One of the best things that Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra does is their Sound Investment program which provides a commission and a tryout period for composers to work on a new composition and for investors to watch the creative process. Previous participants have included Matthew Aucoin, Sarah Gibson, Shelley Washington, Juan Pablo Contreras and Marc Lowenstein. Let me introduce you to this year’s composer: Nina Shekhar.

Shekhar is a first-generation Indian-American composer. Her most performed work to date is Lumina. Her music has been performed by most of the major orchestras in this country including LACO.

For her Sound Investment composition she has written a piece entitled Glitter Monster. The world premiere will be Friday, May 24th at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa. There is a second concert on Saturday, May 25th at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. Both programs also include Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor and Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C Major.

Glitter Monster is a work she wrote without any real rules. She let her imagination roam freely. This was part of what I learned in a recent conversation with Shekhar. What follows are excerpts from my interview with her. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: Matthew Aucoin called the Sound Investment program “very Bernie Sanders” and that it seemed “deeply Los Angeles specific” and that “there are a lot of supporters, not all stereotypically super rich, who want to support music.” How does his perspective align or not, with your own experience?

I think that the Sound Investment program is a really unique opportunity. On the composer’s side we rarely get a chance to workshop a piece or try ideas out. Usually we write a piece for an orchestra and then the orchestra rehearses it, performs it, and it’s very quick and you kind of turn around.

But in this case, we actually get the opportunity to workshop things and we get to have some contact with the performers in advance. We get to try things in a chamber setting and then have a reading of our piece in advance and the donors get to be part of that experience. They also get to sit in on all of these rehearsals. They get to hear what the piece is about. They get to offer ideas. I think it’s a really fun communal experience for everybody.

With so many people offering opinions, how do you distill what are good ideas, what are bad ideas? How much do you want to just remain faithful to what your vision is for a given composition?

Much of what my practice is as an artist is about my own voice; my own experiences and channeling that. That’s part of the reason I became a composer in the first place. I think of music as almost like my diary. I can really share a lot of my experiences [and] get to really understand myself better in that process.

But at the same time, I think a lot of composers forget that music is a communal experience. It’s not just my identity that’s being reflected in a work. It’s also performer’s identity. Everybody in the orchestra is interpreting the work. Also really importantly, it’s the audience’s identity that they’re putting into hearing the work and receiving it. That’s really important to acknowledge.

So in creating this, getting to hear some sort of feedback from the donors and having them say how they received the work or how it made them feel, definitely gives me a sense of how others are going to receive the work. It’s helpful for me to know that when creating a piece.

How important is how an audience responds to it? I think of countless composers, if they relied on audience response, would be grossly disappointed. Take, for example, Philip Glass. People didn’t understand his music until much later. Is the audience that important when writing music?

This piece, Glitter Monster, I felt a freeness in writing this piece that I usually don’t feel. I really took a lot of risks. I really just wanted to write something fun. Partly for myself, partly for the orchestra. In that sense it didn’t really matter what anybody else thought. But on the other hand, I do think it is important, just as an artist, to understand the perspectives of others and understand how others are going to receive your work.

This piece really builds a really, expansive sound world that I think many people can find different things in different kinds of meaning in the sound world that I’ve created. I’m glad that sometimes an audience member might receive something differently than I do. Even if my piece isn’t necessarily about what somebody else thought it was, that’s okay. 

Was this particular work that became Glitter Monster something you had been thinking about in advance of this Sound Investment commission or did it did it come about specifically because of the commission? 

I started brainstorming the piece after I received the commission. I had known I was going to be a Sound Investment composer in advance for a little bit. I’d been thinking about it, but I think really this past fall is when I started brainstorming the piece. The themes in it are about reclaiming femininity, but also as something that could be powerful, or it could be scary, or it could be angry. You know, rather than thinking of feminism as this dainty thing. So the title Glitter Monster came out of that.

I was thinking about this idea of glitter, which is so stereotypically feminine, and thinking about how can I harness that into something that could be maybe scary or angry. And thinking about my own self as a woman who is conditioned to take up less space, to be submissive and realizing, wait a minute, I have my own feelings too. Sometimes I get angry too. That’s how the title came out and then eventually morphed into this really subversive, or surrealist, psychedelic kind of piece, that moved beyond that initial theme.

Coming at this from a male, non-composer point of view, I’m thinking of glitter as shiny and sparkly. But when you combine it with the word monster that could mean any number of things. Does it have more than one meeting to you as a title?

It morphed into being a creature that I’ve created. There’s parts of the piece that sound underwater, there’s parts of the piece that sound like in outer space. It’s like this really large creature that I’ve created that is moving through all these different spaces, and it feels very expansive.

In writing this piece, part of the fun I had was creating this really surreal creature that didn’t exist and creating something that is unexpected. I mean, nobody would think of a glitter monster. For that reason it can mean many different things. Even in the course of writing it, it moved from this one idea to something much larger.

Glitter Monster is going to have its world premiere on a program with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 and Schubert’s last symphony. Do you see a through line from your work through those other two works?

As a composer who’s pretty active in the orchestra world, I’ve been thinking about the pieces that I’ve been paired with. I grew up playing a lot of Bach on the piano. I was a flutist also. I grew up playing a lot of Beethoven. Growing up, I think I did have a love for classical music. I still do. That’s part of the reason I work in that space. And I think that all of those elements have still influenced my music.

I think that my music has a strong sense of counterpoint, which I think comes from that classical world. There’s a lot of rhythmic, intricate details. Some of that comes from that world. I think with Mozart, there’s a clarity in his music and I try to aim for that in my music. In that sense, there is a through line. Although I do think that this piece is pretty shocking compared to those other pieces. But I think that’s great.

Schubert is quoted as having said, “The greatest misfortune of the wise man and the greatest unhappiness of the fool are based upon convention.” Do you agree with him? What role, if any, does convention play in your life and work?

As an artist we often are trying to make something that is reflective of ourselves. In that sense we’re all unique and we do break convention in that way – by presenting a new point of view. At the same time, though, I think that we are part of a larger network of artists. We are part of this lineage. Even pop artists today have been influenced by artists that came hundreds of years ago.

My work is also influenced by Indian traditional music and Hindustani traditional music. That’s thousands of years old. And in that sense, I think that we are a part of convention, but at the same time we can break convention. I’m embracing convention, but I’m not totally following it. I am breaking it in some ways – in a way that feels right to me. There’s no rule that says you can’t do this. This tradition has evolved over time because of that.

If audiences are familiar with any one of your works, it’s probably Lumina, which is getting a lot of play. But you have other compositions that are not getting as much attention. How do you deal with that?

We often say getting the second performance of a piece is probably the hardest thing. There’s so much allure around a premiere. Everybody wants to be the first one to perform something, or the first one who commissioned something and give the premiere. But I think that part of the challenge, and why it’s difficult to get second performances of orchestra works in particular, is because of recordings. With Lumina I had a recording that is publicly available because the first orchestra that played it was a university orchestra. A lot of this has to do with players unions and things like that. 

I’ve been lucky as several of my other orchestral works have been performed more often recently because Lumina got my name out more and people were more interested in performing other works of mine. With chamber music, it’s kind of a different thing because recordings are more available. So it’s much easier for me to have chamber works performed frequently. But I think with orchestras, that’s probably the biggest challenge that composers face.

Homer wrote,”…like that star of the waning summer, who, beyond all stars, rises, bathed in the ocean stream, to glitter in brilliance.” What is the stream to glitter you would like to see in your professional life in the next ten years?

