I've been talking about this for a while, so I think it's time I finally get to writing it:

Come hear:
Kathleen Jagielski, soprano
Mariana Pino, soprano
Erica Haman, mezzo-soprano
Katherine Sanford, mezzo-soprano
Terrance Johns, tenor
Rameen Chaharbaghi, baritone
Michael Oberhauser, baritone

and

Kayme Henkel, piano

perform the following pieces:

Too Solemn for Day (2005)                                                         Michael Oberhauser (1985 - )

Fêtes galantes, serie I, L80 (1891)                                            Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918)
     En sourdine
     Fantoches
     Clair de lune
Fêtes galantes, serie II, L104 (1904)
     Les ingénus
     Le faune
     Colloque sentimental

Siete canciones populares española (1914)                                Manuel de Falla (1876 - 1946)
     1. El pano moruno
     3. Asturiana
     6. Nana
     7. Polo

Heaven-Haven: A Nun Takes the Veil (2007)                                            Michael Oberhauser

Four Songs (1937)                                                                     Samuel Barber (1910 - 1891)
     1. Nun Takes the Veil
     3. Sure on this Shining Night

Bachianas Brasilieras no. 5 (1938)                                          Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887 - 1959)
     I. Aria (Cantilena)
     II. Dança (Martelo)

Passing By (1981)                                                                       John Jeffreys (1927 - 2010)
She is All So Slight (1964)
My Little Pretty One (1952)

Orange Afternoon Lover (2006)                                                              Lori Laitman (1955 - )
     I. Against Still Life
     II. I was reading a scientific article
     III. I am sitting

Love is Not the Last Room (2011)                                                            Michael Oberhauser
     1. Introduction
     2. On Pilgrimage
     7. An Empty Crib
     9. Chloris and Fanny
     10. When I Would Muse in Boyhood
     11. To One Away
     18. Near the Wall of a House

This will be a FREE recital. It will last about 90 minutes.

Thursday, July 28, 7:30pm

Calvary Baptist Church
755 8th St. NW
Washington, DC
The church is right by the Gallery Place/Chinatown metro station on the Red and Green lines. There is also a parking garage right next to the church, but the garage is NOT free. Street parking in the area is limited.

DIRECTIONS TO THE CHAPEL:

The church consists of two buildings; a big red building on the corner of H and 8th, and a white building next to that on 8th street. Next to that white building, also on 8th street, is the aforementioned parking garage. The quickest way to the chapel is to take the garage's elevator to floor G2. As you leave the elevator, the chapel will be on your left, but to enter the chapel, you'll have to walk down the hall, make a left at the fork, and then go into the left door.

I was thinking today about where my time goes, and how that's changed over the years...

Grade school: 
Getting better at everything: 50%
Having fun: 50%

High School:
Getting better at everything: 50%
Figuring out what I enjoy: 20%
Figuring out what I'm good at: 15%
Having fun: 15%

College:
Getting better at everything: 10% (liberal arts school)
Figuring out what I enjoy: 10%
Figuring out what I'm good at: 30%
Getting better at what I enjoy: 20%
Getting better at what I'm good at: 20%
Having fun: 10%

Grad School:
Getting better at what I enjoy: 10%
Getting better at what I'm good at: 70%
Working on places I need improvement: 10%
Having fun: 10%

The real world:
Making money: 50%
Trying to make money out of what I enjoy and what I'm good at: 40%
Having fun: 10%

My soul-searching, self-finding, and self-improvement pretty much stopped after I got out of school. Right now I feel like I'm mostly coasting on everything I've learned up to this point, and spending most of my time just trying to get by. I feel like I haven't grown nearly as fast these past two years as I did any year before. I need to find a way to fit some self-growth in my life.

Two posts in one day? That's MADNESS!

Anyway, I recently ran across this blog post, and it brought up some questions in my mind:

Here's the post

That'll open in a new window, so keep it open to reference back and forth :)

Issue #1: "Operas are usually performed in an opera house or concert hall with a live orchestra." This is the norm, but what if it's not? What about accompaniment just by a piano, in, say, an art gallery or outdoor ampitheater?


Issue #2: Amplification. Again, what the blog post brings up is the norm, but what if I want my opera to be accompanied by electric guitar or electric violin, or by computer generated sounds? Also, what about musicals like The Fantasticks? That'd be just plain odd if it were amplified. (unless it were in a large space, but why would you do that show in a large space?)

Issue #3: "Operatic voices tend to focus sound from the throat." That seems to go contrary to most of what I've been taught about singing. My teachers have always told me to get my throat out of the way and get the sound more in my head. Vocal pedagogy friends, help me out here.

Issue #4: "In musical theatre, you could usually remove all the songs and still have the story make sense, as the dialogue would outline what is happening in the story." What about Into the Woods? Les Miserables? Phantom of the Opera? The Last Five Years? Spoken dialogue-led musicals are still the norm, but less and less so as time goes on.

Issue #5: "Opera can have dialogue, however 'in opera the dialogue is sung; in musicals the dialogue is spoken' (@frindley)." What about Singspielen? Die Zauberflöte? Carmen? There is plenty of spoken dialogue in plenty of operas.

I know these are just guidelines, but I think they need to be re-evaluated. I'd propose:
1.) Operas tend to not use amplification, while musicals tend to.
2.) The style of singing between the two artforms tend to be different - but there is a spectrum to this with a lot of grey area between.

Those two are almost intact from how Opera Australia presented them.  I would actually throw out their #3 entirely, about spoken vs. sung text. I would add my own point, though:

3.) The style of composition between the two artforms tends to be different. Again, there is a spectrum here, from, say, ABBA's Mamma Mia! to perhaps something like Schönberg's Erwartung. There's a lot of grey area in the middle of this one, too, where it becomes difficult to classify such pieces as A Little Night Music, Candide, and Die Fledermaus. 

