Looking at You, a new opera—with music by Kamala Sankaram, libretto by Rob Handel and developed with and directed by Kristin Marting—premiered this fall to great anticipation and acclaim. The opera tells the story of employees at a tech company grappling with issues of privacy, loyalty and the impact of their work on the world at large. EiO Co-Founder, Jason Cady talked with Kamala and Rob to learn more about their perspectives about the piece and how they worked together.
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Jason: First, could you just tell us what Looking At You is about?

Rob: It’s about a coder who gets her dream job as chief engineer at a big company. You know, think Google or Facebook. And just as she’s enjoying this job that her entire life’s work has led to, a story breaks on the news that her Ex has become a whistleblower and revealed a plot by 13 governments to spy on on their own citizens and to keep their audio recordings and the messages of where their GPS went and all the things that the surveillance capitalism system is now keeping track of on us. And because this person was her Ex, she’s involved in the manhunt for him, as he tries to find a safe place somewhere after having blown the whistle on all these governments.

Jason: And it references Casablanca, right? Like the title comes from “Here’s looking at you, kid?”

Rob: Casablanca has more memorable lines that everyone knows than any other movie. One of them near the end is Humphrey Bogart says to Ingrid Bergman, “This thing’s bigger than both of us,” about the threat to civilization by the Nazis. And that really is the core idea that connected the themes in our show, because it’s about characters who have to make a decision between, their feelings and the threats to freedom that surveillance capitalism represents. The parallel is that if any particular group of people can be persecuted using these tools, then anyone can, and no one is really free.

Jason: Are there any musical connections with Casablanca, like quotations from the song As Time Goes By?

Kamala: There are no exact quotations, but the approach to the music is driven by the soundtracks of film noir. So that’s where the saxophone trio came from—trying to capture what those films sounded like. It’s a kind of jazz that’s supposed to signify urbanity and modernity, but of course the urbanity and modernity of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Jason: It’s a unique instrumentation, so I’m guessing your other choices were deliberate for this piece. You have piano, like “Sam the piano player” in Casablanca, and the electronics convey the idea of technology?

Kamala: Because the piece is so much about our real lives versus our lives online, I felt like the music had to mirror that. So we go back and forth between these EDM-inspired sections that are really about the tech company, and then the sections that are more interior or intimate are acoustic. The singers change singing styles. Dorothy [performed by Blythe Gaissert] sings classical through the whole thing, but everyone else has a moment where they break into some kind of pop style.

Jason: And does the piano represent “Sam the piano player” in Casablanca?

Kamala: I did think about the piano in Casablanca, but I don’t know that I thought they were one-to-one

Jason: How did your thinking evolve over the years you two have been working on this?

Kamala: The changes in the news have driven a lot of revisions. When we started out, it was 2013, and Snowden had just released his big document dump. It was all very new. We were in a writer’s group, and we came up with a couple songs. And as we kept going, more things kept happening, and then the election, and Cambridge Analytica. All of that had to make its way into the piece.

Jason: Since the character in your story, Ethan Snyder, is a reference to Edward Snowden, I’m wondering what you think about Snowden? Initially many people thought of him as a hero but now they associate him with Putin and the forces that helped get Trump elected.

Rob: It’s complicated. One of the great things that happened with this show over time is shifting away from Assange and Snowden—who I felt were really interesting when they first emerged because they believed that they were in a glamorous spy movie.

But what we’ve become interested in since then is more about the architecture of this spy web than the people exposing it. Books like Twitter and Tear Gas by Tufecki and Surveillance Capitalism contributed to our looking at the big picture and what it means for individuals and their ability to protest, or take on their governments. And the threat that’s posed to that has really become the main character of the show.

Another way we avoided some of the problematic aspects of these real-life characters is by gender reversing Casablanca, so that the Snowden character is really Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, and our protagonist, Dorothy, is Humphrey Bogart and is the one faced with the moral choice.

Jason: Oh wow! I was wondering about that because Casablanca is more about the triangle relationship between those two characters and Bergman’s character’s boyfriend, which I didn’t see when I read your libretto.

Kamala: An early draft of the piece had a triangle relationship, but we realized we weren’t really interested in that, and we got rid of it.

Jason: Do you think privacy is important in itself, or is it just problematic when people’s personal data gets exploited, like it did in the 2016 election to help Trump get elected?

Kamala: I think you bring up an interesting philosophical question. What does privacy even mean in this day and age, and why should we care about it? That has come up a few times, especially from people who are younger and don’t really have the same ideas about privacy that we have. But I think everyone still wants a space where they can express themselves freely and not be thrown in jail because of it. We should not be empowering governments or companies to know so much about us that they can make decisions about us based on what they think we’re going to do because of what we have done before. That’s already where we’re headed.

Jason: That theme is kind of Luddite, but the show uses technology in real time in an exciting way. At first I wondered if that was a contradiction, but I’ve come to think that the data mining that happens is more a tremendous example of theater magic than it is about using new technology.

Rob: I think you’re definitely onto something. When we tried it out in our various test runs, it really made me aware of how it’s making a group of people who come together in a room look at themselves and who they are, and be aware that they’re in a space with other people. Just like we’re in a space with other people on earth, or in a space with other people in a country. But we don’t actually have to see those people. When we go on Facebook, we don’t actually see those people. We don’t see the people who are sending us messages that are disturbing. And being in a room with someone is different than seeing them in the internet. Being aware that someone in the room would say something on social media that you wouldn’t say to someone across the table. That has been exposed in the workshops for the show.

Kamala: That’s why the piece isn’t really Luddite, because I don’t think we’re saying you should not post on social media, just that you should be aware of what’s being done with your data and who can see your posts. But because the tech companies are making so much money, we cannot trust them to act in a way that isn’t harmful towards their customers. Because there are no regulations in place to force tech companies to be careful with your data, they can do whatever they want with it. And until people care enough to harass their congressmen to change laws, it’s going to be on the person to take care of themselves. You’re not safe online, and you should be. So what are you going to do about it? The problem with something like this is because it’s such an abstract thing, the policy is so complicated, a lot of people just don’t even think about it.

Jason: In real life, I put my foot in my mouth pretty often, but on social media, I tend to be pretty careful about what I say. But when I went to the workshop performance some of my posts popped up on the screens and it felt weird because they didn’t have their original context. So that was eye opening for me.

