Quote from YouTube comment

"It's about voice first, otherwise it wouldn't be opera." josephlemon

I wish someone composing today would get this.

Advice

I think I stopped giving advice to opera composers far too soon.  Please try to understand.  The opera isn't about the orchestra.  The opera isn't about the plot.  The opera isn't about the significance or lack of significance of the story elements.  The opera isn't about the staging, much as we like to carry on about it.  The opera is about the singing.  If the singing stinks, the opera stinks.  Grasp the largest object near you and pound that into your brain.

Chick flicks revisited

I'm sure you remember vividly when I said opera is a chick flick. This is back when I was still giving advice to composers. Well, in the March issue of Vanity Fair there is an article by James Wolcott giving a man's perspective on chick flicks. He quotes the Playboy list of the 10 worst chick flicks of all time:

10. The Notebook (haven't seen it)
9. Sleepless in Seattle
8. Fried Green Tomatoes
7. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (haven't seen it)
6. Dirty Dancing
5. The Bridges of Madison County
4. Bridget Jones's Diary (laughed)
3. Steel Magnolias (hated it, hate movies with fatal diseases except Dark Victory)
2. Ghost (haven't seen it)
1. Beaches (I've always heard it was bad so didn't go see it)

I notice none of these are in my top 25 chick flicks list.

Bridget Jones's Diary with its Jane Austen plot would definitely make an opera. Dirty Dancing? Maybe. Opera singers would have to dance.

He distinguishes two distinct genres: the women's movie usually starring Bette Davis and the chick flick with modern (Sex and the City) women. Legally Blonde, which might make a good opera, is the latter. Now Voyager is the former.

The transition between the two styles came with a series of movies starring Barbra Streisand, principally The Way We Were. Now this could make a great opera. The others so far have been comedies, and composers today don't seem to want to write comic operas. I think this is misguided.

The desirable thing about either one of these genres is that they include strong roles for women. A chick flick isn't going to be about a prostitute who sacrifices herself. It's more likely to be about a prostitute who gets the guy. Or throws over the guy and goes to law school.

Philip Glass worked very hard getting women into his Appomattox opera, but the result was forced and confused.

Think chick flick.

Advice to Composers

I am tired of my advice to opera composers series. I wasn't saying a lot.

1. Aim lower. We're just folks. We might enjoy some catchy tunes or lyrical moments not imported from popular songs.

2. Put in a love story. Those lyrical moments work best when accompanied by love.

3. Learn how to compose for singers. Consider this a goal worth aspiring to. We're here to listen to people sing, usually sopranos and tenors, but other people, too.

4. Write arias that can be taken out of context and performed in concerts and on recordings.

5. Sex sells. There may have been a time when political posturing did, but there's no evidence this is still true. The larger political issues are all settled, and I don't really see an opera about capitalism. I think to excite the imagination it has to be an active contemporary issue that stirs the passions.

6. Sell your opera to the public, not to the Met board or your academic colleagues. If the objective is your academic prestige, then please, just skip it.

We can consider this subject on hiatus.

Top 25 Chick Flicks

Remember I said opera is a chick flick. Here are 25 to choose from.

1. Morocco (1930)
In top hat and tails as Amy Jolly, Marlene Dietrich has never been more worldly than when she seduces men and women alike with her act at a nightclub in Mogador—and never more womanly than when she casts aside her cool for the love of Gary Cooper's foreign legionnaire Tom Brown. Directed by Josef von Sternberg. Starring Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper.

Recitative and aria

An opera includes other things besides recitatives and arias. It will usually have an instrumental prelude and may have other purely instrumental interludes such as ballets. There may be a chorus.

Recitative was invented by the Florentine camerata, but aria is forever for aria is song. The division into recitative and aria is the difference between action and reflection. L'Orfeo of Monteverdi is the first true opera because he instinctively understood the need to break up the action oriented recitative with other more traditional musical numbers like dances, ensembles and arias.

