Posts about my setting of Nancy Willard’s A Visit to William Blake’s Inn
It’s official: William Blake’s Inn was not selected as one of the three finalists in the National Opera Association’s Chamber Opera Competition. Well, I didn’t think it would be. It’s not really an opera, number one, and number two, the opera world, especially the one based in Canyon, TX, is not especially imaginative. And number three, Inn‘s orchestra requirements approach Mahlerian, which is not exactly “chamber.” I think they were thinking piano and string bass.
This is a biennial competition, so maybe by next time I will have on hand something more competitive. This is something I know I can do. The other day, while my lovely first wife was out running errands, I set the Apple TV to play all my music just for the thrill of seeing it on a screen. Sort of like seeing it actually performed. In a sad way.
Anyway, it was set on shuffle, and every now and then a piece from Am Südpol, denkst man, ist es heiß came up. This is the “penguin opera” that I wrote for the Köln Opera’s children’s opera competition back in 2004, and I must say that it still holds up. Some very nice stuff in there.
So, once I clear my table (cello sonata and AFO, I’m looking at you), I may finally tackle Simon’s Dad, a project I’ve had in mind for years and years now. It’s a story by de Maupassant, and it’s a lovely story. You should go find it and read it. My challenge will be to limit the number of players and vocalists, because these competitions all want like three singers and eight players.
Getting back to the NOA rejection, I have to say that I had forgotten all about it. I almost didn’t open the envelope; I thought it was a fund-raising appeal. I was startled to remember that I had submitted anything. I wonder which competition will surprise me next?
And artists quit when they lose the destination for their work, for the place their work belongs. [p. 9]
Longtime readers of this blog will remember the creative crisis precipitated by the decision of my friend Stephen Czarkowski’s not to return to GHP in the summer of 2008. He had asked me to try my hand at writing a symphony for the orchestra, and I had reached a point of having finished (i.e., stopped) the third movement and being stuck with the final movement when the news reached me. (The first two movements never got written.)
For most of my creative life, I have been guarded in my output. I am not a fast composer; I have to struggle for everything I write. And so it has almost never made sense for me to attempt to write something that I know will never be performed. A full-scale symphony? Who would play it?
So Stephen’s offer was a gift from the heavens. If I wrote it, they would perform it. I could write without holding back. In fact, having heard Stephen conduct GHP students in playing Strauss’s Death & Transfiguration, I figured there was nothing that came out of my head which would pose any difficulties whatsoever. The news that it would not be performed that summer was like hitting a brick wall. It meant that it would never be performed.
Whoever the new strings person was (and it turned out to be a former GHP student of mine), I would be his boss and not his friend: I could not ask him to devote so much class time to the performance of my piece without a very real appearance of impropriety.
It was more than a year before I wrote another note of music. The 24 Hour Challenge was an effort to move myself out of that dreadful stasis, and I think it succeeded in many ways. For one thing, I was able to take one of the pieces, “Club-Foot Waltz,” and turn it into the “Waltz for Bassoon & String Quartet,” which then became this spring’s “Pieces for Bassoon & String Quartet,” and which I printed out as soon as I got home on Tuesday and mailed to my former GHP student at GHP, since I am not his boss for the summer (and am in fact now his friend) and can ask him to read through a piece just as boldly as any other third-class first-rate composer.
The problem of destination is illustrated in my work by A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. As much trouble as I had finishing that, particularly the epic “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way”, thoroughly documented on this fine blog, I persevered to the astonishing conclusion, because I believed that it would be performed. I believed that it had a destination. If I had known that no one would have the slightest interest in it, I would have shelved it.
Now you would think that I would learn the lesson from these two episodes that Bayles and Orland try to teach in Art & Fear, that you have to aim your work at a destination that may not exist in your current universe, but I have not. Maybe as I progress through the summer and knock out the Ayshire Fiddle Orchestra piece in no time flat, and suddenly have the skills and inspiration to finish the Epic Lichtenbergian Portrait (not to mention the necessary reference photographs (ahem, Mike, Kevin, Matthew, et al.)), then perhaps I will look around me and decide, hey, why not? I can throw myself into projects that don’t have a light at the end of the tunnel: the Symphony in G, the mini-opera Simon’s Dad, and whatever else I can imagine.
But it’s going to take a lot of success with projects that do have a destination before I trust the universe to create things that don’t.
I spent most of yesterday prepping the piano/vocal score of A Visit to William Blake’s Inn to go out to a competition. Most of it was easy, and it forced me to make the title page of each piece consistent within the suite. (It’s weird that I only recently learned to input all the title/composer/lyricist stuff into the Info box, and then use Text Inserts to handle them.)
A couple of difficulties, but nothing major. I had to generate a piano score for “The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives,” because it was composed straight for trumpet trio and wads of percussion. And I had to create a piano reduction of “Epilogue,” because I had slammed that together overnight and just done it straight to orchestra. I ended up leaving the abysmal “piano reduction” of the sunflower waltz in place, because, you know, if they actually select it, I’ll do something about it.
Likewise the actual orchestration. There’s a limit on 20 players for the orchestra in this competition, and I posited 2/2/2/2/1 strings; 4 “winds,” meaning four players who could switch instruments as needed; 2 percussionists; 2 horns; 1 piano, 1 harp, 1 synth, who would cover trumpets and whatever else I had to leave out. Needless to say, this is a false lie. The thing is scored for an orchestra twice that size, and I confessed that while claiming that it could be reorchestrated in the event of its being selected.
