per Margherita Eugenia

Notes for a variation on Torna a Surriento:

Although my father was capable of some puccaloistic whistling, most of my musical talent came through my mother, who played in a piano-laden ersatz orchestra in her youth, a not uncommon animal in those areas bereft of a bona fide heterogeneous ensemble, performing multi-piano arrangements of familiar melodies, such as her favorite, my countryman Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, whose inexorably testosteronic accelerando rubbed her and her fellow pianistes to the brink of ecstasy. But the LP most in rotation in my boyhood home featured the trademark cascading strings of the Mantovani arrangements of Italian melodies, including Come Back to Sorrento, a calorie-lacking fluffball that I still cannot hear without bawling like a little baby, and a few flavonoids of which I have stolen for my variation here for an ensemble sadly lacking the three thousand strings necessary.

I happened across Scott D. Strader's blog recently and, reading his comment on Prokofievization, realized that I often do a bit of the same, but especially so in this number, since it started with someone else's tune and harmonies, and I needed to make it my own. The process looked something like this:

1. scribbling the original tune into the score - may as well keep the original key;

2. sketching an orchestration of the tune and the chords, by which I more properly mean arranging, where some notes and rhythms exist and one has to scatter them about, but stealing a few ideas as mentioned above from the Mantovani, e.g., the tremoloed strings and guitar;

3. do more of the actual orchestration, i.e., the orchestra-as-an-instrument parts. Who was it that said, when looking at a workmanlike orchestral arrangement of a piece for piano, that it was now time to orchestrate the pedal? So, adding the pedal effects and swirls and swells, an iterative process;

4. at the same time as (3), listening to every YouTubed version of Return to Sorrento and Torna a Surriento and realizing that every single singer who sang the original in all its golden age of opera glory performed the rubati and ritenuti in exactly the same way, so deciding to notate that into the score, requiring some stretching of time signatures here and there;

5. at the same time as (3) and (4), getting bored with the whole thing and remembering the rhythmically unpinned viola in Berio's setting of Black is the colour..., and deciding to write some other, more typical music to start it and to interrupt it and shoehorning that into it, streamlining the harmonies to make them a little less ploddingly obvious, adding some seasoning of the carousel;

6. sleeping on it, revising, repeating;

For 90 seconds of music, it was more difficult than usual, probably because I was starting with something that didn't sound much like me, and, even though constraints can sometimes be liberating, feeling bowed by all the baggage carried by this particular melody. But, even when writing things of my own from scratch, it is rare that I trust the first draft. There is always a process that follows of both honing and embellishing, of adding to and stripping away.

Two New Reviews

Of Mordake, not yet released:

The music is convoluted and tumultuous yet well ordered in its own fractal logics, the lyrics sung in English in Duykers' heroic exhortations ever attempting domination of the reedlike insinuations and madnesses of his sister, snakily evoked through Korporate Marionettes' devices to produce a mocking hectoring from Duykers' own vocal chords (remember, this is a solo opera!), the result effecting a personality split and schizophrenias effective on more than one level. On top, to the side, and underneath, Wold crafted a welter of environments leaping from harsh urgency to ambient tranquility shot through with muted echolalia—the bridge from Go Get Our Supper! to What Have You Done? being a great example.

This daring purveyor of far horizons favors nightmare and the disturbing undermatrix of consciousness in his work, and Mordake is his most impressive evocation of that since Taking the Veil, to my mind stunningly high art…

and the Missa, in the online review journal FAME:

The voices are largely female and angelic in the extreme, male counterpoints recessed, with the cathedral's echo providing an expansive golden warmth to the massed encantings, a palpable feel of heavenly dimensions ... There are effulgent passages of Godly sentimentality but also the turbulence of the states between [Him] and man, reminders of our fall from Grace.

Text setting

Clark Suprynowicz and I were talking opera libretti recently at a fundraiser for the John Duykers and Miguel Frasconi work-in-progress, Hand to Mouth: The Journey of the Seed from Soil to Plate, a opera-ette which draws on John's other career as organic farmer and nearly-organic beekeeper, and the fact of our divergent approaches made got me to thinking. I'm a prose man, and believe in the sanctity of the language, which is typically my entrée into a text-based piece. To reiterate, language is the key to an opera composition, the way in, containing something that strikes me as being musical, in whatever sense one takes that. I've been considering Queer again lately, as we are planning to remount that in the Spring of 2011 as the 10th anniversary of the premiere and the 25th anniversary of the book's publication. Burroughs's writing is very musical, its flow and lilt and repetitions and its connection straight to the gut, not poetic in the old-fashioned sense of meter and foot, but its music inspired my own. In comparison, Clark's cavalier attitude to what his librettists have written down, and the fact that he bends their words to fit his tunes, seem quite sinful. For me, tunes and music spring from the words, although I hope that the music isn't simply painting colors over the words and that the music that comes from this interaction can stand on its own. I remember being asked once by a singer during the development of an early piece which sections were recit and aria and I realized it hadn't even crossed my mind. I was presenting the text, and I suppose some sections fit one label or the other, that some were internal monologue, outside of the action, and some were more action oriented, but I didn't stop somewhere along the way to sing a song, a song with a melody upon which the words were hung.

When I first studied composition, way back when, the very first exercise we did was to set a text and I've realized this may have shaped my approach early on. We each chose a poem and analyzed it, reciting it several times, writing down the rhythmic result in sprechstimme form, trying to capture the prosody and also the pitch contour of our recitation. The teacher's idea was that this was necessary to understand simply where the musical stresses should fall, and what the melodic pitch contour should be to properly capture the sound of the poem. But I realized in a moment of youthful revelation that this scribbled down proto-setting was the nut of the piece to come, that I could distort this pitch function of time in a number of ways, stretching it and shrinking it uniformly or non-uniformly in either axis, translating it, a whole series of affine and even nonlinear transformations, but that this would really be the piece, what the audience heard, my translation of the poem to sound.

When a composer sets text, the composer is the actor, is the reciter, and no matter who performs the piece thereafter, even though they may emote and express, they are fundamentally locked into the actor-performance of the composer herself. The composer locks down the basic timing and puts the reaction of one actor to the other into the mouth of each. The funny thing is, very few composers are taught acting or reciting or anything remotely theatrical or dramatic. We could ask, why should their conception of the text become the one true path through it?

