowledge that this decision is a difficult one for all involved and we do not make it lightly. The decision is not a comment on the merits and artistic value of the piece. 

Our overriding concern in arriving at this decision is for our local musicians, patrons, and sponsors.  As a small community we pride ourselves on artistic accomplishments and institutions.  Our small orchestra has been in existence for 40 years and still includes a number of founding members, family players spanning three generations and is also supplemented by a host of hired "ringers" that complete the ensemble.   It is in consideration of feedback and consultation with them and many others that we are making this difficult decision. nThe depth and nuances of the composition do not overcome the challenging and darker nature of the themes and therein lies our concern.

Thank you for the time and effort spent on this production.  If at all possible we want to move forward with a concert that includes the Caunteloube songs featuring Laura. We are open to feature her in the first half as well if programming decisions can support it.  

Sincerely and with kind regards,

Joanie Packard, Executive Director

Michael Cox, Board President

Symphony of the Redwoods

My response was surprisingly pointed. It's not typically my way to respond to insult by pointing out the insult, but in this case I felt compelled.  Bryan thought I should publish it, so here it is.

Dear Joanie Packard and Michael Cox,

I received your email yesterday.  I’m shocked at the lack of respect you have shown to me and the other artists involved in this project.  As you are aware, I have been working on this piece since January when the orchestra asked me to write it.  I am very busy with other major projects, and I knew there was little compensation involved, but I did it as a favor to Bryan and to support a small regional orchestra.  I have at this point  put hundreds of hours into this piece, working late nights and weekends to make it wonderful.  I also made major revisions to it on two occasions after requests from your organization, and I have from the beginning offered to help the musicians, to rewrite it for their capabilities, and to discuss any issues – even to make changes to the libretto.  

And the piece is gorgeous!  It came out beautifully.  It is something the organization who commissioned it should be proud of. You were given the opportunity to do something amazing and powerful.  

However, after all that, to not even be granted the opportunity to discuss it, not even a phone call, just an email addressed to the anonymizing sobriquet “Dear Artists” – it is telling that the only composer’s name mentioned in your brief email is misspelled. 

I’ve been in constant contact with your organization since January.  There were 150 emails back and forth.  I sent sketches of the work in February and an orchestration in May.  It would have been so simple to pick up the phone. Why didn’t you arrange a talk between me and the people that were concerned?  Why not have a discussion with donors and stakeholders?  Why not have a pre-concert discussion addressing the issues raised in the piece? 

Maybe you didn’t want to perform a work that is so overtly Christian? The one sentence in your rejection email addressing your reasoning is very brief, so I’m not sure what you meant by its challenging nature. The work is on its face about the joys of religious faith – it’s right there in the title!  Note I’ve written many Christian works, including a mass, a number of operas, settings of bible verses, etc. Certitude and Joy is one of in a long line of works addressing very similar issues: Ein deutsches Requiem, Mahler’s Second, Verdi’s Requiem, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14. This list would have made an interesting part of a panel discussion. Joshua Kosman told Laura he was very much looking forward to attending and would have made an interesting panel member,

What is especially confusing to me is that you all knew what the piece was going to be, as it was an expansion of an existing work which has been available to the public since 2012.  Why did you wait until now to bring any of this up?  You could have read the glowing reviews available online - including when the Chronicle put it in their top 10 works of that year.  Plus the entire work is on YouTube, there are interviews with the artists, and a CD release available everywhere. 

I am aware of the issues that face arts organizations.  I too have been involved in the operation of a small orchestra as a founder and a board member for 25 years – as your board president knows, as he has performed with this ensemble.  I also run a larger non-profit producing organization that has presented pieces here and in Europe.  I know that projects can come and go. I know there can be personality issues, and disagreements, and that navigating these can be complicated.  But here I have been treated very poorly.  I can’t speak for the others, but from where I sit it seems you have kneecapped your artistic director and have insulted Laura Bohn, an internationally active and acclaimed singer.  We cannot get back the time lost developing this project, nor can I soon forget the insult. 

