Music vs. Theater

File this under “things I’m required to do when I really should be composing or at least practicing for the workshop.”

I got an email last night asking me to supply some marketing material for the Solo Sundays gig, including a fifteen word description of  my piece for the ticketing website.  Fifteen words!  The full title of the piece is five words and my full name is another three!  That’s over half the real estate right there.   There’s just enough room for:

Brian M Rosen’s “Failing That: A Minor Tragedy” is an opera. Look! Three more words!

Somehow I don’t think that would get butts in seats.

Turns out being brief is a lot of work.  How to be pithy, descriptive, and interesting in so few words? For inspiration I turned to Smith Magazine’s Six Word Memoir project. And then checked out #operaplot over at The Omniscient Mussel, a contest where readers attempt to summarize entire operas using only 140 characters (i.e. one tweet).  Unfortunately, snark doesn’t translate well in marketing materials.

After a surprising amount of time I was able come up with both 20 and 30 word descriptions of what audiences will actually be seeing at StageWerx in ten days (assuming I find time to actually start rehearsing this stuff).

33 words

Brian M Rosen sings an excerpt from his original opera “Failing That”, in which a college student hallucinates his way through a final exam, encountering his inner demons, Einstein, and his ex-girlfriend.

That’ll have to do for now.  Hopefully the 270 words worth of program notes will be easier.

Note to readers: So far this blog has a bit too much in the “Stuff About Me” category for my taste. In the next few days I hope to write up a few posts about music and theater. You know, the title of the blog.

Update: They actually decided to go with this alternative blurb that I included, even though I thought it was less interesting. Go figure.

31 words

Brian M Rosen’s sings an excerpt from his original opera “Failing That,” in which a college student, utterly unprepared for his final exam, turns to self medication with deliriously unexpected results.