In writing Glitter Monster I’m really learning to trust myself in my work. We talked about the role of the audience and all of this. But I think ultimately, as artists, it’s really important that we have faith in ourselves and that we are willing to take risks and try new things. I think that’s something that I’m hoping I carry going forward. With this piece I kind of threw all caution to the wind and said I’m just going to write whatever I want. I wrote something that was very out of the norm. Kind of campy, kind of 80s, larger-than-life, psychedelic, very unusual. But at the same time, it felt like me.

I realize that now going forward I’m writing more works that mean something really important to me. I feel like I want to continue that going forward. So for me, the glitter that I’m hoping that will shine through my life is that I continue to be on a path and continue to just take risks and explore who I am as a person in my work and really be confident in myself.

To see the full interview with Nina Shekhar, please go here.

Main Photo: Composer Nina Shekhar (Photo by Shervin Lainez/Courtesy Nina Shekhar)

The post Composer Nina Shekhar Offers You Her Glitter Monster appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

The opera is based on Atom Egoyan’s 2009 film of the same name. The libretto is by Royce Vavrek. The company performing Adoration includes Miriam Khalil, Marc Kudisch, David Adam Moore, Omar Najmi, Naomi Louisa O’Connell, Karim Sulayman, and the Silvana Quartet. The production is directed by Laine Rettmer.

Kouyoumdjian is a regular collaborator with Kronos Quartet. They will give the world premiere of a new work of hers at this year’s Kronos Festival in San Francisco. In May the New York Philharmonic will offer the world premiere of a musical documentary in which Kouyoumdhian collaborates with photojournalist Scout Tufankjian.

In our recent conversation Kouyoumdjian offered her perspective on the story Egoyan tells. (To see the full conversation, please go to our YouTube channel.)

“There’s a high school boy, Simon, who appropriates a real life news story,” she says. “This is actually the Handel affair in 1986. Someone planted a bomb on his pregnant fiance’s suitcase as she was flying to Tel Aviv, and Simon appropriates the story and convinces his classmates that this is about his own parents. As we are watching it, we know that his parents died of a car accident. But this social experiment that he has really reveals a lot of racism and complexities, both in his family and in the larger community.“

Which is the part that is uncomfortable and Kouyoumdjian wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I’m a strong, strong believer that discomfort in the arts actually prompts conversation,” Kouyoumdjian reveals. “Because when we feel discomfort, we want less of it in our world. I think it is a hard one to sit through for a constructive purpose, but I think it will be 90 challenging minutes for the audience.”

Adoration is not a work audiences should expect to find some comfort in by the opera’s conclusion. That is by design according to the composer.

“I don’t aim to offer relief because again, I think if you leave people with relief, then the piece is less inclined to foster a community that is more inclined to do direct change. I would never say that this opera will launch direct change. My main goal is to spark empathy because once we connect with a character, or just any human being on that fundamental human level, we have more understanding. Then I think we can more readily accept the uncomfortable.”

Given the number of characters involved in this story, Kouyoumdjian asked herself to write different forms and expressions of grief for each one.

“One of the challenges of this piece, one of the many challenges, [is] because Atom Egoyan writes incredibly complex stories where each character goes through immense psychological change – for better or worse. It’s incredibly layered. Every time I go into this story, I’m learning new things about the characters.

“One of the one of the wonderful things that he’s done is that as we explore each character, they each grieve in their own individual way, and the things that they’re grieving are incredibly different, whether it’s people or circumstance. That has allowed a lot of different ways to explore this incredibly universal area. It also has meant that over the course of the 90 minutes, people’s relationship to grief also changes quite a lot.”

From the first instinct to create an opera based on Egoyan’s film to the opera’s world premiere, this has been a five-year journey for Kouyoumdjian. Which means she’s spent a lot of time thinking about grief, writing music around the concept of grief and surrounding herself with the concept of grief. A daunting prospect for anyone which prompted me to ask her about how she protected herself during her work on Adoration.

“That has changed over the years. It’s hard. I tend to work in very intense bursts, and I tend to leave things for long periods of time. It’s hard for me to do a little bit of writing every day for a project like this, because I think that the psychological intensity of all of these characters and of the larger narrative is so demanding that to just pop in here and there doesn’t seem to serve the purpose of the work. So I’ll sort of binge write for a while, and then I will either move to something else or I love not writing. It’s really important to do other human activity in order to find any kind of brain space to be creative.”

Of course a story centered in the Middle East is going to have even more resonance given what’s going on in the world today than it might have had when Kouyoumdjian first embarked on the opera. It’s an idea that is not lost on her.

“We certainly don’t offer any solutions to what’s going on right now, because I don’t know how I possibly could, especially in 90 minutes. The story isn’t specifically about what’s happening right now. It just happens to pull from a tale as old as time, in which these types of conflicts have been going on for centuries, and this kind of racism has been happening for, well, we all know. It’s really about a grieving family. And if anyone has experienced grief, we all know that this brings out the best and the worst in people around you.”

In the end does Kouyoumdjian consider herself a political composer or is the act of composing itself a political act?

“I love how you phrase the latter in just the act of creation, whether it’s in your identity or the choice to make something or the choice of where it’s presented. All of these things are inherently political, which is what I tell my music history students all the time. Don’t for a minute think that Beethoven isn’t political. Forget even the Eroica symphony. Just the act of what a composer is doing, of who they are, of when, how, who funded – all of these things end up being political.

“I used to say that I wasn’t a political composer, but I was just interested in telling true stories. But with so much political conflict, especially things that are affecting my family, my community, so close to home, 1,000% yes! I feel incredibly lucky to live in a country in which there’s very little consequence for speaking out. And we do have, for the most part, freedom of expression, at least compared to other places in other communities. So I take that responsibility and privilege very seriously.”

To see the full interview with Mary Kouyoumdjian, please go here.

Photo: Mary Kouyoumdjian (Photo by Desmond White/Courtesy Mary Kouyoumdjian)

The post Mary Kouyoumdjian and Her First Opera… appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Frank Farian was the mastermind behind 1970’s group Boney M and the disgraced Grammy Award-winning duo Milli Vanilli. Walt Disney was head of his namesake studio that turned Joel Chandler Harris’ Tales of Uncle Remus into the film Song of the South (1946). Only in the inventive mind of artist/writer/director Edgar Arceneaux would these disparate stories find their way into a story about a matriarch battling dementia and how it impacts her two sons.

That’s the premise of Boney Manilli, which has its world premiere on October 5th at REDCAT in Los Angeles as part of CAP UCLA‘s 2023-2024 season. Boney Manilli runs through October 7th.

Arceneaux may be best known for his drawings, sculpture and installations. This very personal show of his, inspired by his late mother’s own battle with dementia, has been in the works for six years. Boney Manilli has burrowed into his psyche and in the process he’s found a way to examine our present-day world while finding a personal catharsis.

I recently spoke with Arceneuax about the combination of these stories, his own experiences with his mother and what it took for him to get all the pieces in place for Boney Manilli to work. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview with Arceneaux, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: Edgar Arceneaux, you told Caroline Goldstein for Artnet in 2020 that “The power of what art is, which is distinctive from other fields, is its unruliness, its nature to ask new questions.” Is that the guiding principle for you when you embark on any project? And if so, what was the principal question you wanted to ask with Boney Minilli? 

Because its nature is to be interpreted, it means that each person’s individual perspective is important. That it’s in that space of differences, in that space of debate, where power comes from. Which is different than, say, an advertisement or maybe even an illustration which is meant to be instrumentalized. But I think that art’s power comes amidst its unwillingness to be fully turned into one meaning or one message.

In the case of Boney, confusion is part of that unruliness, and it’s confusion on two different sides. On one side is a writer/director that I named after myself, Edgar, who is struggling to write a play about Milli Vanilli. Every time he thinks he has it, then it slips away. At the same time he’s trying to take care of his mother, who is slowly dying from dementia and is forgetting everything.

