Mark is best known as a screenwriter and playwright. His plays serve as the source material for these two operas. Mary Motorhead, which was first performed in 2001, depicts a woman (Naomi Louisa O’Connell) in prison who stabbed her husband in the head. While there she ponders what led her to this grisly act of violence.

Trade, first performed in 2011, tells the story of a married man (Marc Kudisch) and his relationship with a young hustler (Kyle Bielfield). It is revealed that both men feel trapped in their very different lives.

Emma, who has written works for large and small ensembles, never thought she would write an opera. But as I learned in my interview with her and uncle Mark, life is full of surprises and revelations. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Does the adage write what you know fit either of you? If so, how is that reflected in these two very interesting pieces?

Mark: As a literary person, I don’t believe in writing just what you know. I believe in writing from what you know so that your own perspective is brought into anything. You can also write about anything you want. So the two works, from my point of view, originated because they were works of imagination really. They weren’t something that I’d been through.

When these were conceived as operas did both of you conceive them as works that would coexist together?

Emma: I don’t think so. I hadn’t ever really imagined that I would write an opera. I had entered this competition that Beth Morrison Projects was running around 2018. I had progressed through and I got a small commission to write a 30-minute minor drama or chamber opera. It was more a case of, Oh God, I need to find a subject matter that I can work with. And I remember seeing Mary Motorhead as a play. This will be what an amazing character study.

My impression of opera up until that point was that the women are like hysterical two-dimensional characters who are inevitably murdered. And Mark’s character, Mary Motorhead, is just the total opposite. She’s all of these messy and complicated things. And it felt really exciting to dive in there. I think Mark’s language is just musical. There is an economy there where something can be conveyed through a look or a gesture. So there’s loads of room for music to come around. I just loved working with Mark, so it was let’s try another one together. 

Mark, do you find writing a libretto as having different requirements and a learning curve for you that is different than writing a play or screenplay? 

Mark: I think certainly it’s different from a play. I think the first question I asked Emma was does it have to rhyme? I was very happy to find out that it didn’t. But I find that music is unique in that it can do two, three different things at the same time. Whereas language really is only doing one thing for you. So you were able to just peel back and peel back and peel back. A lot of the plays or the screenplays that I write, as people would say, are kind of full of silences. But actually there were a lot more words than we needed. I haven’t seen it live yet, but I’ve heard it sung and it’s just beautiful listening to that. It has been an interesting learning curve to see how language fits in with music.

How much does music play a role from your perspective in making these stories more approachable from the audience’s point-of-view? We’re not dealing with necessarily the nicest characters.

Emma: I definitely don’t think either myself or Mark want to tell somebody how to feel. But what’s exciting for me is this is really character-driven and you really get to know and like the characters. So even if they do unlikable things, we’re all complicated, messy human beings. I think that people are kind of mirrors for each other. Especially in Trade when there’s two people sort of interrogating each other. They’re triggered by things that they see in the other character that they might not like within themselves.

In terms of the music, to try and find a way into it, I’ll try and build worlds these characters can exist in. So before I even write a melody line I’m going to be creating like a Pinterest moodboard of sounds. So I want it to feel as real as possible for them to feel like fully-fledged people; they’re human. Maybe that’s the way for people to get to know someone that they may never encountered themselves in their lives. 

Mark, there’s a line in the libretto for Mary Motorhead that really resonated with me and stood out as maybe this is where the story pivots. She says “And slowly we stopped laughing so much.” As soon as I read that line I thought that’s the moment where it turns for me as an audience. Is that an accurate perception and does that line carry as much significance as it seems to on on the printed page? 

Mark: Funny enough, that monologue, as it was in the theater, formed part of a series of monologues. There was a monologue from her husband’s perspective – he who gets the knife in the head. There was some of their friends. There was also a monologue for her. I think what I was interested in doing was writing a series of disappointed lives. I mean they’re kind of extreme versions of it. But people who, when they were kids, are all full of like, oh fuck that. Then they realize that this fronting up or this kind of put-on thing ultimately undoes them. They get to a certain point where they can’t get away from it anymore and they’ve wrecked everything. I think that moment is probably what it is, but what it pivots around is we stop laughing and after we stop laughing what is there left. There’s nothing really for them to save themselves in a way.

Reading the libretto for Trade, and I want both of you to comment on this, there are these very short lines through most of it and then suddenly they spill their guts out. Mark, what did you want to show about who these characters are when they finally opened up? And Emma, how does that allow you an opportunity with the music to more fully open up?