Which we all know is not very likely to happen. Leaving aside the curse on my music, it’s not really an opera, is it? It’s charming, and it would be a huge draw for any opera company, but it’s not fashionably atonal and there’s no plot. My experience has been that people listen to it and think it’s pretty, but shouldn’t we write a script to embed the songs in? No one seems to have the vision necessary to turn it into a performance.
All of which is to say, I love this piece. I love Nancy Willard’s poetry, and I love my music. It arcs, it delights, it inspires. I haven’t listened to it for a while, mostly I think because it reminds me painfully that it will probably never have a real performance, but this week I’ve had it in the CD player in the van, and it is at least a comfort to discover that I still love it. It hasn’t fallen apart in the dark while I wasn’t looking, if that makes any sense. It’s still my masterpiece.
It is a comfort, too, that Nancy Willard loves it as well. She reiterated that this week when I contacted her about sending me something official in writing that I had permission to use her work. I am not being disingenuous when I say that I yearn for a performance of this work more for her than for me.
Oh well.
Everybody take a deep breath.
On Sunday, July 26, at 3:00, at the Centre for Performing and Visual Arts, the Hangzhou Youth Orchestra, on tour from China, will give the world premiere performance of “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way.”
This will follow a performance at the Rialto Center for the Arts in Atlanta the day before.
Holy cow.
What makes this really interesting is that it’s on traditional Chinese instruments, so I have no clue as to what it will actually sound like.
Still.
Deep breaths.
Again.
I had an empty block of time, so I thought I’d amuse myself by pulling up “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way” and filling in the gaps where, in the choral version, the orchestra is not doubling the chorus, i.e., there is no melody present. There are only a couple of passages where that is the case, so this looked to be like an easy re-entry into my composing.
The first stumbling block, you knew this was coming, didn’t you?, was my old nemesis Finale itself. Somehow, whenever there’s an upgrade, it completely loses the ability to read its own dynamic or technique markings. There’s been a steady degradation of playback on “Milky Way” since 2006.
Actually, that was the only stumbling block. Filling in the gaps was an easy thing, or should have been. There were plenty of lacunae in the orchestral fabric, i.e., several appropriate instruments were sitting on their butts during those passages. The problem became, what the heck does it sound like?
Then of course the reverse fear began to haunt me: what if, rather than getting worse, Finale was actually getting better, and the lush, flowing orchestral piece of 2006 was in all reality a dreadful, clunky piece of sludge? The fact that it can’t play its own pp or mf or pizzicato is a comfort in this case.
Anyway, I plugged the holes and am considering sending it to Stephen for his perusal.
As you probably know, because half of you are in it, this weekend is the Lacuna Group’s all-male production of Coriolanus. It’s going to be entertaining. You should probably see it.
But what most of you don’t know is that this weekend was to have been the international world premiere of A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. In fact, at this very moment, we’d be at the reception honoring the production team, our international guests, and of course Nancy Willard, after what we can only assume would have been the triumphant opening performance.
Back when we were working to engage the community’s interest in the piece, we had to book the Centre for Performing and Visual Arts eighteen months in advance, and Don Nixon was more than willing to do that, so I found out when would be convenient for Nancy to come down, and this weekend was best. (It is Vassar’s fall break.) I marked it in my iCal. When the whole proposal fell through, I decided to leave it there so that I could watch it go by as time slipped away.
And slip away it has, has it not?
The University of Georgia Department of Theatre and Film Studies will be considering A Visit to William Blake’s Inn for their 2009-2010 season. I haven’t blogged about this and haven’t even really mentioned it anywhere, except at some point over on the Lichtenbergian site someone blew my cover and I had to respond. I haven’t even told Nancy Willard about it yet.
George Contini is a professor at UGA who moderated the panel on regional/community theatre that I spoke at last fall, and I jokingly suggested that his interest in computer graphics and projections made him a natural for William Blake’s Inn. I sent him a CD and a cover letter, and this past summer, he emailed me and told me he was submitting it.
The old gang got together last week at Craig Humphrey’s studio to record the work for UGA’s consideration. The committee requires some form of performance recording; it’s easier to hear it sung, even if shakily, than to try to figure it out by reading the piano/vocal score. I’ll submit the CD, the vocal score, the orchestral score, and a cover letter with all kinds of details from Lacuna Group’s exploration of the work last year.
I have to do this next week.
And then… I just have to wait to hear.
Everyone says this is exciting. I am not excited. I’ve had this piece shot down before, and I’m not holding my breath. If they choose to do it, then I’ll be excited. But getting excited about the possibility would be completely pointless, unless I enjoyed the agony of suspense and disappointment.
So there you go. I’ll print everything up on Monday, get the CD ready, and mail it all out sometime during the week. Then I can return to my current status as a non-composer, wondering if I’ll ever sit down with score paper in front of me again.
So today I was reading from Nancy Willard’s A Visit to William Blake’s Inn to some interested kindergarteners visiting my Reading Cave™, in celebration of Read Across America Day. I got to “A Rabbit Shows Me My Room,” and was stunned by an error I’ve made for 25 years.
Quick, fill in the blank:
“I will keep you from perilous starlight,
and the old __________ lunatic cat.”
If you said man’s, it’s because you’ve sung William Blake’s Inn one time too many. The actual word is moon’s.
Arrgggh!