Erling Wold

The Saga of the Symphony

2025-09-09T22:26:00.000-07:00

I'm not typically one to air my own dirty laundry but someone else's dirty laundry? Hand me the clothespins! And so let us start, first, with the underpants.

And to that point, I have recently purchased some very nice (clean) underpants from an online shop who now sends me on a regular basis many photos of men in underpants much more well-packaged than yours truly. They are intriguing to me. I find myself wondering upon what the subject and object are musing as these photos are taken. I wonder what is the promise made by this enterprise? If one wears these somewhat revealing garments is one to take on the persona of the model, so sexy and languorous, or is should one fantasize oneself in the persona of the photographer, the male gaze upon the endowéd male? Is it hot in here?

It was in the chilly January of this year, the year of our lord 2025, when Bryan Nies, who is one of my favorite musicians in the world, and who has conducted a few of my favorite operas - UKSUS, Certitude and Joy, Queer - asked me if I would create a version of C&J for his current orchestral position at Symphony of the Redwoods. Of course I said yes, simply because he asked me to, but also because the lovely and talented Laura Bohn had agreed to sing it, and because it would complete my hat trick of variants of the piece: the chamber opera, the orchestral version for the Sofia Philharmonic, and now this mini-cantata.

I threw myself into the project. Orchestrating is absolutely great fun, a delight. To put on the powdered wig and play with a vast palette of old-fashioned instrumental sounds is something I have always enjoyed. It was also an opportunity to switch to Dorico from the poor orphaned Finale, a turning that turned out to be simple, and even shall I say blessed, as the program is pleasant to work with and has some modern features. But rethinking the piece on its Lace Anniversary was a little more difficult. Looking back at an opera is like viewing a film of yourself performing tricks when you were three years of age. It's not you, it's someone else, but you somehow get to take credit for what this other person is doing. Anywho, I got into it, and it came out quite swimmingly. It was to be a beautiful solo piece, with a large orchestral introduction, and Laura playing all the parts: me, the narrator, God, LaShaun, the psychiatrist, etc.

But there was a shadow that came over the work, a difficulty, which in the end actually led to the piece being better, more beautiful, more fun. Laura had talked to a friend of hers about the work who told her that it was not OK for her to sing the part of a troubled black woman as a white woman. Then Laura started running it by more and more people who also agreed with this, and then Bryan got involved, and I got a bit pissed off and petulantly said OK just do whatever you want, and once it's out of my hands it is out of my hands, it's not mine anymore, whatever, pfft. But what I also said was that focussing on the race of one of the characters is absolutely missing the point of the piece in a number of ways. First, it is a piece about a person who is experiencing great religious joy (more on this later) not about a person who is in poverty or madness, second the idea that religion is seductive and destructive is a universal story across all times and peoples and cultures, third the character that Laura would be portraying is me. It's all right there in the libretto:

COMPOSER AND YOUNG WOMAN

(NOW LASHAUN)

In writing the libretto, LaShaun and I became one and the same.

COMPOSER

I accept that she was

COMPOSER AND LASHAUN

in communication with God,

COMPOSER

that He told her

LASHAUN

to kill her children.

COMPOSER

I am compelled

COMPOSER AND LASHAUN

by her certainty and her great joy.

But they took me at my petulant word and went off and asked my buddy Talya Patrick, who was in the original production with Laura and her as alter-egos, if she would take on some of the role, turning the piece into a duet. Of course I couldn't say no to that. I love Talya. She's fantastic. My only request was that they didn't make it about race, that they focussed on the joy of religious faith. It seemed like that was to be. I happily re-restructured the piece to match the new circumstance, and in doing so it gained more light and was even lovelier.

But then, when the concert was only a month or so away, after all plans had been made, taking children out of school and travel and hope and all, that the orchestra attempted one of those tricks where one pulls the rug or tablecloth away and hopes that everything is left standing, and cancelled the performance with a bare-bones email. Let's take a look.

Dear Artists,
We are writing to inform you of the Symphony of the Redwoods Board decision to replace the programmed piece "Certitude and Joy" with another selection for our opening season concert. We have asked Bryan as music director to help with this program change.

We acknowledge that this decision is a difficult one for all involved and we do not make it lightly. The decision is not a comment on the merits and artistic value of the piece.

Our overriding concern in arriving at this decision is for our local musicians, patrons, and sponsors. As a small community we pride ourselves on artistic accomplishments and institutions. Our small orchestra has been in existence for 40 years and still includes a number of founding members, family players spanning three generations and is also supplemented by a host of hired "ringers" that complete the ensemble. It is in consideration of feedback and consultation with them and many others that we are making this difficult decision. nThe depth and nuances of the composition do not overcome the challenging and darker nature of the themes and therein lies our concern.

Thank you for the time and effort spent on this production. If at all possible we want to move forward with a concert that includes the Caunteloube songs featuring Laura. We are open to feature her in the first half as well if programming decisions can support it.

Sincerely and with kind regards,

Joanie Packard, Executive Director
Michael Cox, Board President
Symphony of the Redwoods

My response was surprisingly pointed. It's not typically my way to respond to insult by pointing out the insult, but in this case I felt compelled. Bryan thought I should publish it, so here it is.

