Category: Field Reports

Composers write music on very different schedules, but what if creativity was put on a very short choke chain? Every day for the past year David Morneau has produced a new 60-second composition and distributed it via the Internet. His personal creative marathon is over on June 30, 2008, when he’ll post his last composition in this series, and it seemed like a great time to check in and see how the project has impacted his life and work. He was kind enough to indulge our curiosity.

David Morneau

—Questions for David Morneau—

Every day for the past year, you have composed a new 60-second composition and posted it on your blog, 60×365. I admit I’m having visions of Jack Bauer just thinking about it. What inspired you write a new piece of music every 24 hours?

I was interested in starting a blog to promote my work and my ideas about music, but I’m not interested in writing for a blog. I’m not a great writer and previous attempts at blogging always ended in frustration. Besides, there are already a lot of well written blogs by composers out there. Writing my own seemed like a futile attempt to stand out in an already crowded space.

Then last May (2007) I was working on a one-minute piece for Robert Voisey’s annual 60×60 project. In the middle of working one day I received an email from Boris Willis, choreographer and dancer, pointing me to Dance-A-Day, a podcast project he was starting. Every day he was making a new dance, videotaping it, and posting the video online. Suddenly the idea to make a one-minute piece every day for a year seemed like the perfect angle for a blog. 60×365 was born.

One thing that excited me right away was knowing that this project would force me to compose a lot more. Making a new piece every day is a huge commitment. Like many of my colleagues, I was having trouble finding time everyday to sit down to compose at all. I had hit a mental block on a couple of projects and felt like I was stuck in a rut. 60×365 presented a way to try out some new ideas while developing some discipline and routine in my creative life.

What began as an idea about composing for the internet became a creative lifestyle. Everything became a possible idea for a new piece. Friends and family offered suggestions and opinions. I created everyday and people listened everyday. It was fantastic.

You’ll post your final piece on June 30, 2008. How has your thinking changed over the past year, both purely aesthetically and in terms of how you approach the work of writing music?

I think that the biggest changes are the result of the working style I adopted in order to meet the revolving deadlines: composing intuitively. By that I mean developing ideas very quickly, experimenting with source materials without worrying about “correct” ways of working, and concerning myself more with the actual sound of the piece than with its conceptual structure. On some days there was very little time to work. If I had tried composing with the routines and methods I was used to before this project started nothing would have gotten finished.

There was little time for revisions. I never had the luxury of putting a piece aside and coming back to it days or weeks later. At first this was very scary and hard to get used to. I was putting a lot of incomplete and under-developed pieces out into the world. The nature of this project is more about composing a complete musical thought everyday than about crafting infinitely intricate miniatures. Looking back, I now like many of the pieces I was unsure of at the time.

Mellow (July 26) is a good example of this. Through the circumstances of the day there was no time to work until late in the evening. I had eaten a big meal with friends and was ready to zone out for the night, but still needed to compose my minute. I found a sampled electric piano loop that fit my mood, ran it through a couple of processes and filters in Logic then arranged the results in a dialog with the original. At the time it felt very rushed and incomplete. Now when I listen to it I find it very captivating in its way, and not at all deficient.

So, aesthetically I’m now less interested in intellectual complexity and more interested in phenomenological experience. The sound of a piece is more important to me than the idea behind it. Spending so much of my life composing within an academic setting I became, like many, enamored with complex structure and theoretical conceptions of music. So much so that it often got in the way of being creative. It’s very hard to work while thinking about how my ideas compare to previous ideas in our tradition. Maybe this is something that others can separate from their work, but I’ve always struggled with it.

60×365 helped me to exorcise these patterns from my composing, allowing me to become more productive and much more adventurous than I ever have been. I often find myself approaching new pieces with a sense of exploration rather than trying to realize a preconceived model I have in my head. Serendipity is now extremely important to me. Little unexpected things happen all the time while working. Before I thought of these as mistakes. Now I give them a second glance. Many times these end up being more interesting to me than what I was originally trying to do.

The final piece of the project, At Last (June 30), is a good example of these changes. The idea was to make a collage of cadences. I began work on it by sifting through my CD’s collecting samples. It was at this point that I remembered the dramatic and extended way Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony ends; since the project began with a collage of the Fifth Symphony (bsym5.1 – July 1), it seemed perfect to end that way.