Rob: As the show emphasizes dramatically, it comes back to the fact that your data is not distributed by people; it’s distributed by computer programs. There’s a place on Facebook where you can go and see what Facebook has concluded about you which helps guide advertisements toward your profile. And so when we were working on the show, many of us went on Facebook and looked at that feed. Anyone can look at it. It’s public. It’s interesting to see the things this algorithm was correct, and incorrect about.
I keep getting ads now on Twitter from an astroturfing group. It’s a clearly fake “grassroots” group called Airbnb Citizen, where they want me to contact my city councilmen and tell them to defend the rights of people to use Airbnb and rent out their apartment. And the reason I was so struck by the fact that I’ve only been getting this for the last two weeks is that the algorithm thinks I live in Jersey City where we’re rehearsing the show, whereas actually I live in Pittsburgh. It’s just getting it from my GPS.

Jason: That’s pretty creepy. But I was also wondering about your approach to libretto writing and how it differs from your playwriting? Your libretto tends to be pretty spare. It’s not wordy. And I notice you use an ABCB rhyme scheme a lot.

Rob: It’s not really required to use rhyme, but I just got carried away. The great thing about writing opera librettos is the idea to use as few words as possible, and it’s all about taking words away as you go through the process. I find that really daunting and really delightful.

Jason: As you revised, the language became starker?

Rob: I think in some places, especially the big arias, which is where you want to say the most with the fewest words.

Jason: Do you think of Looking At You as an opera, or are you avoiding the word “opera” for any reason?

Kamala: HERE has a relationship with more theater reviewers, and we wanted them to be the ones to come rather than just the classical music people.

Rob: It really is a hybrid piece in so many ways, both theatrically and musically.

Jason: For some opera purists, the EDM—and probably other aspects—would make them think it’s not opera.

Kamala: Exactly.

Jason: I’m not a purist, so for me, it’s clearly opera.

Kamala: I think it’s an opera. But, it’s also about trying to get people who haven’t been to an opera before to come.

Jason: Lots of people are afraid of opera. They’re probably more afraid of opera than they are of their data being exploited.

Kamala: Yeah, I think that’s true.

EiO’s upcoming opera Chunky in Heat follows the emotional life of a teenage protagonist, Cheryl (aka Chunky), as she navigates the perils of her changing world.  We asked some of the artists involved in the premiere to share how their own experiences in high school informed their work on the opera.

Timothy Stoddard plays the roles of Walter, The Fiancee and Beekeeper in the premiere of Chunky in Heat.

I was like the only out kid at my high school, which is really fun considering we had this giant auditorium that said “Home of the Bruins” that some jackass every year climbed all the way up there miraculously and removed letters so it looked like this: “Hom O the Bruin” (blink blink, knee slap).

I was in choir, and I was also the editor-in-chief of the high school yearbook. I wasn’t the coolest kid. So, I had to head the mass voting for “Best ofs” and “Most Likely to.” Surprisingly, I won best laugh. But of course since I wasn’t cool, there was a slew of conspiracy theories as to how I rigged that in my favor. Also, most people hated the theme I suggested, that ended up getting the majority vote from the yearbook staff: “Raise the Roof!” I was like Public Enemy Number 1.

I also wasn’t good at math. My geometry teacher Mrs. Bybee was a character, to say the least. She wore Birkenstocks everyday, even in winter, and had an array of birdhouse sweatshirts. I had class with my good friend Liyah, who was a refugee from Armenia. But Mrs. Bybee, couldn’t grasp that, and always referred to Liyah as a foreign exchange student.

We had to take a district math assessment during junior year to see if we would progress onto calculus? Trigonometry? I wouldn’t know, cause spoiler alert, I didn’t pass. What she did, was invite us up to her desk and discreetly tell us our scores, while we worked on some math related craft in class. But, when I went up to her desk, she looked up from my test and ANNOUNCED to the class, “Tim, I’m sorry, you will not graduate to the next math class.” SHOOK. I was so embarrassed. But, I was like, oh it’s on, Mrs. Bybee. (I went on to the math class where they teach you how to like balance a check book and shit, which is actually way more useful than trigonometry. K THX BAI)

Before Christmas break, Bybee had brought her scrapbooking scissors to class for us to craft and she had gushed how she looked forward to scrapbooking club over her holiday break every year. So, to exact my revenge for being publicly humiliated, when Bybee wasn’t looking, I stole her scrapbook scissors and sashayed my way to Xmas break. (I didn’t plan to keep them, just hold them over the break, and then return them without her knowing who took them).

After break, we returned to classes. As I entered geometry, Mrs. Bybee was standing by the whiteboard like some sort of dark, mysterious figure of great mourning. Yeah, she didn’t take it very well at all. We spent half that first math class back with Mrs. Bybee drawing ALL the shapes of the blades to each of her scrapbooking scissors like a lineup of missing children posters. She broke down into tears. I was so disappointed with myself.

My friend Liyah told me she would return them in stealth during yearbook period (when I was still a mere reporter), which she did, unscathed. The next day, Bybee was shining like a ray of sunlight. She thanked whoever returned the scissors for doing so, while staring at Liyah, saying things like she didn’t know who, it would remain anonymous, never breaking her gaze at Liyah. “Why you looking at me? I didn’t do it!” “Nevermind, Liyah,” Bybee said. I felt awful again. But I wasn’t about to rat myself out.

The next year, the newspaper had a column for senior confessions, and I was in a position to leave school permanently before it was released. I confessed in the newspaper to Bybee that I had stolen her scissors. I felt a bit of relief.

Later in the summer, I was grocery shopping for my Gramma Boo Boo, who had pretty advanced macular degeneration. She would give me a list of things to buy, she usually referred to the punchline of the products and I had to guess. “The soup that eats like a meal” or errors like “Butter I don’t think it is.” LOL So I was shopping, and I reached the end of the aisle and I did that thing they do in movies where you bump carts with a person coming around the corner. Of course I did, because guess who it was, BYBEE! She was so stunned, and she shrieked “YOU SCALAWAG!” And then she laughed. She was in good humor and had actually gotten a bit of a kick out of my newspaper confession.

LOL awww the memories of being a young sociopath…

EiO’s upcoming opera Chunky in Heat follows the emotional life of a teenage protagonist, Cheryl (aka Chunky), as she navigates the perils of her changing world.  We asked some of the artists involved in the premiere to share how their own experiences in high school informed their work on the opera.

Jason Cady is one of the six composers who contributed music to Chunky in Heat.

