Music vs. Theater

Jake Heggie is kind of a big deal. If his own story were made into an opera, it would be laughed off as contrived and unbelievable (even more so than most opera plots). A working stiff writing copy in the PR department of a national opera gets noticed by the right people and is launched to superstardom (by opera standards) by a series of highly successful commissions. But amazingly this story is true. From his first commission, Dead Man Walking, and to his recent triumph with Moby Dick, Heggie is one of a handful of living composers who actually get to see their operas produced multiple times.

Last night the San Francisco Opera hosted an interactive workshop with Jake Heggie as part of their Adult Education program. The stated goal of the workshop was to explore the evolution of new opera, focusing on the adaptation of existing works. Read the rest of this entry →

Last month, inspired by a post on Chloe Veltman’s blog Lies Like Truth, I wrote a response addressing the melismatic, overwrought style of singing that seems to have been in vogue since the 1990s. Chloe read my piece and invited me to collaborate on an episode of her radio show VoiceBox dedicated to this subject that will air tonight on KALW. (And available streaming from KALW’s website for the next seven days.)

Preparing for this show forced me to clarify my thinking about the technique. For one thing, I’ve decided that we don’t really have a good label for it. Read the rest of this entry →

success = papers not blowing away

My friend Natalie Wilson recently did a remarkable job of setting an enormous goal and meeting it almost to the date. At the beginning of the year she challenged herself to write an entire play (her first) in nine months. Using the extended metaphor of birth (which time and again works uncannily well) she started a blog ‘Birth of a Play(wright)‘ to track her gestation. It’s a testament to her tenacity and determination that she not only finished the play in time, but secured enough funding (and interest) to put up a reading with top notch broadway talent early in November.

And now she’s facing the question that haunts so many early career writers after a big premiere. “What next?” Read the rest of this entry →

No. Not Mel Gibson.

Molly Sheridan’s Mind The Gap blog has gotten particularly geektastic this past week as she hosted a virtual book club. The book in question, Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants. This certainly tickled the computer scientist in me, Kelly’s Out Of Control changed the way I thought about computing in the mid 90s.

Kelly has long been on the forefront of technological thought, hanging with Stewart Brand and his buddies back during the Whole Earth Catalog days through the WELL, and these days with the Long Now Foundation. And along the way he co-founded Wired magazine. Despite a long history of underconsumption and a fascination with Amish and other ‘anti-progress’ cultures, Kelly is cautiously pro-technology, believing that progress is inherently good while prescribing a very specific set of guidelines towards adopting technology more responsibly than we tend to. Read the rest of this entry →

I think it started with Whitney Houston. Then Mariah Carey. And then it spread to any R&B singer with a record deal. And then American Idol. And now, just about every YouTube video you see.

It’s melisma. In singing, it’s any discrete changing of pitch while sustaining a single syllable. A common technique in baroque vocal music as well as ancient church practices of all western religions, it has become the hallmark of virtuosity. “Good” singing has become measured in extraneous flourishes, grace notes, and the extending of a phrase well past any reasonable proportion.

So what is there to do? Read the rest of this entry →

Can you spot the MacArthur genius?

John Adams titled his work “My Father Knew Charles Ives” based on a hunch that had his father ever actually met the groundbreaking American composer, their similar dispositions and interests would have made them fast friends. This little anecdote differs from Adams’ in two points.  First, my father, a lifelong athlete and track coach couldn’t be more different than the groudbreaking American modernist Milton Babbitt, one of the most significant American composers of the century.  And second, it actually happened. Read the rest of this entry →

I’ve come to the realization that 80% of the stress I’ve ever experienced has come from watching baseball. Specifically post season baseball. Which is equal parts a commentary on how little stress I have in my normal life and how stressful it is for me to watch baseball when something’s on the line.

So yeah. This is a very stressful time in my life.  The SF Giants are one win away from taking the National League pennant and I’m utterly distracted. I was useless at Richter Scale rehearsal last night, my mind was consumed by the one run deficit going into the eighth inning. It’s hard to lead a rehearsal while trying to figure out how to sneak in a glance at your iPhone for an update.

At the San Francisco Opera just the night before, as soon as Butterfly and Pinkerton retreated to their folding house I whipped out the iPhone to see who won.   Read the rest of this entry →

This is kinda neat. One of the main musical gestures in the score of Inception is derived from an actual plot point in the film.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVkQ0C4qDvM

Neat! Cool! I love it!

But is it hearable? I mean, now that it’s been pointed out and delivered via the viral web you can hear it, and SOMEONE must have heard it to first point it out, but would anyone hear it on a first, third, or twentieth listen? And if it’s not hearable, does it even matter as a theatrical gesture?

That could be asked of a many musical ideas. While it might require some amount of indoctrination to follow musical relationships in Mozart or Beethoven, there’s no doubt that those relationships are observable and create some sort of meaning. Can any amount of training make the intricate and technical transformations and relationships of serial music hearable without following along in a heavily marked up score? What about the little games that composers would sometimes play, spelling out names with pitches? There’s no way anyone could hear that.

