Well this was a big weekend. I presented a thirty minute excerpt of Failing That at StageWerx, including twenty minutes of brand new material. If that was all that was going on this weekend, that would have been plenty. Unfortunately, it was one of those weekends where just about every aspect of my life had something going on.
How did the workshop go? Well…I’ll get to that. First let me give you a glimpse into the days leading up to it…
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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).
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.
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.
Sometimes I don’t have a great sense of how much time things really take. I figure if it’s conceptually easy, it shouldn’t take much time to do. I neglect to schedule the actual overhead involved with the mechanical tasks. Sometimes this gets me in trouble. I’m a little bit worried that this might be one of those times.
I’ll be performing a 25 minute excerpt from Failing That as part of the Stage Werx Solo Sunday festival on February 28th. This excerpt will follow the arc of Steven Scafidi as he finds himself completely unprepared for a final exam.
These workshops are a great way to see a work as it develops, and also a great way for me to see what works and what doesn’t work.
I’ll be presenting my piece in the first half of the evening (note the early start time, 7pm). My good friend, the lovely and talented Katie Rubin will be presenting a section of her solo show in the second half. I hope to see you there after the show.
Read more about Failing That (including audio samples) here.
You can purchase tickets here.
Hey look! It’s the latest animation from my a cappella group, The Richter Scales. I wrote it. And I sang the solo. And my lovely wife animated it. I think it’s pretty cute. (Although perhaps a tad bit dated. It sure felt relevant when I wrote it back in 2003.)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7XS2NIX8zE
Composing music is not easy. At least not for me. It’s hard. And slow. And kinda lonely. And it requires a lot of sitting around with a piano or computer or piece of paper and trying to will something into existence. Ironically, it has almost nothing in common with the activity that usually compels one to try to compose music, namely, LISTENING to music.