On Nico Muhly's discussions of practicality in collaboration
This past Monday’s guest was American composer Nico Muhly, who
has written in a variety of genres, including opera, scores for TV and film, and
contemporary concert works. He’s also collaborated with some incredible artists . I was really interested in his orchestration and
harmonic techniques, and how great pacing works together with these elements to
create engaging compositions, regardless of genre. The discussions also led to
more practical concerns regarding collaboration and orchestration.
Nico first showed us excerpts from his opera, Marnie, during which he discussed some
ideas for staging and orchestration, as well as some of the practical things to
keep in mind in bigger collaborations. I really appreciated some of the staging
decisions that he and the director came up with, including using dancers to
represent men always looking at Marnie, rather than having the men sing
outright (I hope that this is written in the score, so that it will be done in
future productions). Also, the use of the four past incarnations of Marnie as a
non-vibrato sub-choir was really effective in distinguishing the parts of
character’s mind to the reality around her.
Moreover, I think it was great to hear about the process of
getting these opera singers to sing non-vibrato, since they’re so attuned to creating
vibrato sound. This brings up an interesting discussion regarding performers: I
think we should try to foster a good relationship with performers, in which you
can push them to try different things and they can advise you if something isn’t
speaking the right way, or could be done differently with a similar effect.
In terms of orchestration, I think the extreme registers and
interesting colors really worked as expressive vehicles, and it was interesting
to hear Adams’ Doctor Atomic as a comparison, especially since Adams’ singers were
amplified. Muhly brought up that these practical considerations have to be considered
with staging since the orchestra is in the pit, and some decisions about orchestration
might either overpower the singer or be too soft to be heard. In discussing his
organ concerto, Register, Nico
brought up a really important point when writing for organ – that each organ
and each venue will have a different sound. As such, he used more descriptive
language to serve as prompts for the performer to use to produce a sound with
their judgement, rather than writing explicit instructions for changes.
During the discussions about the practicalities of working
with others, Nico brought up that in opera, the score serves as the master text.
In his collaboration with the director and librettist, he used the process of “building
up known” factors that all parties could agree upon to get the ball rolling
into territory where people disagreed. I think this is a really interesting
idea, and something I’d like to try in my next large-scale collaboration. Especially
for those of us in screen scoring or working on big collaborative pieces, I
think this could be a great way to establish a common understanding of how the
collaboration is going, and what specifically must be addressed in order to
push the project to the next level.
I found Nico's discussion of the collaborative process in opera-making particularly insightful too, and especially as it relates to film scoring (as you mentioned). It seems to me that it would be much more productive if the "building up knowns" happened at the outset in conversations between directors and film composers. However, it's hard to say if it would actually work, considering that in film, the screenplay (and eventually the picture) is the "master text" from which the music must be derived, instead of the other way around. And on top of that, only recently have "reboots"-- or rather, "new productions"-- of older movies become an accepted practice in the film industry, so for most of history screenplays have only ever had one opportunity to be interpreted. I'm sure there is a sweet spot somewhere in film director/composer collaborations that parallels Muhly's experience with Marnie, and the process of building up knowns seems like a great place to start.
ReplyDeleteThe process of "building up knowns" seemed to me a great way to begin a big collaborative process. With any project of that scale, there are going to be many visions of the final product in play at any one time. It is of course key to coordinate those visions to some sort of happy medium, but how the group goes about this can tend to get messy pretty quickly. I like this method of starting large-scale then zooming in, if for no other reason than to get some unanimous agreements, facilitating the conversation in general. In the case of the opera singers singing non-vibrato, something Muhly had to fight for, I'm sure this conversational process had at least something to do with getting the performers to commit to that less-comfortable technique.
ReplyDeleteI too was particularly interested in hearing about the collaborative process behind a large scale project such as Marnie. The premise of the collaborators agreeing on a set of “knowns” & that the score ultimately takes precedent over all, seriously resonated with me & my recent endeavors into collaborative, multi genre work.
ReplyDeleteI was much appreciative of Muhly sharing his compositional process for Register, for Organ and Orchestra. That was fascinating & I look forward to having the time to delve into that composition as well as the one it was inspired by.