I noticed something in my first piece which had real actors, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. Professional actors, who had no problem memorizing long monologues from traditional plays, were suddenly thrown off balance when they had to say their piece over a fixed length of time - to fit with some music and arrive at some dramatic point at the right moment. They stumbled and forget their lines and couldn't remember their stage business or act natural. Their whole acting lives had been all about the fluidity of time and expression and reacting to the moment, reacting to other actors, working in a development process, sometimes over a long time, sometimes with a director, to figure out their best pacing and timing and then to improvise some of those things further during performance, like real life. But the simple request to fit that expression into a certain stretch of time, combined with fighting against the rhythms of the music behind them, broke them down. So what to say about opera singers for whom almost all of these actor-ly expectations are subverted? Does this explain why opera in its heyday, pre subtitles, fascinated by its golden age, almost ignored the text completely, concentrating on the beautiful line, the voice, all the actors standing on the edge of the stage singing to the audience and ignoring each other, the audience swooning and crying, only knowing what is going on from the fact that they had seen the piece over and over and over and had the story synopsis in their program?

I tried to do something different in Mordake to alleviate this, playing with a technological solution, where John could sing a line freely - where he could act - and I would have fiddle with the knobs of the accompaniment, lengthening and shortening the music underneath to fit. I failed to achieve what I wanted, partially because I'm into dominance and control, but also because I think it would have required some more radical changes to my own compositional process. The fragment at the top of this post is typical for me, meters changing to fit the textual rhythm, and that has defined so much of who I am compositionally. I was recently reading an article by Kirke Mechem on choral setting, which is a different animal than opera, as the audience's understanding of the words being not so critical. In this piece, he talks about the importance of musical form, and once I got past my usual reaction in hearing the phrase "musical form," which is to release the safety on my Browning, I realized that I agreed with him, text setting shouldn't be, as he says, the musical equivalent of painting by numbers, but I also realized that all the text setting I have done has changed my notion of musical form. My later instrumental works sound to me like little operas, not that they actually have an underlying story, say Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, but they seem dramatic, wandering along and telling a tale, the music unfolding from what has come before, with asides and interjections, and me making the same kind of dramatic decisions: should there be a climax here, time for the intermission, or for the audience to relax and whisper and kiss their neighbor, am I going to go for the slam bang ending or the whimper, is it time for love interest to arrive? But Kirke did walk out in the middle of my opera Sub Pontio Pilato, brought there by his son and my good friend Ed, whose birthday was yesterday, and with whom I made out briefly for the amusement of his girlfriend and other guests on Sunday, me always willing to give a hand up to my friends, so maybe he didn't agree with my approach and thought my form was lacking, and who can see into the heart of another?

an UPDATE from Ed:

Just for the record, I believe (and I *was* sitting there with him) that he 'walked out', ahem, during intermission, because his back was hurting him. If you want to, ahem, add a little footnote to your post, detailing the dry boring reality (in contrast to the dramatic characterization!) -- feel free :)

OK, well, that is much drier and less colorful so not as interesting, but is the truth.

Dresher's Schick Machine

I drove out to the far distant countryside last week, past the manor houses of the 80 corridor, to see Paul Dresher's Schick Machine. As usual, I was in a bit of a funk, but by the end the piece had completely drawn me in. Steven Schick is a masterful percussionist, one of those who I'm sure can elicit a masterful performance out of any old bit of junk, but in this work his talent is allowed to flit across a variety of one-off noise and tone machines, packed onto the relatively small stage. A number of instrument makers were involved in the project, including Paul himself, but also Dan Schmidt, from whom I studied Javanese Music so many years ago, and Matt Heckert of SRL fame. Mr. Heckert's instrument was one of my favorites, just because of its seeming dangerousness, spinning chaotically, almost out-of-control, reminding me of the bowling-ball cannon shooting at the spectators at the first SRL show I saw way back when. But out of this jumble came some beautiful and quite big music, aided by Alex Stahl's loopers which allowed Paul to build up some massive orchestral weaves.

There is a bit of a story: the man who has lost his name and given himself over to his plans for a world-changing machine, the Schick machine, and, as it is a crux of the piece, I won't give away what this machine really is. But he is trapped there, inside himself, inside the assemblage of sound, constantly distracted, and those moments of distraction, where he stops to play, are the true center of the piece.

Requiring higher education to comprehend

I recently received a request for submissions for a contemporary music composition concert, which happens to be taking place in the city of Eagle Rock, California, where I once studied the craft. In it was this light bit of manifesto:

The theme of this concert is music, literature, and art that evoke in the listener some aspect of the human emotional experience (i.e., love/pain/sorrow/fear/madness/ laughter/faith/hope/etc.). The key is that this music needs to be emotionally expressive, relatable, and readily accessible to the average listener (this of course doesn’t mean that the music necessarily needs to be programmatic). Avant-garde, atonal, experimental music, or compositions that require higher education to comprehend it are simply not appropriate for the theme of this concert.

I was incensed of course, on finding myself transported to a mirror world where not only left was right but up was down, where all that I knew and loved and up with which I grew was no longer true or meet or right or salutary and that my previous notion, that the music I had listened to from my childhood and thought relatable, expressive and more was actually not so. I trashed the email in a huff, but then, later, I untrashed it, and read and read and dissected it, dwelling on it, working myself into a fit. I googled the composers, the venue, every major noun in it, and brought forth the firehose of data from the net, fascinated.

Was anything learned? Probably nothing of value, but I did stop at some intriguing waypoints. One of the composers had a link to bring up a UI where one could listen to his works, which were divided into categories and from there, subcategories, e.g.: Action/Adventure, Asian, Atmospheric, Ballet, Comedy, ... through the alphabet to Whimsical. In the Asian category: Into the Mists of Asia, where we find the subdescription: From the mists of Asian forest, a hero appears to reunite the Shaolin warriors. In another: Frost Fills the Enchanted Woods, where: Entering an enchanted grove, Aerlyn looks around at the frost that is draped across the wood. Listening, I found a sure hand at the synthesized orchestra tiller, and music which did indeed well match the bromidic descriptions, reminding me of when, working on a Henry Rosenthal production, he showed me the batch of nearly identical cassettes which had arrived through the post after the production was announced in Variety or the Hollywood Reporter or wherever, each bearing on the small label the composer's name and a listing of the contents: (1) action (2) romance (3) ...

Silk purse makes sow's ear more ridiculous

Just back from New York City, in a bit of a snarky mood. I love the city and the people and buildings and the park and the overwhelming cultural onslaught, but sometimes find the uptown-midtown-downtown-oh-and-the-rest-of-the-world-but-maybe-Europe's-OK point of view, especially in the music scene, a bit off-putting. We other-coasters do get our dander up about it, but what can we do but sit in our own beautiful city, listening to the other West Coast composers like Partch and Stravinsky and Riley and Milhaud. But my friend and sometimes operatic colleague Laura Bohn dragged us to the Met (the opera one that is) for a performance of Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust, which was touted last year for its interactive video elements, while I was still living in the aftermath of Mordake, so my interests were more than usually piqued. I have to say the sheen is quite beautiful, aided by a perfect projection system applied at the scale of spectacle, reminiscent of the feel of the golden age of stage magic, where storms at sea and horse races were reënacted with gales of wind and rain and treadmills built into the floor, even though this technology is so much cleaner and software-driven. However, the piece underlying all this, this almost-opera, more designed for the concert stage than the opera stage, but that being no real excuse either, is a stinkpile. I may be too kind in that description. Better would be to call it a stinking pile, packaged in a production so clearly expensive and fanciful and dandiful and technologically overwhelming that the whole mess stunk just a bit more to high heaven than it would have if just left to slowly die on its own.