The balance and emphasis has changed throughout opera's 400 year history. The great Italian tradition has always emphasized the aria. The form might change--ostinato in the early phase, florid da capo throughout the long Neapolitan style, the slow section followed by fast section form of bel canto, the free form of Puccini--but the opera exists for the arias.

The balance shifts from generation to generation. In Handel's time the lyric expression of the reflective arias had expanded to virtually smother the action. Gluck was part of the generation that searched for simplicity in art, though this trend began first in France with Rousseau. Because this urge for naturalness and the romanticized rural was felt first in France, Gluck's return to the primacy of action over reflection in opera resonated much more with the French. Gluck tried to hide the distinction between recitative and aria but didn't actually succeed in doing away with it.

Wagner subsumed all to the gigantic orchestral tone poem with singing, a style that seems to create endless, formless arias with no speechlike elements.

The recitative and aria dichotomy is a part of the words and music discussion--prima la musica, etc. The purpose of the invention of recitative was to rebalance the relationship of words and music toward word dominance. Music must conform to the requirements of the text. In aria the priorities are reversed. The words guide the expression, but it is the music that determines the form and contour of the aria.

Wagner destroyed the distinction, indeed he destroyed the entire phenomenon of recitative. He eliminated the text repetitions that tell you you are in an aria. He inflated the orchestra to the point that it carries the music much more than the singers. Everything is extended. Everything is aria. Unrelenting continuity replaced alteration of action and reflection.

In modern times composers can't seem to bear the inflated orchestra of Wagner, the slowing of time that drags his operas into four and five hour performances but retain his formlessness in a much more shrunken form that is closer to constant recitative than aria. There are still no text repetitions, and nothing is extended.

Richard Strauss' through-composed operas while seeming to imitate Wagner, often include extended patter recitatives, as for example most of the role of Baron Ochs. Strauss is still distinguishing action and reflection, recitative and aria, but the transitions are extremely subtle. Strauss is one of the last composers who still knows how to compose an aria.

It is the inability of modern composers to compose true arias that dooms most modern operas.

It is curious to think of Glass' opera Orphée in this context. It's almost as if he set out to create a sound track for a beloved film, in this case Jean Cocteau's Orphée, since he is already familiar with the process of writing for the movies. The French version of the film runs 112 minutes, a length that feels very similar to the opera. Then Glass decided to set the voices to music. There are alterations in the pacing between the film and the opera, but the overall pace is constant. The text brings lyrical moments, but the expected extension of the moment into aria does not come. This is from Philip Glass of all people. The artist who most wants to alter our perception of time does not.

It is the lyrical vocal outburst that makes it opera. Modern opera fails because the moment of extension, the moment of greatest emotion where the glory of the voice takes us to another realm never comes.

Thus the rage about John Adams' lousy librettos. John Adams is one of the few who can actually write a decent aria. But what good is reflection without action?

If I were giving advice, I would say write an aria for your opera. Think of it as something that will stand on its own outside the opera. Think of it showing off the voice of your singer. Golijov's best work is written for Dawn Upshaw. Aim high.

Composing Opera

My interest in teaching composers to write for opera singers was aroused by listening to the singers in Sophie’s Choice struggle with their parts. It was not too hard for them to sing, it was too easy. In fact, the composer probably composed it for himself to sing.

I’m going to write only about composing an opera to be performed by an opera company made up of trained opera singers. I am making a possibly absurd assumption--that you are composing for the ages, that you want your opera to be performed in 10, 20 or maybe even 100 years.

Dear composer,
If you don’t really like to listen to opera singers, if that sound makes you cringe, then please don’t compose an opera. Please. Do a musical instead.

If you are still reading, perhaps you still want to compose an opera. Print a large sign and hang it near your keyboard: “I am not an opera singer.” It doesn’t matter how it sounds when I sing it.

Then move on to the list of Fachs. I’m printing an abbreviated list here, together with ranges and tessituras. The ranges are from Wikipedia, but I made up the tessitura for each Fach, so feel free to criticize. Within each big category based on range, lyric and dramatic specialties will be based on sound.

