albadger | Monday musings for a Tuesday morning (Reply)

Water Heater Saga (I'm not abusing the word "saga" any worse than iPhone game manufacturers and paranormal teen romance novels do) is now complete -- I returned the expensive Takagi tankless unit for nearly a full refund (a small restocking fee). Takagi -- high-tech water heaters and erotic bear artwork. The man can do anything! I've got that right, don't I? Takagi?

Monday night was the first rehearsal for the short play I'm going to be in next month. A three-hander, I'm a good-natured drunken beatnik/hippie poet. Charming young performers in the other 2 roles, it should be good. I'm a little worried about the director, though... he's noticed that the thing is set in 1974, and he's my age, so he thinks that, instead of drunk, we should be high. Which ruins a lot of the playwright's imagery, but heck, I'm not directing this. Also, we need to figure out how to climb up and down a boulder, and they won't let us bring a boulder onto the stage I suspect.

Driving up to San Rafael for the rehearsal, I listened to Act 1 of the new opera Two Boys from the Metropolitan Opera live feed. I don't at all wonder why all new operas suck, but I do wonder why they all suck in exactly the same way. Just as with Dolores Claiborne, the SF Opera premiere earlier this month, the orchestral and choral work was just fine -- Two Boys has some great choruses symbolizing the chaos and freedom of the internet, which would be great in a concert -- but the vocal lines are shapeless, slow and completely undramatic. The singers are mostly American or British, but sound like Pink Lady struggling through a foreign text, sounding it out phonetically, no concept of the meaning. Every sung note is simultaneously random and prissy.

And this has been the standard for new opera composition for sixty years now.

Yes, there have been classics written since World War II -- Rake's Progress and Nixon in China spring to mind -- but it's mostly a wasteland of drab, dead lumps. Doesn't have to be.

Actually I have a suggestion. A big problem is that people who can write tunes don't know how to orchestrate anymore, and people who can write for an orchestra can't come up with tunes. Fine, the orchestration is the hard work. Try this: keep the instrumental lines of, say, Dolores Claiborne, throw out the vocals entirely, and then hire a real songwriter like, oh, Cyndi Lauper to come in and write new music for the singers to go over the top. It couldn't possibly fit worse than the current vocal lines do, and you might actually get a real aria, or some real drama, out of it.

Of course, nobody listens to me, which I know because if they did, they would have put on Mercadante's il Bravo set in the lawless Old West. Which would rock.