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“This record,” the cop said, “you don’t even need to play backwards.” The cop—a guest speaker in my 7th grade English class—was a self-proclaimed expert on how rock bands subvert the youth with subliminal messages about drugs and SATAN! He had already played a variety of jams for us, like Another One Bites The Dust, which when played backwards, said “schmoke marah wah-nah.” But, when he got to the Dead Kennedy’s he read the actual lyrics to us. The song was about a coroner who couldn’t afford to feed his family so he resorted to sneaking them human meat. In case the Swiftian satire was not obvious enough the term “Reagonomics” appeared toward the end. But, according to the cop, this was a satanic band advocating cannibalism.

By 7th grade I had learned that cops, teachers, and adults-in-general were The Enemy. I know rebellion is just another trope of adolescence but my anti-authoritarianism coincided with moving across the country, and I always attributed my bad attitude more to this change of my environment. I had been a boy who loved Mad Magazine, football, and Top-40 Pop, but after moving I started skating, playing drums, and listening to Punk Rock. I experienced all the normal self-loathing associated with puberty but what stands out in my memory are clashes with authority like the cops who arrested me for skating in an abandoned swimming pool or the teacher who put me in a headlock because my T-shirt violated the dress-code. (It was part of a local anti-skinhead campaign and it said “Fuck Racism.”) Feeling rejected by society, I sought out culture that the mainstream had also snubbed, which eventually led me to Ornette Coleman and John Cage. So, in a weird way, I’m kind of saying I wouldn’t have become a composer if the adults around me hadn’t been such assholes.

During difficult times I tell myself, “At least I’ll never go through adolescence again.” Although I’m glad I’m not the person I was then, I must admit that parts of my teen-self are still alive and well. When composing music for Chunky in Heat I couldn’t help but focus on making grooves for drums and bass. I didn’t want any Punk Rock influence in my settings but there was one moment that resonated with my teen music taste; there was a passage in the libretto about Eastern spirituality that I illustrated by trying to evoke the modal Free-Jazz of artists like Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders. I think my teen self would have been down with that section, but he would have been baffled by the whole opera thing. I wonder what the cop who spoke to my English class in 7th grade would think of Chunky in Heat. I imagine him saying, “These guys must be on drugs.”

EiO’s upcoming opera Chunky in Heat follows the emotional life of a teenage protagonist, Cheryl (aka Chunky), as she navigates the perils of her changing world.  We asked some of the artists involved in the premiere to share how their own experiences in high school informed their work on the opera.

Emily Geller is singing the role of Mother in Chunky in Heat.

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I’ve always had a dramatic flare. As a kid (and adult), I enjoyed portraying different characters. Dress up and imaginary play were my favorite activities. Sylvia (Mother) is interesting, like all of A.M. Homes’s characters. She’s fantastically ridiculous. My challenge is to find her humility so I don’t cross over into a caricature. She uses her image, in the form of plastic surgery, to keep control over her life after her son’s death. As a new mother myself, I think this is the key to finding her truth.

EiO’s upcoming opera Chunky in Heat follows the emotional life of a teenage protagonist, Cheryl (aka Chunky), as she navigates the perils of her changing world.  We asked some of the artists involved in the premiere to share how their own experiences in high school informed their work on the opera.

Matthew Welch is one of the six composers who contributed music to Chunky in Heat.

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One aspect of the story that I was trying to capture in the music is the idea of body dysmorphia and also how that can relate to eating disorders. My take on the shapeshifter character, albeit inspiring a magical realist scenario, is that of personal projection on Chunky’s part. Here the shapeshifter externalizes and epitomizes the issues of diet and personal malleability; that one’s focus on their body image and the compulsion to change it are mixed up in an anxious stew, which for teenagers, is magnified by so many changes in body and personal identity.

Personally, I have struggled with binge eating and fluctuating weight, and the delusional idea that something “wrong” with one’s body can be “fixed.” I also was a bit of a loner in my teen years, but a keen observer of the concerns of more socialized and popular kids. No doubt my teenage socially awkward moments number in the millions, a general experience I tried to encapsulate here.

The music for my scenes uses sliding strings and surprise harmony as a metaphor for the changing of body shape, size and visage. Also, it builds off of a stewy mix of musical idioms that comes to represent the sound of LA; grinding skate-punk, bubbly surf-rock and Hollywood-esque soundscapes.

Every Single Visual Image is a Code for Something

Designer, Puppeteer, Director Jeanette Yew is one of the main creative forces behind Experiments in Opera’s premiere production of And Here We Are.  Jeanette has been collaborating with composer Matthew Welch and librettist Daniel Neer for the past year on bringing this chilling story to life through a hybrid form of shadow puppetry.  EiO Artistic Director Jason Cady talked with Jeanette recently about the history of shadow puppetry and why she can understand that God has been pictured as an old man in paintings throughout history.

JASON CADY: First, could you tell us about yourself and what you do in the theatre?

JEANETTE OI-SUK YEW: I am the lighting and projection designer for live performances, and art installation. I also direct, and design, and create contemporary puppetry performances. And I teach design, actually starting this fall, with NYU.

CADY: When did you become interested in puppetry?

YEW: I started when I was at the University of Washington as an undergrad, because there was somebody that teaches puppetry there. I was just fascinated by this idea of marrying craft, skills, object, and performance together. And then I went to CalArts and studied with Janie Geiser, who is an experimental filmmaker and puppeteer.

CADY: Could you tell us what And Here We Are is about and your roles in it?

YEW: And Here We Are is a surreal exploration of a person’s coping mechanism while being interned during World War II in an internment camp in the Philippines. My role in this project is to design and direct it as a shadow puppet opera. The psychedelic aspect of shadow puppetry is a great vehicle to explore this intense psychological landscape that Edgar, the main character, is experiencing. The opera is conceived to have shadow puppetry as the main visual storytelling, so I’m directing that. And there is going to be a band on stage along with the singers.

CADY: Do the singers also act?

YEW: There’s a little interaction in the beginning to set up the convention. The puppets, and puppeteer are an extension of the singers who embody the character through their voices. So there’s a staging aspect in the beginning so the audience understands this puppetry tradition of splitting up the vocal and the visual.

CADY: Do the puppets allow the singers to portray multiple characters?

YEW: Definitely. Although the design centers more on an abstract exploration in that it is not a one-to-one relationship. The wonderful thing is that puppetry allows you to go psychologically to different terrains for understanding storytelling, compared to when the singer portrays the character physically as a human being, we assume that the presence of the person is the same as the character.

