“Yuval was very complimentary about Afterword, which was great for me,” Lewis told me recently of Sharon’s response to Lewis’ 2015 opera. He continued, “So at some point he called and said he was interested in double consciousness. I had just been reading The Comet, which is a short story by W.E.B. Du Bois. a kind of proto-Afrofuturist.”

The end result is The Comet / Poppea which combines parts of Monteverdi’s opera with Lewis’ The Comet. Performances begin at The Warehouse at Geffen Contemporary at MOCA on June 14th and run through June 23rd. The libretto is by Douglas Kearney.

In Du Bois’ story, a comet has struck the world and all that survived is a Black man and a white woman.

Lewis then discusses the plot of this short story. “They find each other and they start to think about what life has been like and what it could be like, perhaps under a new regime. And this is something where Du Bois gets a chance to think about social forces and their role in upholding white supremacy, patriarchy, and so on.”

But it still seems like a stretch to combine a new opera with Poppea. But Lewis tells more.

“They’re both about power and privilege and about patriarchy and time travel, or travel across dimensions or parallel universes. So there’s a double science fiction aspect. That becomes already something where you get maybe more than double consciousness as you get multiple consciousness.”

Perhaps to better understand how this might work together, perhaps defining double consciousness would be helpful.

“I think the original Du Bois formulation, as I recall, was that you were sort of like The Bourne Identity,” Lewis said. “Black Americans used to hear about this consciousness themselves as human beings, that’s how it should be and then as a Negro. How those two inform and deform, their everyday experience.” Though Lewis went on to fully reveal the full story, reading Du Bois’ writing or seeing The Comet / Poppea is a better way to have it unfold for you.

If it sounds confusing, rest assured Lewis is more concerned with where his works lead you as opposed to whether or not you understand them.

“Some people don’t have to understand what I was thinking. They can come to their own ideas about it and then they can enjoy that. I’m more interested in this: I want people to come out of the experience, thinking, wow, that was really different. I’ve never heard anything quite like that before. And then the next step in their thinking is, that was different. So I wonder what else around here could be different? What needs changing. You’ve already changed me.”

Since that is a philosophy at least in some part shared with Yuval Sharon, their partnership on this project makes complete sense.

“I think that this is something that Yuval has managed to do throughout [his] whole time with The Industry – which is to make make things that not only challenge you, but to cope with experiences you’re not going to be able to predict in advance. Even if you’ve heard it several times, you can hear it again and you still don’t quite know how it’s going to be. I think that’s very important to sort of play around with memory and to make sure that memory is something that we have to build, that we just can’t accept nostalgia. I think that’s what’s going to happen in this opera.”

Sharon and has team have carefully blended to the two works into one seamless production. The Comet / Poppea is performed on a rotating stage allowing audience members to see different aspects of the story as the stage rotates – thus creating a physical double consciousness.

“We want to give the audience freedom. That’s why we don’t make fixed relationships between the music and the dance, because we want to give people freedom to create their own relationships. We’ve created one relationship. But it’s not a matter of just decoding what the composer and the creators think. It’s kind of using this as a springboard for your own thinking.”

Lewis is also looking for new ways for himself to think. To create. To evolve. Yuval is doing the same as are other directors working in the opera world. This production allows both of these men to move the needle, yours and the art form’s.

“It’s not like you’re looking for influence. What you’re looking for is the possibility for other people to do things. What’s happening is that ideas are sort of moving back and forth between the historical realms, which are always making new histories. I’m looking at this more as increasing the amount of freedom or the feeling of freedom that we have to make these kinds of interventions. I think that anyone who sees this, it’s going to be wow, that was different. I guess I could do stuff different too, which means I’ll probably have to change a lot of what goes on now.”

If you surmise this deep-thinking composer is concerned about his legacy, you’d be as mistaken as I was when I asked the question.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen there. I mean, I wrote a few books. I wrote a lot of articles. I contributed to various fields trying to write music. Who knows what happens with it, you know? I try to help people in general, whatever it is, writing or music, writing or whatever. Maybe there’s something that takes a spark in them, and then you hope they go out and help other people. I hope I was helpful.”

Main Photo: George Lewis at a rehearsal of The Comet / Poppea (Photo by Erin Baiano/Courtesy The Industry)

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To be fair, it is a little limiting to refer to Marc Lowenstein as just as composer. He’s also a music director (with The Industry and others) and conductor. He’s a singer and also an educator. But since we’re staying in the present, today we’ll talk about his work as a composer and also the most recent one to be a part of LACO’s Sound Investment Commission.

On Saturday, May 20th at the Alex Theatre in Glendale and Sunday, May 21st at UCLA’s Royce Hall, LACO will present the world premiere of HaZ’man HaZeh. I’ll allow Lowenstein to share details about the piece in the following excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview please go to our YouTube channel.