Coloratura soprano.
Range: From middle C to the F two-and-a-half octaves above middle C.
This Fach divides into lyric and dramatic coloratura, but the ranges are the same. The tessitura is E above middle C to high C. The other notes are extensions.

Soprano
Range: From middle C to the C two octaves above middle C.
This Fach divides into lyric and dramatic sopranos, The tessitura is E above middle C to G above the treble clef. The range of a dramatic soprano can go below middle C and the tessitura goes down to middle C. The other notes are extensions.

Mezzo soprano
Range: From the G below middle C to the B two octaves above middle C
This Fach divides into mezzo and contralto. The tessitura is middle C to F at the top of the treble clef. The other notes are extensions. Contralto roles will extend down to F.

Countertenor
Theoretically the same as a contralto. Britten wrote for a countertenor in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and you can too if you want. Traditionally these are roles that were written for castrated men who had voices that were similar to the female voices described above, except I am not aware of a castrato who achieved the true coloratura range. Today they are normal men singing falsetto. I suggest selecting a specific singer to compose for this.


Tenor
Range: From the B below low C to the C an octave above middle C (C to c'). This Fach also divides into lyric and dramatic, and the tessitura is E to G. A high C is a much bigger deal for a modern tenor who is forbidden to go into falsetto than it is for a soprano. Don’t think of them as exactly an octave apart. If you want a lot of very high notes, compose for a Rossini tenor, if you can find one.

Baritone
Range: From the A below low C to the Ab above middle C (A to ab' )
There are buffo, lyric and dramatic baritones, and the tessitura low C to E.

Bass
Range: From the E one-and-a-half octaves below middle C to the F above middle C (E to f'). The tessitura is A to E.

Go to your list of characters, and put each one into one of these classifications. Decide if the sentiments of the character are mainly lyric or dramatic.

Compose most of the notes within the tessitura, but place the notes all over. Write up and down in the voice. When you want a heavy dramatic effect, write a note in the upper extension, but clearly distinguish how high to make it based on Fach. A mezzo will begin to sound dramatic at a lower pitch than a soprano. Emphasize the upper part of the tessitura for sopranos and tenors. Put in low notes for mezzos, baritones and basses. Be sure the singer gets to use all of their voice, possibly omitting only some of the highest extensions, since this will make the role easier for them to sing. This will make the role easier to sing. They are trained to use all of their voices, so you should, too.

I won’t say what the specific style should be. Pointillism, singing with a lot of giant leaps, popular with the Second Viennese school, is not hard to sing if you know what you’re doing and the notes obey the outlines shown above. Compose whatever you want, but don’t just stick to the five little notes you can sing.

If you have particular singers you want to compose for, by all means do. Begin by asking them which Fach they belong to, and then look it up. If they don’t know, reconsider using them. Don’t compose an opera for Sting.

Traditionally certain Fachs play certain types. The heroine is a soprano, the hero a tenor and the villain a baritone. If you are composing for specific singers, you may want to rearrange the traditional setup and make the heroine a mezzo, for instance. By all means do.

The Ghosts of Versailles is a modern opera that is very well written for singers. Britten had a lyric tenor who lived in, so his operas all feature a lyric tenor. This lyric tenor knew what made his voice sound good and made sure the roles suited it. Your job is to make the singers sound good. Modern composers are able to imagine a high lyric soprano like Dawn Upshaw and seem to compose everything for them. Try to branch out. Learn to like fatter voices, too. Please.

I have kept this very basic because that’s how bad it is.

Composing for voice

My copy of Paul Barker's Composing for Voice has arrived. He is obviously knowledgable, but his ideas are not well developed. In fact, he has a hard time carrying an idea past one or two sentences before going on to the next one.

There is an idea that interests me--should a composer write for a specific singer? The answer, it would appear, is yes and no.