Mark: They get to a certain point where their language runs out. They don’t have the language to describe themselves anymore or the predicament anymore. Then when they do find it, it comes out in a flood. Usually when you write in that kind of a way, writing the dialogue becomes revelation within the moment. I’m not even sure why I’m telling you this, but bang, there you go. It has a dramatic impact, I think. So that lent a lot of ease to the idea of writing an aria or something like that. You can take those moments and really deepen them, I think. 

Emma: Mark’s kind of written the pacing into the opera, which makes my life so much easier – when you have someone that’s only responding with a yeah or a voice and then there’s a lot of silence in between. I extended those silences to really have this incredible tension so that the release of someone actually singing about I dreamt about you last night or whatever is really powerful.

The two actors/singers in rehearsal, putting it together section by section, may have had some questions about this silence feeling like a really long time. But then when it actually was all put together and we did a run, those silences were so necessary. The tension at the very start makes the ending so much more powerful. I don’t think I would be able to do anything like that without Mark’s words.

What do you think that these two pieces have in common?

Mark: They’re not traditional fodder for making of opera stories. But they are love stories, actually, at the heart of each of them. Really broke and screwed-up love stories. So maybe that’s good. There’s a bit of attempted murder. At one point in one of them there’s a bit of violence. I think they work as operas. They both are stories of of shattered people. And I think that’s really interesting to find music to lift them up. 

Emma: One person is in a prison, but they’re all sort of imprisoned in their own worlds. I realized with both Mary Motorhead and with Trade, because the sets are small confined spaces, it’s exciting for me because I can get the music to be the thing that creates the expansive world. I think that connects them.

With these two operas your lives both carried off into directions you weren’t anticipating. What have you learned about yourselves in the creation of these two pieces and how do you think that will influence what you do moving forward?

Mark: I have learned absolutely nothing about myself. Only that sometimes stories are malleable. They can move from one form to the next, but you have to put work in to get them there. The idea I’m suddenly the author of a libretto of an opera seems very posh to me and and I’m very delighted. Trade was produced by the Dublin International Theater Festival here in Dublin. It was done as a site-specific work. We took over the bedroom of a small B&B hotel and put a small little riser in there so that we could fit 30 people in there. It’s just a small room. I like the idea that this small room has now gone to New York. In some way that it’s traveled.

Emma: I definitely never imagined writing an opera. But funnily enough, I think it’s the one thing that I feel like I can do really well. Where with all other music I’m generally like, “Oh Jesus, this is horrible. Like, who would ever listen to this thing? I don’t know what I’m doing.” When it comes to actually words and then music coming together, I just feel like I have an instinct for it and it’s really exciting.

I only realized that when I got into the room for Mary Motorhead and saw Naomi acting and the music interacting with her and then lights. All of these elements coming together to tell a story. How powerful is that and how powerful is it that you can tell a story? That’s where the music is, the driving force. It definitely sort of awoke something inside of me. I want to keep doing more of this. So I don’t know whether it will mean I just only do to opera, but I will think more theatrically about other things, too.

Mary Motorhead and Trade will also be presented by LA Opera Off-Grand at REDCAT from April 27th – April 30. For tickets and more information, please go here.

To watch the full interview with Emma O’Halloran and Mark O’Halloran, please go here.

Photo: Librettist Mark O’Halloran and composer Emma O’Halloran (Courtesy Prototype Festival)

The post Emma and Mark O’Halloran Learn a New Trade appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Place was a Pulitzer Prize-finalist in 2018. The committee called it, “A brave and powerful work, marked by effective vocal writing and multiple musical genres, that confronts issues of gentrification and displacement in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.” Hearne wrote the music and part of the libretto. He collaborated with poet Saul Williams who write the rest of the libretto.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group is presenting Place on Tuesday evening at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Hearne will be conducting the performance which is directed by Patricia McGregor. She was recently named the incoming Artistic Director at the New York Theater Workshop.

Last week I spoke via Zoom with Hearne about Place, how he’s reconciled his own ideas about the issues the work raises and how his composing allows him to understand himself better. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

You stated previously that you were confronted with your own feelings after hearing Spike Lee speak at the Pratt Institute about people and the relationship they have to their neighborhood. How did composing and writing Place impact your own perception of how you relate to your neighborhood? Has the time since the work debut altered your perceptions about that relationship, if it has?

One thing that changed is that I started to see the divisions that I created in my own life and my own sense of identity and my own self and how maybe I’ve created a proxy for thinking about those divisions. What I mean by that is that through this process, I started really looking at texts about whiteness and white identity and white supremacy and it got very personal in a way that I think it hadn’t before this process. And that’s a big way that my thinking changed. 