A bit from the libretto:

Has! Has!

(The demons carry Mephistopheles in triumph.)

Tradioun Marexil firtrudinxé burrudixé.

Fory my dinkorlitz.

O mérikariu O midara caraibo lakinda,

mérondor dinkorlitz.

Tradioun marexil,

Tradioun burrudix?

Trudinxé caraibo.

Fir omévixé mérondor.

Mit aysko, mérondor, mit aysko! Oh!

(The demons dance around Mephistopheles.)

Diff! Diff! mérondor, mérondor aysko!

Has! Has! Satan.

Has! Has! Belphégor,

Has! Has! Méphisto,

Has! Has! Kroïx!

Diff! Diff! Astaroth,

Diff! Diff! Belzébuth, Belphégor, Astaroth, Méphisto!

Sat, sat rayk irkimour.

Has! Has! Méphisto!

Has! Has! Irimiru karabrao!

Proof once again that composers are not great judges of texts (see Beethoven's Ninth Symphony), and probably shouldn't help with their own libretti. Although this is a minor work in the Grand Opera canon, many of the most famous have pretty poor libretti. It's hard to imagine a major highbrow theater with as enormous a budget for talent and equipment constantly dusting off the most middling of the plays of the 19th century year after year and spending such enormous sums covering them in layers of fluff so no one pays too close attention to what lies underneath. Experiences such as this make me understand why so many of my through-composed-music-theater-people-who-put-notes-together colleagues avoid the big O word and separate themselves as much as possible from the big O world.

But H. Berlioz's own very posthumous website has an interesting description of his journey writing the piece and his travails in producing it, which I have to admit endeared me to him a bit and made me feel that he and I share some experience of the world, from his Memoirs:

But writing the work was nothing, I had to get it heard, and this is where my problems and disappointments began. Copying the orchestral and vocal parts cost me a fortune; then the numerous rehearsals which I required from the players and the exorbitant fee of 1600 francs which I had to pay for the hire of the hall of the Opéra-Comique, the only hall available to me at the time, committed me to an enterprise which was bound to ruin me. But I went ahead, comforted by a specious reasoning which anyone in my position would have made. "When I performed for the first time Romeo and Juliet at the Conservatoire, I said to myself, such was the eagerness of the public to come and hear it that tickets had to be issued for the corridors to accommodate the overflow of the audience in the hall; and despite the huge costs of the performance I made a small profit. Since this time my reputation among the public has grown, the echo of my successes abroad has bestowed on it an authority in France that it did not have before; the subject of Faust is as famous as that of Romeo, it is generally believed that I find it congenial and that I must have treated it well. Everything therefore encourages the belief that there will be great interest in hearing the new work, which is on a grander scale and more varied in tone than its predecessors, and that at least I should cover the expenses I am incurring…" Vain hope! Years had passed since the first performance of Romeo and Juliet, during which the indifference of the Parisian public for everything to do with arts and literature had progressed beyond belief. At that time already public interest had waned, particularly when a musical work was involved, and there was no desire to go and spend the day (I was unable to give my concerts in the evening) in the hall of the Opéra-Comique, which the fashionable public does not frequent in any case. It was late November (1846), it was snowing, the weather was dreadful; I did not have a popular singer for the part of Marguerite; as for Roger, who sang Faust, and Herman Léon, who took the part of Mephistopheles, they could be heard every day in the same theatre, and they were not fashionable either. The result was that I performed Faust twice before a half-empty hall. The concert-going public of Paris, which is supposed to be interested in music, quietly stayed at home, showing as little interest in my new score as if I had been the most obscure student from the Conservatoire; the audience at those two performances at the Opéra-Comique was no larger than if the most trivial opera in its repertory was being performed.

Nothing in my artistic career hurt me more deeply than this unexpected indifference. It was a painful discovery, but it was at least salutary, in that I learnt from it, and from then on I have not gambled even twenty francs on the popularity of my music with the Parisian public.

photo by Ken Howard for the Metropolitan Opera.

Sweet Encumbrance

Continuing with the treacly investigation of romance and its elations, its euphoric pleasures, begun with Two Orchestral Waltzes for Lynne, the current work, Sweet Encumbrance, makes manifest, in sound, the joyous warmth, the sweet iron fetters and the small panics which flow from hogtying oneself together with one's chosen helpmeet and companion. In this piece, it is demonstrated in some detail how much one can gain in life simply by giving up one's philandering, and, while still given license to strut and flirt and still authorized to play the dandy, one must now, for the foreseeable future, festoon one's costume with the leash and collar and electronic ankle bracelet, sometimes visible but most often invisible, like the line that one might be enticed to cross save for the memories of the previous attempts' resultant truncheoning and electric shocks. But let us not dwell on such past pains, but please to look to that bright future world illumined by the brightest and whitest of most pure light where, joined in glory and set upon one's throne just to the right of the Empress, in a new Sagrada Familia, happily holding court, happily holding the hand of the one most beloved.

Missa fictus Missa ficta

Jay Cloidt and I have been editing together the two nights' recordings of the Missa. It's tremendously thrilling to create such a fiction, something that never was, weaving the different performances, different microphones, different audiences together into one. We've added a few synthetic overlays where a few notes were missing, even recreating one whole section of the postlude. We've discovered once again the joy of reverb in absolving the recording of a great many sins confessed to us under the harsh scrutiny of his monitors, reverb that Jay had foresworn ever since hearing Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

One interesting set of audio interjections comes from a large belled clock in the sanctuary, which goes off from time to time during the recording, especially during the Sanctus, a highly synchronistic event, as the use of bells during the Sanctus goes back almost a millenium. Bells and the Bible go hand-in-hand, like love and glove, and the union produces such poetic gems as those found in Exodus 28:

And beneath upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about:

A golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe round about.

And it shall be upon Aaron to minister: and his sound shall be heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the LORD, and when he cometh out, that he die not.

Tabla lessons with Harihar Rao, with a side trip to Richard Feynman

One day in tabla class - I studied on the side back in my scientific days at CalTech - some progressive-minded classmates and I, looking for a bit of spice and a bit tired of the (while often interestingly subdivided but still) powers-of-2 meters, goaded our teacher, Harihar Rao (top right), into amusing us with some rhythmic fireworks. Like all Westerners, we were always looking for something new and more exciting than what he was actually teaching us, never really willing to spend the time to learn the details of anything, like dancers seeming to hold their partners close but really looking past, scouting the next liaison across the room. But he had been teaching gringos like us for many years and so was used to this blasphemy and, with a weary acceptance, proceeded to teach us a somewhat complex 7 beat pattern. We then tried, a bit shakily, to keep this going, as steady as we could, as he straddled it with an 11 beat pattern, his beat effortlessly 11/7ths faster. It was a sweaty and joyous bit of concentration, collapsing and coming back together as we tried vainly to hold the two opposing rhythms in our head, to achieve what he could seemingly without thinking.

