trenta sei vedute del duomo

Recently garlands of roses

adorned this temple of magnificent structure

sweet parent, and daughter of your Son, virgin, flower of virgins,
your devoted people of Florence

will deserve to receive the merits of your Son in the flesh

Notes on Prototype / New Works Forum: New York 2014

I came to the New Works Forum conference as a composer, as a producer of my own works, and as someone who is just beginning to help others get their works done. I didn’t know what to expect, but was very pleasantly surprised. I suppose it makes sense that those that come to a New Works Forum are those who are interested in new works, but the level of excitement, the feeling that this is the future, the search for new solutions to funding and production and presentation and development of new opera was striking, as well as everyone’s interest in the wide range of what is going on.

The conference was held at the same time as the Prototype festival, which was great.  I had time to see a few things: Paul's Case, which was quite delicate and sublime, Thumbprint, which captured the culture in which it took place and had some very nice chamber writing, and my favorite piece of the festival, Angel's Bone, which is one of those few pieces where the text is so strong that it can stand on its own but where the text and the intensely gorgeous music combined with it to produce something incredible. Let me quote a bit from Royce Vavrek's libretto:

Brick J. can't get enough;

Mounts me, holding me

by my empty wings.

Sucks every drop

Of my inner-most marrow

Moans as he rolls

My tissue on his tongue:

A carnivorous act. 

I was somewhat aware of the pain felt by the larger opera companies, but it was illuminating to hear it directly from them. One can see how they worked themselves into a situation that is very difficult to get out of – a funding structure that is based on very large productions of traditional repertoire – where it is hard to make a move in any direction without losing something. When David Devan talked about the costs of producing, even in his small hall, it’s clear that nimbleness for him is difficult to achieve. 

I did see that some of the aesthetic choices of the big companies (although not all) were towards more conservative works. And maybe saying they are “conservative” is a lazy choice of words – more that some of the works presented in the forum were very play-like, or even musical-theater-like, with lots of dialog, with even a certain cuteness of the dialog. I wondered if this was because it is believed that this is what will align with the tastes of their current audience. I shared a long taxi ride with Ben Krywosz (Nautilus Music Theater) and he stated my concern very succinctly: why are we singing?  It’s a really good question and worth looking at for new works. I do think opera is a very different medium than plays or musical theater, that there’s a certain depth that is possible because of the richness and development of the music over a single work – that it can be an equal partner in the drama, adding another line of emotion and character and narrative development, not just as underscoring or underlining the text. I liked when someone at the conference said that singing is unnatural, so why try to be natural? Yes, right.

There were also some very good discussions about a growing awareness of the audience’s tastes and about developing pieces that do make a connection, and statements that younger composers seemed aware that we have to do things that connect to an audience for the art form to survive. But I do worry that this seems to be taken by some to imply a retrenchment or a – dare I say it again – conservatism.  I believe that there do have to be some uncompromising artists that push the form forward. Those don’t necessarily have to have 1.8 million dollar productions, but a piece that was mentioned a few times at the conference – Einstein on the Beach – is way outside of the style – or even the meta-style – the approach – of pieces people were talking about producing. It’s a perfect example of something I talked about above – a piece that could not be a play or a movie – a piece that relied on the power of its music. I know many composers and artists and directors who were inspired and brought into the then dusty world of opera because of that work, which was so striking and so different and so compelling. I’m one of those people. We tend to forget that Opera itself was a product of the Florentine renaissance, that the concept of a richly sung line over an rich accompaniment was an artistic revolution that displaced the sung monody of the church. It’s good to be reminded that one should not be afraid.

Certitude and Joy, for orchestra

The score is done, the parts are printing, soon all will be on the wing, fluttering into the hands of the Bulgarians who will instantiate my poor sonic mutterings. 