It was as blunt of an interrogation of the tenets of white supremacy and that systemic racism that were embedded in my own upbringing, in my own identity. That was totally not academic because all of my artistic work was right there front and center and that’s a big part of my heart and soul.

I think part of growing up in a place with so much systemic racism as a white person is often, at least in my house, in my generation, it is growing up with the idea that your perspective as a white person is like the neutral one. No one ever like told me, “Oh, that’s a better perspective” or that you’re better than anybody else explicitly. But also no one really told me that to be raised as a white person entailed kind of its own identity. So in a way being raised with this paucity of identity itself. I don’t think anyone should be raised that way. But this process was like a cartography process of mapping all the ways that white supremacy or racism was present just in all of my individual small interactions and the fundamental structures of family.

I’m happy to say that I think the conversation around all these issues has progressed a lot since when I started writing the piece. I’m not saying that any of this stuff was taught to me intentionally. But that’s, of course, the problem. This process really helps me connect all of these concepts which I’ve been wrestling with since basically coming of age in this culture so it makes sense.

Having come through this process how do you reconcile the dichotomy between the shining concert hall on the hill that is Walt Disney Concert Hall and the huge homeless community, mostly non-white, that are mere blocks away. Should that impact the way an audience experiences Place?

I hope it influences the way people see work like this. That dichotomy is all around us in this in this culture, right? In this society and this in this country, in the city. We’re living at a time of a large increase in the number of unhoused people in the city. And there’s a huge increase in aggressive, violent police action to remove unhoused people from the places that they’re dwelling.

Part of the process in writing this piece has been to think about displacement and the connections of displacement and systemic racism. Wrestling with inequalities that have been built into the systemic fabric of these institutions. I know that there are good people within these institutions that are trying to root out these inequalities and trying to create really safe spaces for all sorts of different types of people. But it’s not easy.

Including, I would assume, safe spaces for artists who aren’t just white to be recognized in the performing arts world as well.

Especially American music. There are these incredible innovators who just were never included in institutional music or classical music as we now call it. And I think that the reason that they weren’t included is because they’re not white. Duke Ellington being the most obvious example of a composer who was creating music that is symphonic and who’s pushing boundaries in so many different directions; creating this unique American work. I’m not saying that that necessarily affected Duke Ellington’s reputation, but I do think that when we say classical music we should acknowledge that it’s based on this history of exclusion.

When we think about the language that we use to talk about why certain artists are innovative or important we often romanticize it and leave out all of these very blunt and important sociological contexts: who had access to certain streams of money and who is a white man. These are actually very important parts of it. When we take all this together, we can see how the genre and institution of classical music has been sculpted.

During the pandemic you did an at-home version of Place that was streamed online. Did that prompt any reconsideration of the work that you had already completed or any reflection on what to do next?

I don’t feel like the piece was done until we did the version in March 2020 where we were all sheltering in place. We had already made the album and the album was about to come out. We had all the tracks from all the instrumental performances, from all these brilliant instrumentalists that we recorded across the country to make the piece. But then these singers, who were prepared and all ready to do the whole show, were stuck at home as we all were. So we decided to make this at home version.

The people in the cast, the singers, they all live very differently and they were all affected differently. It was more traumatic to some than others. Something about that, plus the fact that this is a piece about place and displacement. Through people just capturing themselves at their microphone, but capturing the whole environment, we were able to get a really personal picture into the lives of all the singers. I think that was the last key to understanding the piece. It gave us something that we didn’t get when we were doing a large stage version. It made the piece really intimate and we use that in the remount of the piece that we’re doing now in 2022. 

Saul Williams wrote in Said the Shotgun to the Head, “I have offered myself to the inkwell of the wordsmith that I might be shaped in terms of being.” Ted, what is offering yourself to the inkwell of composing allowing you to be?

I’m pretty impulsive. I make like really large works sometimes that take years to make. I feel like often it’s driven by things that I feel in a moment or things that I feel [in] a cumulative succession of moments that feel powerful. I tend to use that as an engine. And then look later at the thing I made.

It’s the learning that comes from the rigorous process of composing. It’s through the rigor of holding yourself to really high standards and making sure that the piece understands and respects itself. Setting those strictures up as clearly and as well-constructed as possible. I think that through that discipline I can come to a much clearer understanding of who I am and who I am in the world. Without composing I don’t know if I would have any motivation to do that. If I didn’t have that process, I think that I would be drawn to living in a way that had no impact. Through composing I can continually examine my impact. 