But with puppetry we’re separating all these different elements so the voice is associated with the singer, while the physical form is portrayed visually. The physical portrayal is not necessarily a straight portrayal. At times it’s almost like an essence of a human being or a thought, rather than an exact representation.

CADY: Plus, it’s an opera instead of a play, so the voices themselves are one level removed, as far as abstraction.

YEW: Yes, definitely. I love working in opera precisely because the voice itself is, as you said, one level removed. So now, in this case, we dive even deeper into further abstract experiences.

CADY: For anyone not familiar with shadow puppetry, could you just explain what it is?

YEW: Shadow puppetry relies on putting a light source and a surface, and in between it is where the form of the shadow, the puppet exists, which then casts a shadow onto the surface.

CADY: And could you tell us a little about its history?

YEW: In the U.S. puppetry does not really have a long history. But shadow puppetry on the worldwide stage has a long tradition, particularly in East Asia. The Greeks, for example, have a long tradition. So does Turkey.

CADY: When I think of Greek theater, I just think of Sophocles and Aristophanes and Euripides, I didn’t know they had shadow puppets.

YEW: The Greeks and Turks actually have a long tradition, they both have this character—in the Turkish version, it’s called Karagöz. And this particular character is very political, and goes around the villages telling stories and making fun of current affairs and the monarch and society. For example—Punch and Judy, which is an Italian puppet—Punch is a despicable character. He hits his wife. He threw his baby out the window. He killed a policeman. He killed a crocodile, and eventually the devil. It’s a long and widely loved form of political theatre, of challenging and saying to the world, “I don’t care. This is what I do. This is who I am.”

CADY: So the puppets can do things that ordinary people can’t?

YEW: For many cultures, human beings are not allowed to portray divine beings. So part of the function of puppetry is that it can embody divine beings and pass on the stories and perform them in public.

CADY: It’s taboo for humans to represent deities?

YEW: It’s not that there’s something wrong with humans portraying deities, but that the human is not the right vehicle to channel these ideas.

CADY: So it’s just that humans aren’t really qualified?

YEW: Yeah, sort of like how we discussed earlier, in opera, the voices become something else. The sheer fact of singing—even though you’re delivering the same text—the singing itself elevates it into something more abstract.

CADY: I always thought it was funny how God is depicted as an old man in Christian iconography. As great as the Sistine Chapel is, it’s bizarre to think God would exist in human form.

YEW: You have to think in context of when the culture was founded. In Christianity’s origin, human beings didn’t live that long, because the world was harsh, and there were no antibiotics. So this idea of the Christian God, being an older person shows a level of power because human beings couldn’t live that long.

CADY: That’s a great defense of Michelangelo.

YEW: Well, I believe every single visual image is a code for something.

CADY: You convinced me.

YEW: [laugh] That’s great! I hope the Pope will invite me to dinner one day.

CADY: And what is your take on shadow puppetry in And Here We Are?

YEW: We were inspired by Indonesian puppet design. Traditionally they use leather and bones to create their puppets, and then there will be a giant group of gamelan players.

We’re contemporizing it by using video projections, and live feed camera, to create shadow puppet effects, in addition to a more traditional idea of using a light source and screen.

CADY: That sounds incredible. It might not even need any music!

YEW: [laughs] I don’t think so! I think the music is what makes it good.

CADY: What other projects do you have coming up?

YEW: I’m developing a piece that explores how we want our communities to look in the future, How would we actually like to live as human beings, assuming we all survive.

CADY: I am often struck by the realization that the world we live in is one we have made and chosen. I don’t mean nature, of course, but society. There are so many problems in the world, and humans just collectively decided to tolerate them. We decided this is the best of all possible worlds, instead of some utopia.

YEW: Yeah, and there’s a lot of debate. Some people believe the only way to achieve a better community is to go small. Some people believe that it is about density. And part of it actually originated with the Bible, the book of Genesis, which is all about how the world was created, and all these different stories of people creating community for themselves, or in some cases God dictating how they would create communities. So, I just want to ask how we really want to live.

CADY: Do you have an answer? Or are you just interested in examining the idea of this question?

YEW: I am interested in the idea of the question. I grew up in Hong Kong, so I think there are huge advantages to high density. But at the same time, I understand people who prefer to live in the woods with 100 acres around them. I don’t think there’s an easy answer, but we should start asking these questions. Just because of how something has been doesn’t mean it is the best way to do something. In every single journey someone, at some point, asks a question, and that leads to the evolution of ideas.

CADY: This reminds me of Walden Two, which was an inspiration for the commune movement. It’s been years since I read it, but I remember thinking it was a surprisingly interesting and compelling novel, considering it was written by B. F. Skinner.

YEW: Yeah, it is. There’s a community in New Mexico where the center of their community is actually a performing space, which is a very Greek idea: performance as a public debate, as a way to converse.
And Henry Ford built one of his factories in the rainforest as an ideal way of living. He was preoccupied with how to create a utopia for his workers to live in and work. So many different people over time have many different ideas of how to organize society. And honestly, I believe that religion started out as a way to organize society.

CADY: Henry Ford was a terrible person in a lot of ways, but also pretty interesting as a historical figure, I’ve been to his Greenfield Village before. Do you know Greenfield Village?

YEW: I’ve heard of it. So you’ve been to it? Wow.

CADY: I’m from Flint, Michigan so I went there as a child, and also this last Christmas. Ford had the Wright Brothers house transported there, and some other homes that were just old. And you can ride in a Model T. But, speaking of Ford, what about communism? Is that one of the utopian ideas for your piece?

YEW: Yeah, definitely. Although I think communism is often misunderstood, because you have to go through capitalism before you get there, and none of the countries have actually gone through that process. But the idea that you can create a system where it promotes a level of economic equality is something I think every country, as an organism, is striving to get to. I think the idea of communism is trying to be a kind and empathetic system, without addressing greed or other kinds of human desire. But fundamentally it’s really trying to think, what does fairness look like? What does equality look like?

CADY: And what’s next for And Here We Are?

YEW: We’re hoping to tour, so if anybody is curious of bringing And Here We Are to their city, let us know.

Composer and EiO Artistic Director Matthew Welch spent six weeks in the spring of 2017 in the Philippines having won a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council. His goal was to engage with local musicians while at the same time researching his opera And Here We Are.  As he tells it in this post on his experiences, the trip was affirming and surprising, providing an opportunity for him to reflect as an artist on his family’s rich history in the Philippines (1905-1945) and the depth of remarkable Filipino cultural traditions.