Philip Gossett's four composers (Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi) didn't hesitate to compose for a specific singer and modify their music to suit the person currently filling the role. In situations where the singer is close to the standard range and tessitura for his Fach (classification--look it up in Wikipedia), this is not a problem. They were thinking about success this week, certainly not further out than this year, and not about posterity. They weren't thinking about twenty-first century productions and problems of casting.

So when Bellini composed for Rubini he wasn't thinking about the fact that Rubini was a one off. No one else can actually be Rubini. Nor do they want to. Falsetto high notes have long been completely out of style. Bellini's presence in the repertoire is negatively impacted by the fact that the tenor started out with this freakish high range which cannot be cast today. Professor Gossett went into detail about the problems of transposing this music so that it still works in duets with the soprano. Very difficult.

Barker recommends working with specific singers and includes interview material with singers who have collaborated with composers. This is great stuff and the comments are excellent. But I was hoping for more material about expectations. He shows ranges for the Fachs and mentions the concept of tessitura, but that's it. I was hoping for more specific information about what the standard tessitura generally is. That means the range where 90% of the notes should lie, the comfortable part of the voice for that Fach. This singer you are working with--is she (all his examples are women) fully representative of her category or is she a bit freakish? It seems to me you should be able to say for each Fach these are the notes they will usually sing and these are the extensions, the outer extremes that can be used occasionally.

Yes, write for a specific singer, but try to be aware of how close this one is to the ideal for her type. Then the music will work for other people, too.

I have been imagining myself in Paul Barker’s class. I was always a very annoying student. He would say, “the trend may be seen as a logical continuation of a process engendered by Verdi’s Macbeth (1847), when he attempted to notate a fuller dramatic conception of the vocal performance.” Then he would immediately go on to another subject with no explanation, as he always seems to do, and I would say, “Excuse me, professor. I’ve never looked at the score to Macbeth. What the hell are you talking about?” This is perhaps my crotchety old lady persona, and I wouldn’t actually have sworn at him. However, I don’t have a library handy that has a score to Macbeth so I guess I’ll never know what is meant here. I wouldn’t mind this so much if he didn’t do it so often. If you’re writing a book like this, I recommend hiring an ignorant editor that makes you explain everything.

Just how bad the situation is with regard to composing for singers can be seen when he says, “…I have never encountered a summary of the traditions and details about the underlay of text in scores….” He goes on to lay them out, and his explanation seems acceptable. He mentions how hard it can be to read vocal music because of the way the text is added to the music.

He writes from the perspective of the twentieth century where everything is precisely composed, and the performer is expected to precisely reproduce the written page. This is actually not the tradition of solo vocal music where the performer is expected to produce an interpretation, not just a performance. Perhaps awareness of this fact is disappearing everywhere except pop.

He discusses extended vocal techniques, things outside of normal vocalization, and cites a number of people who do them but without any description. He does explain the concept of vocal harmonics first propounded by Stockhausen. He says it can take up to 6 months to teach a singer how to do this. Clearly he’s going off in directions I don’t necessarily want to follow. I don’t see a reason to mention these things without either discussing them more thoroughly or citing relevant footnotes. There is a two page bibliography which might provide a wider explanation of some of these facts, but you’d have to read them all to find out.

There is quite a lot of writing about the relationship between text and music. He criticizes singers for making their vowels unintelligible on high notes with no apparent awareness that once the voice is above the formants, distinguishing vowels is simply not possible.

There are a couple of excellent charts, including this continuum: noise - shouting - speaking - sprechgesang - crooning - recitative - singing - prolonged melisma - vocalize. This is virtually a circle.

Another excellent chart is the one in the chapter on “Considerations of Style” called “Variants of vocal style and the effects on singers.” On the vertical axis are 1. Registers, 2. Tone, 3. Words, 4. Rhythm, 5. Proximity (this means the distance from the audience to the performer and extends from immediate closeness to amphitheater distance.) The horizontal axis is “Underdeveloped technique,” “Bel canto principles,” “Over-refined technique.” He then places a number of specific composers in the continuum. Britten is C, bel canto, in all categories. Does this explain the popularity of Britten as an opera composer? This chart could be discussed at great length.