The words of the title come from Blaise Pascal’s Memorial, his description of an irrational moment that shaped his life: a burst of insanity, an experience of love, an overwhelming affection. The piece is sentimental in terms of sentience, defining humanity’s intelligence in its capability to feel.  As a mathematician, Pascal is famous for many things, not the least of which is his triangle, an arrangement of the binomial coefficients, some sequences of which are used as structural elements in the piece.  This musical work is a companion piece to two others, the opera Chosen and the piano duet walking along the Embarcadero past pier 7 and the flowers, both of which dance along the razor’s edge between religious certainty and fanatical madness.

Libertine

It was pointed out to me a few mornings ago that my name had appeared on the list of Notable Libertines in the Wikipedia article on such.  It's unfortunately gone now, the change labeled by an irritated comment, replaced by Jim Morrison, another questionable entry given the true nature of the article itself, a figure who has been found misplaced there before. While I clearly can't pretend to be as Notable as the Notables listed beside Jim and myself, I thought it might be time to explain my feelings on the topic, and my masthead, which my friend Madeleine B. now repeats whenever speaking my name: Maestro Erling Wold, composer, producer of operas, libertine, the list of honorifics extending. Going back through the edit history - in my opinion an invention second only to the talk page - we see that the only others who have been awarded the honor and then stripped of it are three: Peter Doherty, Russell Brand and Carl Barât, all of whom were associated with the band of the name of the article, to wit, The Libertines, whose names were removed with a comment weighted with equal irritation to my own disbarment. 

Most of those on the list are famous for being ancient, since the past, the more distant the better, confers a certain weight and nobility to the members of whatever class of which one speaks. And let us also be clear what we mean of libertine. In the argot of today's common folk in the US of A, libertine equals rake or maybe slut, if that perfect word were to be applied to men, since we note immediately that all those on the list, and all those who have been on the list, are men. The word carries another meaning, and even another undercurrent in its sexual application, i.e., that the reason for the libertine's sexual excesses is that he is a freethinker, a person that rejects regular old European Christian proscriptions on sexual behavior. 

Ami Perrin predates the others and was not so much a libertine in our current sense of the word, not a fucker of goats and a drunken vomiter to excess, but the leader of group of German anti-Calvinists, a group who followed the reformation of Guillaume Farel, who carried to an extreme the theological notion of Sola Fide that my Lutheran father taught me, that we are saved by faith alone and not by our works, in that they were exempt from all temporal laws, be they of the church or of the state. He and his wife were accused of moral turpitude and in one case, that of the sin of dancing, ad even admitted their freedom to partake of such fruit.  From the 59 volume set of the works of Calvin himself, we find such salacious hors d'oeuvres as:

8 April 1546 - Register of the consistory. The wife of the sieur Ami Perrin appeared and was accused of having danced at Belle Rive and at the house of the sieur Antoine Lect. She denied it, although she admitted that she had seen others dancing and that she enjoyed dancing herself. ... She was again asked to name those who had been dancing, and she replied twice that she would prefer to be corrected by the city magistrates and face civil justice rather than the consistory court.

for which terrors, and for his attempt to overthrow the government and slaughter all the French, he was convicted and sentenced to the removal of his hand, a sentence made in absentia and thus of little consequence. 

The antinomianist idea that the post reformation man - and woman in this case - was freed of the shackles of civil and ecclesiastical law  became more popular during the period that the rest of the Notables are from, the 17th to the 19th centuries. Sade almost defines the modern notion of the term Libertine, having written the definitive manuals on the topic, some of which have been covered here before, Justine, Juliette, 120 Days of Sodom etc. But, as Simone de Beauvoir points out in her better-than-the-book introduction to the last work, he hardly actually did much of anything, nothing that would raise more than the slightest stirring in the chair of a daytime TV viewer today, hiring a few prostitutes who complained of mistreatment, using a Mickey Finn on another, sodomizing his manservant, ho hum. But he may have earned the title since he was arrested and sentenced to death for it (in absentia) and did bounce around from prison to prison, liked and disliked by the French governments who were at the time, blowing in the wind. I'm sure more happens in one San Francisco S&M club on one evening amongst those who need to get on with it and get back to their babysat children and their web design jobs. 