For the few years I studied with Harihar, I couldn't walk anywhere without tabla rhythms appearing over the pulse of my step. It was an obsession, a compulsion. I would practice the patterns as I walked, like all drummers I have known since, making approximations of the sounds with my body, trying to fly each pattern against 3 beats, 4 beats, and 5 and 6 and on. The important thing - or what seemed so at the time - was to be able to perform it consistently while shifting one's concentration from one pulse to the other, flickering between views as with the Necker cube. Relative prime rhythms were of course the only ones that were interesting, like the relative primes that defined the intervals of which I was just becoming aware, and these rhythmic practices spilled out into my pianism, forcing me to play scales in polyrhythms, to add or subtract a beat or two or three to each measure of the left or right hand parts of just about anything to squeeze or expand them just a bit, a pleasant flurry of notes not quite lining up, like the middle bit of the first of the op. 28 Chopin préludes where the right hand switches from 6 to 5. [A note to the reader trying this at home: better is to move the right or left hand up or down a bit as well, a fifth or a third or whatever, and then, even better, to just stop playing other people's music as it's easier on the stereo anyway.]

I was lucky enough to attend CalTech when Richard Feynman was still teaching Physics X, and my friends and I would hang out there too, asking questions about the Moon and the blue sky and rainbows and gravitation and electron spin and DNA and the structure of the eye, learning more about science and its cousins in the barest refractions of light in the few smallest drops distilled from the great man's essences than in all of our more formal studies. The class wasn't really a class at all, but an informal seminar, held in the basement somewhere, maybe Lauritsen, where the students would ask questions about anything, attempting and failing to stump the great man, and where Feynman would always cut through to the heart of each issue, bringing an oh-so-pleasant shock of illumination and intuition.

CalTech was a strange and insular place, a tremendous opportunity for those who were prepared to take advantage of it, suicidally difficult for others, stocked with children who had been locked away, sequestered from society from birth by the nature of their interests and their antisocial smarty-pants disposition. But, even in that rarified place, where Nobel Laureates were dime-a-dozen, Feynman was an icon who floated a bit above the rest. When he showed up to our tabla class one day, we were suitably star-struck and tongue tied, unable to respond to his easy manner. His bongo playing was well-known to us, and well as some of his other idiosyncrasies - one I remember well is when he showed up at a meeting of the CalTech Christian students simply to point out what idiots they were for believing against all facts and logic - but in the end the instrument was beyond him, and he an old dog trying to learn a few last tricks, the sounds too subtle and he too impatient to coax them out of the hide.

Duncan Wold's score for In Residence

My son, showing that he is a child of the same Adam, has constructed a heavenly collection of musical fragments, a Soundscape for a Nonexistent Motion Picture, but which, by its synopsis, makes one strongly wish for its actual production:

This haunting film is not for the faint of heart — or the claustrophobic. We are presented with Jane, an artist who begins a residency at a strange home filled with junk. Her goal is to fashion the detritus into a piece of artwork speaking to the theme of recycling and ‘green’ building practices. But things get twisted when the junk compels her to construct an elaborate and, at times, beautiful trap for herself, which she slowly begins to realize is locking her in, pressing her downward into infinite, interlocking chambers. Even as she becomes more entangled in the web of the house, it begins to provide her with sustenance necessary to continue her work.

— Dina Bloomberg, Down the Rabbit Hole Zine

Tuning in the radio station here, at about eleven and half megaHertz on the dial, we are transported into Jane's world, fading into an imagined natural ambiance, shifting, drawing us into a composition where an ebowed guitar caresses a set of melancholy changes. Of course I'm proud of him, and I tear up a bit when I think of my polymath heir, creator of so many beautiful things, another being Shit Show V, soon to be revealed.

Teddy

I have been fortunate enough in my career to have a few people get very excited about a few works of mine, an heartwarming occurrence. Although, two people that I respect awfully have chosen atypical and offhand works of mine from the mid 80s as their favorites. One was a theatrical work based on a game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Denver Broncos during the Joe Montana glory years, written with Everett Shock, and featuring a recitation of a declaration, aided by an overheard projector on which the declaimer laid out an Xs and Os play-by-play, in the style of the Declaration of Independence (a memory fitting this day of all days), but commencing with the line "when, in the course of a football game, it becomes necessary for one team" and so on.

But the other venture, which has been favorited by more than one of my erstwhile fans, was a small piece done in a small venue in Oakland, where I performed a duet with a Teddy Ruxpin® which centered on themes of objectophilia and robot sex in the modern world. In fact, the exact animatronic doll sitting on my desk today in the photo above being prepared for a comeback tour of sorts next month. You can see the blue pulse timing modulation box I built back in my 'maker' days to control its servos and to allow me to make my own, more sophisticated control tapes. My son, who was about 2 at the time, loved it, although it's possible that some of the themes may have gone over his head. He giggled all through the preceding performance that evening, in which a topless and somewhat buxom young butoh dancer, powdered in white, completed, in about ten minutes, a short walk down an incline.

Since the script was quite short, I reproduce it here for your amusement. As my wife was the voice actor for the bear, I performed a small transgendering of Teddy to Trary, and put a bit of ribbon in his hair.

TRARY(Sings) Come dream with me tonight. (Speaks) Hi, my name is Trary Razkovky. Can you and I be friends? I really enjoy talking to people. In fact, some people have told me I have a problem that way, but I don't count these people among my friends. And I do have many many friends.
I would very much like you to meet one of my very good friends. Say hello to everyone, Erling.

ERLINGHello.

TRARYWhat do you have there with you, Erling?

ERLINGIt's an accordion, Trary.

TRARYIt is a very fine looking instrument, Erling. (Pauses) Can you come a little closer, my friend?

ERLINGSure. (moves closer)

TRARY(After a while) I'd like to talk to you about something, Erling, if that's all right.

ERLINGFine.

TRARYI read a story in the newspaper.

ERLINGWhat was it about?

TRARYA very fine car dealership in St. Louis, Missouri had a contest. The dealership was to give to the winner a brand new Toyota. The single rule of this contest and the objective of those who participated was to kiss the car longer than anyone else. Of course, I was concerned for these people. How would they go to the bathroom? How would they eat or drink? People need companionship too, but I guess they were kissing the car, after all. Luckily, the very wise people at the car dealership had thought of this. They gave each person a few minutes off every hour to take care of the things that they had to.