So I loaded the final bars of the symphony into my computer and began playing with other samples to see what worked well with it. Before this project I probably would have approached this piece by collecting only cadences from Beethoven symphonies. Since I’m now open to trying many ideas, I discovered that the more clichéd endings from other styles and genres—the swing bands, the crazy bop saxophone, the predictable blues guitar—worked surprisingly well. It ended up being much funnier than I hoped.

Morneau spent the year expanding his creativity and his compositional calendar

Would this project have been worthwhile without contemporary media sharing systems such as blogger networks, rss feeds, and podcasting?

While there are certainly benefits from composing a complete new piece every day, I don’t think the experience would have been nearly as rich without these systems. These technologies allowed me to connect with my audience in new ways. It was gratifying to receive positive feedback about my work. Most often this would come from friends and family either posting a comment or sending an email, but every so often a complete stranger would have something to say. This was always exciting, and it really helped to know that people were listening. In fact, as the year went on I began to realize that 60×365 was also a commitment for the core audience who listened to every piece as it came along. What an amazing experience to lead people through a year in this way. I tried to acknowledge this relationship by designating November as “Listener Appreciation Month.” Every piece composed that month came from an idea suggested by a listener.

Knowing that I was composing in public (so to speak) kept this project moving along. It would have been very easy to walk away from it if no one would notice. Jay Batzner, who runs his own weekly podcast, Unsafe Bull, wrote about this idea in “The Composer as Podcaster,” an article for the Society of Composers Newsletter (March-April 2008). He writes about creating “an audience of listeners who want their weekly composition…. My imaginary audience is demanding music and I must supply it.” Internet sharing technologies made me very aware of my listeners, and obligated me to keep working.

Another benefit of working within these media sharing systems is interacting with other artists. I mentioned Boris Willis’s Dance-A-Day before. He and I collaborated every Friday during the period that both our projects were live. One week he would make his video early and send it to me for music, then the next week I’d make some music early and send it to him for a dance. Besides being able to cross-pollinate our audiences, we were able to experiment with the collaborative act in the same way that we were experimenting with our respective arts. Sometimes we’d try to work against what the other person had done. Sometimes we’d make pieces that responded to previous pieces. I liked to give him a challenge sometimes; once I made an absurd collage using samples of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears for him to use (bff – August 17). He responded with a dance inter-cut with footage of random blonde women, a search for Paris.

I also met Jay Batzner and got to know his work this year. We’ve shared comments about, interacted with, and promoted each other’s podcasts. Knowing that another composer was attempting to do something similar for a lot of the same reasons was very reassuring.

You drew inspiration from all over: everything from national headlines to lost sounds recovered from your personal computer. What were some of the most unexpected sources of musical ideas? What were some of the most fruitful?

It’s funny how these things work. I had several ideas that I was sure would generate lots of pieces, but never quite did anything. For example, I have a folder full of sounds I recorded while working at the Book Depository at Ohio State. These are all sounds of HVAC systems, really varied and interesting. I wanted to make a series of seven pieces named stx1, stx2, etc. (stx was the library’s system code for the depository.) I struggled to make two (stx1 – August 8 and stx2 – October 4) and never got around to working on the others.

Then one accidental idea can end up yielding many interesting experiments. During a visit with a friend, we came across an old cassette tape of a music group we had formed in college. I offered to transfer it to CD so that we could have a more durable copy. While listening to it I became inspired to use it for a piece. That quickly turned into three pieces (Joyful Noise 1, Joyful Noise 2, and Joyful Noise 3 – October 15-17). Later I began looking for other old cassettes of music I had made earlier in my life and generated seven more pieces (Big Feet Birthday – May 2, Upside Down – May 6, Row Your What – May 7, eieio – May 8, Meeting Mudd – May 10, Old School – May 23, and Trombone Please – May 24).

Certain tools seemed to inspire a lot of ideas. Max/MSP generated over 40 pieces, which was great. Making so many little pieces with it really helped me understand that program a lot more. I also made at least a dozen more pieces using Max/MSP patches that I found online. SoundHack made regular appearances in my work this year. I liked using Sound Studio to create (even though it’s more of a file editing and mastering tool). Careful cutting and pasting can yield some excellent little glitch pieces, like Gl!itch (tar) – August 5 and No Idea – January 3.