LACO’s Sound Investment Commission works a little bit differently than if you had gotten a commission from another performing arts organization in that the people who who donate into this program get to have a number of meetings with you, progress reports, hearing bits and pieces of a work in progress. I assume that’s very different than with any other institution.

It is very different. Although having said that, in my work in The Industry, we did do something similar in that we do workshops and we have our donors come to the workshops and we have meet and greets with them. But that’s not formalized in the way the Sound Investment program is. And it’s really formalized in a good sense: first I met and talked about my initial ideas, then I met and I had a small group of musicians play some excerpts just to check them out and to see if I could coerce one of the violinists into singing, which is a whole other issue. But I’ll tell you about that later. Then there’s one more meeting with donors right after one of the dress rehearsals. So they get to see the evolution from idea to piece and to performance.

One of the benefits of this program is the creation of modern classical works. If we don’t have contemporary works, how many Beethoven cycles can someone sit through? 

Oh, my goodness, no. I’m slightly older, shall we say. So I don’t I don’t think people realize what a renaissance of modern orchestral music there is going on now today, and such a broad array of composers, different styles. 30 years ago you just couldn’t get your music performed by any orchestra. Their idea of modern music was one piece by an extremely famous person and that would anchor the season. Now it seems like almost every concert by every major orchestra has a really interesting piece. Even if it’s not successful, it’s fabulous to hear. 

So I think we’re really in a tremendous renaissance of hearing a broad array of new voices of all ages and backgrounds and all musical styles. I think that’s crucial.

Of course, if we’re talking 30 years ago by one famous composer, it was either Philip Glass or John Adams.

I remember talking to my peers. All of us essentially made our own groups and our own orchestras to play the works. But there was still a barrier. It wasn’t necessarily a lack of awareness. It was sort of a blinkered mindset on the boards of all those institutions. The boards have changed and they realize that there’s all this great music out there. There’s a lot of great young composers out there.

I’m thrilled because the Sound Investment program isn’t just for young composers. I’m not exactly a young composer. I joke I’m sort of a mid-career despite my age, because of all these three different aspects that I do all the time. So I haven’t written as much as many other composers my age. But at the same time it’s refreshing that Sound Investment will have very young and untried composers with tremendous amount of promise and then somewhat older, more experienced ones. Just whoever they find interesting. 

What can you tell me about HaZ’man HaZeh?

It’s about the battle, the internal struggle, between nostalgia and sort of overt futurism. So I try to reach that through a dialectic between song and dance, and then something that’s neither song nor dance.

What inspired the work and its title?

I’m not that religious, but when I am, I feel marginally drawn to the sort of the Jewish mysticism tradition and where it intersects with Buddhism. It’s not very original of me, but it’s just sort of where I sit.

My roots, in terms of what I heard as a young person, [were] romantic chamber music and classical orchestra. Then I moved into jazz. So the beginning is sort of Schumann meets Sibelius meets Charles Mingus and this sort of wild party. Then I realized that in writing all these nostalgic styles, in some ways nostalgia is a beautiful thing. In another way, nostalgia is the enemy because you can drown in nostalgia unless you make something new out of nostalgia. It can really hold you back. 

Also I think if you worry too much about the future, you’re also holding yourself back. You’re not living in the present in that sense. So it’s this weird search for honesty between nostalgia and this sort of attempt to be new. I wanted to have some title that would evoke the present time, that overused word mindfulness of the present.

Then I realized there is something in the Jewish liturgy. There’s a very common prayer every time you reach a milestone, whether it’s just a happy day, a holiday, there’s a blessing. You thank God for bringing you the moment of this moment. And in Hebrew, the words are HaZ’man HaZeh, which literally means this time or the present time.

Where does a singing violinist fit into this picture?

I think one way to really live in the present is to dance. In all my music there is this binary between song and dance, and they sort of fuse together. There’s actually a song I had been working on at the same time. I didn’t think it was part of this piece. I had been setting this meditation on one of the Dalai Lama’s sayings, which is “My religion is kindness.” I’m working on the song. Can I take this block and just move it right here? 

I called up the orchestra manager and I said, “Is there someone in the violin section who wouldn’t mind just getting up doing this intonation, reciting?” At our last donor salon, one of the violinists, Sarah Thornblade, stood up and she just sang. She’s breathtakingly beautiful.

How important is it for an audience to understand what a composer is trying to get across versus just listening and enjoying it?

At its best there’s no difference. I think a lot of composers would say the same thing. We hope that there’s explanation beneath it, but we certainly hope that explanation is not necessary. Having said that, a certain amount of linguistic fluency helps, or familiarity, let me put it that way. 