Dear Joanie Packard and Michael Cox,

I received your email yesterday. I’m shocked at the lack of respect you have shown to me and the other artists involved in this project. As you are aware, I have been working on this piece since January when the orchestra asked me to write it. I am very busy with other major projects, and I knew there was little compensation involved, but I did it as a favor to Bryan and to support a small regional orchestra. I have at this point put hundreds of hours into this piece, working late nights and weekends to make it wonderful. I also made major revisions to it on two occasions after requests from your organization, and I have from the beginning offered to help the musicians, to rewrite it for their capabilities, and to discuss any issues – even to make changes to the libretto.

And the piece is gorgeous! It came out beautifully. It is something the organization who commissioned it should be proud of. You were given the opportunity to do something amazing and powerful.

However, after all that, to not even be granted the opportunity to discuss it, not even a phone call, just an email addressed to the anonymizing sobriquet “Dear Artists” – it is telling that the only composer’s name mentioned in your brief email is misspelled.

I’ve been in constant contact with your organization since January. There were 150 emails back and forth. I sent sketches of the work in February and an orchestration in May. It would have been so simple to pick up the phone. Why didn’t you arrange a talk between me and the people that were concerned? Why not have a discussion with donors and stakeholders? Why not have a pre-concert discussion addressing the issues raised in the piece?

Maybe you didn’t want to perform a work that is so overtly Christian? The one sentence in your rejection email addressing your reasoning is very brief, so I’m not sure what you meant by its challenging nature. The work is on its face about the joys of religious faith – it’s right there in the title! Note I’ve written many Christian works, including a mass, a number of operas, settings of bible verses, etc. Certitude and Joy is one of in a long line of works addressing very similar issues: Ein deutsches Requiem, Mahler’s Second, Verdi’s Requiem, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14. This list would have made an interesting part of a panel discussion. Joshua Kosman told Laura he was very much looking forward to attending and would have made an interesting panel member,

What is especially confusing to me is that you all knew what the piece was going to be, as it was an expansion of an existing work which has been available to the public since 2012. Why did you wait until now to bring any of this up? You could have read the glowing reviews available online - including when the Chronicle put it in their top 10 works of that year. Plus the entire work is on YouTube, there are interviews with the artists, and a CD release available everywhere.

I am aware of the issues that face arts organizations. I too have been involved in the operation of a small orchestra as a founder and a board member for 25 years – as your board president knows, as he has performed with this ensemble. I also run a larger non-profit producing organization that has presented pieces here and in Europe. I know that projects can come and go. I know there can be personality issues, and disagreements, and that navigating these can be complicated. But here I have been treated very poorly. I can’t speak for the others, but from where I sit it seems you have kneecapped your artistic director and have insulted Laura Bohn, an internationally active and acclaimed singer. We cannot get back the time lost developing this project, nor can I soon forget the insult.

Erling Wold, composer

The endless shoot

2025-08-17T20:29:00.000-07:00

Over these last few years of filming, I've learned many things. My brilliant DP Heath Orchard, who has done it all and seen it all, opined that one mightn't say we shoot tomorrow when making a video for the local sheriff, but rather we film tomorrow. My co-producer Lindsay Gauthier has patiently taught me film lingo such as logline (etymology obscure, first attested 1613 as logge-line according to Wiktionary) and crafty, not as an adjective but as a noun.

But I suppose none of this cuts to the heart of the matter, the film itself, for which we have once again accomplished some filming recently. Some photos:

Masterpiece

2025-04-16T09:56:00.000-07:00

Daphnes Garten and Rattensturm - out now

2025-03-23T13:50:00.000-07:00

The recording of Daphnes Garten has just been released on Spooky Pooch, available in a variety of digital formats on bandcamp, packaged along with the libretto in German and English, telling the story of the murder of the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

On the 16th October 2017, the Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered with a car bomb. DCG, as she was in Maltese media, published her own research on the Panama Papers, the massive leak that revealed a worldwide network of offshore companies in 2016. Using the story of a courageous journalist who paid for her commitment to the truth with her life, Daphnes Garten tells a story of international corruption, greed and murder, as well as her love for her garden, her refuge.

This is the third opera of mine that has premiered in its German version, after two that have been performed in German translation. The recording of the previous - Rattensturm - came out a few years ago, not mentioned here before, so maybe it's time for that as well.

World War I began with the poets, inviting young men in the name of duty and country to feed themselves into the insatiable maw of Verdun, Isonzo, and Ypres. Rattensturm (a storm of rats) is a film of an opera as beautiful history lesson, telling the story of the sinking of the battleship Szent István, while the rats sing of the glories of death and destruction. Be careful who you listen to.

Queer

2025-02-22T12:18:00.000-08:00

The buzzy advent of the so-beautifully filmed Queer movie by Luca Guadagnino has revived my own adventure with Burroughs's soul-baring autobiography. Originally an aside to fill my evenings while wrassling the funding for the Bisso/Wold sword-and-sandal-and-ridiculously-epic Sub Pontio Pilato, it has become one of my favorites, and the favorite of a number of people around me, to the point of changing their lives, e.g. my long-time artistic partner Jim Cave, who came out, found a boyfriend, got married, and has lived one hopes a truer life.

There is this lovely ambiguous interview with me about the opera, which now reading back seems to be from a more-articulate time in my life, so pause this blog, read it now and then come back.

I loved watching the film, I keep thinking about it: its stagey aspects, CGI set extensions, the light, psychedelic scenes with the Yage, the filling out of the life beyond. But when I was watching it, I was in a constant double-exposure with the opera. Like the opera, many of the dialogs in the screenplay are verbatim from the book, which is at it should be - Burroughs's language is the thing - and may have been required by the estate, as they did for me. But that meant that every line spoken on screen was at the same time playing its musical version in my head.

