Composers' Forum Spring 2019

The guest for this week’s composer forum is Bora Yoon, who is an experimental electroacoustic composer/performer from South Korea.  During the forum, the things that immediately caught my attention were the Tibetan bowls, old cellphones and all kinds of bizarre objects on the table. Through Bora’s careful manipulation, it was possible to use these materials and generate a variety of interesting sound palettes.  Bora views music as series of sound signals that vibrates in air in a mathematical pattern. The art lies in how to combine these elements and come up with a narrative which the composer wants to tell. It is what interests Bora the most, to discover the symbolic characteristics of certain instruments and repurpose them to break conventional forms. In addition to music itself, the acoustic environment in which the music is being executed is equally as important for Bora. When she works on a site-specific music project, she would always thrive to do intense resear

I enjoy the fact that you know and state what you like in musical theatre-a higher dedication to the happenings on stage remaining “in-world,” as you put it. With this in mind, I commend you for giving Nico Muhly the creative respect to try and marry the traditional role of the aria with more modern inclinations. While his attempt was not successful in your estimation, you are still excited to see what comes next for him because you recognize his passion for music. I think this is so crucial because we have to uplift each other to continue our craftsmanship, even if one project seems to have fallen short of the mark. I recently watched At Eternity’s Gate (2018) with Willem Dafoe and Oscar Isaac playing Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, respectively. When they first start a friendship, Gauguin is thoroughly unimpressed by Van Gogh’s artistic output, but he pushes him to keep going and try new things. When Van Gogh does eventually reach a level of fame before his untimely pass

I’m seeing a lot of mentions about Nico’s mic-ing/ John Adams comments. I do think it’s a noteworthy topic, so I’ll weigh in with my 98 cents. Personally, I am less concerned with the idea of mic-ing the performers as threatening the “Opera-ness” of a given piece of Opera. While I agree that the bel canto style of singing was originally developed for its functionality (i.e. unamplified projection over an orchestra), I don’t think it’s a betrayal of a bel canto trained singer to mic them up. If that’s a betrayal, then supertitles definitely are too. So is the incorporation of dance, perhaps. Or even just liberal use of blocking. Here’s the New York Times on that topic, including mentions of “Marnie”: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/arts/dance/opera-choreography.html . I’ve also seen articles in the last few years about experimentation with stage design in opera, and the hand-wringing/pearl-clutching that sometimes comes with it. I’ll nit-pick a little more… If we

Having Nico speak to forum was a real treat for me – as you may recall, his Mothertongue was my selection for our “one minute of music” presentation last semester. There were many great these he spoke about, including managing a large workload, his musical aesthetics, building a website with "not-boring" headshots, and overviews of some of his recent works. Having seen Marnie recently, I was particularly excited to hear about this. To be perfectly honest, I have never found opera musically appealing, but when I saw Marnie open at the Met this past October, I was completely fascinated. Many things struck me about this work and left me curious to how Nico made these decisions. Luckily, he touched on most of them in his presentation. Musically and conceptually, the Shadow Marnies were a highlight of the entire production. In a genre marked by its heavy vibrato, to hear the opposite extreme on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera was extremely refreshing. After watching, my

I thought Muhly’s perspective and honesty about his work was interesting and refreshing. Although I am someone who isn’t as familiar with opera as I’d like, I still appreciated his creative ways of storytelling, such as having Marnie’s past selves appear throughout the work and function as a collective character. I thought this to be an effective way to avoid the stereotype that he described of attractive female characters in opera either being portrayed as “temptresses or crazy,” and instead showed the depth of the evolving character. Additionally, the use of the male dancers choreographed to be staring at her throughout the show, even in the short video he played, seemed to be effective in illustrating her perspective as well as addressing “male gaze.” Finally, I would be interested to learn more about how the chorus is able to achieve his goal of functioning as both a literal group of people within the show as well as a more figurative group of “spirits,” which might nec

I found Nico Muhly’s presentation to be very transparent and informative on many fronts, but the one that interested me the most was his dive into the process behind his new opera, Marnie. New opera fascinates me particularly in how composers deal with writing within a form and standard practice that has stayed relatively consistent for hundreds of years. Muhly’s approach to form on both large and small scales seems to emphasize the function of the aria. He mentioned that he wanted to avoid “objectification through music” and rather attempted to delve into more philosophical elements of Marnie’s predicaments, rendered particularly legible by the chorus of “past-Marnies” that accompanies her during her ostensibly “private” moments. Through manipulations of standard operatic norms such as the aria and the role of the chorus, Muhly finds room for innovation and transcendence of typical form while working comfortably within the norms of opera. Muhly’s definition of the role o

Nico Muhly – The Past, The Future, and the Marathon Sprint. By Daniel Farrell             Nico Muhly was a breath of fresh air from a young and marvelously talented composer. What I believe to be some of his most enlightening commentary is his small discussion regarding John Adams and the usage and implementation of electronics and how it impacts the technical aspects of opera and classical music in general.             On a brief tangent during his presentation Muhly expressed the fundamental difference between his own orchestration process and the process by which composer John Adams used during his opera “Dr. Atomic”. I was familiar with “Dr. Atomic” before this presentation however, Muhly’s insight into the orchestration practice was not something I was aware of. He explained that Adams made use of microphones on the singers, something that is common place in musical theatre and is becoming more and more popular in modern opera. This allows a change in the orchestration

A year or two ago, I discovered that I couldn’t think of a single musical that didn’t have asides – a moment where a character was communicating their inner dialogue without anyone in-world that could hear them. I’m not very familiar with opera, but I’ve asked my opera-singer friends if they know any operas that fit that description, and so far, we’ve all come up empty – mostly because of arias. An aria, which is at the core of the operatic form, is almost always an aside. While I don’t think that this is a problem persay, I find it very odd. Why are there are no examples (at least that I can find) of theatrical storytelling through music where the music is just the way people communicate and that’s it? Why can’t composers seem to avoid making their characters talk to nobody? I’ve never been quite sure what to do with this information, but hearing Nico Muhly talk about writing Marnie last Monday felt very relevant. Rather than merely take this convention of