Just as composers can get lost in the many styles that are around today, audiences, for their own good, might want to become a little fluent in things that they like. Which is just to say, if you like something, listen to it and try to figure it out. You might not. The first listen might not be as rewarding as the fourth or the fifth. Or maybe it’s not linear or something like that.

How much does working within an organization like The Industry, which has presented operas in a train station (Invisible Cities), in cars moving throughout the city (Hopscotch) and other unique locations, make you feel that we are moving in a direction where traditional expectations of how art is to be presented or consumed and genres are becoming passé? 

I would rephrase it slightly with your permission. I think they’re being expanded beyond that which is passé. Let’s talk about opera, not just symphonic music for a second. I want to look at traditional opera as sort of like those Civil War reenactments. There’s a place for it and people like that. It’s a history and a culture and it’s a deep part of us. It might be a little passé, but it’s deeply important. There’s a real place for the Met and for LA Opera and Chicago Lyric and all those places. At the same time, we can’t live in the past.

Whatever the words: problematize, interrogate, question the relationship between the audience member and the work. It’s very set. If you think about going into an opera house, you know what your relationship to the work is.

Yuval Sharon, Founder and Co-Artistic Director of The Industry told me that “The inner life of the piece of music has to be made manifest on a stage.” He was talking about Invisible Cities. Does that same thought process become part of what you think about when you’re composing something for a concert hall?

I love site specific concert music that doesn’t have voices. So I think there’s always going to be a home for these really beautifully acoustically tuned halls that allow you to immerse yourself in either electronic, acoustic or some kind of sound world so that you can project yourself into the sound. I think that’s fundamentally different than what happens in opera, where it’s a story and you project yourself into the story, the narrative or the scenario. Even with music that’s programmatic, I just think it’s a fundamental difference. So when you try to problematize the symphony hall, it’s going to be different.

I think you can listen to an opera in a recording, and I think you only really get it if you’ve seen it on the stage. But that’s not true of orchestra music. You can listen to wonderful orchestra music in a recording and really get it. And really get it in a way that you just can’t get up.

Almost anyone who listens to opera, which is probably not a lot of people, have almost always seen the work before. Or have seen a video of it. It’s always marketed with visuals in a way to bring you into that story. This isn’t arguing for one form over the other. I just think we have to recognize the fundamental difference, which, of course, will have blurred lines in between it. But I think they are different. And it was very challenging to me. 

I found a quote by Ray Bradbury where he said, “No sound, once made, is ever truly lost. In electric clouds, all are safely trapped, and with a touch, if we find them, we can recapture those echoes of sad, forgotten wars, long summers and sweet autumns.” How would you like your music, and this work in particular, once safely trapped, to help listeners recapture their own memories and experiences? 

I read Ray Bradbury obsessively when I was 14, and he’s definitely steeped in that same sort of nostalgia that I talked about. I don’t know. I don’t know that the music has a message that it wants to give out. I hope it’s successful on its own terms. I would almost unask that question. You tell me.

I’m much more interested in how other people react to it. I know what the sounds are. I know how it sounds. I cannot predict whether it’s even partially universal in expressing what I’m trying to express or if other people get other things from it. That’s always the case.

There have been many pieces that people interpret as one thing and that the composer meant something else. So I have no good answer. I hope it’s successful. I hope people hear it. I hope it’s successful on its own terms if that means something. I’m still kind of discovering what those own terms are.

Is this work finished in your heart and in your mind? 

Yes. I’m very good at saying, “Okay, let’s do the next best thing after that.” That is living in the present. The message of this piece is, in fact, to let it go and to just to do the next thing and to find your next mantra and to live in the next moment. Because that’s literally all that there is. It’s only by letting go and having a tremendous amount of throughput, I think, that you can really find the meaning in the moments.

To see the full interview with Marc Lowenstein, please go here.

Photo: Marc Lowenstein (Courtesy Marc Lowenstein and LACO)

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“Necessity is the mother of invention” for Yuval Sharon, Artistic Director of The Industry and co-director (with Cannupa Hanska Luger) of Sweet Land. He and the entire company came up with a plan to make sure the opera didn’t just fold up without further opportunities for audiences to experience this opera which garnered rave reviews from Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times and Alex Ross in The New Yorker.

Sharon assembled the entire team to film both parts (Feast and Train) of the opera. Now Sweet Land, which was composed by Raven Chacon and Du Yun, can be streamed for less than fifteen dollars. The cost of purchasing this film will help offset losses incurred due to the early closure.

With the release of Sweet Land in this format, it felt like the right time to conclude my conversation with Duncan and Kearney. Remember, the answers below have been edited for clarity and length.

I read multiple takes on Sweet Land from both critics and audience members. One person said that the opera, “disrupts the dominant narrative of American identity.” If disrupting that identity was indeed a goal, what would you, as one of the creators, like that narrative of American identity to be replaced with?

