Hello team,

I’ve migrated this blog, and my googlepage, my house and home, and even my collection of orphaned left socks over to my new site: kevinclarkcomposer.com

And now this instance of this blog will step up its inactivity into some really heavy languishing around the tubes.

…..bye!

Hello again infrequently updated blog…..

Anyway. I’m putting together a reading of the first half of my opera, Summer’s Twilight, on December 5th at 2 PM at the Brooklyn Heights Branch of the Brooklyn public library. I’ve just updated the calendar on my site with the necessary information and links.

Needless to say, this reading is a big deal for me, with a big group of talented people committed to the project. That includes some of my favorite singer-collaborators ever, a great stage director, fantastic film-makers and a recording engineer to document the piece. I am both incredibly excited and incredibly stressed, as one would expect.

Hello, infrequently updated blog.

Hello, Kevin, how are you?

Oh, doing fine, thanks. I’ve been thinking about posting.

Good Idea, have a go.

Okay, I will, thanks.

So. My Midsummer Night’s Dream adaptation, Summer’s Twilight, is coming up for a workshop on December 5th. We’ll have five scenes, running straight through Puck’s line, “Lord what fools these mortals be.” I just finished writing the fifth scene, which includes one of those operatic staples: a scene that doesn’t exist in the play, that was created for the opera adaptation. I used to think this sort of thing was a desecration of the text, but now I think it can be a quite valuable thing to do.

The scene I’m talking about in the play has Demetrius chase Hermia onto the stage, professing his love for her. The crucial confrontation, though, where they meet up alone in the woods, happens offstage. Now, for me, Demetrius is the main threat in the story. The threat of forced marriage it what makes the plot go in the first place. The moment when he gets the girl he wants alone in the woods, that’s a dramatic moment. Does he grab her and abduct her? What happens? Shakespeare skips that, and it works great, but I wanted that scene, so I cobbled it together out of different language from different people in the play.

Demetrius catches Hermia, and instead of abducting her, instead of attacking her (and she is very afraid at this point), he sings a love song. An over-the-top, psuedo-militaristic love song. His threat is neutralized with a bit of a joke. We thought up till this point that he was a monster, a rapist, and it turns out he’s jug a big lug. In the play, blowing over this encounter helps the whole play speed along. And for me, in this shortened adaptation, it’s a crucial moment, and I had to create it out of other things.

There’s other fun stuff to talk about in there, but the question of creating whole new scenes in adaptations of classic plays is a fun one to start with.

Seeya in a few months, blog. Maybe I’ll post again after the reading, but maybe not, who knows….

So I might win the worst blogger ever award. I never call, I never write, I never send flowers. But here we are again:

One of the key reasons I’ve been away is that March is government grant season, and as a grantwriter, that meant a solid month of working late, and a chunk of weekends too. But now that I’m out of that, (whew), I’m back to composing.

Things are moving forward with Harbor Opera for a second production of the score I wrote for the Arabian Nights – but this time with four saxophones instead of one, professional singers, a bigger budget, and enough time to plan the thing. We’re shooting for fall of 2010, so I’m feeling pretty comfortable about getting this done. It’s really good to know that piece is going to have a future. I worked really hard on it, and I’m really proud of a lot of the music; it would feel dreadful to leave it after one production.

The Seafarer film adaptation is progressing too. It’s really surprising how long these things take, coming from classical music. We shot last June, and now we’re re-doing the voice-over, then there’s fiddling with the colors, sound effects, and then the last little tweaks, of which there are surprisingly many. We’ve got a fantastic actress to do the new voice-over track, which is a big step, as we’ve been hung up on that for about 5 weeks.

And, seeing as, as Gaiman said, events are cowards which run in packs, I’m in Baltimore to hear Zach premiere the re-write of The Nominious Death of Z. Robert Herchen, which I wrote for him a couple years ago, and has been starving for a re-write ever since. This piece was an early attempt at acting instrumentalists and instrumental delivery of text line for me, and in the years since I’ve learned basically how to do that. So when I got back to the piece it was very easy, sort of a “oh, right, I know how to do this now”, experience. Like going back to elementary school and realizing how small all the chairs are, sort of.