John Wilmot is famous mostly for being played by Johnny Depp in the movie of the name of this article and his one crappy childish play on the topic featuring characters with names like Fuckadilla, who at least defrauded young woman and their families by posing as a gynecologist and sometimes the matronly nurse Mrs Bendo, where one assumes that the intent was to apply what later became known as a treatment for hysteria, sans batteries and electric motors. That, the fact that he did seem to go both ways and acted in that regard with some gusto, and that he again, like Sade, was a vocal advocate for libertinage, may in fact earn him the title.  

Rimbaud and Verlaine?  Oh come now, a little love triangle gone bad, hardly the stuff of a medium-quality hard-boiled mid-century paperback, even the attempted murder mundane gunplay, no wheelchair-down-a-staircase or stabbing-in-the-eye-with-a-stiletto-heel. And Byron, the pederast and home-wrecker?  The only aspect of his romantic life that rises above tedium was that the married Lady Caroline Lamb lost so much weight in her despair that in stalking him could realistically pass as a young page boy. Casanova?  Most of those, myself included, that deign to wear the mantle of libertinage are truly just poseurs, like AC Swindburne, who Oscar Wilde famously called "a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer."

The reader may at this point say that I am being unfair, that I am viewing these old folks from the vantage of my modern and urbane and laissez-faire period, post sexual revolution, post Wilt Chamberlain's claim of 20000 bedded, post the rockstar lifestyle, where even those who commonly call themselves monogamist are really serial polygamists, maybe waiting until the third date or the second or not and thinking not twice of it. This is a true condemnation. I myself, hardly an athlete of Wilt's stature, have probably had wilder, more public, and more frequently complex sexual incidents and relationships in my life than some of the Notables, and who, when I walk through the Folsom Street Fair can be happily recognized by one of the men in a public speed masturbation contest, who, when I enter a costumed sex party, just to press the flesh, to keep my name in the papers, can cause a ripple of recognition to spread through the crowd, reminiscent of the Leopold scene of Long-Haired Hare. But I am afraid that in the new world, the subsidence of religion as a civil force, the rise of sexual permissiveness, the decriminalization of pursuits long considered unacceptable, the golden championship belt of the World Champion Libertine must be put in its glass case, gathering dust slowly, pushed back bit by bit until it can no longer be seen behind the collection of Liberace rhinestone rings, as much as I wish I wish that I could be presented it. 

My Mother

I went to the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary yesterday to experience the laudation of my mother, who served back in the 80s as the chairman of the board of directors, the first and only woman to hold the position as evidenced by the photo panel to the left. It was an overflowing of love for her, mostly by women, mostly - of course - Lutheran women of faith. My mother was an ardent and sometimes radical Feminist, radicalized by crashing into the walls of the prison into which women had been placed (and to a fortunately less extent still are) by the American Culture and the Church, which lagged even further behind the culture and was a majorly patriarchal institution. My favorite story was that she was told she couldn't teach the Bible, as that was reserved for men, although she could be a missionary and teach the Bible to third-worlders, a statement that masterfully wraps together the worst of sexism and racism into one big lump. But, coming from inside that world, she fought for equal representation for women, for the ordination of women, and, even more shockingly for the time, the same for women of all sexual orientations.

I had to tell a story or two, and one was the story about the time she told me that women "might have to take up arms against men" which made a strong impression on my tween brain, especially as I was a member of the male species at the time. We used to have theological discussions late into the night, where she would point out the particular Hebrew word for the divine with a feminine ending, and the fact that maybe one of Paul's letters was written by a female disciple, and ask me whether the resurrected Christ first showed himself to a man or a woman. But she was very practical in the real world, starting day nurseries in all the churches she served, a place for working women to leave their children, at a time when people spoke out against the idea of a working woman, using the same arguments we hear today against the latest movements towards equality: that it would destroy the family, destroy traditions, destroy the nation. Traditions, we should always remember, are just things that happened in the past, and just having happened in the past carries no weight.