ACD: I find great resonance in that description. One of the things Douglas and I talked about early on was the idea of American exceptionalism. That was something we were really interested in breaking up. In part, by just noticing that the reason so many “great things” happen in America is because land is stolen and labor is replaced. You don’t get to see they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but by the skin and hair of others.

DK: That domination is not abstract. That means at some level that you are a part of something in which people are often seen as resources to be exploited. You don’t have to go to slavery to think about that. You can walk down the street and see people who have jobs that have had to fight for minimum wage.

ACD: What do we want to replace that with? For me I’m most interested in the dis-ease, it’s about being disinterested in the past and the vast wasteland that is that. I want people to reconnect to land and plants and animals. The climate is accelerating at such a fast rate, it just says how much we aren’t in touch with what the earth needs. Actually reconcile with how we got here and what that means.

DK: Some of the work is going to be hard. What we have to ask is is that what we want to keep doing. If that isn’t, it’s going to take work to stop, to create a different possibility. I would like us to have an identity of reckoning with what it is that has gotten us to this moment and actually dealing with it.

There is the idea of privilege that runs through Sweet Land. For those who define privilege in strictly economic terms, what does this opera say to them?

DK: One of the things that Sweet Land talks about in terms of privilege for people whose view of privilege is more strictly speaking routed through economics, we do see a kind of extractive colonialism happening in some of the different scenes. It’s not just the settler. One of the things that’s important about Train 2, is there is a scene that Aja wrote about a kind of distance between sort of the ideal around expansion and possession and a hollowness around what that acquisition actually provides. There’s a kind of soullessness about that. Sweet Land braids and entangles so many different strands of what we might think of as categories for privilege and what we might call underprivilege.

Aja, in your poem, Fictive, you write, “There is a story we tell. A story about suffering. Not because we are suffering, but because that is the story we have been taught to tell.” How does Sweet Land fall into the category of a story you have been taught to tell?

ACD: There is a level of intergenerational trauma that I both hold and continue to re-thread into my present experience and my experience of others – because of the depth of erasure of indigenous lives in particular. That was the project. I also feel as an artist my writing is a way of evoking an alternative future. It’s not just the traumas of the past, it is weaving backwards in order to weave forwards.

Sweet Land is self-described as an “opera that erases itself.” Is that how you looked at it creatively?

ACD: I didn’t have to erase my own story. I don’t think it is in fact an erasure, but I think it gets engaged with erasure in Douglas’s sections. [He wrote Train 1 and Feast 2] I was interested in different kinds of erasures. In the libretto there were a lot of things being disrupted simultaneously.

DK: That question is something Aja and I still talk about. I gave a Sunday talk last week and I wrote a little bit about erasure and and how can you call it erasure when the bones are still there. Is that still erasure if you see bones? What we really wanted to do was show a myth being made.

To purchase Sweet Land for streaming, please go here.

All photos from Sweet Land by Casey Kringlen for The Industry/Courtesy of The Industry

The post How Sweet Land Disrupts appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Our government will soon announce plans bailing out the airline and travel industries. What you won’t hear them discuss, and it is highly unlikely they would even contemplate this, is support for the performing arts and the artists who create and perform. But we, who love the arts and know how much they enrich our lives, can.

Rather than ask for refunds for canceled performances, I’d urge you to consider donating the price of your ticket to the company that has had to outright cancel remaining or upcoming performances. (Many, but not all, such donations will be tax-deductible.)

Certainly longer-running shows will probably have the flexibility to offer you an exchange of tickets for another date. But what of something like Sweet Land by a small company like The Industry? A company that continually invests their assets into their next creative endeavor? Or CAP UCLA which just today announced the suspension of the rest of their 2019-2020 season?

Profits are not guaranteed in the arts. If you drive through town you’ll often see banners along the streets for LA Opera or Center Theatre Group or other performing arts organizations. Those banners are only available for non-profit companies. Even one as large as Center Theatre Group is a non-profit.

The federal government does very little to support plays, musicals, dance, music, artists etc… This isn’t Europe where the arts are supported by the government. In fact, America has a pretty lousy reputation for trying its best to not support the arts. In his most recent budget, Trump has suggested eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts – again!

As PBS says their programming is made possible by viewers like you. So are the performing arts. But ticket sales don’t cover all operating costs. Imagine what the cost of all these refunds would be not just in the short-term, but in the long-term.

And what of the actors, singers, dancers, musicians and more who make their livelihoods by sharing their talents with us?

Chances are that if you can afford a ticket to the opera, a play, the ballet, a concert or a musical, a certain percentage of your income is expendable. If it truly is expendable, and you value the arts as much as I do, I hope you’ll think twice about requesting a refund for a canceled performance.