Traveling to the Philippines was a tremendous opportunity for me.  Amid the whirlwind of travel and meetings, musical lessons and long hikes, I could not have fully understood how this trip would make an impact on me and my music.  Now that I am back in the US, I can see just how rare an experience it was to take such a pilgrimage back to my mythic homeland and walk the soil of my family’s unique Philippine history.

One of the first things I noticed was that, because I am working on my opera And Here We Are, I immediately became more aware of the soundscape of both my hereditary past and my work as a composer.   In my study of gangsa (Cordillera ritual flat gongs), I learned four different regions of the Cordillera: Benguet, Mountain Province, Ifugao and Kalinga.  I learned by rote the subtle differences between each of the traditions, magnifying the diversity of the regions and painting a much broader and subtler picture of the musical landscape of the country.

In addition, I explored the techniques of performance, melodic construction and improvisation for both the Kalinga nose flute tradition.  In these studies with Alex Tumapang, I immersed myself in the history of coupling poetic syllables with melodic constructions in the Ullalim epic from Kalinga.  This exploration of language and music has had direct impact on my techniques as a composer for voice and instruments.  In aural traditions, the references to past treatments of epic songs has a great deal to do with how history is constructed and communicated.

Along with my musical studies, I was able to get closer to my own family history. I stayed at my family’s old hotel that survived the war.  I also toured through the buildings of The University of Santo Thomas which, during the war, served as the internment camp where my family was held.  This experience was indescribably eerie.  Equally as surprising was my discovery of Kneedler Road in Baguio (my family was named Kneedler), on which the remains of my family’s log cabin still existed. My tour of Brent school in Baguio (where the Kneedler boys were enrolled) to recreate photos from the Kneedlers’ boyhoods was indescribably profound. And, I met the 102-year-old wife of my great-grandfather’s lawyer who was bequeathed our Baguio property.  In tribute to my family he named the street they lived on “Kneedler.” In this way, the trip was truly a pilgrimage.  These images and emotions have already made their way directly into And Here We Are, sometimes concretely and other times as ghostly shadows.

I returned with a head-hunter tattoo by 100 year-old batok artist Whang-Od, myriad assortment of Cordilleran gongs (gangsa), bamboo buzzers (balimbing), nose flutes (tongali), and heaps of theoretical and ethnomusicological writings by Filipino composer-researchers, all of which I am now applying to And Here We Are. Through my research on Filipino composers, gained a sensibility on how the dialogue between extant local music traditions and globally modern influences has occurred in the Philippines. As a hybrid-oriented composer myself, this understanding has been critical in my discovering the overall sentiment of my opera’s story.

The profundity of the trip’s impact can be formulated this way: before the trip, I had already composed a lot of music for this opera that would speak to the American (and Kneedler) side of this history. Following the trip, I can conceive of the cultural landscape within which the world of this opera exists: displaced and comingling cultures within the already multifarious sound world of the Philippines. We think of cultures as having borders, but they are more dynamic streams of fluidity that flow, eddy and permeate.

I hope you can participate in my most varied and refined musical project to date. I also hope that through the deep experience of working through this subject matter, my family’s mysterious and tragic past can begin to heal and reach a closure.

Percussionist Ross Karre is the Co-Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble and one of the lead designers, producers of the upcoming Nubian Word for Flowers. This opera has taken a unique shape and Ross’s role as both a designer of video and audio elements and as a producer working with Ione to help shape the second act of the opera which was incomplete at the time of Pauline’s passing in 2016. EiO Co-Founder Jason Cady sat down with Ross to discuss the project from his point of view.

JASON CADY:  First, could you tell us about your background and your role in the project?

ROSS KARRE:  I’m the percussionist and co-artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. I was invited by Pauline and Ione to collaborate as a video projection designer on The Nubian Word for Flowers back in November of 2015.

We spent about a year working on a visual design scheme, and did some tests at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with Monica Duncan, who’s the other video designer on the project.

CADY: Could you tell me some more about your background in video. I’m trying to wrap my head around it because I think of you as a percussionist.

KARRE: While I was getting a bachelor’s in percussion performance at Oberlin, I accidentally picked up a minor in cinema studies, which had a lot of hands-on video art production classes, starting with a woman named Rian Brown, who got me excited about experimental video.

Then when I went to University of California in San Diego, working a lot with Miller Puckette and other electronic musicians, I was the collaborator who could do stuff with video. So I started to hone that craft a little more.

When I finished my percussion doctorate at UCSD I decided to stay and get an MFA in film and video art. Since then, I’ve done a handful of video projection design projects per year. Sometimes it’s with percussion, but most of the time I don’t play percussion at all when I’m also designing video.

CADY: How did you realize the video design from the libretto for Nubian Word for Flowers?

KARRE: We worked with Pauline one-on-one for months to come up with the translation process between the libretto and the video design. Along the way, Pauline was adding notated score elements to the libretto.

She got about half to three quarters of the way through, and then she passed away in November of 2016. So that year between when she invited Monica and I to start working on the images, until she passed away, was spent collecting imagery, deciding on projection design options, staging, blocking, and talking through details.

Monica is responsible for the video images themselves. I’m just helping design the video systems. She has a background as a printmaker. So in making these cards and artifacts, they’re really beautifully rendered images that look authentic.

CADY: I saw the libretto had a kind of color coding scheme, what did it mean?

KARRE:  Ione and Pauline had a shared document they both typed into. When Monica and I looked at that, we both confessed it was a little difficult to understand. So we started to make time and space charts, which would essentially read like a score: descriptions and image thumbnails, blocking, character maps, things like that.

Their way of giving us information was through that color coding system. The color coding was something like green for images, and purple for cast, and orange for sound design. They would highlight text that pertained to Senem Pirler on sound design, or for Monica and me for images.

Gradually this one libretto document became the working method for communication between all the parties. It’s a comprehensive document that has lines of text delivered by singers or actors, then long bits of text about the staging, blocking, design elements.

CADY: I’ve actually taken to writing my librettos with screenwriting software, because the format is so clear. It forces me to always be conscious of not just what’s being sung but—

KARRE: Where it’s being sung.

CADY: Yeah, and what the action is, et cetera.

KARRE: Our process has been one of translation. How do we get that comprehensive intermediate experience at Roulette?

CADY: I remember reading in the libretto that something was happening on the higher back portion of the stage. And I thought, “Oh, Roulette.”