For example, this scene, where "As Lee stood aside to bow in his dignified old-world greeting, there emerged instead a leer of naked lust, wrenched in the pain and hate of his deprived body and, in simultaneous double exposure, a sweet child's smile of liking and trust, shockingly out of time and out of place, mutilated and hopeless." I've linked to the 2001 production of it, and below is the scene from the movie and to the 2010 version, Daniel Craig/Joe Wicht as Lee.

And the scene where "Lee and Allerton went to see Cocteau's Orpheus. In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other's body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals. Allerton shifted in his seat. Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocation of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes." The film was able to visually represent the protoplasm, whereas in the opera, the narrative conceit of the book continued. In film, one is told to show not say, but narration has always been cool to me, and that Lee observes himself in the third person up until the bright ending is also.

The movie, like the opera, is a love story, a love and lust both reciprocated and unrequited, painful, wrenching. But the routines - some of my favorite parts in the book, e.g. the General von Klutch episode and that over Chess Game with their baldfaced racism and sexual predation - are lessened in the movie.

And what to do about the ending, which in the book simply evaporates, "the end of the road" as he wrote later in the introduction. The movie in a dream follows Lee to the end, the skip tracer forever searching for the object of his idealized affection.

An Allegory of Now

2025-02-06T12:59:00.000-08:00

When I first read She Who Is Alive, it seemed to be just the kind of craziness I love, in this case a wonderful insane neo-fascist world filled with the heady precognitions of those who purport to have the truth, and where those truths might actually be the truth. Such joy I felt contemplating such a ridiculous world, where up is down and sideways is the other sideways. Sure, I mean, we've always had believed-in craziness of many types - religions oft being my favorite source, one I could cuddle with at night whilst the children slept - and we've had, in the previous centuries, the upside-downiness of the Stalins and the Vatican and, well, now that I think of it, it actually happens an awful lot. And it now seems that it's back in fashion, like hair wraps and bellbottom jeans. And the kowtows have begun, the politicians polishing their rubber stamps lest they end up a person of interest or audit.

So do we still laugh, like our buddy Daniil Kharms, who laughed while starving to death and force-psychiatrized, or do we scramble into our false bottom coal sheds, hoping to not be found by the side-looking radar pointed down at us by balloon and aircraft and (dare I say it?) some future generation linked-starlike space objects? For now, I push this film along, knowing that it may be used against me, although luckily so far off their aforementioned radar that it seems unlikely I will be lined up against the wall. But, if it happens that this happens, I will boldly smoke that last cigarette, refuse the blindfold, and at the last moment call on them to shoot straight, blow them a kiss, and strike off to meet our makers.

Daphne recording

2025-01-12T04:21:00.000-08:00

Almost all

My good friend Jay Cloidt has been mixing the Daphne recording. He's mixed everything of mine since I think the Missa Notkeri Bulbuli. It's sounding lovely. I'm not sure what to do with these German-language opera recordings. I feel a need to have them as beautiful documents of the music and the way I imagine the music, but I doubt my typical English-speaking fans will enjoy them as much as they could, and I don't have that many contacts in German lands outside of those that commissioned the operas. It's too bad one can't have subtitles floating in space while listening to an audio recording.

Lost in translation

2025-01-05T15:32:00.000-08:00

As the days grow cold and colder here in beautifully decaying Firenze, nestled into a particulate-laden Tuscan valley with the romantic Arno flowing just outside our window, I sit shivering at the dining room table, editing together the latest footage on my laptop and its elfin screen. With a squint and my magnifying glass I can see that it looks pretty good, thanks once again to Heath Orchard, my brilliant director of photography, and the acting skills of Hadleigh and Nikola and Bradley.

We're getting close to some of the biggest and most difficult scenes: the discovery of the creature on the beach and the funeral of April's parents, the arrival by plane at Altar Barbus, the party, the impregnation by the coruscating alien penis. Speaking of, when I hired Lola Miller for the April part, she pointed to that moment in the text (He climbs it and kneels between her legs and inserts his penis into her vagina) and asked "so how are you going to film that?" Um cough I squawked, I don't know, maybe puppets, maybe a ball of light, TBD.

We are well past the 50% point, which gives me a certain perspective over the whole process. The book is one thing, the opera already a strange translation. When I wrote Daphnes Garten, Katharina Tiwald thought some of the sections were so odd, so different than what she had in mind - why is this part so happy? she asked. We composers have total power to change mood and everything, sometimes I suppose subverting the author's original idea, however advertently or inadvertently. But Robert has in general been happy with the music. At one point he did say more Bernard Herrman so I did give him some.

And then there is the film version of the opera which twists it all some more, which in that case isn't so much the difference between me and my intentions, but just the fact that, with film, there are a kabillion variables outside your control. When you imagine music and write a score and have people play it, it's 95+%, but when you imagine a film - at least at my micro-budget level - it's more like 20%, or sometimes even 0%. Even if the outcome is beautiful, wonderful, so much is improvised and in-the-moment, even more than with The Theater.