In fact, while you’re thinking about that, perhaps a donation to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and/or The Actors Fund, can be added to your charitable donations to help performers who find themselves out of work. Why wait until December to make last-minute tax-deductible donations when those dollars can be put to very good use right now?

We are all going to make it through this crisis, but no one can predict how long this pandemic will last. The longer it goes on the closer we get to the point where companies large and small have to close or significantly scale back their programming. The end result is we will all be much poorer.

But when it is over, we will all be clamoring for the opportunity to share in the magic of live performance with one another as quickly as possible. So I ask, brothers (and sisters), can you spare your dimes?

Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt

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While the tagline for Sweet Land is “an opera that erases itself,” Kearney and Duncan had more than that on their mind as they structured the two-parts: Feast and Train. (For full details of the opera please go here.) Not only are there two parts to the opera, there are two parts to Feast and Train.

Kearney wrote the second part of Feast and the first part of Train. Duncan wrote the first part of Feast and the second part of Train. But the librettists had more than just the idea of an opera erasing itself on their minds as I learned when I spoke by phone last week with each of them.

Here is part one of my conversations with the two writers. These excerpts from those conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

The timing of Sweet Land seems perfect given the present administration’s treatment of immigrants. How much did Trump’s policies influence the creation of this work and the writing you did?

ACD: My understanding is the 2016 election had a really profound impact on Yuval personally and that was a large piece of his impetus of wanting to do the original version and then the struggle to fund it through to what we have.

One of the things that in response to his draconian immigration practices is a refrain that people say all the time which is wrong which is “We are all immigrants.” We are not all immigrants. The complexity and nexus of those things was of particular interest for Douglas and I.

DK: One of the things that’s interesting about that line is how it has been imagined as a unifying rallying call. But in that usage there is an erasure that is maybe well-meaning, but is persistent erasure because the indigenous people are not immigrants. That exclusion is central to the American myth.

There is a way in which immigration is imagined as a kind of intentional seeking of a better life. From an Afro-dysphoric perspective, at least some populations of it, I don’t know you can call it immigration.

When creating art that has a strong political component, are you preaching to the converted or do you think that concept itself reflects a naivete that would suggest there’s not racism to be found amongst the arts crowd?

DK: That’s such a great question. I think there was definitely a time period in which I was really worried about preaching to the converted. During the process I had to think about what I was arguing for in terms of representation and space myself as one of the creators. Even in delivering political commentary there is a way people can come expecting a particular kind of response or treatment. So trying to destabilize that and make things less streamlined is one of the ways I try to approach political content.

ACD: There was an operating assumption that the largest percentage of the audience would be white and older based on the demographics of The Industry’s opera audience. However, because all of the creative folks with the exception of Yuval were people of color and we were focused on bringing in people of color, we were not writing in opposition to white imagination or something. I think we were hoping we would affirm things that resonate with people’s experience; jar folks who aren’t as experienced with the experiences of the audience.

It seems to me that Sweet Land reaches two segments of the audience: those who are determined to break the cycle of bigotry and those who repeat it. What would you like each group to get from their experience of seeing Sweet Land?

ACD: One of the things that we were doing in sort of an explanation for the second act for Train and Feast was to evidence ways in which erasures of history are present. Speaking for myself as a mixed race, cisgender queer woman, there’s all kinds of way I don’t write things that I’m tacitly implicit in or just don’t literally see because I don’t see the breadth of them because of my skin, or mixed race or higher education. All of us, regardless of what we are trying to do, can always increase the volume of our awareness.

DK: For people who would like to break the cycle, I would like people to come away from it not feeling as though they have been necessarily given an answer as much as they have been given a method for destabilizing and working through the questions and the problem.

ACD: For folks that don’t care, if they don’t care you can’t speak to them. They need some cataclysmic life event and even that might not change their world view. I’m not sure that people who don’t care were ever our audience. People who are more comfortable not having to care, it’s probably those folks we are hoping we can be in a dialogue with. It’s a presenting of an experience so that hopefully they no longer feel they can’t care.

DK: It’s a difficult game to presume that what a person who is dead-set against recognizing the humanity of other people that what they need is just the right argument. That strikes me that it is the job, often times, of the victims to not be victimized. I don’t know that in the great history of political speech or artistic effort that the goal should be “maybe if I write this one line, that person will go ‘Oh.'” That’s giving them the right to abdicate responsibility. I don’t know that’s the rubric we should be using.

For someone in the 21st century to say they haven’t encountered humanity from other people that are not like them, if they come to Sweet Land, I hope what they see is opera in which you have a group of artists who have created a work of art using an approach while, on the outside it might look like it is consistent with other kinds of productions, but that it was created with an approach of consensus that is more consistent with a sense of community. That it took discipline and that took effort, but was what was central to creating this work that is Sweet Land.