Unfortunately, at 92, half-blind and crippled with Parkinson's, she couldn't make it, so her most atheist son was sent as a representative, a sheep or wolf among the group of older, smart, attractive and somewhat maternal-to-me women.  I did sing the hymns heartily and even took communion for the first time in decades, as I believe in religion-as-performance & religion as one of the biggest collaborative artworks ever. Yes, it is the opiate of the people, but it stands there along with all other entertainment, no worse, with TV and video games and the perils of the Interweb.

Indulgence

I met Jesus tonight at a Party.  He offered me a vegan sweet as the body of Christ.  I told him that I had written much music to his glory. He laid his hand on my head and blessed me.

By Popular Demand, the Gloria

More devils than birds in the sky

A great number of demons in the Vatican, some quite voluptuous, some rakish, some horrific, but all kinda appealing. While we all hope for an eternity spent in quiet contemplation of the Celestial Visage, the fires of Hell and the activities of its residents make a far more winsome subject for the visual arts.  

The Bed You Sleep In: A Warning

A favorite moment from The Bed You Sleep In, where Thomas Morris as the oracle has just hinted at Ray's impending doom. He recites a bit of Revelation 14 and we head off on one of Jon's landscape love-ins. Jon told me that the location of a story was as important to him as plot or character and deserved equal time. The music that starts about one minute into the clip is almost entirely derived from field recordings that Josh Rosen and I made of the local sawmill in Toledo, Oregon, now closed down because, as they discuss in the movie, you can't get any of the big trees anymore. (And why not, you ask? Because they really did clearcut the whole state and ship the uncut trees off to Japan.) But the sawmill was a beautiful aural environment. Walking through it was like listening to a futurist symphony and the raw recordings were beautiful, but of course I felt like I had to prettify it all a bit, and I think I was successful in that. I've bumped up the volume of the music in the clip so that it is a bit more intense, but you can hear the original music here or on the full soundtrack recording here.

soleil d'or

Since Jesus was assumed bodily into heaven, there aren't many bits of him available to venerate, but a lovely umbilical cord reliquary is just a block up from our Paris Apartment at the Cluny (see to the right: De Umbilico Domini Jesu Christi) and of course there are the many pretenders to the præputium scattered about Europe.

Yesterday's adventure was being allowed into the atelier and other sancta sanctorum of the Chateau de Versailles by Lynne's friend Laurent, a peintre décoratif who has the magical key that lets you through any door at the place. And, as a sign of special affection and respect, our friend Emily the gilder was given a large and faintly odorous piece of rabbit skin glue by one of the master gilders there, a two year supply for and a necessity for the lengthy but infinitely superior water gilding process. Whillikers, they use a ton of the stuff there to coat most every surface with gold and more gold, dogs of gold, arrows of gold, shields of gold, helmets of gold, and especially the golden rays of the sun to glorify the sainted King Louis, Le Roi Soleil.

And today, took a pilgrimage to IRCAM to visit Michael Fingerhut to talk about digital libraries and music information retrieval and life and death and get the ten dollar tour of the place, a place of my dreams for so many years, underneath the Place Igor Stravinsky, imagined as a place with stone steps worn by so many knees. Discovered today that Gérard Pape is director of CCMIX (Xenakis's UPIC) and have tried to get in touch but no luck yet. We corresponded a few years back when we found we had both written operas on Max Ernst's A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. I haven't heard it and I don't believe he has heard mine. Ah well. In trying to find Gérard's address, discovered that Matt Heckert had also considered an opera on the same book.

le baptème du sade

In Saint-Sulpice, where my dear friend and mentor Donatien Alphonse-François de Sade Marquis was christened on a balmy summer day early in the month of June (Prairial for my Republican readers) 1740 and where Marcel Dupré was the organist for many years. The Paris Meridian runs through the church and also through the gaggle of Dan Brown fans tapping the floor to find the secrets to the Sanct Grael hidden below. Went to ISMIR in Vienna last week. A lot of people using MFCCs for similarity just like the old Muscle Fish patent. Had dinner with my good friend Mariko Wakita who played the Marceline-Marie rôle in die Nacht wird kommen... in Klagenfurt and Brühl and the singing Jenny in Blinde Liebe. Richard Friedman is going to play the Mordake Suite #1 on Music from Other Minds on the weekend. Talked to Mrs. Childs about how "Freddy" Hundertwasser used to hang around her dining room window to see if they were eating so he could seem to be serendipitously stopping by and, oh, are you eating, why yes, I'll just have some bread with butter. Has anyone else noticed how most artists are poor during their life and are capitalized on after their death? Yes, of course, we all know.