There’s a brother in the middle of the story whose name is Bro Bro, and he’s the younger brother. He’s also trying to tell a story. But this one is centered around the Song of the South, the story that Walt Disney Studios made into a film. He’s convinced, and everyone else in the family is convinced, that that movie was actually written by their grandfather and that Disney stole it from them. So all of them are trying to tell the story before the mother passes away.

How often do you find ideas or projects that you’re doing slipping away from you? If you’re going to name the character after yourself, how much of you is in this? 

Quite a bit. But there’s two different aspects of the character. There’s the one that’s struggling with the story and the frustration that comes along with that. But he’s struggling with the economic insecurity where he hopes that this thing is going to be able to get him out of the hole that he’s in. He’s living with his mother again.

Then there’s also the kind of madness that happens to people that can happen to you when you’re taking care of a loved one who’s going through either dementia or Alzheimer’s, because they go from being the person who’s there to nurture you to you becoming the person that nurtures them.

My mother and I had an amazing relationship up until the day that she passed. I did recognize in myself the capacity to become a really terrible person because of the emotional weight and responsibility. It just really tears and breaks everything apart when the mom is dealing with an illness.

In a podcast that UCLA Arts did with you a year ago when Boney Manilli was a work-in-progress, you talked about how these characters go through a baptism of fire. Have you been through a catharsis during the process of creating and bringing this show to life?

Most certainly. This is actually the fourth expression of this project over the last six years. This is the first one where I felt like I really could use the the aspects of how dementia impacts your mind as a kind of organizing principle for how to tell the story. When we did it as a work-in-progress presentation last March, it was impossible for me to really tell the story from that perspective because my mom had just passed away a year before. To go in three years after her passing, that can be a little more objective and a little more settled. The absolute reality, the undeniable reality, that she’s no longer physically here has given me a bit of creative distance to be able to really dig in to it in a way in which I just couldn’t do before.

I had this beautiful moment last night because I was with my dad. I had just taken him out to dinner and we were sitting on the bed. I finished a final edit of the script and I sent it to all the management team and the designers. I realized I was sitting on my mom’s side of the bed when I sent that final email off. It felt, in a subtle way, that there was something about it that was very poetic and I couldn’t have timed it that way.

Boney Manilli combines two problematic components of popular culture: Milli Vanilli and Song of the South, both of which have their own baggage that accompany them. What was the impetus for combining these two into one story?

I started to think about the relationship between these two stories: the one about the the potential death and then the way in which Joel Chandler Harris, the person who’s credited with these stories – actually just collected them from people who lived either on his plantation and of his grandfather or other Blacks who had these oral traditions – and then he created this character called Uncle Remus essentially in the same way that Rob and Fab existed as these fictional placeholders for a white author’s voice.

I recognized that these two stories are coming together, but I couldn’t leave those two things together without recognizing that there was a third element which was produced by juxtaposing these two things. Which is the way in which there is an industry of entertainment that values and monetizes this kind of trauma. The show is very critical of our desire to learn about the stories of people who’ve been taken advantage of.

And Frank Farian and Walt Disney both did that.

They did. But the lens of this show is very much focused on the appetite of the audience for these kinds of stories. So when you come and see it, you’ll see how we try to turn the camera from the stage to the audience. And it’s funny to me in some interesting ways.

CAP UCLA says, in laying out information about this show, “To paint the picture of identity and infamy within its true reality is Arceneaux’s artistry at its best.” We’re living in a time when identity is being discussed far more openly and with perhaps greater acceptance than it has in quite some time. But it’s going hand-in-hand with a culture via social media that allows us to manufacture our identity – which doesn’t necessarily have any basis in reality. What do you see as the present day reality of how we are looking at identity? 

The question of how we see ourselves, how we label ourselves, goes hand-in-hand with with lens-based technologies that force us to quantify where we begin and where another person ends. I think the more pluralistic understanding of race, class, identity is really good for us as a republic. I do think that is butting up against the edges of grand monopolies and grand pooling of resources, both politically and economically, which is fortifying itself against this this desire for more of a plateau as opposed to giant pyramids of power. These things are pushing against each other. These monopolies are ways of reinforcing heteronormative ideas about ourselves.

Many artists are most excited about doing something that scares them. Was doing something like this show something that scared you?

A reason why I’ve been working on this project for six years is because the first three iterations were not great. I was sweating. It’s the worst feeling in the world to have an audience watching something of yours and you know that it’s not right. You’re just cringing on the inside because putting on these shows is so expensive. You’ve raised this money from other people [and] you want to do the best that you can. Sometimes you’re just not there and you just have to keep working at it. You have to keep faith that you’re going to get there. But there’s no indication that for certain you will.

Then at a certain point I was just like, Oh, I see the story now. I never could find the ending. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t write it for five years. And then I did. 

After your mother’s funeral, you quoted her on social media. You said she said to you, “Just because my body ain’t here don’t mean I’m not still with you. I will always be two steps behind you, just right there when you need me.” How is your mother there with you through the creation and the rehearsals for Boney Manilli? 

Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, that example of sitting on the bed with her last night is one example. She was a person who had an unyielding faith in me and my siblings. Oftentimes I would hear her voice or I can feel, some inkling that I was doing right by her in the story. After she passed I could feel her energy all around me, in me and the natural environment around me. I would often just rely upon that belief to stay grounded and keep the faith that this was going to be a great show.

To see the full interview with Edgar Arceneaux, please go here.

Main Photo: Two cast members of Boney Manilli with Edgar Arceneaux (Photo by Richard Ffrench/Courtesy CAP UCLA)

The post Artist/Creator Edgar Arceneaux Goes for All or Nothing appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

This Sunday the Los Angeles Master Chorale will give the world premiere of Malhaar: A Requiem for Water at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. It’s a work that combines, as much of her music does, Hindustani and Western classical music styles.

I know what you are thinking, a requiem for water when Los Angeles is getting more rainfall this year than it has in decades. Of course there is an irony to that. But the composition of music doesn’t happen overnight. Any more than one season of rain makes up for multiple years of drought.

Born in Los Angeles, Esmail’s music has been performed Kronos Quartet, the Seattle Symphony (where she was composer-in-residence 2020-2021), Imani Winds, Brooklyn Rider and more. She is currently the Swan Family Artist-in-Residence at the LA Master Chorale where many of her works have been performed.

Earlier this month I spoke with Esmail about Malhaar: A Requiem for Water, finding emotionality in environmental issues and, yes, the irony of finishing the requiem during a deluge of rain. 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.

In your TEDx Skid Row talk 9 years ago you said, “I’m at the beginning stages of this journey. I might always be at the beginning stages of this journey.” Where do you feel you are today and what step in that journey does Malhaar: A Requiem for Water represent?

I still feel like I’m at the beginning stages of this journey. When I had given that [talk] I had just come back from India and I was trying to figure out how do I bring these two cultures, these two worlds, these two musical languages together? I was asking that question for the first time in many ways. I was really just kind of throwing things at the wall to see what stuck. And I would take a certain element from Indian classical music, a certain element from Western classical music, and try to see what would happen when I put them in dialogue with one another.

It’s almost a decade later and I feel like I’m just asking that question in really new ways. But I think over time what tends to happen is the more you do that, the more you’re almost creating this third space where certain combinations exist and then become kind of fused together in a dialogue that is, I guess, in its own language.

This piece feels like a step in a new direction because it’s one of the first times that I’ve written a piece that involves Indian and Western classical musicians together that isn’t necessarily on the theme of that involvement. I’m trying to move into that space where I’m using these two styles of music to tell a story that is so far beyond just what that connection is between those styles of music. 

As you ask that question in new ways are you finding that you are getting different answers now?