Check back soon for part two of my interview with Aja Couchois Duncan and Douglas Kearney.

Main photo: An image from Feast 2 in Sweet Land (Photo by Casey Kringlen for The Industry) All photos courtesy of The Industry

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Even if you never experienced Invisible Cities at Union Station or Hopscotch in cars around Los Angeles or War of the Worlds in a former parking lot across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall, you probably heard about them. I can assure you word has already spread about the new project from The Industry called Sweet Land which is now being performed at Los Angeles State Historic Park.

Yuval Sharon, the Artistic Director of The Industry, has assembled an amazing team to tell, in opera form, the story of indigenous people (or The Hosts as they are called here) who encounter settlers (or The Arrivals.)

The team includes composers Du Yun (Pulitzer Prize winner for her opera Angel’s Bone) and Raven Chacon; librettists Douglas Kearney and Aja Couchois Duncan and joining Sharon as director is Cannupa Hanska Luger.

The creators refer to Sweet Land as an opera that erases itself. Let them explain.

There are two distinctly different tracks you can experience when you see Sweet Land. One is entitled Feast and the other is Train. (Note that they are separate and require separate tickets.)

The opera begins with Contact where The Hosts and The Arrivals first meet. Then you begin on either Train or Feast. In each track you experience the story first as a natural progression from Contact. There is an interstitial section (called The Crossroads) that immediately follows either Train 1 or Feast 1. The Crossroads allows for both tracks to reset and tell a different story about life once The Arrivals have made their presence known and have completely appropriated the land, the life and the people we were first introduced to as The Hosts. (These are called Train 2 and Feast 2).

Sweet Land comes to a conclusion in the same space where it started in a section called Echoes and Expulsions. (By the way, the higher you sit in the bleachers for this last segment, the more you will experience.)

Having seen both tracks I can tell you that you are in for a moving and thoroughly thought-provoking experience. It is recommended that you do NOT see both tracks in the same day. I can attest to the wisdom behind that because I did see both tracks on the same day. My mind was filled with so much that I regret not having the proper time to digest and think about what I had experienced. This is truly powerful and inventive work.

One other thing to be aware of before going: this all takes place outdoors at night. You will spend time walking, standing and sitting in the elements. Even though we are in Los Angeles, it does gets cold during the performances. I strongly recommend you bundle up before attending even more than you might otherwise normally do. (Makes me even more amazed that the 31-person cast and the 24 musicians and 2 conductors can sing and play as beautifully as they do.)

There are two full performances each night and each track runs 85 minutes.

For tickets go here.

Main Photo is an image from The Crossroads in Sweet Land (Photo by Casey Kringlen for The Industry/Courtesy of The Industry)

Update: This post incorrectly listed Yuval Sharon as Shuval. That correction has been made. We regret the error.

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To mark both anniversaries, Camerata Pacifica began a Why Beethoven? project last year. The two-year celebration concludes at the end of their just-started 2019-2020 season with a performance of the Beethoven String Quartet in B Flat Major, Op. 130 with its original ending. Last season concluded with the same quartet, but with its revised ending.

I recently spoke by phone with Spence about his original goals for Camerata Pacifica, where he sees the ensemble today and through it all I got insight into his views on classical music today and the role Los Angeles plays in its future.

How was Camerata Pacific carved a place for itself in the classical music world in Southern California?

What we’ve done much more generally is bring a mainstream audience into the 21st century with us. Our mission talks about affecting positively how people experience classical music. At the end of every season my goal is to make the audience more capable listeners than I had at the start of the season. I think we’ve done that. Over three decades this has become a well-honed audience. If you don’t want to come and lean in and listen, because I expect you to do that, don’t come. There are a whole bunch of other groups I can recommend to you.

What was your vision in 1989 and how does Camerata Pacifica today reflect what you envisioned?

I’m glad to say that we’re living the dream. You are a writer in the classical music business, you understand and this is no indictment of you personally, but no other industry writes so poorly about itself like the classical music industry. Tobacco does a better job and they kill people. I don’t think it is as bad as it was. This is the golden age. This is the second renaissance for classical music. 

We’re immersed in this whole Beethoven notion, but we’re still presenting concerts by rules established in 1800 and the wheels are coming off that machine. The large paradigm institutions have to make massive corrections. Filling a 3,000 person concert hall is a problem, particularly for regional symphony orchestras or operas. Filling smaller halls is being lead by chamber music and it offers a broader range of repertoire. That’s what I’ve always wanted to be a part of. If you can’t listen to Toru Takemitsu, then you’re not hearing Beethoven. That’s been an assertion of ours for 30 years.