The Flag of Appenzell

Faithful readers know that my Mass is premiering this fall in St Gallen, Switzerland. But they may not know that to the south of the city is the canton of Appenzell, represented by the flag above. In heraldry-speak: Argent, a bear rampant sable, armed langued and priapic in his virility gules. Translated: on a silvery white field, a bear is represented standing on one hind foot with its forefeet in the air, in profile, facing the dexter side, with right hind foot raised, in black, with red claws and erect penis of red tincture.


The bear on the flag is in fact that same bear previously discussed, shown in the above bas-relief befriending Gallus. Appenzell was a vassal state of the Abbot of St Gallen until 1403 when it threw off the yoke of the bear-loving abbey, retaining however a fondness for the bear, putting it in their flag but adding the bold red erection as a touch of defiance. The story goes that, in 1579, a printer in St Gallen removed the bear's hard-on from a collectible calendar, almost plunging the two sides into war until he toadied to the Appenzellers and the city agreed to destroy every copy it could find.

After writing the ordinary of the Mass, I decided to add an organ postlude. The Dom Cathedral has three organs, including two smaller baroque instruments in the choir, but the large organ is very beautiful, visually and aurally. It's a typical postlude, with a flamboyant opening, a memory from my youth listening to Norberto Guinaldo's florid improvisations, my own attempt a poor imitation. In the middle, it ventures into a more static territory, another poor imitation, this time reminiscent of Terry Riley's Shri Camel. Let's part with just a glimpse of it.

Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi

My Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi will be performed at the beautiful Abbey of St Gall in Switzerland on the Day of Repentance and Prayer (15 September). The Abbey was the commissioner of the piece, and it is thus named after one of their most famous, the musician and poet Notker Balbulus, aka Notker the Stammerer (840-912, beatified 1512). He is known as the first ethnically German composer of music and for publishing the first collection of Sequences, mnemonic poems for remembering the series of pitches sung during a melisma in plainchant, many composed by him. The stammering little monk "was so much loved by the monks of his abbey that for a long time after his death, they could not speak of him without shedding tears."

Some selections from the Mass were performed last Summer by the SFCCO and Schola Cantorum San Francisco. Here's a bit of it.

The Celestial Bridegroom

I was raised in a religious family and the iconography, the ritual, the warm embrace of Christianity are all felt strongly in me, but at a young age I was seduced by art, literature, even by seduction itself; in my dreams, the symbols of one and the other, its shadow, were mixed and confused, synthesizing a new self, more base, less seraphic, a fallen angel who shall never enter into paradise but, like Moses, will die while gazing upon the promised land, the celestial city, a place of joy where honey flows like water. The ecstasy of religion has been replaced by other ecstasies, those of the flesh, and those of the intellect, poor substitutes to be sure but, haven fallen so far and for so long, I have little else. The operas come from this place, mixing these worlds, the sounds formed by the slowly fading echoes of true religion, the cries of fleshly delight, the resonating in the hollowness of my soul.

I look now for salvation in many places. Rimbaud's life teaches me (O Lord, O Celestial Bridegroom, do not turn thy face from the confession of the most pitiful of thy handmaidens. I am lost. I'm drunk. I'm impure. What a life! ) and I find some comfort in Robert Glück's Margery Kempe, a beautiful juxtaposition of sexual obsession and religious obsession, where he and the earliest English autobiographer both seek sainthood through a union both sacred and profane, imagining their coupling with their own Celestial Bridegrooms and, finally, from my own work, the section of that title, der Himmlische Bräutigam, so wonderfully evoked by Josef Oberauer, wearing a pink thong and platform shoes, lifting him just that much more towards heaven.