And one more wolf for the pack of events: Sean Cunningham, a No Signal-er of old, is finishing his masters at McGill, coming back to New York, and planning a concert on June 19, including a premiere of a solo piece I wrote for him a good long while ago now. I’ve still got to make the ending possible for a human hand playing a violin, instead of just for four disembodied fingers obeying my every telekinetic whim, but no matter. (Actually, it’ll be fun to get to work with Sean, pick new pitches while looking at his hand on the instrument and seeing how far I can push him.)

And that’s what’s going on in my musical life. Hopefully we’ll have some news on the Lincoln 2nd Inaugural piece I’m writing for Greg Jukes and the gradual progress of Summer’s Twilight in the near future, but knowing me, even if there is news I won’t write about it till the 2010 mid-term elections.

So, I’ve been thinking about what I want for my music. In part, I think that’s a product of having less time to spend writing because of having a full time job. Do I want my music played by classical musicians and listened to on WNYC? Do I want teenagers to listen to it and find it a guide to a maturing emotional life? Do I want a hit on the radio? It’s not a question I’m used to thinking about, but the more restricted my time to write becomes, the more I want to focus that writing on what I truly want it to accomplish. So these larger scale questions are coming up for me.

An answer that seems good for me (for now) is that I want people to relate to my music the way I relate to poetry. I don’t relax to it, though a favorite line might go through my head as I wait to fall asleep. It’s something that I treasure when I’m alone, and want to feel a certain way. I take out a book, look up a poem I love, and as often as not I read it aloud alone in my room. The patterns of verse and the power of my favorite images and phrases are a delight for me.

Poetry is something I do with focused attention, and looking for a combination of a deep emotional reaction and pleasure. I enjoy reading poetry – it’s fun for me. It’s something both removed from life (and this is an important point for understanding what I want from my music) and simultaneously very immediate. I love when a poem goes from high emotional imagery to something plain and rough, like “You and I are old!” in Ulysses, by Tennyson (a poem I was planning to set, until Blago had to misquote at a press conference – now I have to wait a few years).

I’m not sure quite where to go with this idea, that I want people to relate to my music like I relate to poetry, but for now it provides a good guide to the kinds of feelings I’m trying to stir up in people. In particular I mean emotional depth and private pleasure.

Once again, sorry for taking so very long away from the blog. I’m having a bit of a difficult time making progress on my work. My relationship of four years ended recently, and it’s rocked me back a bit in terms of my producivity. But enough of that.

I’m still trying to get a good balance of work (by day, at Meet the Composer) and social life and writing, and it’s not quite right yet. However, having a day job has significantly slowed the cycle of getting pieces ready for performance. When I was in school I’d have a new piece performed every couple of months, and planning for than 6 or so months ahead was ridiculous. Now I’m working on putting together performances and pieces that will certainly not come to fruition for over a year, or maybe even longer. It’s a strange feeling. In part I think it comes from having less time to work, and being therefore unable to promise completion of projects as quickly as I could before. But it also comes from working on larger projects that are more collaborative, and a greate emphasis on the planning process.

I’m working with an opera company in the early stages of doing another production of the score I did for Mary Zimmerman’s Arabian Nights adaptation last summer. But where in the past my approach was to pick a date on the calendar when I thought it would be ready, and then do as well as I could in the time allotted, now I’m doing a lot more work in the planning phase, working more on making sure what we’re up to is really what we want to be doing.

I think this way of working on a production is pretty analogous to the way my writing has changed recently. Instead of banging out as much as quickly as I could, now I spend most of my writing time planning what it is I want to do, and less and less time actually choosing notes.

In the long term it’s better, and it’s definitely influenced by working at a non-profit, and seeing how Meet The Composer treats long term planning and execution. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to get used to. Where I used to have some pretty good validation through performance every few months, now I have long term projects (2 films, 2 plays, 1 opera, 1 acting percussion piece for Greg Jukes) in various stages of long term work. It takes a deal more patience, commitment, and faith in what I’m doing than the old way did.

Now it’s time to restate my hope of posting more frequently, and obviuosly of writing more music about which to post. And now it’s time to close.