How important is the pairing of well-known composers with lesser-known composers in order to grow appreciation of classical music?

I think it is critical for the audience. In the latter half of the 20th century you had a small number of white males deciding who was going to be listened to and what was recorded and broadcast and that’s all collapsed. And that’s fabulous. The arrival of the iPod shuffle is brilliant. Young people are not defined by genre. They listen to what they listen to with an open mind. Classical music is always going to be a minority participation sport because it requires greater participation. We’re never going to get a market share of 95% – it will always be 1 or 2 percent. But that share will always be there. There are always smart people who want to think for themselves. Whether Millennials or Gen X or what you want to call it, you are going to have smart curious people. If you have smart, curious people they can be brought to our product. We are stewards of this art form and we, too, as audience members, should be handing it off to the next generation better than we received it. This is what I think about every day.

You have a unique way of looking at what an audience is and/or should be.

I’m not interested in the music lover. A music lover has fairly rigid ideas of with they think is good or bad music. They are usually thinking of 18th or 19th century work written in a linear manner. What I’m interested in are the intellectually curious and it’s going to be Beethoven and George Crumb and Huang Ruo and they will ask “Why?” I want to reach those people. I believe there is a massive audience of intellectually curious who don’t come because they think of it as dusty or boring. Why the hell you’d drop 50 or 100 bucks on that I don’t know.

How would you describe the state of the arts in Los Angeles as we move into the 2020s?

Nobody has asked me that question before. I think Los Angeles is where it is at. I think the LA Philharmonic is doing a superb leadership job. The growing work done, particularly by Esa-Pekka Salonen, that was superb work that has helped create an audience whether happily or unhappily, they expect to be presented with new music on a regular basis.

I think the future of classical music is looking west into the Pacific. And I think Los Angeles and Southern California is poised to do that. Even in the time that we’ve been performing here there’s been an explosion of chamber music groups. You look at Yuval Sharon’s The Industry, some of the off-stage stuff LA Opera is doing – which is critical, Green Umbrella, Jacaradana, we’re trying to work together and show audiences what’s out there and present it collaboratively.

When you see so much going on – good ideas and bad ideas – whether  all these things survive, that’s the sign of a healthy artistic musical environment. Because that’s what you want – constant new ideas and most of them, by the nature of being, aren’t going to work. The more you have, the more that will work. That’s just simple. I think in Southern California we’re seeing that, which is exciting.

All photos courtesy of Camerata Pacifica

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Gail Gordon, Numi Opera’s Founding Director also wants to put an emphasis on Lost Voices, operas that were suppressed during World War II by the Third Reich. The inaugural season launches on Thursday with a production of Alexander Von Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg. There is a second performance on Sunday and both take place at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel.

This is not Gordon’s first time producing opera. She created Opera Nova in 2000. In 2008 she lead Santa Monica College Opera Theatre. She was also instrumental in the West Coast Premiere of Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy.

Der Zwerg is based on a story by Oscar Wilde called The Birthday of the Infanta. Zemlinsky used that as the inspiration to tell the story of a dwarf who is unaware of his grotesque appearance until he is given as a gift to a woman with whom he is smitten, but she wants nothing to do with the dwarf. The cast for Numi Opera’s production features Rodell Rosel, Shana Blake Hill, Oriana Falla and Roberto Perlas Gomez. Christopher Luthi is the Musical Director.

We spoke with Gordon, who is directing Der Zwerg, about the challenges of establishing a new opera company in a city rich with them, why she chose Der Zwerg to launch Numi Opera and the challenges of doing it herself.

How difficult is it to launch a new opera company in Los Angeles?

I have never heard so many “no’s” in my life. I worked with a wonderful grant writer. She got me started. Because I was new they needed a three-year footprint before they were comfortable. When I heard back it wasn’t that they didn’t feel the subject was worthy, but as a new company I didn’t have a footprint. Aside from the money my husband I have raised, it is going to cost me a little chunk of change.

Los Angeles has a robust opera scene. What did you see was missing from the local opera scene that prompted the formation of Numi Opera?

It was not necessarily related to what is or is not here in Los Angeles. In all fairness I did not even think about how I would fit into the landscape. It was just something that I felt I needed to do as a person of Jewish extraction. When I did see Der Zwerg at LA Opera I had one of those visceral reactions. Zemlinsky hit me head on. He was the first one I wanted to perform. I think his music is magnificent. It has many emotions in it. 

[LA Opera had a series called Recovered Voices that launched in 2007. It was a passion project for James Conlon. In 2008, they performed Der Zwerg.]

Given James Conlon’s passion for this material and particularly music silenced by the Nazis, did you have any conversations with him about your plans?