I am really interested in living in a way that helps other people be better. But I have to help myself be better. I know it’s very presumptuous to think you can help other people be better without really putting yourself through the paces continuously. So I think composing is just the whole apparatus for that. 

Place is produced by Beth Morrison Projects. To see when Place might be performed in your area, I suggest you go to BMP’s website here.

Main photo: Ted Hearne conducting Place (Photo courtesy Unison Media)

The post Composer Ted Hearne Seeks to Understand His Place appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Du Yun has collaborated with librettist/director Michael Joseph McQuilken on In Our Daughter’s Eyes, based on Young’s experiences, which is having its world premiere at LA Opera beginning on Thursday. McQuilken was the director of Du Yun’s Pulitzer-Prize winning second opera, Angel’s Bone. The opera Sweet Land, on which she was one of two composers, was named 2021 Best New Opera from the North American Critics Association.

She doesn’t shy away from stories with big issues at their core and In Our Daughter’s Eyes is no exception. Baritone Nathan Gunn is the sole singer in the work. Beth Morrison Projects, a staunch supporter of new works, is presenting this 70-minute opera with LA Opera.

I spoke yesterday with Du Yun about In Our Daughter’s Eyes, its themes and whether happiness and grief are flip sides of the same coin. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

How did you first become aware of Royce Young’s story?

Beth Morrison and Nathan Gunn talked about making a work about manhood in 21st century and they reached out to me and asked me if I would be interested in the project. I remember saying that I don’t think I know a lot about manhood and nor am I particularly interested in exploring manhood. But I have a really close relationship with my father and he is a really good role model for for me. But he is not a perfect person – just like any of us. So I wanted to to find a point of entry through that perspective. And I worked with Michael Joseph McQuilken on Angel’s Bones when we did the premiere production and he was the stage director. So it’s really nice to have this chance to work with him. We talked about the new kind of a point of entry and then he found Royce Young’s article.

Once you and Michael delved into the story how did you go about expressing it musically?

Musically, it’s always in a way, like a second thought to me. It’s funny, right? I’m always interested in human nature and humanities and the complexity of the humans in question. So for me I just sat down with Nathan, Beth, with Michael really going through the different layers of the psyches of this protagonists. And I don’t want to also see the easy way out, right? He is a flawed human being. And so my first test is understanding and exploring the layers of that flawed human being who is reckoning with this process. When the process is challenging, what’s his response and how’s he making the decisions? And also the mother and her decision. What’s his response to the mother’s decision, so on and so forth. The music then becomes easier – if that makes sense – just for me to hear it. It’s much easier and quicker.

We have all these global crises going on right now, but it seems like the moments that get us closer to understanding them or understanding ourselves are moments like what goes on in In Our Daughter’s Eyes. Because it feels like it’s the personal, it’s the deeply emotional individual story that gives perspective on the whole thing.

Absolutely. I have been in Berlin this spring at the American Academy. I would sometimes spend time at the Berlin main train station where you see so many refugees coming from Ukraine off the trains. You do see the family coming off the train that had to say goodbye to each other. That’s what made us want to weep. The feeling of compassion is because through that we actually can connect with our family, with our own future generation and with our parents and grandparents. I think also the global COVID lockdown, you know, I think a lot of us are looking inward looking to the cause or structures that we have in life.

Speaking of perspectives, what impact did winning the Pulitzer Prize have on you?

I just wrote pieces and write works. All of a sudden you do have a lot more so-called platforms and I’m glad to use those opportunities to make space for other people as well. Not just other people, but wider topics that we need to talk about and certain things that I would like to engage in. Those are the very positive impacts from the recognition.

Euripides said, “Lucky that man whose children make his happiness in life and not his grief, the anguished disappointment of his hopes.”  What Euripides doesn’t say is that through that grief some happiness can be found. What’s your view of the relationship with happiness to grief and vice-versa?

I think there is a huge difference between my understanding of what happiness is and the mainstream definition; the American life or even developing country’s happiness. I absolutely am not someone who strives for happiness in life. However, having said that, seeing my parents are happy makes me actually very happy.

I think that I do feel grief often. I think that’s life. I wouldn’t say I’m the most pessimistic person ever. The planet is going to explode anyways, right? But while we are here we got to make some some effort and that’s who I am – so I don’t chase happiness.

To see and hear my conversation with Du Yun, please go here.