Composing for the voice is a much broader topic than the narrower composing opera. An opera presumes opera singers, presumably the same people who will be singing Puccini on other days.

My own approach would probably be to proceed from the perspective of style. I admit the possibility of all manner of style elements and approaches, but I insist the composer must first choose. Jumping from style to style would be discouraged.

He discusses the growth of the orchestra over the course of the nineteenth century and its effect on singers. It’s not exactly a bad book. It’s as though the light has been turned on, but the exposed space has not been sufficiently explored. A set of appropriate footnotes would probably be as big as the book itself which is about the same size as the dual language edition of Odes to Common Things by Neruda. It’s definitely not worth $95.
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Conspiracy Theory

What of opera as conspiracy theory? How about a JFK assassination opera? Was Lee Harvey Oswald really a double agent for the CIA? Maybe John Adams should do an opera with this as the subject. It would have actual characters, unlike most of his stuff, though the story isn't about love.

Of course, the problem with a JFK assassination plot is that there are too many options. I might go for a murder by the CIA plot. My favorite has always been the murder by Castro theory. That would be very amusing.

Blogging

I am pleased to read that Anna Netrebko has gone ahead with her Austrian citizenship. It is also pleasing to realize that Austria still values music so much that it grants citizenship so easily.

Though I said opera is not a newsreel, I am aware that this is something of a goal for the minimalists. I think stories can come from reality, even present day reality, but I think the story has to stand alone.

My own ideas are evolving. I'm trying to decide what the path forward for opera is, and I feel very concerned that the powerful people in this field are generally misguided when it comes to new operas. Read the Cambridge companion to twentieth-century opera and notice how few of these operas you have actually seen or are ever likely to see.

I'm convinced that the singer plays a much larger role in determining what operas become standard than is ever realized. Golijov writes for Dawn Upshaw. This is a very smooth move. Find a singer you love and write an opera that will make her a star. It will work.

Bel Canto

I have thought of a book that would make a great, though controversial, opera: Ann Patchett's Bel Canto. It has singing. It has characters. It has relevance.

Relevance

In Opera News for August is an article titled “Is Opera still Relevant?” My immediate reaction is the question, “When was opera ever relevant?” Who said opera was supposed to be relevant?

There’s nothing at all relevant about people standing around singing. Opera is about love, and we who love the opera are there to experience passion, not relevance. In fact, I would even go so far as to say it is the incessant desire for relevance that kills a good many new operas today.

His examples are perfect. In Death of Klinghoffer, Adams is working overtime to be relevant. Ditto the more recent Doctor Atomic. He just leaves out even the tiniest representation of human emotions. With him it’s all relevance. So there should be no surprise that no one wants to revive Klinghoffer.

Verdi was probably the most political of opera composers, but it is the Verdi who writes about human relationships that is “relevant” to our ears and hearts: Rigoletto, La Traviata, Aida, La Forza del Destino, Otello, Falstaff.

I agree that Dead Man Walking was one of the best of the recent efforts, but its place in the world wouldn’t have been improved by trying to preach its relevance. It needs to appeal to everyone, not just to those who are against capital punishment. The opera is great because it is about people, because it is about love. Dead Man brought us passion and tears as few modern operas do.

Opera is to make us laugh and cry, to feel as much passion as each of us is capable. We are trying to make it, or we should be trying to make it more relevant to our hearts, not our politics.

Whither contemporary music?

The dichotomy of classical and pop music began with the twentieth century. Prior to that time the split would have been between professional music and folk music. In any era there was a basic continuity of style across the board. The scale, the harmonies, the importance of tonality, the rhythmic organization, all these elements applied to any music of an era. Classical composers in these times made use of and developed within the idea of music in their context.