I’m in different places because these cultures have people in them, right? They’re not just disembodied cultures. Every time I come into dialogue with new people there are new questions. Since that time, I’ve come into dialogue with some of the most famous Indian artists of our time. I’ve been so privileged to write for and work with them. They bring their own context because they’ve had decades and decades of experience in a particular tradition and some of them have even had experience crossing over. So you can do really interesting and different things.

You posted on Facebook last week that “My 2022 is finally over. This is the last barline of my Requiem – two months and two days late, but mercifully, I am done.” What were the biggest challenges for you in writing Malhaar: A Requiem for Water?

The first biggest challenge was just time because 2022 for me, and I think probably for many composers, was that crazy year where everything that was rescheduled was rescheduled into that year from the past couple of years of COVID. Then everything that was in 2022 didn’t get moved. So basically we were writing three years of music on top of one another. And so that was the 16th of 16 commissions that I wrote in 2022. So you can tell my 2022 ended on March 2nd, 2023.

I think the other musical challenges were I realize I have never written a piece originally for choir and Indian voice at the same time. We all have certain ranges that our voice can sing in. I don’t know why I didn’t quite realize this before, but the fact that the Hindustani tessitura lies about a fifth below the Western female tessitura creates a lot of interesting challenges. What key do you set something and how do you make everyone feel comfortable in their own range? 

[Tessitura is Italian for texture and refers to a range of pitches within vocal lines of music]

The other thing that I ran up against, after over a decade of working in this field, I didn’t quite realize that a lot of times I set Indian classical ragas into Western settings and in instrumental music. But I realize that when you’re speaking in English or even in Latin, it’s very hard to set raga in a way that sounds authentic. If you look back through the tradition, you’ll see it’s rarely done. It’s mostly people singing in Indian languages and there is a reason for that. 

[In Hindustani music a raga is a pattern of notes with uniquely characteristic intervals, rhythms and embellishments that serve as the foundation for improvisation.]

A malhaar is usually associated with torrential rains. It seems appropriate that you finished this work as Los Angeles was being pelted with torrential rain. Did it strike you as ironic or was that in any way also inspirational for you?

[Malhaar is a raga named after the “giver of rains.”]

Writing this requiem that had to do with water and the disappearance of water is something that goes back to my childhood. It’s not just something that is happening now in context of climate change. But what was really interesting is the minute I started writing in January, I took a month off just to really work on the scaffolding of the requiem. The other thing I was doing was hiking. My hikes would just constantly get canceled because it was raining. Then I’m working on this requiem about the disappearance of water.

It’s funny because if you see it through traditional Indian eyes, malhaars are the ragas that are designed to beckon rain. So you’re singing this raga hoping that rain will come. On the spiritual level I’m thinking am I somehow beckoning the thing that I am trying to write about the disappearance of? It messed with me in all kinds of ways. But at the same time, it is inspiring to me because growing up in LA rain is so special. 

Since the onslaught of the pandemic we’ve been surrounded by loss of all kinds. Loss is part of any requiem. We’ve been challenged and continue to be challenged by water supply issues. How do you go about addressing these issues vis-á-vis your music in a way that is both emotional and intellectual?

I think grief and loss and those emotions are things that we experience viscerally. I’m looking at the L.A. Times every day and I’m seeing now water is being lost in this way. Here are the facts, here are the statistics. All of this is very important. But none of those things make you feel like this is actually something that is deeply emotional. I think that we are incentivized to act when we feel that emotional response.

So I thought to myself, what is a way to bring some kind of esthetic around this that is more than just these are the facts. To actually connect into our heart space when we’re thinking about what to do about this water crisis. That was largely why I decided to write this requiem about water. That’s in front of us as people who live in Los Angeles every single day. And yet it’s a thing that we just have to tune out because maybe it feels like it’s too big to deal with or we can’t do anything about it. It’s also a thing that’s really scary, right? 

What I wanted to do is actually connect some of those feelings that I know other Angelenos share about how terrifying it is to lose water; how much we maybe need to grieve. All these places we see that are just completely empty that we know used to have water in them. Just the terror of seeing that and the grief of that.

The end of the requiem is essentially making the point water is going on to its next life. Water is not just being destroyed. It will find the place that is the best for it. If we are not making a place that’s conducive to it, it will find somewhere else.

Water is going to be fine. It’s us that are going to be mourning its loss. So what do we do to actually not have to completely mourn the loss and preserve what we have left?

I went back to the first interview that I posted to our YouTube channel because the person I interviewed, a musician, said the following, “Hopefully what any creative endeavor accomplishes is the ability to create a portal, that mirror or lens of one’s attention in time, to be able to give oneself a glimpse to say, you know what, I have the right to create something, too. I have a voice. I have something to say. Whether we’re going to sit ourselves down and apply ourselves to the craft of creating, manifesting something from that capacity is the work before us.” Do you agree and what resonates with you today on your journey as the work before you?

It’s funny because as you were saying that, I was like, I think I know the person who said that. I’ve had many discussions like that in the context of my own home, in fact.

It was your husband, Vijay Gupta, who said that.

This idea of art as a portal, and the fact that that anyone should be able to express themselves through art, I absolutely agree with that. Those were the values that we very much first connected on. In my case I see that there’s this portal that exists between different musical cultures and we think of them as so separate because the surface of them might seem really different.

Say someone’s performing a string orchestra piece of mine that uses Indian classical music. There will be someone who is like, I’m getting kind of a taste of this through my own lens. I’m getting maybe one version of this improvisation kind of frozen for me so that I can actually learn it in my own instrument the same way that you would transcribe a jazz solo or something like that.

But then there will always be those musicians in every group who think, let me go further, let me actually go into Indian classical music itself and vice versa from Hindustani into Western classical music. That is the joy – to see someone actually take the ball and go through that portal and just run with it until they’re on the other side and can make their own connections.

I think about that a lot and how to facilitate those connections between people so that it’s not just me in there all the time. Being that conduit is important and just feels amazing.

To watch the full interview with Reena Esmail, please go here.

Main Photo: Composer Reena Esmail (Photo by Martin-Jamie Pham/Courtesy LA Master Chorale)

The post Composer Reena Esmail And Her Water Music appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

This interview originally ran in March when the Philadelphia Orchestra was giving a concert performance of The Hours. We have updated this story with more details about the Met Opera production, clips from the production and additional comments from composer Puts. We have also posted the complete interview up on our YouTube channel.

The Met Opera production stars Joyce DiDonato as Virginia Woolf, Renée Fleming as Clarissa Vaughan and Kelli O’Hara as Laura Brown. These were the characters played by Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore in the 2002 film. Both the movie and the opera are based on Michael Cunningham’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

If you read the book or saw the film you’ll remember The Hours is about three women from different time periods who all have a connection to Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway.

Also appearing in the opera are Kathleen Kim, Denyce Graves, John Holiday, Sean Panikkar and more. Yannick Nézet-Séguin will conduct all but the last Met Opera performance on December 15th. Kensho Watanabe will conduct that performance. The production is by Phelim McDermott (Akhnaten).

“The idea came to me from Renée Fleming,” says composer Puts. “She was thinking about it and she thought how interesting to have an opera that takes place in three different time periods all at the same time. It was on her mind because she had just had lunch with Julianne Moore..” That’s how The Hours began its life as an opera written by Puts.

Earlier this year I spoke via Zoom with Puts who won the Pulitzer Prize for his first opera, Silent Night. What follows are excerpts from that conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

Virginia Woolf once asked, “Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?” Your opera of The Hours is based on a novel written by a man who was inspired by Woolf and is being created and directed by three men. What would you say to Woolf if given the opportunity to address her question?