To wit, we had a big idea in the scene just above. Heath was going to haze up the place like crazy and do some giant noir-ish shafts of light cutting through the space. However, in filming the scene downstairs, the intense hazing set off the fire alarms, and the fire department came and wagged their fingers at us and said don't do that again or you will face the consequences of your actions - those consequences being at the least monetary and at the most - well, I don't want to imagine it. Probably being passed around the station house for boxing practice. So Heath had to completely redo his whole idea, which - as often happens when one is faced with the pressure of disaster to come up with something else - ended up looking fantastic and allowed for the oddly unsettling reflections on the left of the screen. It was something like I imagined in my initial look-book, the imposing Mussolini-like space defining Sonja's power, but was it exactly like I imagined? No, not at all. The performance of a notated flute part is one thing; the realization of a stage direction in a screenplay is quite another.

The self-updating teaser of the film

2024-08-23T21:46:00.000-07:00

This teaser is slowly accumulating bits of the film as we go. More details at shewhoisalive.org.

Sonja Fleeing

2024-07-24T11:55:00.000-07:00

Daphnes Garten Oberwart

2023-11-14T13:43:00.000-08:00

Part 1: tschüß

Lynne and I said goodbye to the first run of this beautiful, tragic and true production by Peter Wagner. Martin Ganthaler, who played the bass in the attending choir, said it was the first performance where he felt he was taking a bow for someone else, in this case of course the subject of the opera: Daphne Caruana Galizia. The ovations were for her bravery and her strength, and when the piece ends with Katharina Tiwald's reworking of Mark Antony's "Here we are to speak of what we know, the good that women do lives after them" the tears that are shed are for her as well, and for her fellow martyred journalists. 

But I must applaud all the performers: Janina's gorgeous Daphne, Michaela's wry portrayal of the voice, Marika and Johanna's beautiful blending, and Martin and Fernando's power and comedy. The comedy is so important in this piece. I couldn't think of another way to set the ridiculousness of the corruption and the denials of corruption, and the ineptitude of Daphne's killers. 

I was so happy when Peter pulled the whole band out of the "pit" and forced them onto the stage to accept their due - thank you Davorin for navigating the score so adeptly. Too bad we had to bring down the fortissimi to not deafen all in attendance.  Maybe next time, in Klagenfurt / Eisenstadt / Vienna. 

Part 2: writing fast

As with Rattensturm, this piece had a short schedule, three-ish months from talking it over with Peter and Katherina before it needed to be in Davorin and the singers' dropboxes, along with all the attendant synthetic recordings, click tracks, parts and partiturs, and my own german-bing-crosby-mixed-with-teen-boy rendition of all the singing and speaking for Peter to use. Someday I should really learn some German. 

But speed means once again theft, or at least accepting whatever first comes to mind, which sometimes turns out to be a chat-gpt-like interpolation between all one has heard before in one's own musical latent space. And I may have done a little more than usual in memoriam of my friend Mark Alburger, who died just recently after a mercifully short illness, whose style was based on troping the works of others, e.g. his Variations on Variations of Brahms on a Theme of Haydn. So, some examples in no particular order:

1. Scene 10 Übergriffig's opening, when I wrote it, seemed so familiar, and I puzzled over it until I realized it was in fact the opening notes of the I Spy TV series theme song.

2. Szene 09 Vom Meer: the opening is obviously taken from the opening of La Mer because of course. 

3. Szene 06 I am from Austria: It's a short scene, and Peter said seems like it should be a scherzo. Always happy to have a starting point, and although maybe he was just indicating the literal meaning, I thought of the glorious 9th, and so in the pot she went. Curiously Martin was the only one who noticed, and he, being a bass, I prompted to sing the 4th movement of the aforesaid glorious 9th and I joined in until Michaela or maybe Martin looked at me like why do you know all the words and, strangely enough, when I went to meet Katherina's 8th grade class and she said, let's listen to some classical music so we know where we are with this composer guy, she played the European National Anthem and, when she saw me singing along, she mouthed toward me do you know all the words by heart, and I sheepishly said yes, which reminded me of: 

4. When I first met Katherina, I told her I planned to set some of her words comically, and she said something about working in something Baroque. I think she said Baroque, although maybe it was baroque.  Anyway, I loved my first composition teacher Robert Gross, who was a fine violinist and whose recording of the Biber Passacaglia I have also always loved, so in the pot she goes as well. It turns out that simple descending line is the basis of a lot of passacaglia tunes and chord progressions, including my own from Queer, and Philip Glass's I think Satyagraha, and some others, so I tossed in a bit of each.

5. The libretto starts with Daphne's death, so I wanted the piece to start with the explosion of the car, and I found a recording online of someone blowing up a car in the countryside - I believe for a sound effect - and it was preceded by bird noises, which I loved, as the birds brought to mind the garden of the title, and were such a beautiful and awful contrast to the Hackfleisch that follows. The birds reminded me of Messiaen, and two of the most beautiful pieces of all time are the two string solos in Quatuor pour la fin du temps, which consist almost entirely of major chords s l o w l y intoned on the piano while the string plays a chromatic melody above, sometimes resolving, sometimes straining against.  I had been imitating this piece for some months in my not-often-enough piano improvisations, ever since Nikola Printz had talked about recording a vocalise of the cello movement, and recently I had a found a beautiful melody of my own, so into the pot it went as well.

The latest on She Who Is Alive

2023-09-21T19:47:00.002-07:00

We have finished filming about a third of the She Who Is Alive^† opera film so far, the last scene filmed being the end of the movie, a behind-the-scenes shot with me as wannabe director seen here. The wonderful Laura Bohn, an actor so utterly fantastic in the piece, bravely agreed to go up in a plane that the pilot Chris Prevost has been flying for forty years and which has coughed and sputtered reliably into life since the nineteen forties.