With the rise of rag time African-American influence gave rise to styles of music of a strongly ethnic character which nevertheless transcended cultural limitations and spread around the world. Occasionally a composer came along who tried to incorporate black style elements into classical structures. This was a vogue in the twenties in Paris, for instance, but in general there has been little enthusiasm for this.

As the context of music in a culture changed to one based on African-American elements, simple harmonies and powerful, driving rhythmic materials, the relationship of classical composition to its context completely changed. This situation has progressed to the point where in the twenty-first century there is no cultural context for classical music. The music of the public mind and spirit is never the material used to compose larger compositions.

What is classical music in contemporary society? It is a body of museum-like institutions which revive the glorious achievements of past generations – we treasure Mozart more than his contemporaries did – and it is an intellectual activity that often seems closer to the world of experimental visual arts than to the institutions devoted to music, either popular or classical.

Wagner seemed to want to explain almost more than he wanted to compose, and since his time what we know as classical music seems to require a theoretical construct prior to the setting down of any actual notes. The music is never justification enough. Schoenberg did this. Messiaen did this. And apparently the minimalists also do this.

I have long suspected that minimalism was a direct response to serialism, and sure enough, that is the case. A principle of serialism is the rejection of repetition, and the minimalists responded by embracing and emphasizing repetition. The reason you don't really like either one of them is because both ignore the way the mind works, the way any human's brain organizes musical materials and sustains his interest in them, an organizing principle that works on the combination of repetition AND variation. Repetition creates anticipation, and variation creates interest and emotion.

The separation between public mind and classical composition creates a dissociation and detachment from the classical community that continues to increase with the passage of time. This leaves a chasm in our musical lives. No one is creating music for both our minds and our emotions, leaving us to search repertoire of the past for this.

Oswaldo Golijov's work really does seem different. He is making music based not in some arcane theory, but based in the music – we are strongly inclined to say popular music – of his own life. His materials are musical in origin. Perhaps he will start a trend.

Why Wagner is a better composer than you are

The music of Richard Wagner is not really that tough. This is one of the main reasons for his enormous continuing popularity.

He takes the elements of obsession with tonality used by all his contemporaries and does something very different with it. He abandons cadences, for one thing, and puts them only at the end of scenes. He makes everything a secondary dominant which in turn makes everything constantly modulating from one place to another. When you're listening to it, this is not hard to figure out.

Then he carefully invents memorable themes, which he ostentatiously calls Leitmotivs, and peppers them throughout his huge movements. When listening to him, you are constantly hearing music that sounds familiar. Some people think they have to study these so they will clearly remember the assigned associations for each Leitmotiv. This idea was not invented by Wagner. He wanted you to recognize the melodies because he designed them to be easy to remember.

At every step of the way he is giving you something to anticipate and hold on to. Admittedly Philip Glass is making the whole thing a lot simpler by just repeating exactly the same music over and over. I don't think you have to go quite that far. It isn't a sin against proper modern composition to give me something to hold on to. Make this easier to get. Give me a hint every now and then, because if I don't get it, most of the other people won't either.

Opera is about love

This is a continuation of a previous blog.

Operas in the A list, the core repertoire of all opera houses, are all about love.

It began with love. The first operas were written on the story of Orpheus who descends into hell to try to bring back his beloved Euridice. Operas on this plot include both endings: he always looks back, but sometimes love goes wrong and she does not return to earth, and other times the gods are so charmed by him that they reward him anyway.

Mozart always writes about love. Figaro is full of love: the countess mourns its end, and Figaro and Susanna celebrate its beginning. Cherubino loves the countess; the countess still loves her husband, who is wild for Susanna; Susanna and Figaro love each other. Barbarina loves Cherubino. It’s almost too complicated to describe, but amazingly it all ends well.

Don Giovanni is about love in another sense. That the Don is drawn to the women he pursues cannot be doubted. He is seen as a kind of personification of evil because he cannot live within the confines of traditional love. This is a difficult perspective to maintain in modern times—thus my suggestion to portray him as the always randy Austin Powers. Donna Elvira truly loves him, and provides the human perspective. The Don is punished in the end to validate the importance of love.

