When I meet new people I’m always reluctant to tell them I compose opera. It’s not because most people hate opera. I’m proud to listen to genres that other people hate – from rap to country to free jazz. No, my hesitation is because sometimes I encounter opera fans and for them, opera equals Puccini and their favorite divas. Confusion then ensues. It’s kind of like telling someone you’re a comedy fan and they assume that means Fatty Arbuckle and Henny Youngman, and when you respond by saying you’re more into John Mulaney and Broad City they give you a blank look and start reciting Henny Youngman one-liners.
But to paraphrase an old joke: art forms are like sharks. They have to keep moving forward or they die. Do we want opera to be a dead shark?
The good news is that opera is alive and well. It’s not just at big opera houses like the Met; it’s underground at music venues, small theaters, and online. And, no, I’m not talking about eccentric stagings of the old classics. You can dress a “war horse” in new clothing but it’s still a horse. Or a shark. Wait, what was I talking about?
I’m talking about new opera being written today. There are many small companies in New York City, and elsewhere, producing new opera such as: Experiments in Opera, Beth Morrison Productions, Rhymes With Opera, ThingNY, and Fresh-Squeezed Opera. Full disclosure: I founded Experiments in Opera with Aaron Siegel and Matthew Welch; Kamala Sankaram and I are the current Artistic Directors. I’m going to talk about some recent operas, including a few I worked on as a producer or composer.
Sasquatch by Roddy Bottum premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017. Experiments in Opera produced a preview performance of it at Roulette, in Brooklyn, in 2015. Roddy Bottum is the keyboard player of Faith No More, a band whose eclecticism was decades ahead of its time. He wrote both the music and the libretto for Sasquatch. The opera is a “misunderstood monster” story about a family that gives Bigfoot tours, which always end with a sighting of Bigfoot because a family member in a costume appears in the distance at just the right time. The twist happens when the family encounters a real life Sasquatch deep in the woods. The ensemble featured two trumpets, tympani, drum machine, and two synthesizers. This unique instrumentation was perfect for the opera: the trumpets depicted the majestic mountain top setting, and the tympani suggested Sasquatch; while the drum machine, synthesizers and the vocal styles conjured Faith No More style metal – yet without guitar. The opera was dark, campy, fun, and unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Bottum followed it with The Ride, a one-act opera about two characters biking from San Francisco to Los Angeles as part of AIDS/Life Cycle, an annual charity event. Like Sasquatch, Bottum wrote both the libretto and music and it featured an unusual instrumentation: four flutes, two keyboard synthesizers and drumset.
To Music by Nick Hallet has not premiered but the first three acts had preview performances respectively at Roulette, Merkin Hall, and Issue Project Room. The fourth and final act will preview at Roulette on October 23, 2019. The hilarious and relentlessly contemporary story is about a composer getting in trouble over social media, having an affair and stealing music from another artist. Significant portions of the libretto are text messages and online text: instead of being sung these words appear in video behind the singers. Like the two Bottum operas, the composer wrote the libretto himself. I find it special when the composer and the librettist are the same person. Opera is inherently a collaborative medium, but a composer who is also the librettist brings a unity of vision to a project that guarantees a unique perspective. Not all comedians write their own material. We don’t expect Stephen Colbert to write his nightly monologues but when Sarah Silverman comes out with a new special we assume she wrote every word of it, because we’re not just there to laugh, we’re tuning in for her idiosyncratic viewpoint. There may be no better example of the unified vision of a composer/librettist then Anthony Braxton’s Trillium operas.
When I started composing opera nearly 20 years ago the task of writing a libretto felt overwhelming. Composing music is hard enough and maybe I’m attracted to it because my thinking is not always verbal. But over the years, I have come to enjoy writing librettos as much as music. A few years ago I made a video opera called I Screwed Up the Future, which premiered at Anthology Film Archives, in New York City, in 2016. I began the project by thinking about the Y2K problem. Remember Y2K? Computer programmers had been writing code with only two digits, which meant that computers would “freak out” when the millennium happened. I daydreamed about what the ramifications would have been if the Y2K problem had occurred. Maybe Al Gore would have become president. Maybe violence following Y2K would have led to gun control. Maybe the internet would not have developed and created certain problems we now face. I wrote a libretto about this alternate history: the protagonist makes a time machine and travels back to the 90s to prevent Y2K. She succeeds and returns to the present to find herself in the dystopia of the world we now live in. This was before Trump got elected, so my idea of dystopia is now a little quaint.