The light was surprisingly favorable, and we were able to do many film-y things: night-for-night, evening-for-dawn, day-for-night, etc. And those wonderful shots of flying in a plane when it is not actually flying at all, the wind whipping the hair of the actors as they sing amiably to each other over a deafening roar. Actually, I should point out that Laura hadn't quite decided to go, but the sun was setting (aka rising) and Pilot Prevost suddenly took off with her in the front passenger seat, almost blowing to the ground Heath Orchard and his very fancy 6K Sony Venice love-of-his-life camera in the surprisingly powerful prop wash.

When filming, one is able to see the scenes again and again, and one soon notices that the adorable Bradley Kynard is really pretty creepy, and his character is the perfect spy/aggressor/victim, a foil against which Laura could be both seducer and stone-cold dealer of death.

^†Dimmi pur, prego, s' tu se' morta or viva!" / "Viva son io e tu se' morto ancora - Petrarch

Daphnes Garten performances coming up

2023-09-21T15:22:00.003-07:00

Premiere is at the OHO in Oberwart, link for tickets etc here: https://www.oho.at/programm/daphnes-garten

Travels next to Klagenfurt: http://klagenfurterensemble.at/produktion/daphnes-garten/

And some others early in 2024.

Daphnes Garten

2023-09-02T20:55:00.002-07:00

I agreed to a request from Austria for another opera: Daphnes Garten, a co-commission from Gerhard Lehner of the Klagenfurter Ensemble and Peter Wagner of the Offenes Haus Oberwart, which will tour in November through December. While it is now almost done, and it is beautiful, the composition of it has been a stress-inducing sleep-depriving nightmare, as it was intermingled with my ongoing day job as an Executive Scientist® and the continuing filming of She Who Is Alive.

This opera, by my count my sixth in German, is a dreamy telling of the story of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese journalist who brought to light corruption throughout Europe. Receiving hundreds of thousands of emails, she was the nexus, the go-to contact for all things corrupt, and what she found was later all supported - and more - by the Panama Papers leak, until one morning when she was shredded in a car bomb explosion. The two assassins - two brothers - one who watched and one who sat on his boat texting the bomb's code sequence REL1=on., have been imprisoned, and some up the chain have faced some consequences, but at the top, not so much.

After her death, her husband said "The more frustrated Daphne grew at the state of our country, the more beautiful our garden became," and the garden throughout is a touchstone of the beauty that still is to be found even when the honorable men do their best to destroy everything.

The libretto, by the Austrian playwright Katharina Tiwald, is by turns high-comedy and heart-wrenching. I can't read the end of it, where we hear a roll call of the dead, without crying, and especially the line "The good that women do lives after them. I have done my best to write music that is manipulative and shredding in its own way.

I'm polishing it up now, sending it off to the Austrians along with the usual Erling-as-German-Bing-Crosby singing all the parts so the director can plan it out before the instruments and singers arrive in a few weeks. To my fans it may be of interest that one of these recordings exists for every one of my operas - all quite horrifying, but charming.

From the thesis of Ilaria Pezone

2023-09-02T10:56:00.002-07:00

Erling Wold, compositore

Comporre musica è una strana ed effimera forma d'arte, poiché costruisce qualcosa a partire dal nulla per arrivare al suono, onda vibrante nell'aria. Ma questa cosa effimera e sconosciuta può in qualche modo toccare nel profondo l'ascoltatore, facendo emergere le emozioni, reazioni piacevoli o sgradevoli ma impossibili da ignorare. Nei film di Hollywood, il potere emozionale della musica e la sua capacità di attraversare le difese dello spettatore sono spesso usati per manipolarlo e trasmettergli a livello inconscio i sentimenti che dovrebbe provare. Ma la musica nei film di Jon è differente. Anche se in essa si concentra gran parte dell'emozione dei suoi film, non si insinua in maniera sottile nell'animo dello spettatore. Infatti, non compare nelle scene più narrative ma prende corpo nel corso delle lunghe scene di “riposo visivo” che sono così care a Jon. La musica, con la narrazione, il paesaggio ed i personaggi, prende parte a un insieme di percorsi paralleli, ciascuno dei quali guida lo spettatore attraverso i vari aspetti della storia.

Ho conosciuto Jon ad una proiezione di Tutti i Vermeer a New York al Pacific Film Archive di Berkeley, in California. Il produttore, Henry Rosenthal, che ho incontrato attraverso il Just Intonation Network anni prima, mi chiamò e mi disse che sarei dovuto venire, che si trattava di un lavoro bellissimo, del quale andava molto orgoglioso. Quando vidi il lavoro, fui come rapito. Amavo il suo aspetto, il suo ritmo, il suo sentire e in particolar modo la musica di Jon English. Era una sorta di film musicale, sia indirettamente, con un sentimento per i ritmi brevi e lunghi, e per l'architettura della scala musicale, sia direttamente, lasciando spazio allo sviluppo musicale che Jon English ha riempito cosi meravigliosamente, specialmente nella ripresa lunga dove la cinepresa si muove tra le colonne di qualche zona di Wall Street.