In Magic Flute true love is the reward for virtuous accomplishment. In the case of Papageno it may be the reward for annoying persistence. Love is the goal for which we strive.

Rossini’s Barber of Seville is all about the successful pursuit of a young woman who is locked away by her guardian. Love triumphs.

In Lucia di Lammermour a young woman loves one man and is forced to marry another. This is a new era of opera where true love wins by bringing all the characters to a tragic end.

Lohengrin breaks his vow to the Knights of the Grail by marrying Elsa. Love is his guiding light but ends tragically when Elsa forces him to reveal his identity.

The Lord of the Rings is just about a stupid ring that men covet and fight over. The Ring of the Nibelungen is about love: the love of the Rhine maidens for their gold, the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, the love of Wotan for his daughter Brünnhilde, and finally it is about the love of Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Only the Rhine maidens are successful in love. All the others go down in flames.

Rigoletto is about his love for his daughter, Gilda, and the love of Gilda for her student, Gualtier Maldee. This turns out to be a cruel joke perpetrated by the duke of Mantua. When Rigoletto tries to exact revenge, his life turns to dust.

In Il Trovatore the troubadour, a gypsy, falls in love with Leonora, a woman far above his class. Through a lot of complications about class and prejudice against gypsies, all ends in tragedy.

La Traviata is about true love, can there be true love with a prostitute? Should we give up love when it interferes with social status?

Faust has spent his entire life in study and wants to experience love with Marguerite. He ruins her life in the process, but she just manages to save her soul. Faust worries a lot about souls.

Masked Ball is about illicit love and the political danger this can cause.

Tristan and Isolde is nothing but a very long, tragic love song.

In Die Meistersinger marriage with Eva is the reward for Walther’s successful entry into the prize competition.

Aida is a love triangle between Rhadames, the slave girl Aida and her mistress Amneris. Rhadames never had a hope of union with Aida and sacrifices all for her.

Carmen warns Don Jose, “If you love me, beware of me.” He ignores this advice and loves her anyway. He is not sufficiently interesting to hold the tempestuous Carmen.

The Tales of Hoffmann is about loving foolishly. Each of Hoffmann’s loves has a tragic flaw which he does not see.

Manon is yet another opera about loving prostitutes. These are always doomed.

Otello is the man who has everything, love and success in war, but is brought down by jealousy.

Both Cavalleria rusticana and I pagliacci are about married women fooling around with other men and bringing grief to all.

In La Boheme true love is foiled through illness and poverty.

Tosca. Love comes to a sudden, tragic end.

Madama Butterfly loves her Pinkerton to the end, through his complete betrayal.

In Der Rosenkavalier the story begins with love between Octavian and the Marschallin and moves to love between Octavian and Sophie.

This is the A list of opera, the works which form the center of all opera repertoire, and they are all about love. If you want your opera to live on, at least give it a fighting chance in the opera world of tomorrow, make it be about love. Give the characters something to sing about. Because opera is about love.

Seven plots

I read somewhere that there are seven plots. I researched this on the internet and found a page with lots of different lists of numbers of plots.

1 plot. Lots of people like this, but obviously this is just a structure that they’re describing, not a plot.

3 plots. Foster-Harris proposes this. It sounds kind of interesting and warrants further study.

7 plots. Jessamyn West proposes man against various entities—nature, machine, god, self, etc. This doesn’t cast much light on opera plots.

20 plots. Ronald Tobias. This is actually a useful list.

However, opera is a special case. For opera I would like to propose 3 plots:
1. love problems that resolve badly.
2. love problems that come out well (practically every comic opera).
3. everything else. The list of twenty can be used to break this out.

My number one includes Carmen, Butterfly, Orfeo, Otello, Masked Ball, La Traviata, La Boheme, lots of stuff.

Turandot is a riddle opera.
Fidelio is rescue.
Rigoletto is about revenge.