I told him I was going to do this opera and it was his baby. I wanted his blessing. He said, “Where are you performing?” I told him the Theatre at the Ace Hotel. I briefly told him my mother was a Polish immigrant and the rest of my family went into hiding for five years. These composers and this music really speaks to me. I lost so much family during the war. He was lovely about it. He got excited.

Zemlinsky described himself as hideous. He also had a failed relationship with Alma Schindler who married Gustav Mahler within months of breaking off her relationship with Zemlinsky. How much do we think this relationship inspired the composer’s interest in the Oscar Wilde story?

I think 100%. Zemlinsky felt this was quasi-autobiographical and he said so himself in some papers I read where he wrote about his heartbreak with Alma and how he felt he was always an ugly little man. His relationship to the dwarf was autobiographical. He felt it was him. Emotionally he was distraught.

There must have been something appealing about Zemlinsky?

If you think in terms of the most brilliant person you know, regardless of what they look like, the brilliance of the brain is attractive. He was the finest conductor and teacher at the time. He was the one everybody went to to learn composition. He had so many facets to him that being five-foot-tall and very thin with a very large nose paired in comparison to his other capabilities.

Your second production in December is Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Der Ring Des Polykrates. Korngold was a student of Zemlinsky’s. Is it possible to hear the influence of the teacher on the student from one work to the other?

Korngold was 17. This was his first opera. In Der Ring Des Polykrates you’ll hear much more lyric statements. It doesn’t quite have the emotional depth that Zemlinsky did, who was 24. Between 24 and 17 is a lifetime of differences, particularly in that time of the world. It doesn’t ever really go down in the darkness the way Der Zwerg does. But when you hear some of these beautiful lines the dwarf sings, you’ll hear similarities in the writing.

Nellie Melba, an Australian operatic soprano in the late Victorian era and early 20th century said, “The first rule in opera is the first rule in life: see to everything  yourself.” Do you agree with her and how does that statement reflect your starting of Numi Opera?

Yes I do. I’m at a point where I’m trying to learn – the word is delegate. I have visions about things and how they should be. Fortunately for me, I’m surrounded by people who believe in what I see and what I feel. That’s very helpful. I think it is true. I think you have to see it, feel it and be it before you can produce it.

For tickets on Thursday go here.

For tickets on Sunday go here.

All photographs courtesy of Numi Opera.

Update: Gail Gordon’s name has been changed to correct the previously listed Gale Gordon. Cultural Attaché apologies for the error.

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For Invisible Cities, you begin your journey in Harvey House, a restaurant space that houses the orchestra. From there, you follow whichever characters you like as they walk and sing through Union Station. Along the way you might encounter other singers, dancers, and most certainly the general public. And the whole time, you’re wearing headphones that amplify the musicians and the singers.

“Los Angeles is the inspiration for the work that I’m doing with the Industry in every way,” Sharon explained on the phone during a rehearsal break a few days before opening night. “Doing the opera at Union Station reflects that. It is an icon of Los Angeles that honors both the architecture and the city itself.”

But who stages an opera in a train station? “Composer Christopher Cerrone proposed the work when I was project director at New York City Opera’s VOX. The inner life of the music had to be made manifest on a stage. Calvino’s novel is more a piece of philosophy, a tone poem rather than a novel in the traditional sense. The opera is very quiet. Singers sing at low volume for most of the opera. You want to feel that the characters are singing in your ear.” It was then that the idea of using headphones and roaming around a large physical space was born.

“What you are hearing has no connection with what you are seeing,” Sharon says. “You have the opportunity to create relationships between eyes and ears. The book is fundamentally about what happens to us internally when we face a journey anywhere in the world. How much external reality is just a reflection of what’s happening with us. This was the perfect way to realize the piece that Christopher had been trying to create.”

The only thing missing was the location. “I started thinking where was a place the audience could move freely? Where could we do an intervention that wouldn’t disrupt daily life? The romance, the beauty around Union Station—you are instantly back in 1939 imagining the past in L.A. All of this speaks beautifully with the themes of the book and the opera.”

While the opera is being performed, trains continue shuttling passengers to and from the City of Angels. “Everyday life is a crucial part of the way the piece works. The life of the station, the people, and the subtle displacement are key elements,” Sharon says. “We are used to having our physical and mental reality not necessarily reinforcing each other. We carry so much in our phones.  As our lives get so digitized, these experiential type of performances resonate very deeply because they are something that our phones can’t do. The headphones and the public space are not the show. They are the means to experience a really beautiful opera.”

If the day-to-day hustle and bustle of Union Station isn’t enough, on Halloween there’s another level of engagement. “The life of the station on Halloween is going to be so electric. Costume designer E.B. Brooks and I had the idea of having a costume contest. It doesn’t change the nature of the performance at all. The creative act does not reside only by the artist. It is the spectator that is doing creative work with the artist.”

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