One very unexpected idea came while looking for something in iTunes one day. I have a lot of long mixes from other podcasts, some which aren’t well labeled about which songs are where. To find what I was looking for I ended up clicking in different places along the playback bar. At one point I accidentally clicked and dragged and discovered that iTunes doesn’t really scrub very well, it just skips around trying to keep up. Inspired, I routed the output into my recording software and scrubbed around for a while. Then I carefully selected little chunks of my “performance” to construct a cohesive piece. ScrubM (October 27) quickly became one of my favorite pieces.

Did you ever get bored?

No, I don’t think so. There were always enough things to try to keep it interesting. I know that I got tired of the project several times. Working everyday can get old. Often I’ve got other things to do so I may not have the time to enjoy the process. This becomes frustrating very quickly. Of course if I only composed when I had lots of time to enjoy it I’d be writing much less. But this is the part of the project that ultimately is the most rewarding. I’ve made creativity a central focus of my life. I get to compose something new every day. It’s exhilarating. I feel very lucky to have done this.

Knowing what you know now, if you had the chance to do the year over, would you do it again?

Definitely. I know that I am a better composer now than I was before. Proving that I possessed the creative stamina to finish this project gives me a lot of confidence in my abilities. I had the chance to try out a lot of new ideas and techniques much sooner than I would have otherwise.

Plus I’ve met new people online through this project. More people know my music now.

Even though it was very difficult on some days, the benefits far outweigh the struggle. I think that everyone should try their hand at making something new everyday, even if just for a month. Now that I’ve finished I’m going to look for ways to promote the idea of being creative everyday. There are several projects out there doing that already (Flickr has several 365 groups and Thing-A-Day), but there’s always room for one more. I’ll see what comes up.

Will you do it again?

Maybe, but not for a long while. It’s a big commitment.

Composers represent at NPAC

So NPAC is over, and as I sit in the terminal of Denver International Airport and tap away at my MacBook, I have a few nagging regrets. I wish I’d met more people, attended a wider variety of sessions, investigated more booths, picked up a complimentary Schott Music shot glass (what was I thinking?!). But my biggest regret is that I didn’t arrive in the Mile High City with all my homework done. If I’d had a better grasp on the step-by-steps of lobbying, advocacy, and outreach—the usefulness of survey data, for instance, in making the case for greater arts funding—I think I could have made much smarter decisions in the conference’s four caucuses. Although I had my composerly agenda firmly in mind, how can I articulate short- and long-term strategies at the national, local, and organizational levels without understanding the way arts policies and partnerships are formed? My knowledge of these intricacies is hardly encyclopedic, but I grok much more of them now than I did Wednesday, and I wish I could go back in time and reconsider the angles I pushed.

That reservation aside, NPAC has been a remarkably fruitful experience for me. I’ve finally connected face-to-face with so many movers and shakers (including the awesome AMC staff) whom I’d only communicated with over long distances before, not to mention a huge host of artists and administrators I encountered here for the first time. And I’ll sleep better at night knowing that all 3500 (roughly) attendees will return to their towns of origin, brains overflowing with arts priorities, to fight the good fight. The three chief missions with which we’ve been tasked—impress communities with our relevance, improve arts education, and increase diversity—are broad but by no means insurmountable goals. And if we all make small, specific contributions (what organizer, cheerleader, and all-around awesome dude Eric Booth called “trim-tab” contributions), I think we can reach them in my lifetime. Bottom line: Next time there’s an NPAC, figure out a way to get there. We’ll appreciate having you around.

The roaring NPAC vessel may have motored off into the distance, but it leaves a long list of to-dos and follow-ups in its wake. After several days of meeting new colleagues, strengthening connections with those already well met, and undoubtedly strengthening my elbow bending technique at the martini bar with convivial comrades convened for this convention, I’m happy to be back in my studio and very, very invigorated by all the stimuli. Okay, the vodka probably was invigorating, too, but that wasn’t on the NPAC agenda, was it?