I can’t answer why, but I would say for me women are more interesting as characters. I don’t know why. I love operas like Billy Budd, but these characters are fascinating and I like writing for the female voice very much.

Just before speaking with you I had the television on and I was flipping channels around and the movie Aliens was on. It’s the same thing, [director] James Cameron is fascinated with female heroines in his story. I don’t know exactly why.

My first opera was basically almost all men and now I’m starting to get my musical mind around having melodies that are essentially around middle “c” on the piano. That is a different kind of thing because then the harmony has to be in a different place, et cetera. I don’t like to get too technical, but it’s very natural for me to write for women’s voices. But that is a very Virginia Woolf thing to say and probably true as well.

You mentioned that, like the novel, your opera takes place in three different time periods. Musically how are those time periods reflected and is that necessary for an audience to stay on course with the story you are telling?

The piece has a very kind of otherworldly and kind of mystical feel to it. But definitely we want the audience to know what’s going on.

I didn’t have a real premeditated idea that there would be three different types of music, which would be extremely different and would signify the different characters. But I think it just happened naturally.

Virginia Woolf feels trapped in Richmond and she wants the wildness of the city. So there’ s a musical language and certain elements of that language which describe that for me. Then there’s her sort of manic desire for London. So there’s that kind of dichotomy in her music.

Laura Brown, the middle period character, was living outside of Los Angeles after World War II. WIth her husband and her three-year-old son, she feels trapped in sort of an alien domestic world that is not natural for her. So there’s a way of describing the world that she can’t fit into, which has its own language.

Clarissa, Renée Fleming’s character, has a kind of musical language that is characterized by Clarissa’s eternal optimism and radiance. She thinks everything will be fine if we just have the perfect party and we get the flowers exactly right.

I really do think of them as musical environments. They’re not leitmotifs, but they’re languages that I think are associated with the different characters and their situations.

This opera has been in the works for quite some time with Fleming, O’Hara and DiDonato attached. Did that allow you to write specifically for their voices?

It was very much written for the three of them because we hadn’t started writing yet. So I knew who we were writing for. I knew Renee’s voice very well having done a couple of projects with her. And I knew Kelli O’Hara’s voice from musical theater. I was talking to her a lot and finding out that she actually has an incredible range and she can sing the lyric soprano roles. And, of course, I knew Joyce DiDonato’s voice. The piece will continue to be written for the three of them over the next several months.

I really think that’s crucial for an opera to make sure that the principles really feel like they can deliver with their parts. It’s funny how minute the changes can be and sometimes that makes a big difference to them. It’s easy for me and actually really satisfying for me to develop these roles within the parts of their voice that work given the situation.

How did Greg Pierce become the writer you wanted to adapt Cunningham’s novel and create the libretto?

Greg had only done one opera, Fellow Travelers, which is a really successful opera with Gregory Spears. I read the libretto and I really liked it. I also liked the fact that he hadn’t done a lot of operas. He had done work in other areas: screenplays, et cetera. He showed me some poems that he wrote. I knew there would be a poetic element to the language. It’s what inspires me. I think that there has to be some poetry in the libretto. His enthusiasm for The Hours was clear. He had been thinking about it for years as a possibility as an opera. In our first conversation I felt like we were already writing it. It just felt natural once I met him.

In the spring of 2021 you had a workshop of the music with Cincinnati Opera. What did you and Greg learn from that session and how did it inform the subsequent work you’ve done on The Hours?

My score was marked in red. I just went to work immediately. Once you figure out what you need to do you just want to forget the past like it never happened.

I think that one of the really crucial scenes in the opera was entirely re-written. It’s a complicated scene actually. A couple of scenes between Clarissa and Richard. I need to work really hard at dialogue. I feel like it should all feel like part of a seamless musical flow and there should be real singing in the dialogue. It should flow naturally like a conversation that kind of ebbs and flows. So those scenes, in some ways, require the most work.

How did that work in the middle of the pandemic?

That was a heroic thing that they did. We were all in a massive ballroom and there were twelve singers – all of the masked in little separate booths with microphones. The pianist and the conductor were in the middle of the room and none of us could approach each other. But we got through the entire opera and we learned a ton from it.

Given that Mrs. Dalloway is so revered, as is the language of Virginia Woolf and that The Hours is revered both as a book and a movie for the language that Cunningham and screenwriter David Hare used, what challenges do you face in continuing with a successful telling of this story?

I think it always is the case when you’re working with a property that’s really known. It’s inevitable. They’re going to be reactions like “well, it’s not like this. And I love the book and it’s too bad that it’s not this way and that way.” It was certainly true of The Manchurian Candidate, my second opera. It was the same kind of challenge.

But I felt like when I began composing that I was doing things on my own terms. It just feels different – just the nature of the piece. I feel like it’s its own thing and it’s not going to feel like the book. It’s not going to feel like the film. The music has its own personality, I hope. But yeah, that’s definitely a challenge. I hope that people will listen to it on its own terms.

The nice thing is the book and the film will still exist independent of the opera.

As soon as Renée mentioned the book I started thinking about the possibilities that can happen on an opera stage that cannot happen in a film. You can’t split the screen in three ways. These stories can begin to intermingle and overlap and they can sing duets that transcend time. That was what was really exciting about it for me because with the language of music and harmony it’s possible to do that. So that’s why I wanted to do it.

I think about that all the time. What’s the point? But I think with this I really thought there was a point.

Michael Cunningham said in an interview when the novel was released that he felt that he entered into some kind of maturity with The Hours and that it was something only he could have written. I’m wondering if you could compare your own thoughts about your perspective of having written this opera at this point in your life and whether you’ve reached a certain kind of maturity and if only you could have written this.

I don’t feel that I’m the only composer who could have written this. But I do think that the way I like to approach opera is well suited to this story. The emotional situations; I live for these these things as a composer. I live for the moments when I can let these situations wash over me and let music come out. This is why I do it.

I think as far as maturity, I feel like now I understand how to not only how to write for voice and how to set the English language and the way I want to that really extracts all the musicality that’s possible out of it. i really love to set English as a language. But also I feel like I’ve kind of tempered my, what is often described in Silent Night, as a kind of a poly-stylistic approach. I’ve tempered that in a way that feels like it’s more cohesive and more kind of all me, even though there are references to different stylistic things that occur in the piece. So yeah, I feel like it was a good time for me to write this opera.

To see the full conversation with Kevin Puts, please go here.

Main Photo: Composer Kevin Puts (Photo by David White)

The post UPDATED: Composer Kevin Puts Discusses “The Hours” appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Who are they you ask? If you recognize any of these song titles you know their work: Alfie, (They Long to Be) Close to You, Do You Know the Way to San Jose, I’ll Never Fall in Love Again, I Say a Little Prayer, Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head, This Guy’s In Love with You, Walk on By, What the Wold Needs Now and The Look of Love.

The last song was written for the 1967 film Casino Royale. It earned Bacharach and David an Academy Award nomination. They didn’t win, but just three years later they did win the Oscar for Best Song for Raindrops which was featured in the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Mark Morris, the innovative choreographer known as much for his outrageous statements as for his work, has created a new dance work centered around the work of these two legends. The Look of Love will have its world premiere this week at the BroadStage in Santa Monica (October 20th – 23rd). From there the show will travel to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (October 26th-29th) and Gogue Performing Arts Center at Auburn University in Alabama (November 8th) before the end of the year. The show will resume performances next year in multiple venues.

Last week I spoke via Zoom with the never self-censored Morris about this music, the work (and he was still working on it a week before its premiere) and if any of his work or his career has turned out the way he expected. What follows are excerpts that have been edited for length and clarity.

What was Bacharach’s response when you first reached out about creating The Look of Love?