ERLINGSo who won, Trary?

TRARYA woman won. Her name was Ellen J. Twaddle. She won by kissing the car for 110 hours, longer than anyone else who tried.

ERLINGThat's an amazing story, Trary.

Um, why did you bring it up?

TRARYWell, I began to wonder. How does she feel about the car she has won by kissing it for so long?

ERLINGI don't know.

TRARYWell, wouldn't she be more attracted to it?

ERLINGMaybe.

TRARYMaybe it would seem a little more animate? Wouldn't there be, well, a cognitive dissonance in kissing something for so long that one saw as inanimate?

ERLINGYes, I think you're right, Trary. If she had seen it as inanimate, she would be repulsed, not attracted.

TRARYThat's right, Erling. But she stayed. She even lost her job. Her company was upset with her when they found out why she had been calling in sick for five days.

ERLINGThat's quite a sacrifice.
(pause)

TRARYWould you kiss me, Erling?

ERLINGSure. (Erling kisses Trary for a long time)

TRARY(mumbling through the kiss) I hope you see me in a new light.

ERLING(drawing back) What was that?

TRARYI said, "That was nice."

I think I am in the mood to sing a song for all the people here. Could you accompany me on the accordion, Erling?

ERLINGSure. (Trary and Erling perform The Second Prayer from A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil.)

Intuitionism

Bath-time this morning was facilitated by an iPhone 3G® in a Ziploc® bag - thanks to my friend Nicole for enlightening me of this wonderful invention - and a circuitous path through those intoxicating days early in the last century where Hilbert and Brouwer led the fight over the non-finitary law of the excluded middle (see photo) and other such issues.

As a boy, I was so interested in all of this. The issues seemed so important and, later, as I became a composer, I faced them again, feeling a pressure from above to maintain an intellectually rigorous Germanic methodology in all my musical decision making, a certain belief promulgated by my betters that there was a notion of music that existed in a Platonist reality where deep truths live separate from the dirty business of breath and bows and spit and turntables and stylish hairdos, and that compositional progress was in the furtherance of passage toward this Utopian Ideal.

But I was, deep down, more tolerant, and shall we say more Dutch, and believed that music really was purely an act committed by people for their own amusement, that it existed in this world and not the other, and that it had benefits beyond an explication of existence, namely (0) transcendental beauty here on earth (1) encouraging teen pregnancy through passionate embrace (2) a devil-may-care use of drugs (3) hearing impairment in the elderly (4) separation of fools from their money (5) penis casting (6) nonpareil spirituality and mystical joy (7) creative jouissance (8) and so on, and that music was concerned with the grit and chaos and noise of sound, and that it was, at its core, an inexplicable and impenetrable pursuit, evading all attempts to capture it, drop it in the killing jar, and to pin its beautiful wings to the setting board. The theories I learned as a student did not attempt to cover anything except what I found to be the most superficial aspects of music, the voices and pitches and rhythms, and I was left to find the rest myself.

One of the reasons I started writing - English rather than notes - was to try to explain what I did day-by-day during the compositional process, thinking that in so doing I might capture the uncapturable. But I've failed every time that I have tried. I can't really say easily what I do. There is no process to speak of, and the moments spent in the compositional state sneak by unseen to end up in a piece that I no longer feel my own.

Score Directions

The score is done, the parts have been shipped away once again, and, while usually one for absolute control - a chimera at best - I have abrogated my responsibility as a Komponist to allow the so-called performers a bit of leeway, one arm unbound from the straightjacket, a rest from the hamster wheel, the industrialist lightening for the moment the blows on the backs of the restive workers, but this philosophical change of heart, like most, has come from expediency rather than deep thought, as my compositional laziness seems to increase year upon year. I remember a day in the not so distant past where, to begin the simplest of tunes, I first had to build the instruments, sawing and sanding into the wee-est hours to the ire of my roommates, decide on a tuning, and, locked in my slattering studio, learn to play the aforementioned devices or at the least to coax a sound. But now my compositional life has settled into a pattern: (1) agree to a deadline (2) wait until the last possible moment (3) use every shortcut, trick, careless theft and accident to produce something as quick as possible. I had lunch with my friend and co-producer Paul Dresher the other day and had to hide my head in shame after listening to him describe the months of preparation on Shick Machine, building the instruments, learning to ... yes, you get the idea, everything I had been, and revealing to all the shadow I have become.

In the Stomachs of Fleas

We, that is, fognozzle and Erling Wold, present for you a tale of fear, horror, xenophobia, political posturing and denial, all contained within a musical program piece of sorts, a savage delight for the senses and an allegory for today, this and that and the other thrown into the pot of narrative and boiled up into a scenario as follows:

The Australia steamed into San Francisco in 1899, carrying corpses and rats infected with the plague. Between 1900 and 1904, one hundred twenty-six people contracted the disease in San Francisco and environs. One hundred twenty-two of them died while the governor denied the very existence of the plague and the press blamed the Chinese for spreading it.

The plague was brought under control in 1904, only to resurface in 1906 as the great earthquake displaced the human and rat population. The response to this second outbreak was dealt with more efficiently as the causes were better understood, but one hundred eighty people died of the plague in San Francisco between 1906 and 1909.

Fortunately, Xenopsylla cheopis (the Oriental rat flea) never secured a foothold in San Francisco, and our dominant flea remained Ceratophyllus fasciatus, which lacked the deep stomach required for effective plague transmission. Many more people would have died if the reverse had been true.

Unfortunately, the rat-eradication efforts during the San Francisco plague outbreaks did not extend to the squirrels of the East Bay. Through them, the bubonic plague established a permanent foothold in the Pacific Northwest, where it lives on today - in the stomachs of fleas.

SAN FRANCISCO COMPOSERS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

and Old First Concerts Present:
DREAMS OF THE RESTLESS
Saturday June 13th, 2009 at 8 pm
Old First Presbyterian Church
1751 Sacramento Street/Van Ness, San Francisco, CA 94109
$15 General, $12 Seniors (65 and older), $12 Full Time Students

My Sister, My Love

Alamo!

A habit I picked up years ago from Ed Toomey, formerly of Neef, who picked up every playing card he saw on the ground - a surprisingly common find - compels me to scan the terrain for interesting bits of detritus. I no longer carry them home to fill filing cabinets and adorn the walls; I merely scrutinize and inspect and leave undisturbed. But recently I came across one of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries' screeds on a New York city street, and was reminded of my colleague Barry Drogin's opera named after the selfsame amusing and intolerant religious leader.