It seems that there are two flavors of transformation, the transformation that is purely part of the compositional process, part of the mental game the composer plays to create a satisfying piece. It may have meaning to the composer, but it requires some extra-musical information or very careful analysis to be observed. Then there is the transformation that is designed to be followed and tracked by the astute listener, to give meaning and structure to a piece.

In Zimmer’s case with Inception, there may be parts of the score that encourage the listener to hear this relationship between the doom gesture and the Piaf tune, all it would take is one passage that presents one the themes speeding up or slowing down into the other and all would become clear. But without that breadcrumb somewhere in the score, I suspect that under normal listening that relationship would remain unobserved and, therefore, meaningless.

I really dig Guitar Hero. From the first time I picked up a four buttoned plastic guitar and jammed out to We Got The Beat at the 2007 SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference I was hooked. Having a reasonable amount of musical aptitude, I took to it pretty quickly.  I can usually sight read songs at the hard level without failing (on guitar at least, drums are a bit harder for me). I’m pretty sure I’d be able to get through expert, if only there was a display mode that showed real rhythmic notation (e.g. eighth notes and quarter notes) instead of the scrolling piano roll that makes it hard to keep track of the beat.

But is Guitar Hero good for music?

Growing up I was magnetically attracted to music. My dad was an athletic director for a high school and every autumn weekend I would go with him to the football games.  I never paid attention to the games, I just wanted to hear the marching band play. There’s a picture of me at the age of 3 sitting inside a sousaphone, trying to blow into a mouthpiece about half the size of my face.

As soon as I was old enough, I started learning how to actually participate in music.  First violin, then trumpet, and then (much later) piano.  I would spend countless hours practicing so I could play some role however small, in creating the ensemble sounds that I found so enrapturing. Sitting in a band or orchestra, playing the right notes at the right time, contributing my voice to something greater than the sum of it’s parts remains a deeply enriching experience.

But the funny thing is, these days, when I play Guitar Hero, I feel that same musical itch scratched to a surprising extent. It really FEELS like I’m playing that music, like I’m a great guitar player. I find myself wondering, if I could have had this semi-instant gratification, the illusion that I’m creating music when I was 10 or 11, would I have bothered spending those countless hours learning how to be at best a middling trumpet player? Or would I have spent those hours learning how to press the right buttons on the Guitar Hero controller at the right time, rewarded by the perfect strains of The Who or Led Zeppelin from my speakers.  To be sure Guitar Hero does require a real level of expertise, but with the possible exception of the coordination needed for the drum part, that skill doesn’t translate into anything involving the actual creation of music.

Perhaps Guitar Hero will end up being a kind of gateway, encouraging kids to eventually graduate from the plastic toggle switch to a real guitar. I’m not so sure. A friend of mine who is a pretty accomplished guitarist often says that the only way to become a great guitarist is to truly enjoy being a crappy guitarist for a long time. I wonder if folks will bother suffering through the crappy guitarist portion of their lives when the illusion of rock legend status is just a power button away.

Oh man.  Another small theater is taken out of commission.  I just learned that Climate Theater has lost its lease and is moving operations to the Traveling Jewish Theater.  Chloe Veltman covered it on her blog.  (Somehow I keep crossing paths with Chloe Veltman.  I think I only met her in person once, very briefly at the opening night parties that Cutting Ball theater threw for their production of Mud, but she keeps on popping up.  First she’s friends with fellow Richter Scale Jerry Cain (via NY Times blogger Scott James).  Then she’s interviewing my composition teacher David Conte.  This time I was actually in Jessica Heidt’s living room getting ready to do some work on Failing That while Chloe was interviewing her. One of these days we might actually have a conversation. But I digress…)

As someone who prefers his theatrical spaces to be intimate (more accurately, someone who prefers theater that isn’t going to draw more than 50 people in any given night) this is a bummer. We need all the small spaces we can get. So as a tribute to the Climate’s lost space, why don’t you take a look at what’s playing in San Francisco’s teeny houses this weekend. Or next weekend. (But don’t wait too much longer, lest they lose their leases as well…)

The Real Kim Harmon is doing a performance piece in the art space/curio shop hybrid Viracocha in the mission

The Dark Room is continuing it’s Twilight Zone productions as well as their bad movie nights.

Stage Werx has Lisa Marie Rollins’ solo show  Ungrateful Daughter (which features a scene that came from a suggestion I made at one of W Kamau Bell‘s solo performance workshops…)

SF Playhouse is previewing their re-imagining of The Fantasticks set in a contemporary dystopia.

The Garage has got the athletic dance group the San Francisco Moving Men

Counterpulse has a new show about LGBTQ elders by Outlook Theater Productions

Intersection for the Arts is celebrating its 45th anniversary with a Gala auction.

And, of course, up in Petaluma, I’ll be performing in the closing night of Emmeline at teeny opera company Cinnabar.