I was getting ready to ask a whole bunch of questions and then he answered them: Be sure this isn’t boring. Have you thought of doing medleys, changing some of the tempi or male or female singers or include some other changes? It was basically almost a sort of carte blanche kind of thing. He said what about this? Well thank you those were all my questions. That will be all Mr. Bacharach. So it was really great.

What would you tell people is the reason to take interest in the music of Burt Bacharach, particularly if they don’t already know it? 

In one sense, I couldn’t care less. Listen to whatever the hell you want. But also I would slip in listen to this. I’m not trying to convert people to the church of Burt Bacharach or anything because I’m not a member of that. I just love the music.

This comes up a lot because five years ago I did a piece that re-looked at and listened to music from Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for a piece of an evening called Pepperland. Don’t worry fans or enemies of mine. I’m not just doing a trip down memory lane from when I was 11 years old. I don’t even remember that so it’s not that. I’m trying to turn on a whole new generation to this music of this very broad period.

This piece with Mr. Bacharach’s music, in its very purest form, is very direct and very, very moving. It’s all been written to be performed live. We’re not doing a really complicated examination of the work. It’s what a great song, let’s listen to this and have some music and dancing.

As someone who has known this material for a long time were there new discoveries that you made?

One thing that wasn’t much of a surprise is that these songs are hard to sing. [Marcy Harriell will be singing live with a band headed by Ethan Iverson] There are surprise shifts all the time. What people just hear as a sort of a modulation up toward the thrill, the payoff of the crescendo and the modulation to higher and higher until the big payoff at the end isn’t always true. Sometimes the bottom drops out or it goes another direction or goes chromatic or major and minor in the most wonderful [way]. Evident when you hear it, but surprising if you’re trying to make it up yourself. 

What influence does that have on what you create and what you ask your dancers to do?

I’m always dealing with the idea of how much text I’m going to use. Are we dancing the words or is that redundant? We hear them. Do you have to also do them? The thing with opera it’s like you’re singing it, you’re saying it. There’s supertitles, the music is saying it. How many modes of translation do we need: words, rhythm, music, the people, the dancers themselves, how they move, who they are. And of course, I decide what the choreography is, but it’s based on many things: text, rhythm, harmony, orchestration, probably barometric pressure and audiences. It affects all of it.

As Burt and I warned each other, it’s not a jukebox show. It’s not get slightly drunk and sing along. Although you’re welcome to if you do it quietly. I didn’t want it to be, first of all, a mess, you know? I didn’t want it to be a name that tune kind of thing or a grocery store. Although I admire the company called Muzak as it was and as it is. I love that. But it’s the idea that you’re led from one thing to another, not trying to make a Mamma Mia story out of things that aren’t really a story. 

You were quoted as having said “No dance has ever turned out the way I thought it would, because I trust enough that I can start something with some ideas and then it takes itself somewhere.” How does that concept apply not just to The Look of Love, but to your entire career?

I’m tempted to say ask me in ten days because I have eight services starting tomorrow where I have to finish it. That seems like a lot because I have a lot of it done. I just have to do a little bit of what do you call that plaster? A little bit of caulking on the seams of it. That’s the tricky part. I have almost all of it done. It’s just it has to snap in – the capstone has to drop in. And all of those metaphors aside, I never know what the hell’s going to happen.

I still don’t know what the very beginning and the very end of my piece are. A lot of the stuff in between I can change it. The people I work with are brilliant enough where I can say, remember that thing we did two weeks ago that started on the other leg and you weren’t in it? Let’s do that. I can do that and it’ll just take a couple of minutes for people to come up with the solution because they’re used to that. Iit’s always live music. It’s always live them. So it happens. It’s not democratic. I make up the dances, but they do it. So the sooner I can pass them on so it’s out of my hands, the more comfortable, meaning accurate and inhabited, the piece will be. So it’s not what I thought it was going to be and it won’t be what I think right now it’s going to be. But I have a hunch and that’s going to be working soon. As more of us collect in the room, the more it’s going to finish itself. 

It’s been 42 years since you formed your own company. How much does what that company look like today mirror what you imagined it might have been in 1980 when you formed it?

Let’s see. Every model of person is different, but there are new models every year of people. I don’t know how that keeps happening, but they differ not just because they’re of different relations, but also times change. People change. I’m still very close friends…You know in the COVID period I spent more time on the phone – or whatever we call the phone – with my ancient friends. My earliest dancers are all in their sixties and seventies. They were mostly the women in my company from way back. We talk more than we have in years, these wonderful women and men too. That was wasn’t even memory lane. It was like, can you believe what’s going on? Of course my dancers are a third my age now, so that changes everything.

I didn’t visualize a company in my mind. When I started the company I was just making up dances. I didn’t know what that dance was going to look like in 1984 or whenever until I made it up. That’s still true. We do pieces in my repertory that are actively in repertory, pieces that are 40 years old still. Occasionally I like them and if I don’t like them, we won’t do them. I’ll make up a new one. 

To see the full itinerary of Mark Morris Dance Group, please go here.

Main Photo: Mark Morris (Courtesy BroadStage)

The post The Look of Love in Mark Morris’s Eyes appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

“I do like the possibility of just people experiencing something that they’re unfamiliar with. And then hopefully what it does is just either raises some questions or just piques their curiosity.” That’s how Grammy Award-winning violinist Johnny Gandelsman describes the optimal reaction he’d like audiences have to his new anthology, This Is America.

The project finds Gandelsman performing 24 newly-commissioned works for solo violin. Amongst the composers who have contributed to This Is America are Rhiannon Giddens, Angélica Negrón, Tomeka Reid, Terry Reily, Tyshawn Sorey and Conrad Tao. The composers represent the true melting pot that is America: straight, gay, multiple ethnicities, young, old, immigrants and more.

Gandelsman is himself an immigrant having been born in Russia. He was raised there and in Israel before moving to the United States. He is best known as the co-founder of the string quartet Brooklyn Rider and a regular collaborator with Silkroad Ensemble. Gandelsman has collaborated with such artists as David Byrne, Yo-Yo Ma, Anne Sofie von Otter and Suzanne Vega.

Our conversation took place after a horrific weekend of violence and racism in the country he now calls home. What follows are excerpts from that conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

How much is your list of composers for This Is America a reflection of that basic idea of what this country is supposed to be and by extension, how much does their individual music represent that concept as well?

The project is there to sort of broaden the conversation about what is America and who are the voices that we hear from in the concert hall. So all of those things where definitely part of my thinking when I was working on the list. I love lists. I have a very long list of people that I would love to work with. So 24 is definitely not the end of it. It’s trying to present a broad view of what’s happening right now in this country in terms of creative output. This is just a drop in the bucket.

How does new music allow you to do that in a way that the classic repertoire of classical music does not?

If we want people to feel connected to music, to what we do on stage, we can’t just play the old stuff. It just doesn’t make any sense. I really think that hearing from people who are writing music today and putting their experience in front of other people is the way for audiences to connect to music that’s written right now. Just like people [could] connect it to when Beethoven was writing his symphonies and he was a contemporary composer. I think the practice of playing music of the past is a relatively new idea. And while it has done some good things in terms of making sure that those pieces are around and people are familiar with them, it just cannot be the only thing that our art form does.

Each composer has his or her own approach and compositional style. How did you respond to all these various pieces?

Some pieces I had a feeling that I understood right away. And some pieces what was being asked of me was was either foreign to me or challenging or just something that I’ve never tried before. And so I had to overcome this sense of fear of I can’t do that. That’s foreign. That’s no good. It’s embarrassing to admit, but my first reaction was, oh, this is just not good, you know? And it was just because I didn’t understand it. And I was totally afraid of it. What was really nice about it was that the composers were really kind and gently guided me into their process of thinking and what they were imagining.