In the current missive, Alamo is persecuted, like all good Xtian martyrs, but in his case again by the anti-Christ, who has taken the form of the US government, now accusing him transporting minors across state lines for immoral purposes. In Barry's opera, Alamo's persecutor du jour is the Cult Awareness Network, and a particularly poignant moment occurs when Alamo's polemical rant against the Catholic Church suddenly becomes personal, and we suddenly see through a window to his soul, consumed by a deep and pervasive sadness, a frantic desperation of a man trapped and scared and alone, wondering why God has forsaken him. Barry has put up a section of the score and recording, linked to above and here below, respectively.

Update: Barry has informed me that, and I have apologized for:

As per its full title, "Alamo! a scena for a cappella voice and Bible (King James version)," calling "Alamo!" an "opera" is an error in scale - kind of like calling a one-act play a full-length play, or, say, any orchestral piece in one movement a symphony.

Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein

Flash: Miss Erika, one of our remote correspondents, has sent along this communiqué.

re: Nazi Blog

Are you aware of the nazi sweetheart march "Erika" ,1939, by composer Herms Neil (was the marching song of the Waffen SS)? I feel it needs a place in your blog as it has such a forceful & catchy refrain.

here are video links (montages, etc):

www.youtube.com/watch

www.truveo.com/Erika/id/2182569962

www.youtube.com/watch

German Military Composer Herms Neil blurb:

www.pzg.biz/herms_neil.htm

www.tomahawkfilms.com/herms.htm

Lyrics in English:

1. On the heath there grows a little flower

And its name is Erika

A hundred thousand little bees

Swarm around Erika

Because her heart is full of sweetness,

Her flowery dress gives off a tender scent

On the heath there grows a little flower

And its name is Erika

2. In the homeland lives a little farm maid

And her name is Erika

This girl is my true treasure

And my luck, Erika

When the flower on the heath blooms lilac red,

I sing her this song in greeting.

On the heath there grows a little flower

And its name is Erika

3. Another little flower blooms in my small room

And its name is Erika

In the first rays of the morning and in the twilight

It looks at me, Erika

And it seems to me it speaks aloud:

Are you still thinking of your little bride?

Back home a farm maid weeps for you

And her name is Erika

Name "Erika" had been derived from the heather plant (German: Heide, Erika; Latin: Erica). Vast heather-yards are one of the proud symbols of German natural heritage.

Just thought I'd bring this to your attention.

The small room of the third verse no doubt a prescient image of the small room his corpse will inhabit soon. It is in fact a fine example of the excessively sentimental and jingoistic Soldier Marching Song, like so many others, e.g., Just Before the Battle Mother ("Farewell, mother, you may never / Press me to your heart again"), with a tune that, although needing to be carried along with the heavy rucksack, lightens the load, and reminds the bit of cannon fodder why they are fighting and dying, romanticizing the blown apart bits of body and blood mixing with the bittersweet tears of the girl and/or mother left behind. Once heard, these tunes are hard to forget, and I have found myself since Erika Deer's dispatch humming the chorus as I have gone about my day-to-day.

And I find myself hoping that, in the new coed & don't-don't-ask-don't-tell army of the US of A, there will be both gender-neutral and gender-preference-neutral marching songs as stirring as this, sung by legions of men and women and all points in between, marching to their deaths filled with a heady and passionate joy.

die nazisau

Another missive from a foreign correspondent:

The Mel Brooks video of the previous post reminded me of another contemporary take on the musicality of Adolf, this time hunkering down in his bunker. Walter Moers, a German author, created this great take on the absurdity of Hitler in today’s world.

2B ∨ ¬2B

One of my foreign correspondents sent me the following, and so I quote:

Has it really been a quarter of a century since Mel Brooks re-made Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not To Be? Here’s a little hip-hop number of the same title with Mel Brooks qua Josef Tura qua Adolf H.

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.

the rights...

Several times in my life I've been tempted to set a pre-existing bit of lit, something that somehow inspired me language-wise or otherwise. And, in fact, I have from time to time succumbed to this temptation, the whisk of the devil's tail against my ass, and have paid a price for it, a sin confessed through the grill whilst the priest daydreams of beddable young 'uns spurting out wet, white and jam-like decades of the rosary laying recumbent upon the altar.

But let me give the reader a bit of advice. When the itch comes upon you to adapt, first, step into the kitchen, put the kettle on the boil, traipse out into the garden and pick a bit of fresh mint, pack it into a clear glass teapot, pour the water hot over the aromatic plant, pick the pot up and then smash the whole thing hard against your face. And the point of this exercise is to allow you, the reader, to experience a scale model of a simulacrum of the pain that will ensue if you are foolhardy enough to follow this path, a scarring burning pain that never never never ends.

I'm feeling this pain once again as I'm trying to assemble a DVD box set of my operatic legacy (titled Erling, a life in Opera) and once again the pain is beginning to throb deep behind the eyes. Once again I'm on the phone and the email and the written letters with the lawyers, the agents, the holders of rights, the representatives, the money changers and all their ilk, and the wretched torture rises again.

When I first read queer, Burroughs was quite alive and, as I thought of writing an opera based on the novel, I figgered I would just write him and ask him if I could do it, auteur to auteur, assuring myself that he would put his arms around me in a fatherly way and tell me sure, go ahead, I'd like that. But then, like a number of my erstwhile partners, he went and died on me, leaving me in the hands of his estate, a cold institution not so fatherly, unless we consider fatherliness to be the quality of the absent father, the dad that doesn't take you fishing and isn't there for you and turns his back when you say I love you.  I had contacted Burroughs's longtime secretary, James Grauerholz, who was into the project, but the institution and its lawyers were not satisfied.  I wrote many letters and many many emails, pissing into the wind, and the months and years went by and time was running out. The theater calendar had been set, the costumes were on the drawing board, the greasepaint was already being poured into the troughs and I was considering going forward guerilla style when, one day, I mentioned to my colibrettist John Morace that the latest roadblock was that the lawyers had informed me Steve Buscemi had optioned the rights to queer for a movie and all was in limbo while he scared up money for it.  Upon which, John picked up his phone, dialed the number of Steve's brother from memory, and all was taken care of.  As it turned out, John and the brother had been friends since childhood and once the outer defenses of the celebrity fortress had been penetrated, well, Mr Buscemi could give a shit about some small-time chamber opera writer infringing on his option. I rapturously forked over a $1000 to keep the lawyers sunny and all was then right with the world.

But, every time I think how lovely it would be to resurrect the piece, to see Trauma act it again, to put out a DVD, to do any more than think about it, I realize I have to face this all again.  The Buscemi version seems to have never materialized and who knows who has their hands on it now. 

