The Operetta "Patricia" -- Having Some Music Composed

 In an earlier post, I described how the libretto for "Patricia" came about. At the end of the day, I had a bunch of pages of attractively formatted text and that was it. 

 Now for the music. 

For the next couple of years, I episodically tried to get someone interested in composing the music, and finding a singer, for JUST ONE ARIA – sort of as a demonstration project – and always offering to pay for it. Several people expressed interest and took my contact information. I then typically never heard from them again, or in the rare cases when I did, things never went anywhere. 

Puzzling this over, I came to a couple of tentative conclusions: as a non-musician, I was not part of what might be called “the club” and as a result not to be taken seriously, and my age may also have been a factor. I also started to think that the era of “starving musicians” must have come to a dramatic end. No one seemed in need of any additional income.

 Then one day, driving back from the gym (late in life, I became, before the pandemic struck, a gym mouse – the diminutive form of gym rat), I saw a sign by the road advertising voice and piano lessons. You guessed it: the phrase “why not?” flew into my head. I stopped the car, wrote down the contact information and had the exceptionally good fortune of meeting Heidi Snyder who, after I described the feminist nature of “Patricia” and the type of music in which I was interested, was not only willing, but enthusiastic. Wow!!

Heidi, then a relatively recent arrival in Seattle, studied double bass, composition and vocal performance at the University of Michigan and had taught voice and piano for over 20 years. Working with her has not only been a great pleasure, but a major learning experience for me.

 We started in mid-June 2019 and completed two arias by November of the same year: thought-out, composed, rehearsed (with a singer named Sarah who Heidi knew) and finally audio-recorded to piano accompaniment. At the same time, Heidi’s compositions had to be entered into “Finale,” a computer music notation program, from which they could be printed in a professional manner and, if necessary, relatively easily modified, or transcribed to, for instance, accommodate what is known as the tessitura (vocal range) of a particular singer.

 This is a demanding process in part because of the unforgiving nature of technology, but also because of the very wide range of musical notation possibilities. It makes one’s head spin.

Heidi, coming from an earlier era, as it were, did not use “Finale” or any similar computer program so I had to purchase a not-inexpensive copy and enter all the notes and musical notation myself from her hand-written scores. It was a tedious job involving more than one pass through the music. I would complete a score, make a PDF file of it and send it to Heidi. She would review it, make corrections or improvements, photo those with her cellphone, and message the photos back to me. I would then correct the score in “Finale” and send her a new version. And so forth and so on, but the final product looked very professional.

 All in all, producing a single song can be a major undertaking – and not inexpensive. But in this case, in large part because of Heidi’s compositional abilities and strong desire to get the finished product exactly right, the voice-with-piano-accompaniment recordings most definitely exceeded my expectations.

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The final, orchestrated versions  of the "Patricia's first two arias can be viewed here:

www.youtube.com/@operetta-patricia

The two songs (about 7 minutes in total) are "All my life I've been sensible" and "I'm good at my work."  After playing the first, YouTube may take you off to other stuff that has nothing to do with me and you may have go back, perhaps by starting over.  Be sure to start each song from the very beginning because there are a few spoken words that help to explain why the songs are being sung. There are also explanations of the songs, including the lyrics, just below the pictures of the videos if you are interested. Click on “more” when you see the text.

 

The Operetta "Patricia" -- How It All Began

 In 2017, I took a workshop offered by the Seattle Opera on how to write a libretto. That means how to convert a story into words that will be sung and spoken as a means of telling a story that is fundamentally musical. Grand opera, chamber opera, operetta, oratorio, and musical theater, such as Broadway shows, are various options. 

The workshop was taught by Jessica Murphy Moo, who wrote the libretto for "An American Dream," an opera that has been performed in Seattle (where it was commissioned), Chicago and various other venues. Her course materials focused on a three-act contemporary opera, but she told the dozen or so participants they could do any form they wanted. 

Not a fan of contemporary operas, which are typically "sung through" as opposed to having a number of often-memorable stand-alone arias, I opted for a one-act operetta in neo-Baroque, or Baroque-influenced form. Baroque operas and oratorios, and most notably those by G.F. Handel, most definitely put singers first. Great vocalization was what 18th century London audiences most wanted to hear and Handel knew how to deliver it, often at great expense since while having one of the best European choral traditions (which Handel exploited), the Britain of his day was not known for producing opera singers, most of whom then came from Italy. 

Most useful for me were four points that Ms Murphy Moo emphasized: start in medias res, or in the middle of an ongoing story; the main protagonist must want something; there should be a twist in the plot, and cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. 

I used one chapter of a novel I had been trying to write and boiled it down to rhyming lyrics that packed as much meaning into as few words as possible. It was both a challenge and a lot of fun to do so. Unfortunately, the workshop did not involve any significant collaboration with a composer, and what will follow in subsequent posts has to do with that very significant shortcoming.