That fear or the unknown seems like it is also a reflection of our world today.

When faced with something that was really challenging, my first reaction was fear. And that’s what we see in the world today across all all spheres of of our lives. People, when faced with unknown things, the first reaction often is rejection of those things. I say this in the notes for the album, but I really wish that people in all walks of life would have this kind of gentle guidance into the unfamiliar world where they could feel safe to experience something new and then find a way to accept people who [have] different ideas, who are different.

Once you settled into each composition in This Is America, how has your approach to them grown? In addition to the recording you are also performing some of the selections live in concert.

When I recorded these pieces they were very fresh. Since then I’ve had a chance to perform them. That experience in itself changes how I feel about it. It changes the piece. In a way I wish I could re-record the whole thing again. But that’s true of almost all albums that are made. I do think that the pieces might resonate now slightly differently. I mean the world just keeps throwing these things at us that are just constant.

Has This is America allowed you to foster a greater love for America or question whether the American experiment is destined to ultimately fail?

That’s a really hard question. I love this place. I’m Russian, Israeli, American. And all of these places have some incredibly disturbing things about them. At the same time they have great culture, great people and probably equal amount of people who believe in the things that we believe in. They just don’t have the governments that, at least currently, allow for a conversation about that really. So I don’t know. I do believe that this place the idea is great, but it’s clearly a work in progress.

It’s easy to kind of stay in your own bubble and not engage. It seems like maybe we don’t have the luxury of staying on the sidelines and letting it roll down the hill and then seeing what happens. I think people do whatever they believe they need to do in their own ways. I can’t say that I’m an activist in any way. I’m hoping that through the work of being a musician there’s something positive that I can bring to the conversation or people’s experience.

Hopefully for at least the length of your concert, regardless of ideologies, people are having a shared experience that silences those differences.

This might be my imagination, but it does feel like when we’re together in the room experiencing music – and that’s relatively new now right after COVID – people find ways to connect to, if not the music, but the idea behind it. I think that’s a kind of invisible bridge that is established for that period of time. So it does feel like we’re all in it together: the composers, the audience and myself. Which is a nice place to be.

Johnny Gandelsman will perform selections from This Is America at The Wallis in Beverly Hills on May 19th. For tickets and more information, please go here.

To pre-order the CD or a digital download of “This Is America,” please go here.

All photos courtesy of the artist and The Wallis.

The post Johnny Gandelsman Explores America appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

“It was important for me to not see Martha Graham,” declared Janet Eilber, Artistic Director of the Martha Graham Dance Company. “I didn’t want things that were Graham-esque. We have Graham. We have the most fabulous 20th century choreography that exists, in my opinion. So to bring someone in and ask them to do something like Martha is just too much of a mountain to climb. I really look for people who have developed their own distinct voices and ask them to take inspiration from one of Martha Graham’s ideas, but to create a completely different dance, something that is their own.”

The project about which Eilber is speaking is The New Canticle for Innocent Comedians which is having its world premiere this Saturday at The Soraya in Northridge. The original version by Graham debuted in 1952. But there is no permanent record of that work. All that exists were the memories of one former dancer and a film of one of the eight parts that make up the work, even though the original Canticle was revived in both 1969 and 1987.

“It was kind of a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy if anyone remembers what Xerox was in 1969,” she said of those revivals. “The initial performances were never filmed. So 18 years later many of the original cast came back and tried to remember what they had danced and they put together a revival. That revival was not filmed. In 1987, another 18, 19, 20 years later with an entirely new company, a few of the original cast came back and said, ‘we sort of did this. Maybe we did this. Let’s use our collective knowledge of Martha Graham and put something together.’ So when I was researching bringing it back to the stage again with no filmed record of any of those earlier efforts, I thought I’m not going to pretend that we know what Martha Graham choreographed back in 1952. But we had her structure, we had her blueprints. And I thought that would be great inspiration for some of these young emerging choreographic voices that I wanted to work with. Martha’s blueprint for Canticle for innocent Comedians, with its eight distinct vignettes about nature, gave me an excuse to have eight different choreographers involved.”

Joining one vignette choreographed by Graham and a second recreated by Sir Robert Cohan, a dancer in the original production, are works by Sonya Tayeh, Kristina and Sadé Alleyene, Jenn Freeman, Juliano Nuñez, Micaela Taylor and Yin Yue.

Tayeh may be the best-known of the choreographers for her work on So You Think You Can Dance and her Tony Award-winning choreography for the stage musical Moulin Rouge!

“Sonya’s choreography is very emotionally descriptive. And she has her own physical vocabulary that is quite different from Martha’s. But it’s still this idea of using using motion and movement to describe emotion.”

Emotion and heart are the keys to The New Canticle for Innocent Comedians maintaining a connection to the original work by Graham.

“You’ll see, even in this brand new version, that the emotion is just the emotion that comes through the dancing that we do,” Eilber offered. “Certainly the Martha Graham classics are all about the physicality that she invented to reveal emotion. To reveal, as she said, the inner landscape, the heart and that comes through. That was the core principle in all of her choreography. And I think it’s certainly true of our New Canticle – even though it’s got a great variety of creative artists who have put it together.”

Another artist joining in this project is musician/composer Jason Moran who has created a new score. For the world premiere he will be performing his music live. Two days later he’ll be recording the score for use in other upcoming Martha Graham Dance Company performances of The New Canticle for Innocent Comedians.

“Jason has gone in his own direction. It’s a long piece – long in a good way. It’s about 40 minutes for solo piano. It’s a tour de force for him to play for 40 minutes. Jason had carte blanche and he did not really have direct contact with any of the individual choreographers. He’s been working with Sonya and me. He came into the studio several times and you could just feel the sparks flying once he saw our dancers in person. He sat down at the piano in our studio and just began to create sounds and phrases that went with the choreography Sonya had already created.”

The New York Times, in a review of the 1987 revival, called the original work by Graham one of her “most atypical pieces.” It’s an assessment with which Eilber agrees.

“One reason that made it atypical in 1952 was that Martha Graham was not in it. The works that she was creating in the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s, for the most part, revolved around her. She was choosing narratives – borrowing stories from the Bible, from Greek myths, from wherever – to have a vehicle for herself as a leading actress and dancer. It wasn’t just a narcissistic trip. She often transformed these stories in genius, revolutionary ways.”

With Canticle, Eilber says, “She’s not creating a vehicle for herself. She’s creating virtuosic solos and duets for her company. So it’s an ensemble work. It does not have a narrative. There’s no bad guy or anything like that. So it’s a much more sort of poetic and abstract idea without a leading lady at the center of it.”

As for the leading lady, Martha Graham, Eilber thinks she’d be very interested and supportive of this new version of her work.

“As long as we’d ask her to bow and bring her up on stage she’d be happy,” Eilber said followed by a joyous laugh. “The other answer is, people think of Martha as the sort of old-fashioned, staid diva who wanted things a certain way, but it was quite the opposite. She was a revolutionary. She embraced change until the last day of her life and was always looking for new. She had an appetite for the new and and she was always looking for ways to astonish her audience; to figure out what was new and what she could do. So I just have to believe that she would be behind us all the way; that she would be interested in the experimentation that we’re doing.”

To watch my full conversation with Janet Eilber, please go here to our YouTube channel.

For tickets and more information on The New Canticle for Innocent Comedians please go here.

Main Photo: Martha Graham takes a bow (Photo by Martha Swope/Courtesy NYPL Archives)

The post What Would Martha Graham Think? appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

“If you study the history of the trombone, some of the pieces of art, Mozart’s Requiem, Brahms symphonies or Mahler symphonies, wouldn’t be what they are without the trombone,” Mollá said.