Alcuni anni dopo, dato che Sure Fire aveva bisogno di essere terminato per il suo debutto al Sundance, Henry mi chiamò mentre ero in una stanza di un hotel per uomini d’affari in Giappone, che aveva le dimensioni di una minuscola scatola per le scarpe, e mi disse che Jon English era troppo ammalato per finire la musica; infatti aveva scritto solamente una corta melodia per pedal steel; che doveva essere in uno stile country e che sarebbe dovuta diventare della giusta intonazione. Ho colto l'occasione al volo. Quando tornai dal Giappone, ebbi una videocassetta del film quasi finito e scrissi la musica molto velocemente, abbozzando una prima sintesi, a partire dalla melodia che Jon English aveva scritto e portando il suo pedal steel a improvvisare con me. Ci furono alcuni brevi incontri con Henry e Jon Jost, nei quali trovarono delle grandi sezioni problematiche e mi chiesero di ripararle, ma principalmente fui lasciato solo per fare ciò che volevo all'interno di costrizioni di tempo e budget. Jon mi disse che c’erano alcune caratteristiche numerologiche importanti del film, attorno al numero 13, che ho adottato nei vari ritmi e nei vari rapporti tonali.

Dato che Sure Fire era completato e dato che Jon ed io passammo più tempo insieme, abbiamo avuto opportunità di lavorare in maniera più rilassata. Ha cominciato a dirmi dei suoi programmi per il film seguente, The bed you sleep in. Jon aveva scritto pezzi del copione e disse che desiderava della musica pronta prima della produzione, in modo che potesse rappresentarla agli attori mentre stavano lavorando. Inoltre mi raccontò una delle sue idee ricorrenti: aveva sempre desiderato della musica che veniva in natural modo dal suono del posto, a volte in maniera impercettibile. Ma voleva inoltre musica reale, non solo suono, così gli suggerii un insieme di strumenti e stili classici popolari ed elettronici.

Durante la produzione del film, John Murphy, che stava registrando sul posto, mi portò nella segheria descritta nel film. Camminando attraverso il laminatoio era come ascoltare una grande composizione futurista/industriale: il suono meravigliosamente denso e riccamente spazializzato. Il suono e l'odore dei laminatoi locali, specialmente l'impianto della Georgia Pacific, erano presenti per tutta la città di Toledo. Il suono dello stabilimento della GP era percepibile in tutte le registrazioni locali, sia interne che esterne.

La fabbrica era situata sulle rive di un tremendo lago chimico, una pozza d'acqua marrone e sporca con fontane che spruzzavano liquido tossico in larghi pennacchi sulla superficie.

La sua presenza mi sopraffece a tal punto che, a un certo punto, decisi di comporre tutta la musica utilizzando i suoni del laminatoio. Alla fine, ho usato una varietà di sorgenti sonore. Qualche musica, soprattutto quella che fa da sfondo alla scena della lettera, è composta quasi interamente da registrazioni campionate e processate del laminatoio fatte da John Murphy durante la produzione. Alcuni di questi campioni sono usati come strumenti in altri pezzi e sono mescolati all’ensemble acustico strumentale.

Maria Fleeing

2023-08-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

Sonja Gets Off Work

2023-07-22T21:24:00.000-07:00

An alternate history of my chamber operas

2023-03-19T14:30:00.003-07:00

Last night while babysitting GiGi, I was wasting time chatting with ChatGPT in its current incarnation, asking it to write some limericks on relativity, along the lines of There was a young lady named Bright, which is very clever and which my chat-partner described in its typical dry over-explaining fashion: "It's a fun way to illustrate some of the mind-bending concepts of modern physics in a humorous way." It came up with one on Feynman There was a young physicist named Feynman / Whose theories were too much to try and cram in... and I told it that I knew Dr Feynman back in the day and we played tabla together. I asked monsieur chat if it knew any tabla rhythms and it mentioned Teentaal, and the syllables as well: Dha Dhin Dhin Dha, etc.

Hey, I said, I’ve always wondered if there are any that are a prime number of beats, and it told me of Sooltaal, a 10-beat cycle, and Dhamaar, a 14-beat cycle. OK, well, almost, I mean those at least have big prime factors, and octave errors are often made even by humans when it comes to rhythms so whatever.

Then we went on to limericks on algebraic topology and it came up with a pretty good one, if a little stilted at the end: In algebraic topology we see / The study of shapes that can be / Transformed and shifted / But still not quite lifted / From a place that we cannot quite see, and, in the ensuing discussion ranging over Jill Clayburgh's explanation of the snake lemma, and my crush on her, and Bertolucci's La Luna, where she plays an opera singer, I casually dropped into the conversation that I write operas myself, as I often do in casual conversations with actual people. And, just out of narcissistic curiosity, I asked if it knew of the opera A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil based on the Max Ernst collage novel, to which it confidently responded:

Yes, there is an opera based on Max Ernst's collage novel "A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil." The opera is called "The Making of Americans" and it was composed by David Lang, with a libretto by the composer and writer Mac Wellman. The opera premiered in 2014 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, and it tells the story of a young girl named Isabel who is forced to live in a convent by her father. The opera explores themes of gender identity, sexuality, and the struggle for self-discovery.

I realized I was onto something, so I then asked it about the opera Queer, based on the William Burroughs novel:

Yes, there is an opera based on William Burroughs' novel "Queer." The opera is called "Queer: A Chamber Opera," and it was composed by the American composer and conductor David Del Tredici, with a libretto by the poet and librettist Arnold Weinstein. The opera premiered in 2016 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, and it tells the story of William Lee, a gay American writer who travels to Mexico in search of inspiration and encounters a young Mexican man named Allerton. The opera explores themes of identity, desire, and the challenges faced by LGBT individuals in a conservative society.