A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil I ran across at Cody's on the remainder table in the early 80s, playing with it for a decade before taking the plunge and setting the whole thing. As this was before the experiences with queer above, I was even more the naif. Permissions were an ephemeral notion that turned solid enough when I ran headlong into them. Unraveling the tentacles of the octopus that is the rightsholder to the Ernst artworks was a process that took over six years from start to finish. The English translation was by Ernst's wife, Dorothea Tanning, pictured above, born 1910 but who was and is still alive and writing and painting. I tracked her down and received permission, I thought, for everything, but the underlying untranslated text was still held by the Artists' Rights Society in New York City, and the images by ADAGP France, facts that took years of investigation.  Like all good rights societies, they slice and dice Ernst's holdings into the smallest pieces possible, and my six years of effort and another $1000 led to the acquisition of the limited rights to print up 1000 copies of the opera CD and perform the piece three times: San Francisco, Klagenfurt, Brühl. Again, happiness at the end of a long road.

But, once again, every time I dream of reviving the piece, of hearing the music come to life, of finishing the DVD, the familiar weight comes upon me and drags me down into the mud, where I struggle in vain, lungs filling with muck.

The secret of success in New Music

Lou Harrison's Music Primer was one of many very influential and important books in my musical development.  At the time I read it, I was rediscovering a certain melodic simplicity in my own work. His ideas shaped some of mine, but I was especially taken with one particular passage, somewhat outside of the world of music composition per se, but dealing with that which is most important to a career in the arts, namely that a pure career in the arts is an essential impossibility:

If you really have to be a composer and are attractive and uninhibited, then try and get yourself “kept” – whether by woman or man.  This might be easier than undertaking a whole second career in order to be able to afford composing, and you might get a little restorative affection as well.

Unfortunately, I was stupid enough, and probably too inhibited at the time - my late teens, not to follow his advice, to try to make a go of the 'second career' path, to give up sleep, and not to take the high road: to flatback and think of England, to become a good wife, flipping my hair and asking on my knees for a bit more pin money from my loving husband.

But later in life I did figure out that the judicious - or injudicious - placement of my unit in a number of compromising positions could in fact be helpful to the bit of musical career that I eked out on the side.  In the late-mid 80s I started working with choreographer and dancer Miss W_ on an extended series of pieces. The first and maybe the best was Crash, an hallucination on the already hallucinatory J.G. Ballard novel.  My pal Henry Kaiser had recently purchased a Synclavier and a few of the local classical avant types were thrusting their bowls in his face and asking for a bit of the corn gruel drippings off its gleaming steel and black plastic but I had a key, haha!, since Hank and I were working on Secrets and Mysteries (aka Secrets of the Unknown) with Edward Mulhare, using the early sampler to write as much music as quickly as possible. I stole into his beautiful little studio and worked all night every night coaxing as many floating microtonal lushnesses as I could for Crash and Hagalaz and the others. And why, may one inquire, would I work my little ears to the ossicles to find the perfect romantic musical moment, the perfect twist of pitch ratios adding a glint of a knife to a pretty harmony? Because I was in love. And, when Miss W_ came to hear it for the first time, sitting in the dark of the studio late at night, the fullness of my gift fell upon her, parting her lips, spreading her legs ever so slightly. Later, at a restaurant far away, she looked into my eyes and told me of her most favored venereal pleasure, something so near and dear to my heart that my pulse quickened at the thought, and I flipped through a number of scenarios and possibly near-term advantages and pleasures, but, like everyone else who desires and desires so strongly, I hadn't quite thought through the rest of the story: the pain, the recriminations, the crying and the destruction and the loss, but, before that all came to pass, we spent ourselves through a burst of creativity that produced some of my still favorite works, and some of my still favorite memories: risky sweaty writhings under soft sheets, towels put down to catch the blood; hot tubs overfilled of naked lissome dancers, their supple fingers probing under the foaming jets; furtive quasi-couplings in cars, backstage before a performance, in the corner of a darkened gay bar; sweet shared conspiracies.

And at one of our performances at the Lab in San Francisco was a young choreographer named Robert Wechsler, just beginning to develop a new language of sinuous dances based on groups, canons and symmetries, where the dancers moved quickly through each other in seemingly impossible ways, who took a liking to me (and I'm sure Miss W_), and he kept in touch, asking me from time to time to contribute short soundtracks to dances, e.g. Modules and Loops. Not long after, Robert developed some financial complexities in the US, and moved to Nürnberg to allow things to cool. By the mid 90s I had forgotten all the lessons learned with Miss W_ and was embarking on another long walk off a short pier with Ms. A_. Once again, I enjoyed a burst of creativity, my pen pouring out one inspired score after another, intending to woo and succeeding again beyond my expectations and beyond my ability to deal with it. Once again, I found myself pressed against a lithe body, this time straddling me, allowing my hands to wander over her prepubescently boyish frame, a suggestion of immodest nature whispered to me, hot breath on my ear, kisses on my face. Once again, I was caught up in clandestine plans, this time of a global nature, a vast intrigue tapping into a worldwide network of co-conspirators. I accepted an offer from Robert to come to Europe to work with his company, Palindrome, on an evening of dance and music using a set of interactive technologies: a MIDI controlled pipe organ, dancer-tracking software, heartbeat monitors, the very new and pre-browser Internet. And surprise, it so happened that Ms. A_ was working on a project in Prague, a short train ride away, and so came to visit, pleasantly insinuating herself in the company and, after I left, performing on tour with them through Austria.

While performing with Palindrome in Klagenfurt in the south of the Austrian republic, Ms. A_ left a tape with the theater of my first chamber opera, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. Although they didn't care much for the production, a reflection I believe on the cultural divide between the Old and New World, they found themselves drawn back to the music a number of years later and asked me if would be willing to have them perform it and, if possible, to develop a version in German. Although, by the time this came about, my life had plummeted into chaos and into an even more complex sexual by-now-quadrangle including another Ms. A_, a young woman of great vigor and blondness who evinced in me a before unknown tendency for obsessive stalking behavior, one of the high points of my life came while descending into the Klagenfurt airport, a Tyrolean Air flight attendant in an absurdly sexy dirndl leaning over me, noticing a photograph of a woman's mouth covered in blood in the newspaper of the passenger in front of me, seeing my name in the caption of that gory image, landing a few moments later and being greeted as Maestro by the theater director, sweeping me into the dress rehearsal and a magical otherworld, jetlagged and fagged and fashed. The first Ms. A_, who was again performing in the Easter bloc, once again came to meet me, but this scene quickly descended into the by now familiar recrimination, tears, anger, drama and worse and worse. As Ali Tabatabai once told me, we theater folk know not where the stage ends. But, just possibly, do the means justify the terrible endings?  

And this now reminds me: a dream-like trip to Amsterdam with a friend to live out one of her fantasies: that of having two young Dutch boys simultaneously. We tripped and traipsed and shagged our way through the red-light district looking for connections to these ultimate striplings, the perfect combination of enthusiasm and ability and fresh-faced boyishness. In one of these fact-finding encounters of flat-backing fieldwork, the two of us were huffing and puffing and panting over a quite amazingly beautiful and busty Dutch fille de joie who, hearing of our desires, gave us her mobile number and invited her to her wedding in Rotterdam the next week, assuring us that her soon-to-be husband and one of his friends would without doubt fill the bill and that having some other artistic & libertine types there would surely be of benefit to all.