KARRE: Back in February we decided to switch from talking generally to talking about Roulette. We have this stencil which is a black and white line drawing, that has all the stages. It’s a proscenium view as opposed to a section or plan view. We call it the Roulette stencil. It’s really simple, but it helped Ione and the video designers think about the space and how it translates. It gives you the idea of what it’s like to put a person there.

CADY: Will you also play percussion in the piece?

KARRE: No. Nathan Davis, the other percussionist in ICE, will play percussion. It’s possible that Levy Lorenzo will also play percussion. But he has a sound design role as well. It’s a bit confusing, because a lot of people wear multiple hats.

But the primary design team is Ione as the director and librettist, and she’s also playing the role of The Interviewer. She has a table in front of her with an overhead camera aimed bird’s eye view onto the table. So she can place different cards that are artifacts relating to the history of this piece. Then those images get manipulated by Monica. She’s operating that live.

The sound design is handled by Senem Pirler. She worked directly with Pauline on selection of sounds, both Foley sounds, artifact sounds, historical sounds, and the performance of Pauline’s analog oscillators.

Last on the design team is Nick DeMaison, who is a conductor and composer. He is the hero responsible for taking all the fragments and sketches that Pauline had completed for the opera, and compiling them into one document, and re-engraving them in Sibelius.

Then there’s the cast of six, an orchestra of eight, and a chorus of three, who use their voice in different ways and play auxiliary instruments.

CADY: How were the unfinished parts of the opera filled out?

KARRE: The first act is almost 100 percent notated, and the second act uses almost 100 percent text anthology scores. Specifically, it starts with the piece “Heart of Tones” for solo wind instrument and accompanying wind instruments and sine tones.

It’s followed by a piece called “Out of the Dark,” which uses the same tuning, droning method, and then finishes with a piece called “Earth Ears” which evolves out of the drones of “Out of the Dark” into a more active place.

Meanwhile, the libretto developed following the same rules as those scores. In the second act, the goal dramatically is to create a really long slow-building arc. Several of Pauline’s pieces from her anthology of text scores lend themselves to that slow build. We’ve recorded nearly everything we’ve done with Pauline, from little concerts at Jack in Brooklyn to the shows at Lincoln Center. So we have a library of pieces and we just swapped in recordings of ICE playing these pieces, to get a feel of what they might sound like.

After a bunch of trials we landed on these three pieces in sequence, to represent the three wars. And it works. It’s stunning how these text pieces so perfectly suited this piece.

CADY: Are you using Pauline’s vintage analog oscillators?

KARRE: Yeah. There’s two or three analog oscillators from the ‘60s that Pauline used for a lot of her pieces. They provide sub-sonic tones, but also audible frequencies into the patch. We’re also using, for brief moments, Pauline’s Expanded Instrument System—EIS—to process some of the acoustic instruments.

CADY: Could you describe the Expanded Instrument System? I saw Claire Chase perform one of Pauline’s pieces and she didn’t play flute at all. She spoke, and her voice was manipulated in real time.

KARRE: That piece is called Intensity 20.15 — A Tribute to Grace Chase. It’s a play on the Varèse flute piece. The subtitle is A Tribute to Grace Chase, which is Claire’s grandmother’s name. It uses the EIS system on Claire’s spoken voice, and some flutelike instruments: an ocarina, a harmonica, stuff like that.

Levy Lorenzo operates the EIS in that piece. Pauline had the opportunity to teach Levy how the parameters can be controlled on a system that’s decades old. It used to be analog systems, then early digital systems, and side chained effects that are controlled in a unique way, and ended up being in MaxMSP. It took on a life of its own, and it’s a really interesting artificial intelligent improvising partner.

We’re lucky that Levy’s on the project, because he’s one of the few people that Pauline taught how to use the software.

CADY: So Levy will manipulate some of the live sounds in an improvisatory way. But is the MaxMSP patch also improvising in Nubian Word for Flowers?

KARRE: Yeah, there are stochastic procedures and algorithms built into the Expanded Instrument System patch. They create a really complex sound world, where it’s hard to tell the origin of the sound samples and how it’s being manipulated.

The way Ione has described it, it’s Pauline’s own presence in the piece. Both her analog oscillators and the Expanded Instrument System bring Pauline’s designs into the piece in a way that really feels like her presence is there.

CADY: Will the audience feel a big shift going into act two, or will it feel more seamless?

KARRE: They will notice a huge shift. It’s not just the result of the fact that Pauline didn’t have the chance to write a lot of the music for act two. The shift is actually a dramatic shift. The first act is about the history of Lord Kitchener and the imperial goals of Great Britain. We learn about his affectionate relationship with the Nubian people. We meet a Nubian boatman. We meet his friend and potential lover Colonel O.

Then in the second act he’s on trial in a kind of purgatory because he died in a boat explosion on the HMS Hampshire. And the process is trying to help him understand or atone for his unethical behavior. He’s asked by interrogation with Ione, as The Interviewer to speak to these moments in his life where he has been a war criminal.

Ione levels these anecdotal criticisms at him from each battle: Battle of Khartoum, the Great War, etc. Supporting Ione are these testimonies from a chorus in the loft at Roulette and their sound will be processed, drone-based, aggressive, dissonant beat frequencies.

It’s really spooky, whereas the first act surprisingly plays with the conventions of traditional opera. There’s a waltz. There’s tonality, modality, dodecaphonic writing.

We had to make a lot of guesses about what to do in the second act. But the drama is so clear that these pieces fell into place without us feeling too self-conscious about their selection. And Ione supported all of the research we did to figure out which existing pieces become the bed of instrumental work and electronic sounds for the piece.

CADY: Had Pauline said anything about her plans for the second act?

KARRE: She didn’t give too many hints to me, but she did speak with Ione a lot about that. Ione is a co-composer in many ways. She helped structure a lot of these pieces. So, it’s with that experience that we made these selections.

When we were building the video design we showed [Pauline] the options of this overhead camera, and said this has a lot of parity with older analog video technologies, with a live camera into a CRT monitor. And she said, “Yeah, that feels right, because I’m an analog gal.”

We took that to heart, thinking about it like, “Which of our video decisions pay homage to an analog sensibility?” And we’re doing that with the sound design: the analog oscillators, the way the effects are coupled together, and the way the EIS is built.

CADY: In our conversations with Pauline and Ione, I wasn’t sure if the staging was going to be super high tech.

KARRE: Where it’s technically current is in projection mapping software which is the ability to map images onto precise surfaces. Also the intermixing of a live camera with HD video and stills is used a lot. But the way we’ve used these postcards as a consistent theme brings it a timelessness.