Conferences are what you make them, and one’s experience is directly related to one’s mood and intentions. A friend of mine admitted to me that although she had a good time at the convention, she just wasn’t that motivated this week to get out there and work the floor. I, on the other hand, must have eaten an extra helping of networking Wheaties and arrived excited to be a composer in the schmooze-ic business, and particularly to meet colleagues in genres other than what I’m currently working in, with an eye toward expanding my commission base.

Meeting all these new faces was only the first step. Now comes the next, equally important move in the dance: follow-up emails with those colleagues from whom I felt a connection and an interest. It’s not enough to just show up in person; adding glue to the relationship with personal emails and forthcoming materials is what makes having met all these people especially worthwhile. A fresh lump of business cards looms on my desk, each waiting to be triaged into piles which dictate my next action. And of course, there are always one or two at which I squint blankly, wondering, “Who the heck was that??”. I have no doubt that other attendees are staring at my card today wondering exactly the same thing. There are only so many humans one can process in a day, whether one’s brain cells are addled with Grey Goose, or not.

The most wonderful thing about the convention was the physical cross-pollination of the musical arts with those of theater and dance. I have been to no other conference that brings all these disciplines together, and it was great to be among peers in related fields. For multimedia composers who write for theater and ballet, NPAC offered an opportunity to build new professional relationships. And in my role as a panelist and moderator one day, I found a new challenge in wrangling control of a conversation with a far broader set of opinions and experiences on both sides of the dais than I’m normally faced with in my frequent duties as a new music event host. The diversity of angles was refreshing.

I returned home from Denver with a renewed focus and excitement about what I’d like to accomplish this summer. That kind of clarity is a byproduct of the vibration that comes from being surrounded by several thousand art-makers and art-supporters, and I can’t think of the last time I was part of a specialized herd that large. It’s reassuring to know just how many of us there are out there, and the resulting inspiration is a drug like no other—even better than the best martini.

Today is my 28th birthday. And as often happens as one approaches this age, I’ve found myself inexorably turning into an Adult. Adults, it turns out, lead rather boring lives. Instead of whooping and hollering at concerts and happenings, we stand around at conferences and talk about solutions and best practices. Instead of snuggling together with friends on the bus, we shake hands and keep our distance. We get married. We have kids. We get wrapped up in our own concerns. Gone are the days when I would stay up all night to see an entire new music marathon (despite not one, but two opportunities to do so this spring) or spend five intense weeks with the same group of 60 people singing and making music with them across an entire continent.

So when I found myself here in Denver on Wednesday morning, I felt like I was at work. I was ostensibly present as a composer, but I knew that my other life as a business school student and an aspiring professional in arts philanthropy would dictate much of my activity for the week. I was ready to roll up my sleeves and confront the hard issues facing the performing arts in the United States. But be inspired? Not so much.

During AMC’s joint opening meeting with the American Composers Forum and Meet The Composer for the composers at the conference that morning, the microphone was opened up for questions and comments from the floor. Several attendees obliged and offered feedback and advice for the crowd. But one participant had a different kind of contribution to make. Noting the large conglomeration of musicians in the room, in a moment of spontaneity she stood up and offered to sing for those assembled.

There was an awkward pause. I have to admit that my skepticism was winning out. Sing for us? At a question and answer session? Are you kidding me? Who does that? Well. It turns out that she was going to improvise over a drone, but there were no instruments in the room. That is, except for our voices. So she asked for an F# and someone gave it to her, and for the next several minutes we hummed in static octaves while she wove a rapturous melody around our ears.

This sounds a bit trite in the re-telling, perhaps, but I can assure you that at the time it was not. Singing is a huge part of my life. I’ve sung in choruses since my senior year of high school, and in the shower for a long time before that. Singing is pretty much the reason I’m a musician at all. Singing that one note, breathing in and singing again, over and over, turned that morning’s session from work into play.

I’ve felt for a while that the greatest beneficiaries of the arts are not necessarily the audience members, but the participants. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to make the case for supporting the arts to people who are not themselves artists. Sure, you can talk about the arts as a driver for urban and regional economic development or their effect on kids’ math and science scores, but it’s impossible to communicate to someone who hasn’t experienced it the feeling that one gets from participating in genuine artistic creation. It’s a feeling that you’re alive again somehow, and a feeling of connection with the people around you on an almost physical dimension. It’s something rather foreign to Adult life.