Main Photo: Composer Du Yun (photo by Zhen Qin/Courtesy LA Opera)

The post Composer Du Yun Explores 21st Century Manhood appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Basil Twist is the person you go to when you want puppets to help tell your story. Not traditional puppets, but often large-scale works that are abstract. You wouldn’t necessarily think of going to a puppet artist for productions of A Streetcar Named Desire or Petrushka or Symphonie Fantastique. Shows like The Addams Family Musical and the musical version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory seem like more natural fits. Twist did them all.

He has now collaborated with composer Huang Ruo on Book of Mountains & Seas which is having its U.S. premiere at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in collaboration with Beth Morrison Projects. Twist is both director and designer for the work which had its world premiere last year in Copenhagen.

Book of Mountains & Seas is based on a revered book of Chinese mythology. Man’s relationship to the natural world is at the center of these stories.

Ruo has created a work for 12 singers and two percussionists that focuses on four main stories: Pan Gu, the Spirit Bird, Dragon King and Kuo Fu. Twist designed enormous puppets and other elements to help realize Ruo’s vision.

Earlier this month I spoke by Zoom with Twist who was in Montreal for a puppet festival. What follows are excerpts from that conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

Let me start by asking if you still have a poster of the Disney animated film Peter Pan in your studio and do you see yourself in that character?

How did you know that? I still have a Peter Pan feeling, although I question it as I get older. I played Peter Pan in a Mabou Mines production years ago and it was a super important role and an awesome role to play in a puppet way. So that reinforced my Peter Pan-isms. But yeah, I do have that poster still. I’ve had the studio for almost 30 years and I’ve had that poster for almost as long.

What did you respond to in Book of Mountains & Seas?

The kind of epic-ness of each story, the hugeness of each of them. They’re each this massive creation myth. Half of each of them felt daunting, but also let’s see how to do this. The trick was also that the project was brought to me way before the music was finished. So I just had the stories and had to start imagining how to do that in a practical way. And a lot of what I do is taking sort of really outrageous ideas and embrace something that’s really challenging in the staging of it. How would you do the creation of the world?

You have these four main stories and characters. Conceptually how did you address the challenge of staging it?

I try and create an overall world so there is a very specific esthetic world that all of the pieces fall into. It’s trying to find a common language that will work with all of those four stories. And that language is silk because I use silk a lot and silk is an extremely generous and transformative material. And then Chinese paper lanterns just because of the subject matter. Then the last element was driftwood. So there’s something light and formal, which is the lanterns. There is something completely fluid and mutable, which is the silk. There’s something that’s concrete that suggests the natural world and also a sense of time because driftwood has weathered. So breaking it down into these three elements. Then how do I tell these four stories just using those elements? 

Using natural materials seems to fit, well, naturally, into a story that seems so concerned about man and the environment. How important is it to you that your work help get the message built into these stories across to audiences?

It’s important to set with this stories an appreciation of the natural world and a reverence for it. At least one of the details has a kind of apocalyptic potential to it. Even while enjoying extraordinary music and the beautiful visuals that we have, it is meant to to remind us of our place in this precious world we live in.

How extraordinary to have been working on it in Copenhagen and then I was spending a lot of time in California during the pandemic, kind of darting back and forth. To imagine being on opposite sides of this ball called planet earth, working on this show, was actually all the more resonant for me.

All mythology gets slightly altered as the stories as passed down from generation to generation. Is this iteration of Book of Mountains & Seas another alteration in the telling of these stories?

There must be, but it’s not just because it’s filtered through my form of storytelling. My staging is so spare and sort of minimalistic. I boil it down to some real essences, but I guess that’s just simply a matter of practicality or clarity in my storytelling. But as far as the stories themselves, I always tried to stay true to what Huang Ruo was sharing with me. His really wonderful passion and commitment for his family’s culture and these stories and the importance of them; I just wanted to respect that.

Since I started by asking you about Peter Pan, I’m going to end by asking you about something that J.M. Barrie wrote in The Little Minister: “The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” Looking back from this point in your life and career, how does the story you set out to write compare to the reality of the story it has become?

I just wanted to make things that honestly pleased me. That’s my measure: if it was interesting to me, what I thought was missing, what I wanted to see. So I started to make it mostly for myself. So to be in a place where the different opportunities that have come in response to that sort of staying true to myself, that’s allowed me to become a mentor to a lot of other people. I’m here in Montreal at a puppet festival where puppeteers are excited to meet me. It’s amazing to be in my fifties now and be someone who other puppeteers admirer and that I’ve influenced them. That’s at odds with the Peter Pan feeling that I still have inside, but that’s extraordinary. I didn’t set out for that.

