Another Country (2015)
A chamber opera in one act
Libretto by Shannon Berry
Duration: one hour
Cast, in order of solo vocal appearance:
Becca - mezzo-soprano - A bartender, and Jordan's ex girlfriend
Duncan - baritone - A veteran, and Izzy's husband
Jordan - tenor - A director, and Becca's ex boyfriend
Hugh - tenor - A veteran, and Sylvia's husband
Michelle - soprano - A therapist treating Hugh
Peter - baritone - An actor
Izzy - mezzo-soprano - An actor, and Duncan's wife
Sylvia - soprano - Hugh's wife
Missy - soprano - Izzy and Silvia's new friend
Instrumentation: piano
Libretto by Shannon Berry
Duration: one hour
Cast, in order of solo vocal appearance:
Becca - mezzo-soprano - A bartender, and Jordan's ex girlfriend
Duncan - baritone - A veteran, and Izzy's husband
Jordan - tenor - A director, and Becca's ex boyfriend
Hugh - tenor - A veteran, and Sylvia's husband
Michelle - soprano - A therapist treating Hugh
Peter - baritone - An actor
Izzy - mezzo-soprano - An actor, and Duncan's wife
Sylvia - soprano - Hugh's wife
Missy - soprano - Izzy and Silvia's new friend
Instrumentation: piano
Program Notes
This opera was commissioned by Craig Kier of the University of Maryland Opera Studio for their annual New Works Reading. The commission was for a piece with a cast of nine, no real lead characters, dealing with social justice.
Shannon's Program Note:
Sometimes in writing, pieces are born easily, flowing like lazy rivers or gentle streams. But other times the writing is slow, labored; the words are made of something more viscous. “Blood” is too trite and melodramatic a word. It's more like a layered liquid: oil paint rather than watercolors. Writing Another Country was very much the latter. Characters would show up and then disappear almost as quickly, replaced by new and better versions of themselves. They would move in time, in place, the setting shifting like well-designed stagecraft, but I was too slow to keep up. Eventually though, after a lot of time and work, everyone arrived here, in the forms you see them today, with the character of Becca, holding them all together, a Mother Goose to collect the stories.
It would be easy to see and even dismiss this work as Anti-American. But instead, I ask you to see it as a love letter to a broken country and to a people who walk with their backs to walls so that they can see what is coming, who jump at loud noises for fear it is another shooter with another gun, who flinch walking home in the dark alone, who watch another commercial, wander another shopping mall, and leave aching. My hope is that as the chorus echoes phrases and stanzas from nursery rhymes, you see a hint of yourself here, and find that beautiful, hopeful, Greek aspect of drama - catharsis.
Michael's Program Note:
Another Country was as much a challenge for me as it was for Shannon. A great bit of care went into this piece: to make the characters as real as possible, to suggest the constant preoccupation of each character with his or her inner thoughts, and to highlight the long-reverberating reactions to past events. The way I found myself drifting into the mental states of the various characters was almost amusing to me - that practice made it clear that I needed to add any levity I could whenever possible.
Bits of Americana are woven into the libretto - this gave me the license to dot the score with quotes. I took Charles Ives as an inspiration when it came to the quotes, but tried my best to fold them into my own style. Even the “America the Beautiful” quote at the beginning of the first opera leads well into the whole-tone wandering mind that makes up the majority of the aria.
“When she wanted to wander, she’d fly through the air…”
Shannon's Program Note:
Sometimes in writing, pieces are born easily, flowing like lazy rivers or gentle streams. But other times the writing is slow, labored; the words are made of something more viscous. “Blood” is too trite and melodramatic a word. It's more like a layered liquid: oil paint rather than watercolors. Writing Another Country was very much the latter. Characters would show up and then disappear almost as quickly, replaced by new and better versions of themselves. They would move in time, in place, the setting shifting like well-designed stagecraft, but I was too slow to keep up. Eventually though, after a lot of time and work, everyone arrived here, in the forms you see them today, with the character of Becca, holding them all together, a Mother Goose to collect the stories.
It would be easy to see and even dismiss this work as Anti-American. But instead, I ask you to see it as a love letter to a broken country and to a people who walk with their backs to walls so that they can see what is coming, who jump at loud noises for fear it is another shooter with another gun, who flinch walking home in the dark alone, who watch another commercial, wander another shopping mall, and leave aching. My hope is that as the chorus echoes phrases and stanzas from nursery rhymes, you see a hint of yourself here, and find that beautiful, hopeful, Greek aspect of drama - catharsis.
Michael's Program Note:
Another Country was as much a challenge for me as it was for Shannon. A great bit of care went into this piece: to make the characters as real as possible, to suggest the constant preoccupation of each character with his or her inner thoughts, and to highlight the long-reverberating reactions to past events. The way I found myself drifting into the mental states of the various characters was almost amusing to me - that practice made it clear that I needed to add any levity I could whenever possible.
Bits of Americana are woven into the libretto - this gave me the license to dot the score with quotes. I took Charles Ives as an inspiration when it came to the quotes, but tried my best to fold them into my own style. Even the “America the Beautiful” quote at the beginning of the first opera leads well into the whole-tone wandering mind that makes up the majority of the aria.
“When she wanted to wander, she’d fly through the air…”