I once had a conversation with a family member (also in business school) in which I really pushed the economic arguments for arts support mentioned above. I was throwing land values, crime reduction, tourism, the whole kitchen sink at him. Just as he was starting to get interested, I said, “but that’s a reason that the arts should be funded. I would never say that it’s the reason.” “So what’s the reason?” he asked. “Because they’re great,” I answered. Blank stare.

I did not come to Denver to be a member of Nirmala Rajasekar’s backing band, but I’m glad that’s the way things worked out. We all have to remind ourselves, each in our own way, what brought us here in the first place.

AMC’s exhibit booth located at East 7 and Main Street

NPAC feels like the most gigantic family reunion ever; the folks you see regularly are all in attendance, but so are the distant cousins you’ve heard all those stories about over the years, not to mention relatives you didn’t even know about. There is a fascinating person to meet around every corner! I am definitely adding Anna Deavere Smith and Jim Collins to my ultimate dinner party guest list.

Over the past three days we have been gathering together to concoct a plan for the future of the performing arts in the U.S. Needless to say, there are so many issues on the table, and they are being discussed with stunning passion and intelligence. I am amazed at the ability of the caucus facilitators (one for every 6-10 people) to condense these exchanges about audiences, performance space, inclusiveness, marketing, you-name-it, into a few short sentences that accurately reflect the previous several minutes of talk.

After we finish each session, that information is handed over to a group I now think of as the “Caucus Elves.” They work through the night, sifting through the data and identifying common themes and recurring threads that will comprise the next day’s conversation.

Most inspiring and unexpected is watching people working in radically different fields, such as the leader of a guerilla theater group and the development director of a major symphony orchestra (I kid you not), sitting together at the same table, finding that their wish lists for the future of their art forms are not so terribly different, and engaging in meaningful discussion about how to arrive at that situation. Regardless of the outcome of this larger process, positive change is clearly taking place.

Yesterday I attended an in-depth session on “Higher Education and the Real World of Practice,” two topics near and dear to me. The session, which included both small-group discussions and germane spiels from recognized experts, focused on training university and (especially) conservatory graduates with business acumen, administrative skills, and other “peripheral” skills besides playing technique, theory, and music history. Apparently 85 percent of music majors end up working “in the field,” although fewer than five percent are full-time professional performers. These are some pretty telling figures: Most music students will be doing something in music—teaching, administration, and so forth—but not what they went to college to do.

What I don’t know is how these numbers vary by institution. My time has been spent mostly in large-ish public universities, including two Big Ten schools. I wonder if the percentages I’ve seen are representative of such factories—or, by the same token, of conservatories, liberal arts schools, or Ivy League joints. Anecdotally, at least, they seem reflective of my own experience and my friends’.

I’m speaking conjecturally here, but if the session’s statistics are valid across the board, I have to wonder how the conservatories, which equip their graduates with (maybe) the best specialized training and (maybe) the poorest generalized training, can justify their programs. Practicing eight hours a day is a great way to become a virtuoso, but it’s also a great way to develop an eating disorder, and apparently it makes you only incrementally more likely to sustain a career as a full-time soloist or orchestral player than someone who only put in four hours per day. Conservatory training continues to carry a great deal of prestige among musicians; however, if most conservatory graduates (like most other music graduates) aren’t putting food on the table by playing three hundred nights a year, maybe their curricula should be reevaluated accordingly. In any case, more preparation to handle logistical and managerial duties can only help music students no matter where they’re enrolled.

Colin Holter Photo by Randy Nordschow

Four caucus meetings are taking place during NPAC (two down, two to go); these are the conference participants’ opportunities to voice our thoughts on the “challenges and opportunities” facing the arts in America today. When we assembled in smallish groups for the first of these caucuses, we began with a preliminary eight-point vision statement. After a few tweakings, most of these points seemed to gain widespread consensus. I found this list of goals for the future of the performing arts especially heartening in one particular respect: Most of these aspirations dealt with the packaging rather than the content of the art we produce.

