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OPERA and OPERETTA,
This page hosts a collection of my operas.
Here you can find a selection of scripts and recordings available for download,
and at the bottom of this page, an explanation of some of my methods.


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How to Look at the Ocean (Now I am a Flower)

Premiered at the Old Gym, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY on December 13, 2008.

How to Look at the Ocean (Now I am a Flower) is an opera featuring a 7-piece chamber ensemble, 4-part chorus, 4-piece bar band, 8 actors, electronic music, and video. The opera premiered at Bard College on December 13, 2008 and had a running time of 75 minutes. I revised the opera in July 2011. I estimate the revised version will have a running time of approximately 65 minutes.

The opera is made up of two stylistically opposite acts. Each act tells a similar story about growing up. Act One, subtitled “How to Look at the Ocean,” is a poetically illusive account of a mother and son at the ocean together working through their troubled relationship; a god-like narrator, Leviathan, and a chorus of seashells tell the story of the mother and son. Structurally, Act One is made up of three pieces of music for chamber ensemble, chorus, and Leviathan. The music transitions from one piece to the next without pause throughout the entire first act.

Act Two, subtitled “(Now I am a Flower),” is a comedic music-drama about a young songwriter, Scotty, overcoming his self-doubts and meeting his musical hero, Shades McGlenn. This act introduces seven actors and breaks away from the flowing, contemplative tone of Act One; the music is sparse and interruptive, and the dialogue is often manic, confrontational, and impeded by non-sequiturs.

Some music from the opera:

1. The Seashells Speak to Mother
2. Dancing Seashells
3. The Wrinkler

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Tydrus the Twit

Premiered at The Bushwick Project for the Arts, Brooklyn, NY, on December 8 - 11, 2010.
Remounted for The Tank, New York, NY on February 3, 2011.

 

Tydrus the Twit is about a middle-Georgia punk's inability to get a job and his bad trip through a dream world filled with witches and hopeless love. The opera is an immersive musical world spanning the intense reality of a small, southern town and the dreams of its occupants.

The music for “Tydrus the Twit” combines instrumental music and unmusical sounds made by the mouth. The score specifically avoids the carefully notated practices of traditional opera, relying instead on procedural notation and musical games employing the entire ensemble. These practices, designed with an eye to creating an immersive theatrical environment, includes singing, blowing on bottles, laughing, clicking tongues, whistling, buzzing, grunting, yawning, and spitting.

Download the script.


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Bottles, Nails, and Tambourines

Produced as a staged-reading at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY on May 19, 2009.

Bottles, Nails and Tambourines is an open-instrumentational opera consisting of three vignettes, Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Each vignette is constructed around the sound of a specific object: bottles blowing in heavenly wind, the stressful sounds of a nailgun, and tambourines rattling in hellfire. Utilizing a variety of simple musical games and procedures, the music of “Bottles, Nails, and Tambourines” is uniquely structured to allow a musical ensemble to peform independently of one another. The result is a compelling combination of ambiant/environmental music and the sound everyday objects.

Download the script.

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Susie and Mark

Premiered at University of the Streets, New York, NY, on December 6, 2009.

An operetta about two lovers doing things that most lovers do: sleeping, drinking, eating, praying and confessing their love in odd ways. Every scene has different procedures to guide improvisations. The opera is for 1 dancer, 3 singers and 2 musicians (cello and piano) and was composed for performances in a small, dark and loud room.

Susie and Mark's score was designed to mentally distract the performers. For example, some of the musical instructions require performers to compose mental lists, count two different things at once and make a visual connection to the word one is singing.

Download the first two scenes.

 

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"Tydrus the Twit" Artist Statement

Theater is a process of seeking out the space between direction and understanding. Discoveries, whether personal or public, are always fleeting. As a performer begins making decisions about tone of voice, timing, and movement, these discoveries are either refined or discarded. In short, the performer assumes the role of a composer as he or she begins to dictate the sound and timing of a scene.

For the acting process to work within the confines of a musical setting, the music cannot constantly interfere with an actor’s search for timing and sound. But for some financial, historical or psychological reasons (a lot of people like opera the way it is), most opera embraces a limiting musical practice: that of musicians reading music and following a conductor/singer. This practice binds singers/actors to a very specific timing and sound while also limiting an instrumentalist's performance to that of interpreting a conductor’s direction.

Interactive musical theater attempts to improve the relationship between instrumentalists and actors. Musical instructions are presented in the script along with stage directions and dialogue. These instructions are not limited to traditional notation but are made up of a combination of musical techniques such as written procedures and musical games that are intended to release musicians from the time-binding, one-minded practice of western music notation. With more interpretive freedom, musicians are encouraged to interact with the drama on stage, to make dramatic decisions and to exist in the same reality as the actors (though the breach of a rational world is always within music’s power). By engaging performers with an evolving system of mentally diverse musical instructions, musicians focus on their approach to sound and explore new avenues of musical interaction.