Everything else is love. Tip for composers—find a story about love and make a libretto out of it. John Adams' topics aren’t operas. Vanessa is about love and is gaining in popularity with the passage of time.

I am going out on a limb here—maybe this is the reason for the failure of modern opera. Opera is about love.

What’s wrong with modern music

The book about music and the brain is spending a lot of pages to get at some basic ideas. The movement of perception from right brain (feeling) to left brain (idea) in professional musicians is huge.

There are three things
1. The natural characteristics of sound—what is usually called acoustics
2. The natural characteristics of us, how we hear, how we perceive the sounds we hear, how we organize them in our brains, all things designed to support survival, not entertainment
3. The building up of expectation over time—learning

Education is a kind of fourth thing, but this fourth thing has only to do with the process of composition, not the cultural idea of music. Basically the problem is that our composers know too much. They are carefully trained to know all about serialism and every other cute trick someone has dreamed up over the centuries. To curtail this conversation to its shortest possible length, they know a very great deal more than they have any actual use for.

The most successful composers of the past took the idiom they were born into and manipulated it to their own ends. Wagner took the new ideas of modulation he was hearing all around him and organized them into a seething, writhing morass. Bach took the tricks of the fugue invented by others and carried these to new heights of expression and complexity. Both of these very different composers are just writing variations on the compositional style common to their own era. It is item 3, the building up of expectation over time, that makes this all possible. They owe a huge debt to those who preceded them, because it is they who created the context of expectation. A Bach that appears out of thin air is completely useless as well as completely impossible.

These modern composers with amazing skills are lacking one essential feature: a context of expectation. We never know what to expect. I know that Messiaen had a whole theory of composition that he based his pieces on. I don’t need to know what this is to realize that his theories allow him to build up a context of expectation for me the listener. My brain knows what he’s doing without understanding his theories and is able to derive pleasure from it.

Gross generalization number one: theories of composition are for composers. In the precise second that the listener needs to know about them, the sounds in question have ceased to be music. Our brains make up their own solutions, and do not require the assistance of theoreticians.

The music of today lacks an overriding cultural style. Our music is absolutely all over the place, so society is not being particularly helpful to people wanting to write music.

I’m going to put in a little Vivaldi, some Brubeck, here and there a little tango. You actually hear composers saying things like this. Spend a lot more of your time concentrating on the context of expectation you are creating for the listener and lots less on impressing us with how much you know and how well you write.

Which reminds me of my Imbrie story. There is a composer named Andrew Imbrie, and when I was in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus we were assigned to sing one of his pieces. Every week, sometimes two or three times a week, we would come and take out his piece, and every rehearsal there would not be three notes that sounded familiar. It was always a new piece each time we rehearsed it, and this went on for weeks. He seemed completely successful at eliminating expectation and probably would not understand if I told him this was a bad thing.

Create in me an expectation. Society is not providing you with a context, so that means you have to create one. The context and the expectation are one. Help me anticipate where you are going, because it is my anticipation that creates the music.

Gross generalization number two: it is the listener and the process of listening that makes it music. Not you.

In Doctor Tischler's history classes we were taught that tonality was the invention of the Italian composer Archangelo Corelli. Up until then strong harmonic direction existed mainly only at the cadence points and in between things went in pretty much any direction. Tonality meant that this sense of harmonic pull permeated the entire composition. This was a powerful concept that then swept the musical world and became the primary interest of composers for 200 years.

The attraction of tonality is that it provides a context for anticipation. We love the sensation of being pulled along. Pop still includes this feature, but the fascination of tonality to the exclusion of virtually all else is gone. Serious composers today seem offended by the idea that someone would easily organize their materials into understandable structures. Confusion seems to be the objective.

Many of the most attractive composers now belong to the school called minimalism. They have decided to pare it all down and try again. Maybe too much complexity is just boring. Glass is the most extreme, but Pärt is definitely a minimalist. So is Górecki. Less is definitely more.

Footnote: Corelli created the reality of tonality, not the theory--that came much later.