A light bulb went on above my head some time ago regarding the way new music is made and promulgated in the US; NPAC has, so far, only increased its wattage. We don’t have to change anything about the way we write music–we just have to change the way we talk about it. I’m convinced that every bit of the ego, eccentricity, and bloody-mindedness that characterize our content can be retained without alienating a single listener as long as every drop of condescension, selfishness, and diva-hood is wrung out of our packaging. In fact, kowtowing to audience-development pressure in the way you compose may actually damage your work’s reception: Listeners, especially listeners under 65, can smell inauthenticity a mile away. Why do you think most baby boomers would rather shell out for a Springsteen concert than a lukewarm orchestral premiere by a composer commissioned on the basis of how few people his music will offend?

Be as esoteric as you want as long as you have the right touch when it comes to publicizing and describing your art. Easier said than done, of course—but that’s what I’m here at NPAC to learn.

Colin Holter Photo by Trevor Hunter

I just arrived at NPAC, a Major Arts Event about which you’ll be able to read many impressions from many observers on NewMusicBox this week. I feel like a small-town girl in a Busby Berkeley picture. NPAC’s enormity is such that I can’t voice my thoughts about it in prose; instead, enjoy these stunned, overwhelmed bullet points:

• If you’re ever on a really turbulent early-morning flight, ask the airline personnel to seat you next to Middle-Aged Midwestern Guy, who will be more than happy to cackle and nudge you through what will seem to be your imminent demise.
• This event is gigantic. The convention center is swarming with composers, many of whom I recognize from (decades-old, in some cases) head shots but am just now meeting in person for the first time.
• Weirder yet, it seems that for each composer there’s a small handful of publisher reps, arts administrators, agents, tour organizers, etc. It’s comforting to see that the support structure for new music numbers so many people…even if many of them are trying to sell you something.

I promise next time I’ll have a normal paragraph with a beginning, middle, and end. Until then.

Hey, what’s going on in there? Denver welcomes 3,000+ National Performing Arts Convention attendees. Photo courtesy NPAC-Denver Convention and Visitors Bureau

If you can’t find your favorite performing artist or arts presenter this week, check to see if they have packed their bags and headed for Denver. Don’t worry, they’ll return to you at the end of the week—hopefully armed with some new ideas and new connections formed during the National Performing Arts Convention 2008.

Designing this gathering was a huge endeavor that was years in the making. Now we are at the gates, and Denver has signaled they are ready for all 3,000 of us to land. During the week we’ll be putting our heads together across performing arts disciplines to hash out how we can work together effectively as a larger unit, where our focus should rest and what our goals should be, as well as strategies for achieving the aims we set. It’s more than a generalized hope; a major part of the convention will be a highly organzied 21st Century Town Meeting: Building a Performing Arts Community, complete with four lead-in caucuses and American Idol-style voting opportunities.

In addition, there will be sessions—many, many sessions. Break-out groups, workshops, and art-making sessions led by guest artists. (If you’ve ever wanted to see the executive director of your local orchestra get in touch with his inner hip hop artist, this might be your chance.) All this and plenty of meetings, exhibits, networking opportunities, live performances (it’s why we do what we do, after all), and a few parties.

Since many readers are special fans of the new music scene, you might want to jot down these particular highlights in the conference programming, including a special orientation to help you get your bearings and the presentation of the preliminary results of Taking Note, an in-depth survey of new music activity in the United States.

There’s so much going on this week in Denver, in fact, that whether you’re actually in town for the gathering or not, you’re bound to miss something. We’ll do our best to keep you up to date with daily reports posted here on NewMusicBox, so check back often. Also, ArtsJournal will be featuring commentary from 20 attendees on their own NPAC blog, and I’ll be trying to keep up with the action by posting those reports over at Mind the Gap.

Buckle up, kids. This promises to be quite a ride.

Frederick Douglass (Donnie Ray Albert) speaks to a crowd including John Brown (James Maddalena). Photo by Douglass Hamer, courtesy Lyric Opera of Kansas City

John Brown, the opera, must have evolved; it certainly was not a product of intelligent design. No intelligent composer would embark upon a course that requires so many years and so many twists and turns. So be forewarned: this is not a “how-to” essay.