Ione can play many roles, but it’s consistent that she’s a judge or an attorney doing research or an investigator or a journalist doing research with these different artifacts. When she’s organizing these artifacts on the table, that organization is scaled up to these large projection screens, which are also scenically the triangular white sails of the Nubian boatman. The Nubian boatman is played by Zizo from Egypt. He’s stationed upstage right on a felucca ship. He serves as an interstitial singer/songwriter role that helps to contextualize the Nubian culture.

CADY: Was there anything about Pauline’s music that people misunderstand, or would be surprised to learn?

KARRE: Pauline’s not afraid of a pretty melody, and you’ll see that in the first act of this opera. When I’ve seen her improvise she’ll put warm, beautiful, melodic gestures into her playing.

People who know Pauline really well won’t be surprised to hear these tonal melodies in the first act of this piece. People who sort of know Pauline might be surprised by that.

For me, the biggest surprise is that there aren’t more of these operas. She wasn’t typecast as an opera composer. But looking at how intricate all of the details of this came together, I wish she had the opportunity to do more of them, because it’s a super interesting narrative and intriguing way of approaching it that’ll create surprises for everybody in the audience.

 

Composer Nicole Murphy has been spending a lot of time with EiO over the last couple of weeks as we prepare her opera ‘Mandela Was Late’ for the upcoming Flash Operas.  As this interview that Jason Cady conducted with her proves, she thinks about storytelling in a methodical way and digs in deep when a commission pulls her into uncharted territory.  

CADY: In your blog post you talked about adapting the Peter Mehlman story Mandela Was Late for your opera. So let’s talk about the music you composed for it.

MURPHY: The music is rhythmically based and the construction of time is represented through the wood block which goes through this series of metric modulations in the piece so you always feel like you’re pulled out of time, out of the situation for a moment, and that the clock is this overbearing character in the piece.

The story and the music are intertwined. It’s kind of hard to separate one from the other. One of the big compositional challenges was to create the sense of tedium of a bureaucratic meeting. How can you have enough contrast but still have this sense of monotony of sitting through this process that both these characters realize is ridiculous?

CADY: That reminds me of the book “Osmin’s Rage” by Peter Kivy, which was inspired by a letter Mozart wrote to this father about composing Abduction From the Seraglio. It was this idea of, “how do you make music describe an ugly emotion yet also sound beautiful?” It must have been a real challenge to represent tedium without actually being tedious.

MURPHY: Yeah, you need the audience to experience tedium but obviously a rewarding sense of tedium. It was a fun challenge.

CADY: You mentioned the wood block and the metric modulations. I remember there is usually a quarter pulse on the snare or a dotted quarter pulse on the wood blocks and lots of changing meters. Could you tell us more about your rhythmic logic?

MURPHY: It was based around this idea of representing time. Essentially, the woodblock is the second hand of a clock. The crotchet equals 60, but occasionally it doesn’t. There is this kind of tension between how we feel time and how we measure time. I wanted all the action in this meeting to feel slightly at odd with the concept of time. That’s where the rhythmic construction came from. It’s also something that I’ve been playing with of late.

CADY: So you’ve explored this in other pieces?

MURPHY: Not linking it to time as much but the sense of shifting the grid underneath the parts. I like the element of surprise that brings. You lock into a groove and all of a sudden it’s interrupted and feels quite uncomfortable and then it snaps back in.

CADY: Many composers seem to not really understand that to do interesting metric or tempo things there first needs to be that sense of a groove for it to be perceivable.

MURPHY: To me it’s all about subverting expectations. It sounds cruel to your audience, but it’s about pulling the rug out from under them. I like to be surprised musically.

CADY: You said the music and story were intertwined for you. Did that lead you to try anything new?

MURPHY: The one-track mind of the piece is driven by the context of the story. Had it been a fifteen-minute piece that didn’t have this story attached I would have changed tracks earlier. It forced me to think of other subtle ways to do contrast, to give a sense of forward motion before that interrupting, woodblock pulls it back into the second-hand ticking.

CADY: I was struck by your compositions for guitar, especially your chamber piece, Stolen. Are you a guitarist?

MURPHY: I’m most certainly not a guitar player. I managed to get through most of my schooling without ever having to write for guitar. I hadn’t avoided it purposefully but it’s one of those things that doesn’t come up in orchestration class. When I had to write the electric guitar chamber piece for a festival I thought, “I can just hide it in the background, play a few harmonics and no one will notice that I don’t know what I’m doing.” Then they said, “Could you write a guitar duo?” That project sparked a bigger 45-minute electric guitar and chamber ensemble piece. The last few years of my life have been dominated by guitar. But my instrument is piano and some woodwind and strings as well.

CADY: The guitar sounded so idiomatic you fooled me.

MURPHY: That’s just lots of score study and fingering charts. The thing about guitar that’s so exciting is there are so many ways to realize a certain passage. Often I’d think, “it works this way,” and then I’d put it in front of a guitarist and they would say, “We can play it this way or this way or this way.” There just aren’t as many possibilities with other instruments.

CADY: And what about your classical guitar piece?

MURPHY: That was part of the Norfolk festival. They had a whole heap of guitarists there: three different guitarists involved in that project.

CADY: Is guitar a little less common in New Music in Australia?

MURPHY: Yeah, definitely. I know it’s a big part of the new music scene in the U.S. but it’s not so common here. That sounds ridiculous because it’s such a common instrument, but it’s not part of the new music scene.

CADY: You get quite a lot of performances in the US. Do you have a connection here?

MURPHY: I don’t know. It’s strange. There have been a couple of years where my music was performed more over there than it was at home. I have no idea, but I guess I just feel very fortunate.

CADY: What’s going on in the Australian scene?

MURPHY: We have a really vibrant new music scene. Where I live in Brisbane it has really grown and flourished in the last five years. We’re the smaller city to Sydney and Melbourne which have really strong scenes. Both those cities have a distinct sound world and I like being up here in Brisbane because I have more freedom. I’m not really locked into those scenes. Australia is very active because it’s so far removed from everywhere else. You have to make your own projects happen. It’s very local. We have amazing musicians.

CADY: Plus you can have a garden with a dog and chickens.

MURPHY: It is really lovely. Before I started my PhD I had a pretty thriving vegetable garden with lots of fruit trees and stuff. The fruit trees remain but the vegetables have since died. But the chickens are just funny little creatures. One of them we called Kanye because she was the loudest.

CADY: You also composed a previous opera, right?