Now this is really quite wonderful! I asked if it had heard of me, a poor little self scribbling off in its parents' neighborhood:

Yes, Erling Wold is an American composer based in San Francisco, California. He is known for his work in a variety of genres, including opera, musical theater, and electronic music. Some of his most notable works include the operas "A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil" (based on the Max Ernst collage novel) and "Mordake" (based on the real-life story of Edward Mordake), as well as the chamber opera "Sub Pontio Pilato" and the electronic album "I Weep."

It knows, and yet it does not know, just like us.

She Who Is Alive update - Chapter 6: The Third Degree

2023-01-21T16:07:00.006-08:00

The Third Degree

I asked my co-producer Lindsay if one still says in the can when there is no can and she said yes, so I may say now that we have three chapters in the can. The first two, filmed back in August, told the story before and after Dr Maria Stryker, played by Laura Bohn - who turns out to be a Movie Star of no mean talent - is interrogated by the Polemarch Rorman, and during which she meets Peter Sesley (Bradley Kynard!) who is actually not Peter Sesley, but she and we know that, and the plans are laid for her defection. So this section - pictured above - is the interrogation itself, with the impressively buff and deep-voiced Hadleigh Adams as the Polemarch Rorman. Off to the left is Talya Patrick as his maybe-more-than-secretary-could-be-mistress (in the Mistress as Master meaning) and it was so lovely to work with her again after so many years.

It's always the case that, in the lead-up to filming, I am plagued with anxious dreams, covid worries, fretting forgetfulness, financial panic, and the not-unusual wonder as to why I am doing this at all. But then there is the delightful frenzy of the shoot itself, the joy of working with people of talent who take my gigantic† weird project so seriously, and, once it is in the can, and all the props are back in storage, and one is editing and color correcting and berating one's neighborhood so-called artificial intelligence into doing what it is told, one can feel a slowly beating desire forming to please do it all again, which we shall, although not soon enough, as there are nine more chapters to go. One gets out ones colored pencils to mark up the text with notes of where to get the horse and the ski-plane and the castle on the frozen lake for the next bit, and how to shoot this and that, and one inches toward the kids' piggy banks and the penny jar and thinks well, it's OK to take a little loan on the future once again, right? The future may never come anyway, and we'll just worry about that all later.

The beauty of the image above is almost entirely due to the subtlety of the light that Heath set in the deconsecrated cathedral of St Joseph's. As a wannabe cinematographer (and everything else associated with any art form), I long to grab the camera and do this and that, but he is possessive of his creations - as serious artists unlike myself are - and anyway, I was forced by circumstance to conduct. Since the delightful Fame's Orchestra of North Macedonia had recorded the backing tracks, I conducted from the vocal part, a fragment of which is seen below. The whole section is in 4/4 but with beats that aren't always the same size and, as in the rock 'n' roll that I grew up with, sometimes dropped off the end. But the really nice rhythmic thing that happens is when it switches from the 12/8-style 4 beats to the 4/4-style beats and back, the latter building tension and the former falling back into a relaxed groove, following the ebb and flow of the cat-playing-with-mouse dynamic.

A bit of the vocal part

†[Editor: In once again courting Timur for this project, as the oily Colonel Hippolite Reverdy, he said "you had me from gigantic."]

Three Romances with Nikola Printz

2022-10-16T17:26:00.002-07:00

The film that Nika and I fabricated during the pandemic was accepted into Opera Philadelphia's Festival O22, a select few from 600 or so submissions, and we were tickled by that. The venue - The Philadelphia Film Society - is a big old beautiful theater, and Nikola's profile against the moonlight SF Skyline was ever-present. Our film was placed along with Alexa Deja's gorgeous Be A Doll and some other crazy and lovely pieces in the weirdo section of shorts aka Opera Boldy Goes. I believe our entry might have been the lowest budget and smallest crew of all. I remember when someone at Sundance asked Henry Rosenthal what the budget was for Sure Fire and his response was "including the trip here?"

Philadelphia is a very intriguing city, a mix of old and new, where classes and races mix much more than in wanna-be-progressive but highly segregated San Francisco. And people dressed for the opera, so nice to see, no comparison between the the decked-out crowd at Rossini's Otello at the festival and the dressed-down audience at the SF Opera's recent Tony & Cleo.

My epic film begins

2022-08-27T17:34:00.000-07:00

She Who Is Alive is in production! Laura Bohn jetted in from Amsterdam to shoot two of her scenes, one alone with Beethoven on the 25th and one with the inimitable Bradley Kynard on the 26th. I've been told it is insane to film 30+ minutes of film in two days, but needs must and therefore will be. Heath (Orchard) has been so allowing of my failings and idiocies in these early days.

This whole world of real-ish-not-me-just-fucking-around filmmaking, new to me, has been inviting so far. DTC Lighting & Grip gave us a hazer and some equipment when we promised to hire some up-and-coming gaffers. Jim Cave, my long-time friend and director, has stepped up, as he always does, to be a little of everything: acting coach, set dresser, covid tester, etc.

