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.

 

Thoughts about the Opera "Blue" You Won't Find Elsewhere

 The most poignant -- and disappointing -- moment for me when attending a recent performance of the contemporary opera "Blue" was near the end when the unnamed Mother gets up out of her seat in what is presumably a church and walks over to stand one last time at the coffin of her son.

"At last, an aria," I thought. This is the moment she is going to actually sing a song -- a musical tour de force through her thoughts and emotions -- highly memorable melodies requiring exemplary vocal technique, in the finest tradition of opera. The sort of thing that leaves one exclaiming in due course:  "wasn't she fabulous!"

But, no, just more of the same bits and pieces of often almost recitative-like vocalization, occasionally soaring with the continuous orchestration into one variety of crescendo or another.

While I'm sure she didn't do it, I can just see Briana Hunter, who sang the role of The Mother, down on her knees, begging librettist and director Tazewell Thompson and composer Jeanine Tesori "please, please, please, let me SING!" My heart goes out to her, as would have those of Handel and Mozart.

But that's where it's at these days in contemporary opera: "Singing? What's that? Some sort of distraction." I can hear Thompson and Tesori dismissing Hunter along those lines.

But what about the rest of "Blue," which I saw in a Seattle Opera production the other day. Widely praised, the almost entirely Black (librettist and performers) piece centers on the story of an angry and idealistic young Black man, the son of a police officer, being killed at what was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration by another officer. He's an only child and beloved by his father despite sociopolitical differences and thus a sometimes tempestuous relationship.

While the race of the officer who kills The Son isn't identified in the program or promotional material, he's identified as white in the lyrics, giving the opera additional currency in the post-George Floyd era. But interestingly, The Father at one point bemoans the fact that his son was killed by one of his "brothers" on the police force. 

Young Black men are not always killed by white officers. Notably, in "Between the World and Me," Ta-Nehisi Coates relates the trauma he experienced when he learned that a man named Prince Jones he had apparently known at Howard University had been killed by a Black police officer in a jurisdiction controlled by Black politicians. And, according to Coates, the officer who supposedly mistook Prince for someone else was sent back to work.

Well, the first half of the opera, which runs for two hours not counting the intermission, is about the risks young men run being born Black in America and the second half opens with news of the death of The Son as a result of police violence, and of course the racial inequities of that in America.

But almost immediately thereafter, the opera changes course in a fashion that none of the reviews that I have read mention. Race relations fall into the background and what comes to the fore is religion -- Christianity in this case. What's at issue in the lengthy segment that follows news of the death is whether the Chruch, and a particular Reverend, can offer the family and eventually their friends any consolation. The message there is at best mixed.

This jumped out at me in part because I had just finished reading "On Consolation," subtitled "finding solace in dark times," by Michael Ignatieff.

His bottom line: "It is not doctrine that consoles us in the end, but people."

Perhaps in that vein, the final scene of the opera takes the form of a flashback to a family dinner at one point during which father, son and mother join hands at the table. Perhaps the audience is led to believe the Mother and Father are consoled more by such memories than by anything else.

Hume's "Rigoletto" as an Appology

What I'm about to discuss in this post is a theme to which I will return: opera and ballet companies trying to make older works relevant to contemporary life because they just don't have anything comparable with which to replace them.

Opera companies regularly try new works and subscribers dutifully attend, but most are not particularly successful.  The "hits" are for the most part tried and true operas from the past even if many of the story lines were somewhat problematic when first performed and a lot more so now.