MURPHY: Yes, it’s called The Kamikaze Mind and it was performed in New York last month. The libretto is from this amazing novella by an Australian author Richard James Allen. It’s about an astronaut who falls into a black hole and is scattered into an infinite number of pieces all around the universe. So the story is essentially him trying to put himself together with these fragments of his life and memory. It’s organized like a dictionary. You get a word and its definition tells the story. It’s ordered alphabetically but you can read it a number of different ways. You can read it via themes or read different letters or chronologically. Some of the definitions make you laugh out loud and others make you cry for humanity.

I used to joke about it with friends because I got this book in the mail and I have no idea who sent it to me. Whenever I shared it with friends, if they were composers I’d say, “but I’ve got dibs on writing an opera from it.”

CADY: Someone sent you this book anonymously, and you never found out who?

MURPHY: No, I never found out. I have absolutely no idea.

CADY: Even after writing the opera no one came forward? It’s amazing!

MURPHY: I often forget about that part of the story, but it’s kind of wonderful.

CADY: You could write an opera about your opera!

MURPHY: I sure could.

Composer Cristina Lord comes to her work with a wide open mind and sensibility.  In this conversation with EiO Co-Founder Jason Cady, she discusses her interest in electronic music, pop songs, and in using text to tell stories.  Her Flash Opera ‘Pledge Drive’ will be featured in three performances at Symphony Space on May 5 and 6, 2017.

CADY: I enjoyed your piece “Life on Mars” and it made me wonder if you came out of a pop background or a more classical one.

LORD: My training was mostly in classical music but in the past couple years I really got into electronic music. I made an album that was basically me learning how to use Logic. That’s what “Life on Mars” is from: this album of experimenting with things on the program. That was really fun.

Since then, I moved onto Max MSP and I joined the laptop ensemble at CSU Long Beach where I did my masters. It’s a quartet and we write exclusively on Max and perform the pieces live. I’m very intrigued by electronic music. It appeals to the perfectionist side of my personality because I can control every sound. You can do things that live performers can’t do.

CADY: In addition to the academic electronic music do you have an interest in pop music?

LORD: Yeah, definitely. I actually did my master’s thesis on popular influence in classical music. I discussed composers who have approached this issue of the divide between the two realms in various ways because I’ve always been intrigued by the fact that there are these two distinct camps: you’re either a pop artist or a classical composer. Why do we need to have this distinction? Why can’t we just be musicians or artists who create music?

With my own music I like to breach this divide. With the opera I wrote for you guys some of that pop side came out and I learned to embrace this aspect of my musical personality. I basically just see music as music. I’m interested in making music that appeals to a lot of people, not necessarily in a commercial way but in an accessible way.

CADY: Which artists did you discuss in your thesis?

LORD: Jacob TV’s opera The News. Steve Reich’s rock band influence in some of his music. Alvin Lucier’s, Nothing is Real. Gabriel Kahane’s song cycle Craigslistlieder. I talked about quite a few pieces. I wanted to cover different approaches to this problem. Either taking media directly, like Lucier using “Strawberry Fields Forever,” in the teapot, or taking instrumentation like Steve Reich using electric guitars and drums.

CADY: Since you also sing have you done anything that’s singer/songwriter-ish?

LORD: Sometimes I sing and play electronics or the piano as a quasi-pop artist, but I don’t know if I would call myself a singer/songwriter. I usually do solo voice and electronics, just because I either want to be a pianist in some other capacity or sing with electronics.

CADY: Let’s get to your opera. It’s a hilarious story by Patty Marx called Pledge Drive about the author fundraising money to support her lazy lifestyle. The first thing I noticed was you use a big opera voice in the opening for a comic effect.

LORD: Yeah, it’s supposed to be over the top and ridiculous. The idea is that it’s opening with a cadenza. It’s her chance to show off and be the center of attention which leads nicely into “You were just listening to an uninterrupted hour of Patty.”

CADY: And the flute tends to be flamboyant which seems to be taking off from that initial idea.

LORD: Overall the piece is pretty flamboyant, but the flute definitely gets to show off and take on this role that the opening has of this showy nature and providing fills and accents and doubling where necessary to maintain this level of something ridiculous.

CADY: Are there any other ways you portray humor in the music?

LORD: I have a lot of shifts that happen musically. I was thinking of it as waiting room music. This repeating jazzy interlude comes back throughout and ties the piece together. Between that we have these exaggerated emotional sections. For example, when the soprano sings “as of three years ago Patty was totally dependent on parental funding.” The emotional shifts are over the top to make it clear that it’s sarcastic. It’s supposed to be fun and we’re not taking it too seriously.

It starts off tonal, and then decays into a more chaotic texture. There’s a section where she’s at an ATM. At that point I change from something that’s happy-go-lucky and innocent to something that’s falling apart until we get to the climax which is “Patty will blow you” which I thought was the darkest part of the text. It’s like, “Whoa! How serious is this?” It seems like everything is falling apart in Patty’s life and I wanted the music to reflect this. From there, there’s a shift back to this waiting room vibe as we close off the piece, but this time it’s deconstructed into something that is not nearly as innocent to reflect this loss of innocence that Patty experiences.

CADY: One of the reasons I find the story funny is because I can relate to it since it pokes fun of flaky creative types. Do you identify with the story?

LORD: Yeah a lot of us can relate to that. A lot of artist types like to hear ourselves talk, and being an artist or a composer comes with a certain level of privilege. It’s not really the most lucrative profession.

CADY: How did you compose the opera?

LORD: First, I spent a lot of time with the libretto, read it out loud a lot and tried to decipher the emotional content and any deeper meaning I could find within the text. After I had a trajectory in mind, I started playing around with some ideas. I wrote it pretty linearly. I started where the text started. And I just went straight through. I knew the climax was going to be at “Patty will blow you” and that it would deteriorate until there. I wanted some motifs to occur throughout but at the same time I wanted it to feel more through-composed and go through these different shifts. I spent some time with each part playing around with different ideas and seeing what went with the emotional content the best. It started as a piano vocal score and I orchestrated it from there. The cadenza I added at the end, so that opening part I actually wrote at the end.

CADY: Did the story inspire you to try new things?

LORD: I’ve written a lot for voice but I had never done an opera, so thinking about the theatrics was new, and really inspiring for me. I enjoy collaborating with artists, dancers, film and video techs, but I’m not used to doing theater which is exciting and interesting. I tried to keep in mind how it would look and what the singers would be doing.