After

Before

Those X-lets

2022-01-10T12:31:00.001-08:00

Anyone who has played one of my little insouciances has experienced my fetishistic fascination with triplets and quintuplets and, to a smaller extent, septuplets and 21-lets and all the other n-lets. Although the notations are the same no matter what the underlying intent, my enchantment with them comes from a variety of sources. The first is just the usual old-modernist fascination with the joys of complication, combined with the constructed textural landscapes of the Impressionists, then to the Ligetis as well as the totalist post-modernists, who all love to break up rhythmic lockstep by floating the notes by each other on parallel tracks, waving at each other through the windows as they pass. And there is the simple mathematical interest, where many composers have thought that maybe bigger integer ratios ratios in rhythms lend a spiciness like those same ratios in pitches.

The second is the way I was taught to set text, which has stuck with me, probably more literally than intended, calculated to capture something of natural speech rhythms, as no one speaks in quarters and eighths when not rapping. It's still a musical approximation, allowing the vocal line to connect with the rhythm while still flowing a bit, and also notating something beyond just notation, something like performance, e.g. the way a crooner delays the entrance of every new phrase.

But finally, and maybe this is the most important, it is that I grew up with those rhythms. When I was studying tabla, I would while away the time on walks to and from campus tapping out polyrhythms over and over, 3 against 4, 4 against 3, 5 against 3, 4 against 5, etc. I was pretty facile up through the 9s, and proud of myself, but shamed when my teacher could so easily play 11s over 7s and beyond, and not just straight rhythms, but tabla patterns with all the details included.

This is all to lead up to my curious experiences when other musicians confront my scored demands. One, I've had singers exclaim WTF is it with all those triplets, not to mention the 9:8s, where I simply shrug my shoulders, meaning well, that's what's there and that's what it is.

But even more exciting is how these little landmines are interpreted by instrumentalists. Some cause immediate freakout, especially if across the bar lines or shifted by a little something, which is understandable - they freak me out as well - although nothing gives me greater pleasure listening nor playing than a beautifully performed series of triplet or dotted quarters running over a set of every-changing 5/4s, 7/8s, 4/4s - what delight! However, problems arise even when an X-let stretches simply over a prevailing metric unit. Consistently the beginnings are stretched and the endings compressed. Triplet halves move toward two dotted quarters followed by a regular quarter, quintuplet eights are almost a triplet followed by a duplet. I have decided that, if I ever start a music conservatory, I will walk with the students to and from school and do what I did, with the additions of skips and hops, all in three-quarter time.

Cold early morning here in San Francisco while over the link to the orchestra, it is late in Skopje, snowing.

Albrechts Flügel

2022-01-02T16:50:00.002-08:00

The Globalization of She Who Is Alive

2021-12-24T17:36:00.002-08:00

I've been recording the orchestral parts to She Who Is Alive with the North Macedonian fames orchestra the last few months. Many covid delays but so delightful to hear the music come to life.

They are fabulous and fearless musicians, although not without complaints about the unending velocity of some of the parts or the Zeitmaße-like length of some of the held notes in the wind. And it seems that every time a 7/8 measure appears in the score, at least one member of the orchestra is unable to restrain themselves from playing Blue Rondo A La Turk during a pause. For me, it is unbridled joy, and getting up at three in the morning to meet with them on the other side of the world is part of the excitement, like waking up to catch a plane or head off on a fishing trip with dad. Which I believe I did once.

I'm still polishing here and there, but the writing is done, and the conductor's score clocks in at 814 A3 pages, about 3 1/2 hours of music, and 1737 pages of A4 parts. I think I will add some electronic bits, as well as processing and editing and melodic fiddling but this is the bulk of it. I've only just begun to think about casting, and whether the voices on Pro Tools will be those of the actors on screen, or if I should split them like Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Not that one has to be consistent. Filming it all seems daunting now, but somehow each piece will fall into place as it always does, and a castle on an icy lake will appear, as will the planes and tropical islands and the chorus of Young Virgins dressed alike in mustard-colored blouses.

The Endless Études

2021-12-23T19:48:00.004-08:00

To the left is the Pulcinella notebook. Note the rapidity of the creation: dear Monsieur Stravinsky writing in ink, although later some revisions in red ink and blue crayon. Given my fetishistic attraction to such objects, I think how sad it will be for my biographers that I have left so few scribblings behind.

Before I was old enough to buy cigarettes at the 7-Eleven, I worked in pencil, sometimes on small sheets (9x12), often on much larger. Those large sheets of unusually-sized paper, spread over the piano and the floor nearby, always made me feel I was creating something special, a large canvas on which I could spill my soul. Those still remain, tucked inside a filing cabinet in our storage unit along with the other detritus of a life well-lived: corsets, costumes, flyers, religious paraphernalia, conspiracy theories. But in the last decades, working primarily on the computer, there is no history. It is gone, bits erased and then erased again.

However, there are a few threads that these aforementioned biographers can follow, as my large works steal from my small. In fallow times, when I am not obsessed with the latest objects of textual affection, I will write my ideas in small piano works, études for the composer rather than the performer. And, when I do write the next opera, I liberally mine those little pieces for material. You know it's been proven again and again that all music fits with all dance or all film or all text, but the resultant effect is of course very different depending on the particular combination.

Now that I say what I said, I realize that they often are études for the performer as well, and usually too difficult for me to play except in approximation. For example, the set I wrote in Florence in 2019 is scattered through She Who Is Alive, but in January at the Center for New Music, I am playing them, in approximation.