Books of Mountains & Seas continues at St. Ann’s Warehouse through March 20th. For tickets and more information, please go here.

Main Photo: Books of Mountains & Seas (Photo by Teddy Wolff/Courtesy Beth Morrison Projects)

The post Director/Puppeteer Basil Twist Still Feels a Bit Like Peter Pan appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

The opera was named the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2019.

A film was made of the opera and LA Opera is making that film available for free streaming through February 8th.

p r i s m tells the story of a mother and daughter who live in a Sanctuary and they shut out the outside world. Bibi, the daughter, suffers from an ailment to her legs. Her mother, Lumee, keeps her in this Sanctuary in an effort to heal her daughter. But each time when Bibi has to take her medicine, she hears the voices of her previous selves. As those voices grow louder, she starts to question her mother’s intentions.

The opera is an examination of trauma and the lengths one might go, regardless of the toll it may exact, to protect someone they love.

This opera was one of the true highlights in culture in 2018 and I strongly recommend seeing the film. It isn’t easy material, in fact there is adult content and nudity in this 82-minute film, but those who watch p r i s m will be richly rewarded.

Beginning January 29th, LA Opera will also be making a short film called Lumee’s Dream available for free streaming. Darrah directed the film which takes a moment from p r i s m and expands the narrative. As Darrah told me recently, “p r i s m inspired another visual realm of its universe. That is a more sensory experience and it is long form.”

He went on to talk about his working relationship with his friend, composer Reid.

“Ellen is a good friend. The way she works, opera composers are supposed to disappear, write something and go away. Then there’s James Darrah and so and so’s production. We talked about how she made it, how Roxie wrote the libretto and hen we shaped it to the stage – together. More people should have the opportunity to wormlike that. Not just at REDCAT. Film, television and opera needs to get on that wave length.”

p r i s m is available now through February 8th.

Lumee’s Dream will be available from January 29th – February 11th.

Photo: Anna Schubert in p r i s m (Photo by Larry Ho/Courtesy LA Opera)

The post Ellen Reid’s Opera “p r i s m” is Now a Film appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Angel’s Bone tells the story of a married couple who find two fallen angels. The angels have not fared well in their journey to earth. Once they have recovered their strength and are feeling better, the husband and wife use them for their own personal gain.

The libretto is by Royce Vavrek (Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves – which LA Opera will perform in February and March of 2021.)

In awarding the Pulitzer to Angel’s Bone, the committee called it “a bold work that integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world.”

In April of 2017, Du Yun told NPR about the work’s theme, “When we look at human trafficking, we always think that it’s far away from us. We all have our own narrative of what human trafficking is supposed to be, but if you do a little research, human trafficking happens, in many different forms and shapes, right in our backyard.”

Du Yun was one of the composers of Sweet Land which was recently produced and performed by Yuval Sharon’s The Industry.

While we won’t have opening night on May 1st to experience Angel’s Bone in person, at least we do get to see and hear the work that inspired Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim of the New York Times to write, “It’s an appallingly good work when you consider that it takes on the subject of child trafficking and mixes in elements of magic realism and a musical cocktail of Renaissance polyphony, electronica, Modernism, punk rock and cabaret.”

Photo of Angel’s Bone performed at the New Visions Arts Festival in Hong Kong in 2018. (Credit: Hong Kong Leisure and Cultural Services Department)

The post Angel’s Bone appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Muhly has assembled a program that includes his collaboration with Thomas Bartlett on Peter Pears: Balinese Ceremonial Music. This album was released in 2018 by Nonesuch Records. It features nine songs the two wrote together and three transcriptions of traditional Gamelan music.

Philip Glass has long been an inspiration for Muhly. As part of this program he will offer his own interpretations of some of the composer’s lesser-known works. These will be performed with Nadia Sirota on the viola and Caroline Shaw on vocals and violin, Alex Sopp on flute, Lisa Kaplan on piano, Lisa Liu on violin, Patrick Belaga on cello and Wade Culbreath on percussion.

Rumors are circulating about some special guests who will be part of this concert. Since Muhly has worked with Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner, Benjamin Millepied and more, who could they be?

I’m hoping that one or more of his operas, Two Boys, Dark Sides or Marnie might be performed in Los Angeles sooner as opposed to later.  LA Opera? Beth Morrison Projects? REDCAT?

Until that happens, we’ll have Archives, Friends, Patterns which is our pick for Your Best Bet This Week in Culture.

For tickets go here.