And so, after Klagenfurt and the collapse of the entire quadrangle in flaming death, and as a period of even more intense sluttiness and my relationship with Lynne "die Zweite" began, the Max Ernst museum in Brühl and I planned to have the Little Girl opera performed as part of the dedication of an Ernst sculpture, newly installed. I showed up in town with my freshly blue hair, gathering some curious stares from the locals, overseeing the installation of an outdoor stage for the production, the arrival of the ensemble and all the rest. Also, at this time, Sub Pontio Pilato, also recently translated into German, was heading for its quirky premiere in Austria where a certain Miss B_ was starring, who wanted to come up to Brühl to meet me and see something of what I do. I was feeling my oats, as virility comes with success, and something happened which my gentlemanly upbringing does not allow me to divulge. Even though, with some familiarity, this led to some drama back home with the Empress, Miss B_ and I cemented a personal and artistic connection so that, after the Pilate premiere, she went back to St. Gallen and played the Credo from the opera for the musical director at the Abbey. After an Austrian review of Pilate claimed that the Credo must have come from a pre-existing Mass, I wanted to create such a thing: a crucifix of pieces overlaid, a pre-existing piece from an alternate youth, a time of innocence and faith, before the devil grabbed hold of my soul and I made that Faustian bargain, taking the path of sin, the path of success.

On the Sanctity of Stage Directions

Finally picked up the latest issue of Opera America's rag and betwixt its covers are the usual snaps of Grand Opera productions featuring Giulio Cesare's Divine Julius (as in Gaius Ceasar) in a vaguely fascistic 20th century uniform or Wagner's Das Liebesverbot in a 50s disco setting.  The cover displays a Tales of Hoffman which seems to include robots of a breed I believe unknown in Offenbach's time as well as a white-lab-coat-frocked doctor with steampunk gizmos on his head.  I was drawn back to a jet-lagged endurance-fest in some sunken Dutch city trying to make heads or tails of a Peter Sellars "contemporary staging" of a Rake's Progress which seemed to have been rethunk as a anti-prison-industry diatribe. And there is my friend of a friend Roy Rallo too (although I do have to say I loved the bit in his Finta Giardiniera where, in one of those comedies of misidentification so belovéd of our artistic forebears, the lady who has just mistakenly given a blow job to the wrong fellow in some sort of 70s high-school auditorium or something rises as the lights come on, fades away and draws the back of her hand across her check in a lovely post-head gesture.)

Yes, I know, I know, in our remix culture® we all love the vegematic mish-mosh and hotch-potch of low and high and black and white where blending usurps creating and simple-minded novelty wrests the crown of achievement from laborious toil.  And I accept all that.  I myself have manipulated, slowed down, processed and otherwise pissed on pieces of high art and then called them my own. But why, beseechest me of thou, is it OK to totally ignore the stage directions of the opera libretto, the settings and characters and motions and decor that provide some context for the piece, but it is somehow not OK to touch the music or the words? Why don't these postpostmodern reimaginings apply themselves to the notes and rhythms and other composerist bits as well? Well, we know why: stage directions are second-class citizens, not at the level of the real art.

We see the same abominations in the non-music-theater world as well. The fact that the following anonymously authored entry is considered a point even deserving of empathy is somewhat shocking to me:

Since Beckett's death, all rights for performance of his plays are handled by the Beckett estate, currently managed by Edward Beckett, the author's nephew. The estate has a controversial reputation for maintaining firm control over how Beckett's plays are performed and does not grant licences to productions that do not strictly adhere to the writer's stage directions. (from Wikipedia)

Would there be such gumption if the evil estate made vain protestations against those productions that ignored all the other words appearing on the page?  I mean, sure, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, so go ahead: blend, chop and liquefy it all, but why, after one is done changing all the author's words that just happen not to be actually spoken, do you, yes you, the one with bloody hands churning the grinder handle demand that the poor and probably dead author's name be kept on the marquee?  

When the director of my own opera Mordake worked with the libretto - a beautiful object written by the young, gifted & macabre Douglas Kearney - the sung words were changed hardly a bit and only after careful consultation with the writer, whereas the stage directions were ignored from the get-go, and my mild remonstrations in favor of at least considering their value were met with an awkward silence, some quiet coughs, knowing glances in the direction of the cast member and then quietly ignored.

So, the libretto for St Cecilia, the new twinkle in my eye, is being written only as stage directions, no dialog at all, no escape from the handcuffs for the poor director assigned to the task. I'm doing this out of a certain cantankerousness of course, but goddamn it my rage must be assuaged; and I pray that the wails of anguish that rise from the theater soothe the now-avenged souls of the dramatists so cruelly wronged.

Jolie Holland!

Saw my old friend Jolie at Bimbo's tonight.  Over the many years I've seen her perform, from the olden days at the Rite Spot to her vaunted entry into the seraphic heights crowned with the pop music diadem, it was the best of them all. 

Kathy Acker

Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas were to write an opera together but Thomas drank himself to death before they could begin. Stravinsky wrote that this was "a terrible blow to me as well as to all those who knew Dylan Thomas's genius."  Stories of creations unmade, like this one, always seem so insufferably sad to me.  Even though we did receive In Memoriam Dylan Thomas out of the tragedy, what might have come? 

I have my own story along these lines, an opera unborn, hardly at the same culture-defining level and probably not even a real possibility, but important to me OK, goddamn it, and such a source of regret.  Unknown to me, Carla Harryman invited her buddy Kathy Acker to the original production of Little Girl back in '95.  I didn't see her until the end of the performance, at which point I ran up to her. Erling: Ms. Acker, I'm a huge fan of yours (quoting from Blood and Guts in High School) "Her father's touch is cold, he doesn't want to touch her mostly 'cause he's confused. Janey fucks him even though it hurts her like hell 'cause of her Pelvic Inflammatory Disease." I'm so happy you came. Kathy: (doe-eyed) I'm a big fan of yours too. 

Well, maybe the doe-eyed bit is an exaggeration, but I told her I wanted to work on something together and she said yes in the way people do when they are invited to go to Budapest for the May-December wedding of The Accordionist, the National Hero, and they say yes, sure, knowing that they aren't really going to go but, at that moment, really wanting to go, imagining it, thinking that it could actually happen.  For months after, the thought rattled around in my head without ceasing and, a number of times, I picked up the phone to get her number from Carla but then put it off, partially because my possessive mistress at the time didn't trust Ms Acker, saying she had stolen someone-or-other's husband or boyfriend or whatever but, all the time, not knowing that the cancer that would kill her was already growing in her breast - and then she died.  A terrible blow to me. What would have come from it?