He should know. In addition to composing, Mollá is also a highly accomplished trombonist. His instrument and the brass section will be on full display Tuesday night at the Hollywood Bowl when his Fanfare for a New Beginning has its world premiere. Tianyi Lu will be conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Also on the program is the U.S. premiere of Thea Musgrave’s Trumpet Concerto and Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

Last week I spoke by phone with Mollá about Fanfare, the role of music in troubled times and where he sees his careering going. What follows are excerpts from that conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

Your Fanfare for a New Beginning was commissioned by the Singapore International Low Brass Academy. Yet the premiere is at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. How did that happen?

I’m from a little town in Spain. Very close to my home, David Rejano Cantero, principal trombone player of the Los Angeles Philharmonic was born. I have known him for many years and we have a very good relationship. At some point I thought I have nothing to lose. I said, “It would be a dream come true if you at least listen to it.” A few months later he answered me back saying he passed it to the rest of the group. He felt it was a piece with a lot of energy and should be part of the program. I was shocked they really liked it and respected the music. This is how finally it was programmed with the orchestra which makes me feel very honored and happy.

Fanfares are traditionally short pieces. What are the challenges in creating an impactful piece in a brief amount of time? How tightly threaded must your ideas be to accomplish what you set out to do?

I’m a beginner composer. I’m 29 years old now. I’m aware I have a lot to learn. One of the common mistakes is to have extra material for a piece. Sometimes you are working on new music and suddenly three or four melodies that are very interesting come to mind. Your first reaction is to use them all in one piece. At some point you have to organize elements in a way that you create beauty at the end. Sometimes when you add too much material to a single piece of art it becomes too dense and nothing can be understood. I would say the biggest challenge is to be aware when you have to delete part of the music you like.

It seems as though premieres are easier to get than follow-up performances so a composer’s work can be heard more broadly. What can you do as the composer to get your work heard?

The first important thing is if the piece works. If the piece doesn’t work, it won’t be a big success. The piece really needs to be a piece of art and people appreciate what it can offer. Nowadays if you are not on social media or any other platforms, it’s difficult for people to know what you write exists. If a piece is premiered but not recorded, either video or audio, so people can experience it at home, it’s very difficult to make it to the rest of the world. Maybe the third point to a piece being successful is a bit of luck.

Following your work on this program is Thea Musgrave’s 2019 Trumpet Concerto which she wrote at the age of 91. Do you see yourself writing music into your 90s?

Of course…unless I lose some abilities. I don’t see myself retiring. I’m kind of an obsessed worker when it comes to composition. It’s just one of my needs. It’s kind of my meal every day. When I think about getting old I just see composers and conductors who have been working until their last days and I kind of se myself in that position.

There are probably two well-known fanfares: the 20th Century Fox Fanfare by Alfred Newman and Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. Copland said, “So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.” We’re living through challenging times. What role would you like your music to play as we move through and beyond our present-day challenges?

This is a very challenging question actually. I feel like there is no wrong music. Music isn’t bad or good. It’s just what the composer wants to tell. You can hear it or not. The only thing I would like to do for the rest of my life is write whatever I want and whatever I feel. If people like it, it would be a great thing. If they don’t, I will not try to change my message. Music is just expressing what you have inside. You should create the best music you can with the knowledge you have and the experiences you’ve learned and just see what happens. Being constant and never stop working and enjoy what you do. That’s the pillar of the equation.

Photo: Ricardo Mollá (Courtesy Los Angeles Philharmonic)

The post Composer Ricardo Mollá Gives the Trombone Some Love appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Tom Dugan, perhaps best-known for his one-man show Wiesenthal, has written a new play that takes its inspiration from some of the stories by Sholem Aleichem that did not find their way into the musical. The play, Tevye in New York, reveals what happens to the Jewish milkman and his wife after his three daughters have left Anatevka.

The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts has just opened the world premiere engagement of Tevye in New York. Just prior to starting previews, I spoke by phone with Dugan about taking on such a beloved character, why he remains so popular and what he’s learned from Tevye. What follows are excerpts from that conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

When you tackle a character like Tevye, who has been brought to life by the likes of Zero Mostel, Topol and even Harvey Fierstein, what challenges do you face in giving the audience the character they have come to love, but still make it your own?

I’m very mindful of that. It’s a play about his growth and development and how he has to change with the changing times. I knew when I walked on stage I had to be recognizable as Tevye first. I can’t come out and say, “This is the new Tevye.” Little by little it takes us to a place where Tevye’s mind is open to new things.

I believe more than anything else in our popular culture, the film version is what is most indelibly marked in the mind. So I am going to try to emulate as much as I can of Topol in the beginning of the play so people recognize him. Then we’ll take that character into a brand new place. He’ll be doing things that the Tevye in the musical never did go through and could never conceive of.

In the wonderful documentary Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles they showed a production in Japan of the musical where the cast was asking how the musical could be so Japanese. In other words, these stories are universal. Does Tevye in New York serve as a universal story as well?

I think I have a lot of help because I have Sholem Aleichem on my side. What Joe Stein [book writer of Fiddler on the Roof] did so brilliantly was to take a lot of what Aleichem had written, take the essence of it and then change it. Rewrite it. That’s what I’ve done. The majority of the Tevye stories are not included in Fiddler on the Roof. There are four stories people don’t know about that are more powerful than what’s in the musical. I’m taking from the original stories just as Stein did and I’m creating a one-man play with it.

Harry Stein, son of Joseph Stein, said that there were some in the Jewish community who felt that “Fiddler was a betrayal of much that gave that experience and weight and instead became a parable of assimilation in which the tragic core of the original Shalom Aleichem stories is replaced with an all-American optimism.” Do you agree with that perspective?

I’m not sure. Everybody has their opinions and Aleichem went from the darkest of dark stories to the lightest of light stories. When I spoke with the Sholem Aleichem family they invited me, just before the pandemic, to an island off of New York where they have the estate and the family has a reunion every year to celebrate his work. Aleichem asked on his deathbed please get together and celebrate my work. Please do not focus on the sad stuff. I don’t think that Fiddler on the Roof would have displeased him in any way shape or form. Especially the success of it.

This is not the first time a continuing story about Tevye has been created. Alexandra Silber, who played Hodel on stage, wrote a novel following that character’s story after the musical. Why do people want to create new stories for these characters and why do audiences want to read or see them?

I think it is because they see themselves on stage. These characters are so well written from the original stories. It’s not black and white. They have faults, they make mistakes, sometimes they say and do ugly things. Then they go on and try harder and they do something else and you grow a greater respect and connection with them beach that’s what we all do. We’re making it up as we go along.

Sometimes the hero knows what to do. Tevye ain’t that. Men, women, children all appreciate the fallibility of the character. The reason that he’s popular is because they either see themselves, their husbands or their father up on stage.

Whom do you see?

My connection is not a small one. I played Tevye in high school as a 17-year-old. That was the part that made me say I want to do this for the rest of my life. So Tevye looms large in my life. When I original did it, who did I see? I saw my father.

What has Tevye taught you?

From the first time in high school I saw the power of how the character and the play could bring people together. I don’t want to get too snobby, but I grew up poor. With poverty comes alienation in the family and depression and anger. I remember opening night and my parents came. I got home at three in the morning. I was tip-toeing. There was my uncle, aunt, father and mother laughing their heads off. I just marveled how that play, that character, had brought these people who were living a pretty sad existence together. That’s when I thought that’s the power of theater and the character and I want to play characters like this.

Tevye in New York runs at The Wallis through July 25th.

Photo: Tom Dugan in Tevye in New York (Photo by Lawrence K. Ho/Courtesy The Wallis)

The post Tom Dugan Talks Tevye Traditions appeared first on Cultural Attaché.