Erling Wold, composer

The endless shoot

Over these last few years of filming, I've learned many things. My brilliant DP Heath Orchard, who has done it all and seen it all, opined that one mightn't say we shoot tomorrow when making a video for the local sheriff, but rather we film tomorrow.  My co-producer Lindsay Gauthier has patiently taught me film lingo such as logline (etymology obscure, first attested 1613 as logge-line according to Wiktionary) and crafty, not as an adjective but as a noun. 

But I suppose none of this cuts to the heart of the matter, the film itself, for which we have once again accomplished some filming recently.  Some photos:

Masterpiece

Daphnes Garten and Rattensturm - out now

The recording of Daphnes Garten has just been released on Spooky Pooch, available in a variety of digital formats on bandcamp, packaged along with the libretto in German and English, telling the story of the murder of the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. 

On the 16th October 2017, the Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered with a car bomb. DCG, as she was in Maltese media, published her own research on the Panama Papers, the massive leak that revealed a worldwide network of offshore companies in 2016. Using the story of a courageous journalist who paid for her commitment to the truth with her life, Daphnes Garten tells a story of international corruption, greed and murder, as well as her love for her garden, her refuge.

This is the third opera of mine that has premiered in its German version, after two that have been performed in German translation.  The recording of the previous - Rattensturm - came out a few years ago, not mentioned here before, so maybe it's time for that as well.

World War I began with the poets, inviting young men in the name of duty and country to feed themselves into the insatiable maw of Verdun, Isonzo, and Ypres. Rattensturm (a storm of rats) is a film of an opera as beautiful history lesson, telling the story of the sinking of the battleship Szent István, while the rats sing of the glories of death and destruction. Be careful who you listen to.

Queer

The buzzy advent of the so-beautifully filmed Queer movie by Luca Guadagnino has revived my own adventure with Burroughs's soul-baring autobiography. Originally an aside to fill my evenings while wrassling the funding for the Bisso/Wold sword-and-sandal-and-ridiculously-epic Sub Pontio Pilato, it has become one of my favorites, and the favorite of a number of people around me, to the point of changing their lives, e.g. my long-time artistic partner Jim Cave, who came out, found a boyfriend, got married, and has lived one hopes a truer life. 

There is this lovely ambiguous interview with me about the opera, which now reading back seems to be from a more-articulate time in my life, so pause this blog, read it now and then come back. 

I loved watching the film, I keep thinking about it: its stagey aspects, CGI set extensions, the light, psychedelic scenes with the Yage, the filling out of the life beyond.  But when I was watching it, I was in a constant double-exposure with the opera. Like the opera, many of the dialogs in the screenplay are verbatim from the book, which is at it should be - Burroughs's language is the thing - and may have been required by the estate, as they did for me. But that meant that every line spoken on screen was at the same time playing its musical version in my head. 

For example, this scene, where "As Lee stood aside to bow in his dignified old-world greeting, there emerged instead a leer of naked lust, wrenched in the pain and hate of his deprived body and, in simultaneous double exposure, a sweet child's smile of liking and trust, shockingly out of time and out of place, mutilated and hopeless." I've linked to the 2001 production of it, and below is the scene from the movie and to the 2010 version, Daniel Craig/Joe Wicht as Lee. 

And the scene where "Lee and Allerton went to see Cocteau's Orpheus. In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other's body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals. Allerton shifted in his seat. Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocation of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes."  The film was able to visually represent the protoplasm, whereas in the opera, the narrative conceit of the book continued.  In film, one is  told to show not say, but narration has always been cool to me, and that Lee observes himself in the third person up until the bright ending is also. 

The movie, like the opera, is a love story, a love and lust both reciprocated and unrequited, painful, wrenching.  But the routines - some of my favorite parts in the book, e.g. the General von Klutch episode and that over Chess Game with their baldfaced racism and sexual predation - are lessened in the movie.

And what to do about the ending, which in the book simply evaporates, "the end of the road" as he wrote later in the introduction. The movie in a dream follows Lee to the end, the skip tracer forever searching for the object of his idealized affection. 

 

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.