I will write more about this project, but meanwhile, if you would like to see whether the concept worked, click the link below.

www.youtube.com/@operetta-patricia

The two songs (about 7 minutes in total) are "All my life I've been sensible" and "I'm good at my work."  After playing the first, YouTube may take you off to other stuff that has nothing to do with me and you may have go back, perhaps by starting over.  Be sure to start each song from the very beginning because there are a few spoken words that help to explain why the songs are being sung. There are also explanations of the songs, including the lyrics, just below the pictures of the videos if you are interested. Click on “more” when you see the text.

Comments are encouraged. 

 

One Way To Look at Poetry -- and the Lyrics for an Aria

 The Nov. 11, 2020 New York Times has a review of "African American Poetry," as compiled by Kevin Young, currently poetry editor at The New Yorker and soon to become director of the Smithsonian's African American Museum in Washington D.C.  At present, Young also heads the New York Public Library's research center on Black culture.

Young's new anthology, at about 1,110 pages, is a roundup of poetry by African Americans over the past 250 years and, among other things, attempts to save some Black poets from obscurity.

The Times review, by Parul Sehgal, was very positive. Among other things, he said, it reads like a form of history.

What jumped out at me, however, was what might be viewed as a definition of poetry by Sehgal. To wit: "Whatever the style, whatever the shape of the vessel, the particular holding power of the poem is clear. More efficiently than almost any other form, a poem can convey a feeling of simultaneity; the past can saturate the present, the future can rear up behind us, a mood can tip between lament and praise song."

I am far from an expert on poetry -- in fact quite the reverse -- but that definition rang some bells for me because I have been attempting to write the libretto for an operetta that would be done in a neo-Baroque style. Among other things, that involves writing lyrics, generally in rhyme, for individual songs, or arias. This is in contrast to most contemporary operas which generally employ continuous music with voices coming in and out, albeit sometimes for extended periods, but generally not singing anything that can stand alone as "a song."

In the Baroque style, which emphasizes the vocal capabilities of singers first and foremost, the lyrics need to be kept very short. That means packing as much meaning or as many ideas as possible into very few words to achieve a result somewhat similar to that described by Shegal above.

Readers interested in the operetta project can check out this page on my author's website.

A Woman's Life Lived Not to the Expectations of Others

 I was looking through the Arts section of the Nov. 1, 2020 Sunday New York Times  and got reading an article about a photographer named Jona Frank.

What jumped out at me was the following:

"Unlike her mother, however, she pursued her personal dreams, not others' expectations." 

This reminded me of a project of mine, proceeding very slowing at present as a result of the pandemic: trying to get at least a few arias of a neo-baroque operetta called "Patricia" composed and sung. While I may blog more about this in the future, if you are interested you can find out the details and hear a couple of songs sung here. (Click on the word "here.")

The operetta is all about a young woman named Patricia who, like Jona, doesn't want a life based on the expectations of other people.  

Jona's mother, readers learn, believed in the importance of "respectability" in traditional middle class American suburbia. "She was not a person who believed she could have options," the NYT quotes Ms Frank as saying. While her mother lived in what Ms Frank believes was "quiet despair" Ms Frank herself felt trapped in "the uncomfortable fit between societal norms and individual desires." Her photographs attempt, among other things, to explore such a situation.

Patricia's situation is a little different. A very bright girl, strong in math and science, her parents and teachers strongly encouraged her to pursue a career in such directions and when one encounters her in the operetta, she has a high-paying technical position with a firm specializing in digital imagery. Her first aria, in the baroque da capo style, is entitled "All my life I've been sensible" and her second is entitled "I'm good at my work."  I'm sure you get the idea.

But Patricia has just returned from her first visit to Manhattan, for an industry conference, and her eyes have opened. She wants to drop everything and go there to "search for the woman I am, shed the woman they made me untrue."

Her friend Beatrice is horrified -- an on it goes from there.

Well, I started this project well before the pandemic and I suspect Patrica would not be anxious to start over in Manhattan at the moment.  But the composition project is moving exceptionally slowly and with any luck, a vaccine will have been deployed and Manhattan back to it's familiar self, with respect to culture and the performing arts, by the time this is completed.  If not, I suppose I can set it clearly in the past as sort of a nostalgia piece.

The Death of Jerry Herman and "Patricia"

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I have been attempting to have a neo-baroque operetta called "Patricia" composed.  This is an ongoing project, but if you would like to listen to demonstration recordings of two arias, you can find them here. Please feel free to comment on what you like or don't like about these songs, which have a feminist theme.

I mention this because Jerry Herman, the composer of "Hello Dolly" and other popular musicals recently died. As his obit in the New York Times noted, at a time when Stephen Sondheim and other contemporary composers were writing "dark, intricate melodies and witty, ambiguous lyrics, he (Herman) wrote song-and-dance music that stuck to the story line with catchy tunes and sunny phrases of hope and happy endings."

One of my gripes about contemporary opera is that it, like some contemporary musicals, doesn't have any memorable songs -- no melodies or lyrics that one can really remember or want to remember.  Indeed, it sometimes seems the singer comes last despite the fact that the main reason people go to the opera (as opposed to going to the theater, watching television or reading a book) is to hear great voices sing beautiful and/or powerful songs.

"There are only a couple of us who care about writing songs that people can leave the theater singing," Herman told the NYT at one point during his career.

Well, that's just what the composer with whom I am working and I are trying to do.