When I was thirteen my father wrote a play about John Brown that was produced on a national radio broadcast. Much later, as a composer, when I finally had the nerve to write an opera, I naturally thought of the old abolitionist. I asked my father if he would transform the play into a libretto. I was living in London at the time, and before I had a chance to work out the structure and operatic changes with him, my father sent me a complete libretto. Alas, the quality of his writing was not even close to what it had been in his younger years, so I gave up the project. I based my first opera on Moliere’s Tartuffe, writing my own libretto. Its immediate success emboldened me to try John Brown again, this time acting as my own librettist.

Because Brown is such a controversial figure I spent over a year doing research and holding readings of several drafts of a libretto. I consulted with the foremost biographer of John Brown, Stephen Oates; he agreed to read the libretto, correcting any unacceptable compromises I had made with historical fact. (Historical dramas must always telescope events, times and places.)

Finally I began the music. The first notes I composed were an original melody for Brown’s favorite hymn, “Blow ye the trumpet.” Why didn’t I use the existing tune? Because research in several libraries of old hymns did not turn up any melody that matched the words for the hymn quoted at the end of Oates’s biography, To Purge This Land with Blood. [Ed. Note: “Confessions of A Hymn Bandit,” an article Mechem wrote for the Spring 2004 issue of Chorus America’s magazine Voice addresses this issue in greater detail.]

The subject of this opera is so serious and dramatic—the story of John Brown is also the story of why the Civil War was fought—I decided to compose directly for voices and orchestra. Most opera composers, including me, usually write an extended piano-vocal score first, then orchestrate that.

I finished the full score of Act I in the early eighties and had it copied by hand. (Computers could not print music yet.) During these years I also had to make a reduced orchestral score for Tartuffe, as well as writing various choral pieces on commission to help pay for the copyists. By the time the Act One score and parts were copied and I was well into Act II, it became clear that hand-copying was doomed. My copyist, the incomparable Peter Simcich, was already familiar with computers, so I encouraged him to learn the new music notation program Score, and to redo Act I.

Meanwhile, time was flying by and I had some of the choruses from John Brown published as separate pieces: “Dan-u-el” and “Blow ye the trumpet,” both with G. Schirmer, with whom I had a contract for the opera. Composers might be interested in the nature of the contract I negotiated with the publisher. I furnished print-ready scores and parts, in return for which I receive 2/3 of rental and performance fees until I have recovered my expenses. At that time the split reverts to the usual 50-50.

Several years later I completed the full score for all three acts and began to make a piano reduction. That was the most painful part of the whole project. To reduce a complex orchestral score to a piano score is like trying to reduce a multi-colored, wall-sized mural to a 3×5-inch black and white snapshot. Only a lot harder.

While waiting for the opera to be commissioned I had an offer from a consortium of choral and orchestral groups in southern California to commission a five-movement suite from the opera, which I called Songs of The Slave. This was a godsend. It gave me a paid opportunity to try out parts of the opera and to use the recording to interest opera companies in commissioning John Brown. I already had a demo tape using my young friends Deborah Voigt, Mark Delavan, Helen Dilworth, and David Okerlund singing some of the arias with piano. Schirmer published the suite, which has received over sixty performances. Its warm reception encouraged me not to give up on the opera.

The orchestral parts of John Brown were extracted and I carefully proofread them. By 1992 the opera’s first version was ready to market. About time! It had already taken twice as long to prepare as Tartuffe had. The latter, like my two more recent operas, required about three years, including writing the libretto and preparing final scores and parts. The difference lies not only in the circumstances already described, but because of John Brown‘s size. The other operas have just a little over two hours of music; John Brown came in at three hours and a quarter!

John Brown (James Maddalena) comforts his son Oliver Brown (Patrick Miller). Photo by Douglass Hamer, courtesy Lyric Opera of Kansas City.

I knew John Brown was too long, but decided to put off the cutting until I had a commission and a guarantee of performances. I believed that it might be wise to get some input about cuts from the commissioning company. After all, I would be asking a company to commission an already completed opera. That’s not the way it’s usually done, I know, but I have seen too many commissioned operas fail because the composer was carrying out someone else’s ideas. When I write such a time-consuming work as an opera, I want to pick the subject and work it out in my own way.

John Brown is probably the most controversial figure in American history. At separate times, two large companies were poised to commission the opera but backed out when they encountered opposition to the subject matter. One opera director said that he would not be able to fund the work because his board told him that “John Brown was not a very nice man.” As if Boris Godunov, Macbeth and many other operatic subjects were “nice men”!