Those are just a few of my thoughts... what are yours?

As I was finishing this post, I ran across my friend Steve Spotswood's article about the definition of theatre: http://www.stephenspotswood.com/?p=134

To help myself keep track, here's what I need to talk about:-Words and Music Concert
-Twitter
-Necromancer's Dance
-ALT's CLDP
-Of Montreal concert
-Don Pasquale
-Words and Music Concert
-Upcoming recital

I have 20 minutes to write a lot of stuff, so I might not get it all in this post. (Deep breath...) Ok, go!

I'm in Twitter now. I've discovered it really is a great way to interact with some other people who are passionate about new music and opera. I'm finding lots of interesting articles and links to new music that I'm sharing on there, so follow me: @moberhau

Necromancer's Dance is finished! That's what I ended up naming my orchestra piece. I don't really know what to do with it now, though. Should I just start throwing it at orchestras? Perhaps with baskets of fresh baked cookies?

I applied for American Lyric Theater's Composer Librettist Development Program. I really, really want this - but it's out of my hands now. Wish me luck! If I get this, it means I'm moving to NYC!

This doesn't really apply to new classical music, but - if you ever get the chance, go see Of Montreal in concert. They put on a ridiculously entertaining show. Fun music, and lots of random people in costumes.

A disappointment, then: Don Pasquale at the Washington National Opera. I wasn't expecting it to be the best thing ever - in my opinion, it's one of the worst operas that's in the traditional canon - but I was expecting to at least be amused, entertained, and impressed by the talent. I wasn't any of those. There were a few good moments here or there, but mostly everything was ho-hum at best. What a disappointment.

Not a disappointment at all, though: Words and Music's concert yesterday, The American Composer I. Great works, all by living American composers: Laitman, Rorem, Chipulo, Johns, and Frazin. Johns and Frazin were there - I already knew Terrance Johns, tenor extraordinaire and a really excellent composer, and it was wonderful to meet Howard Frazin. The usual four singers and pianist that make up Words and Music were diminished slightly - the bartone's wife had just had a child, and the tenor (Terry) was really sick. The soprano and mezzo took on most of the concert, with Terry joining in for the ensemble pieces. They also had a terrific clarinettist there, Brian David Jones, who played on the Rorem and two Frazin pieces. All really great stuff - but now I have to run! Memorial Day festivities, and not enough time to write about the most exciting part (for me): the upcoming Songs recital! Look for a post about this soon.

So, I recently stumbled across the music of Christopher Cerrone. Check out his music - it's really nice. I especially like his opera Invisible Cities.

Cerrone was listed as one of NPR's top 100 composers under 40. He's making a pretty great name for himself.

Only thing? He's only a year older than me. I'm... a little jealous. Who knows, though- maybe this year will be my big break and I'll be somewhat famous soon.

Hah. Maybe wishful thinking, but... fingers crossed.

The private social club where I work has a monthly concert. They always bring in amazingly talented performers, but the works that are programmed on the recitals aren't always particularly exciting.

Yay! It's done! I'm sure I'll tweak it for a while, but it's done and performable! The entire thing ended up being about 40 minutes long. It's late, but I was excited and needed to post this.

Now I can devote more attention to my orchestra piece (which might be named The Necromancer... is that hokey?), the libretto to the Lilith opera, the song recital (which looks like it actually is happening), and now a potential opera performance that some friends and I are discussing.

More on the song recital: What I think will happen is the singers will each sing something of mine and something by another composer. I might even sing myself!

More on the opera performance? Well, I don't want to give away anything yet. This is full of a lot of maybes, and I don't want to jinx it. It quite possibly will include a staged performance of The Name on the Door, though, and that's exciting.

I just made some huge changes to the website: Everything in the Experience and The Music tabs now is broken into different pages by content. Now, if you want to see one piece of information, you don't have to wade through a bunch of other information to get it! Check it out!

Just yesterday (coughcoughwhileIwasboredatworkcoughcough) I started working on the libretto for the first of the operas that's meant to be a companion piece to The Name on the Door. This one deals with Adam, Eve, and Lilith... probably set in 1967. It may or may not involve brownies.

The past few days have actually been somewhat good for me, creatively.

I have a start on "The Good Night," the last song I have yet to write for Love is Not the Last Room. Well, it's my third or fourth start, but I don't think I'm scrapping this one. Thanks, Prokofiev, for the ideas. You'll probably hear the more obvious idea if you listen to it, but that led to a less obvious idea #2, which probably only in my head. Oh, idea #2 owes a little bit to Shakespeare, too. (Cryptic much?)

The real progress was made in the orchestral piece. I spent the last week or so listening to some of the great orchestrators (or, at least the greats that I have full scores for.) Listening to Stravinsky's Firebird gave me some great ideas for colors in the piece, and I'm able to reference those colors for recurring musical ideas throughout the piece. In just two days of orchestrating, I'm 2/3 of the way through the piece! It's moving by much more quickly than the past couple times I've tried to orchestrate this. So, thanks, Stravinsky, for letting me borrow some of the crayons from your box.

Oh, and the piece doesn't actually sound like Stravinsky. It sounds like another piece of mine, Cogito ergo sum, which I've been told sounds like Bartok. Well, Cogito ergo sum kind of feels like a practice piece for this new piece. Much more involved. 

So yes, thank you Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Bartok, and, in a roundabout way, Shakespeare.

Also, while I was listening to the great orchestrators, I rediscovered this amazing piece. Strauss didn't normally write with his heart on his sleeve, but he totally did here. This isn't the direction I wanted to go with my new piece, but I had to listen to this... several times. Give it a good listen yourself (along with the other two youtube videos that make up the full performance). Trust me. You'll love it.