Photo of Nico Muhly by Heidi Solander/Courtesy of Cap UCLA

The post Your Best Bet This Week in Culture: Nico Muhly: Archives, Friends, Patterns appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

p r i s m uses a mother-daughter story to explore a sexual assault survivor’s memories. Anna Shubert plays the daughter, “Bibi” and the role of the mother, “Lumee,” is played by Rebecca Jo Loeb.  James Darrah directs and the performances are conducted by Julian Wachner.

I spoke by phone with Perkins immediately following Monday evening’s rehearsal. We discussed the nature of the story in p r i s m, her collaboration with Reid and why librettists just can’t get any love.

Why drew you and Ellen Reid to each other?

I think we’re both really intense. I think we’re interested in the same kind of thematics and we both use our work to explore form. She writes a lot of different types of music. I similarly work in a lot of different mediums. We were interested in narratives about strong women and not in a stereotypical tough bitch kind of way, but strong, complex female narratives that deal with trauma.

Did you go in specifically wanting to explore a sexual assault survivor’s memories?

Yes and no. It started more from thinking about a mother and daughter story. Then I feel, like in almost all of my work, I’m interested in the lies and stories people construct to survive and the power of that delusion. We first started talking about that and then getting the back story. That’s how it emerged. 

How did the two of you work together on this?

What came first was the text. It was a long writing process where I would write the libretto and give it to her and she’d give me feedback. But no music at that point. We were talking story and feeling and we spent a lot of time on that. Maybe she was writing and I didn’t know. Once the music happened, then I rewrote a lot of things and we went back and forth quite a bit. Her score is incredible.

Not having seen p r i s m  yet, how did you balance when the trauma was expressed verbally and when it could be communicated with just music?

That’s a really interesting question. Traumatic moments are intense and should be very visually communicated. The libretto is quite sparse in terms of what is sung. It’s very poetic in form and “stage direction” is a rough word, but it’s written much more like a play where there’s a lot of poetic words that are meant to inspire Ellen, James and the design team. It has space for other people to create.

How does working in opera allow you to express yourself in ways other mediums do not?

“Traditional writing” is a hard term. I’m not even sure what it means. I don’t think my playwriting would fall into that category. What I thought the bridge of it was thinking of it as an emotional score. James jokes that Ellen and I are a great combination. Her music is challenging, but beautiful. The way I like to use text is very staccato. Finding the contrast and juxtaposition is really exciting and it allowed me to lean in further to the way I write more in a film or television medium that’s more visual. It’s more about what is unsaid.

Where does p r i s m  land in the middle of the national dialogue that’s been happening about women and how they are treated?

Obviously the piece is timely, but it’s also eternal. It didn’t start happening because we’re talking about it now. It’s very much in tandem with the cultural dialogue for better and worse. It’s a piece about how do you deceive and how far will you go to deceive. Who will you hurt in order to survive. It’s very much about life afterwards and how coping can be a tool for destruction and survival. The danger of something being called timely means it is just about this moment and doesn’t have meaning later. What we hope for the piece is it’s the conversation. Let’s talk about this.

Do you see yourself working in opera again?

Absolutely. It’s such a fascinating medium and specifically from my part, the way that it uses text and the way writing words within it is so strange and classically has been not the most featured element. 

Let’s face it. When operas are referred to they seem to be solely the creation of the composer and the librettist gets very little, if any, attention.

I think it’s interesting because the way it works in theatre is that in the room the director is king because the playwright is supposed to be dead. That’s the traditional mode. They are not living because the play is old. It’s an interesting parallel to how opera functions. When you get into the physical making of the opera there are so many captains and moving parts. It takes so many people to bring it to life. I’m grateful it’s so collaborative and everybody has the same goal. It’s about the director, composer, conductor and then it’s about all the people, the librettist included, having voice and space in the room and making room for others. I think there’s so much room for collaboration and experimentation. I think it’s an exciting field.

Production photos by Lawrence K. Ho/LA Opera

The post First-Time Opera Librettist Roxie Perkins appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Joining Reid in creating p r i s m is librettist Roxie Perkins. Beth Morrison Projects produces the opera.

p r i s m tells the story of a mother and daughter who live in a Sanctuary and they shut out the outside world. Bibi, the daughter, suffers from an ailment to her legs. Her mother, Lumee, keeps her in this Sanctuary in an effort to heal her daughter. But each time when Bibi has to take her medicine, she hears the voices of her previous selves. As those voices grow louder, she starts to question her mother’s intentions.

The opera is an examination of trauma and the lengths one might go, regardless of the toll it may exact, to protect someone they love.