In 1993 I was finally offered a commission, and a workshop was planned for the following year. I made sure to get the artistic director to agree that after we consulted on how much to cut, I would have the final word on where the cuts would be. Unfortunately, during the workshop rehearsal period he reneged on our agreement, so after the workshop I withdrew the opera.

I had other work to do, and put John Brown away. A year later I looked it over with a more objective eye and was able to cut 45 minutes out of the opera quite painlessly. But that required an enormous amount of work not only for me but for the engraver. Everything had to be rearranged—vocal score, full score and all the parts. I put it off for a long time, until about 2002, when Lyric Opera Kansas City’s general and artistic directors asked to commission the work. Once again the engraver and I sprang into action. LOKC and I came to an agreement to premiere John Brown in 2006 to open the new opera house in Kansas City’s proposed performing arts center.

But again there was a delay. Funding for the PAC dried up. After a year or two of waiting, Lyric Opera decided to go ahead with the premiere in the old house to celebrate the company’s fiftieth anniversary in 2008. But the pit in the old house was smaller than I had written for, so I scaled back the instrumentation somewhat. I originally scored the opera as follows: 3333 4331, timpani, 4 percussion, harp, celesta and strings. I now eliminated the contrabassoon, two percussion players and the celesta. At the same time I cut another ten minutes, bringing the duration down to about 2 hours, 18 minutes. More work, more expense, but these were good changes.

As the rehearsal dates approached I encountered another problem. The musicians’ union had reduced by about twenty the number of players who were allowed in the pit. I certainly sympathize with players who have to work in cramped quarters, but it meant that my opera would suffer from string anemia: 9-7-5-4-2 instead of the 14-12-10-8-6 I had written for.

But finally: the glorious payoff. All the work and waiting were worth it. Lyric Opera Kansas City gave John Brown a magnificent send-off. Ward Holmquist, artistic director and conductor, and Evan Luskin, general director assembled a fine cast and chorus. James Maddalena was a great John Brown and Donnie Ray Albert a thrilling Frederick Douglass. The founder of the company said that there had never been such a prolonged ovation in Lyric’s 50-year history. Maestro Holmquist tamed the brass and encouraged the strings. Director Kristine McIntyre splendidly developed the characters and handled the large crowd scenes masterfully.

But there is one hurdle that we may never get over. As Stephen Oates writes in the preface to his biography: “Because [John Brown] is controversial, anybody who ventures forth with a study of his life—no matter how fair-minded and well-researched it may be—is going to encounter a number of readers, critics, and professional historians who have already made up their minds that Brown was either (1) a vicious fanatic, a horse thief, and a maniac or (2) the greatest abolitionist hero in history, and who will furiously attack any book that does not argue their point of view.”

Most of the reviews of the opera have been very generous. Paul Horsley in the Kansas City Star even described it as “The sort of magical success that composers and musicians dream of.” But there will always be some viewers who simply cannot abide seeing a sympathetic treatment of the man they have been taught all their lives to hate.

As reviews continue to trickle in—the magazines have yet to come—I see several misunderstandings that I want to correct. First, it did not take me twenty years to compose John Brown. As I’ve tried to make clear in this essay, much of that time was taken up by delays and technical problems. Second, I did not rely heavily on folk music or common hymns. With the exception of “Once to Every Man and Nation” and a bit of “Let Us Break Bread Together,” the hymns, prayers, spirituals and “folk-song arias” are all of my own composition, even when some of the words come from an existing source. They were tailor-made to advance and catalyze the story. Third, the parallels between Brown and Moses, David and even Christ are not inventions of mine; they have been drawn by Emerson, Thoreau, and countless supporters of Brown ever since he was hanged.

I hope that my opera will help dispel the ignorance about the real John Brown. In the last few years five new John Brown biographies have been published, all of which supply the same historical and human context as I have tried to dramatize in my opera. But as I have stated in my Afterword to the libretto, “I have from the beginning been acutely aware that an opera lives or dies by the quality of its music. Here I gladly give up words and turn over the consideration of that enigmatic and timeless old man to the hearts and minds of my listeners.”</p