It’s been a couple months, but it’s felt like forever. I’ve been away from the play since the run at Theatre Hopkins in Baltimore. Now we’re talking about bringing it back with Harbor Opera in the Spring of 2010. That’s in the very early stages, and I’m preparing some songs from the play for further discussion. We’re talking about working with the AM/PM saxophone quartet for music. It’s still a long way from reality, but the chance to take another whack at all the sweat that went into the play the first time is very exciting. I’d have four saxophones instead of one, and a cast of trained opera singers – it’s a very exciting thought.

The trouble is that I’ve never had to dig this deeply into something I’d finished before. This play had its months of taking over my life, and it’s nine performances that got me my first proper reviews – and they were very good ones too. But now I’m going back into it again. I’m taking melodies I wrote for one cast and reconceiving them a year before we’ve cast anyone, and long before we’re even sure we’re going to do it – it’s a very strange feeling.

It’s times like these I have to remind myself how long composition takes; it really is the epitome of delayed gratification. At any rate, it’s a strange experience digging in this wonderful mud a second time.

I’m working as an assistant director/stage manager on my friend Rose’s production of Antigone, which is running at the Manhattan Repertory Theatre in Times Square on December 18, 19 and 20, by the way. Technical theatre seems a weird thing to throw yourself into as a composer, and I had to think about it a fair amount before committing, but commit I did, and I’m really enjoying the work. Since so much of my work is theatrical, to me it seems completely natural. That’s both worrying and encouraging about the wisdom of the decision. Also, as I’m working on Summer’s Twilight, for which the principal challenge is dramatic, I think it will be good to spend time working on a play while I write. On another note, I’m still not writing the way I want to be writing. I think there are a few factors contributing to that. Chief among them is that I really enjoy my job at Meet The Composer, and I often stay late, cutting into my writing time. Also, I’m still trying to get the balance right of how many nights I see concerts, how many I have fun, how many I see my girlfriend, and how many I write. Frankly, I’d expected to have that balance sorted out by now, and to have a regular schedule of writing established. I’ll keep trying to balance everything I do, and see how happy I am with the arrangement at Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Now that I’ve got a full-time job, finding time to write music is not the easiest thing. I’m doing a lot of it on the weekends, when I can dedicate large chunks of time to it, but I’m surprised at how much I can get written on the train. When I’m working out harmonies and melodies I need quiet and an instrument, but working on Summer’s Twilight I have a lot of work that I can do with just a notebook. Writing this opera, I’m finding, involves a lot more thinking about plot points, characterization, structure, and similar issues than actual time writing pitches. I’m writing about how I want to do this piece in notebook after notebook, and then writing each scene one or two times only. It’s a little surprising as a way to work, but I’m liking the way it’s coming out, and I’m really liking that I can write on the train this way. I’ll be even happier when this piece is finally done, but I’m glad I’m taking the time to do it right.

Sorry to be away for almost a month – I’ve been moving, starting work at Meet The Composer while still looking for full-time work, going to a wedding in Rhode Island, that sort of thing. It always takes me a little while after a move to feel comfortable enough to start writing again, but I seem to have settled into my life in New York enough to work. It is still heavy lifting working on Summer’s Twilight – it seems that the longer I spend working on this piece the more inertia it acquires, the more complex even simple decisions become. That said, I’ve got a very strong re-write of the opening. It used to be an aria I was very proud of, and now is a slightly shorter arietta, with more space for the ideas to breathe. The problem was that the original aria, Hermia’s, was too wordy and strong. I want the piece to open with Hermia’s reaction to the threat of forced marriage to Demetrius; we start with her terror, which is subsequently explained. This re-write strengthens the Hermia’s fear by not giving her complex metaphorical language to dispense while in intense emotional distress. The biggest issue still facing me is the question of ensemble architecture. this is one of the big questions for any kind of music-theatre. If people are singing at the same time, why? They can sing very similar music simultaneously to show, usually, a similarity of feeling, or they can sing wildly contrasting music either simultaneously or alternately to show conflict. A particular question for me is this: where should I strike the balance between quick dramatic moves and expansive, emotive music? If I speed the drama along too quickly, the music will become pointless, and an impediment to storytelling instead of an aid. If I luxuriate in beautiful sounds too long, even if those sounds express perfectly the character’s inner state, the drama will stagnate, and the audience will be bored. My current goal is to draft a range of different ensembles, and get some hard data to help guide the rest of the writing process. Let’s hope it works out.