Anna Schubert is Bibi and Rebecca Jo Loeb is Lumee.  The voices Bibi hears are sung by Members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street. The production is directed by James Darrah and conducted by Julian Wachner.

There is a warning on the LA Opera page for p r i sm that the piece includes explicit language. And the material itself is intense.

There are four performances of p r i s m.

Look for our interview with Roxie Perkins soon.

The post p r i s m appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

For Soldier Songs, Little interviewed veterans of multiple wars to put together the libretto for this multimedia work that looks at the lives of soldiers through three phases of life: Youth, Warrior and Elder, all offering perspectives on war and the experience of being in war.

I recently spoke with Little about the people with whom he spoke, how he responded to their stories and about his views on the military and the arts.

One of the things that intrigued me about the promo movie was your comment about veterans saying it was the first time they had spoken about their service. Did that surprise you?

I asked veterans who were family members or people I had grown up with or one person I met later. Perhaps it is that people are not asking. There is an anxiety because you don’t want to ask the wrong thing or be insensitive. So people can sometimes not engage. One of the friends I interviewed, and the story he tells in the piece, his mother heard for the first time at the premiere of Soldier Songs. 

How much could you relate to the stories they told you?

There’s something about these experiences from what these men and women told me, it’s almost like you can’t understand it if you haven’t experienced it. My perspective has shifted over the years. Initially I thought I could understand it, now I have accepted that I can’t. But I want to get as close as I can through empathy and listening. The piece over the years has been able to facilitate that in certain ways. It can serve as a bridge between a veteran’s experience and the absence of the experience for the civilian.

Were the people with whom you spoke all from one war or conflict or was there a range?

They were from all different time periods. The only guiding principle was I needed to know them personally. I talked to my grandfather who is now 98 and was in World War II. I talked to my stepfather who was in Air Force Intelligence in Vietnam. Two uncles who were in Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia at the time. And people in Iraq and Afghanistan. My grandfather in WWII, with a clear objective, varied greatly from my uncle’s experience in Vietnam. Despite that there were threads through them. That’s what the piece explores is that thread.

War is war and war is hard and not all wars are the same?

I don’t want to split hairs over which war was worse or better. Of course there is a reason that “War Is Hell” is a common phrase. Because there is absolute truth to it. I wonder about the nature of clear objectives. Especially thinking about Vietnam. The sense that I got from the people I spoke to is there was a moment in Vietnam where our feelings about the government and whether that government had the best interest of the solider in mind became more complicated. For that generation that is something that has been very difficult and that is different than what my grandfather experienced.

Does having made these stories the foundation of Solder Songs leave you feeling an overwhelming sense of responsibility for making these intimate experiences public?

The act of talking brought up things they’d rather not have brought out. On one hand it feels like a continued sacrifice. Not just their service, but being willing to talk about that service to help others grapple with whatever they are grappling with. To the extent that I caused any emotional difficulty for them, I would have rather that had not been the case. This piece, and as the piece gets performed year after year, it gets a little harder for me to attend because I know all these people.

I know from your Twitter feed that you are not apolitical. Is there a political point-of-view to Soldier Songs?

I tried to not make it a political piece. This felt like something bigger than politics. It certainly intersects with politics in a way because it is about an experience that is impacted by politics: combat, war, where they are sent and why. Beyond that I didn’t want to write a piece to make a point about Iraq or any particular conflict. There are certain moments in the piece that show evolving attitudes about the government in general and where a soldier is sent and why. I wanted to approach it from the perspective that individuals experienced, not some grand political statement.

In the divisive world we live, where, depending on to whom you are speaking, spending on the military is deemed more important than funding culture, what are your views on our priorities as it relates to both?

That’s a huge question. I’m not even sure where to start with that. I wish that we funded the arts more. That’s the simple answer. There are all kinds of different ways that communities benefit from strong arts programs and the presence of really great art. 

I don’t think I could, thinking about my friends who served and knowing what kind of technology they need, I would not want to suggest that that should be funded less when you consider that someone’s life is on the line. I wouldn’t look at them as a seesaw where one gets more and one gets less.

Maybe I can just say culture benefits from the arts and we should fund the arts more. The military question is extremely complicated in terms of…I have this work, Agency (2013) which is sort of about the process of accepting that there are things you will never know about your government and coming to a kind of peace with that almost. Not that you shouldn’t try to learn at all, but maybe you’ll actually get there. This questions falls into that category for me.

Photo of David T. Little by Merri Cyr.

The post Composer David T. Little tells “Soldier Songs” appeared first on Cultural Attaché.