The Opera Project

Some time ago I started toying with the idea of creating a "chamber opera" in Esperanto.

My idea was to create something so small scale that it would be very attractive for touring companies with outreach projects (it's a lot easier to tour with 8 singers than 50+).

I thought it would be interesting to make it in Esperanto as I personally think operas in English always sound stupid.*  Plus, if it was in Esperanto, it would be almost guaranteed to have someone staging a performance somewhere in the world once every 2 or 3 years.

Esperanto speakers have regular "conferences", and they love to do things to celebrate their language - what's more celebratory than an opera?  If the opera was small scale and easy to stage, it could be rehearsed by the cast and musicians on their own until a few days before the conference, and then they could schedule a few intensive rehearsals prior to performing it.**

My original plan was for the opera to be written for 8 voices (2 sopranos, 1 mezzo, 1 alto, 2 tenors, 1 baritone and 1 bass), a string quartet, a brass quintet, a piano and a percussionist.  Some pieces would be written for just the quartet or the quintet, so that they could be regularly trotted out by instrumental groups of that nature.

My idea was to create something that was attractive to a number of different groups for a number of different reasons, so that whether you were an opera company, a brass quintet or a group of Esperantists, you would think about either staging this opera or at least using one of the pieces from it in your concert.

Then I started wondering whether a Concert Band would be better than the quartet/quintet combo.  Granted, more musicians means more work to stage the thing, but on the other hand it would mean that the various pieces from the opera could become part of the standard Wind/Concert Band repertoire.  Every good band would play pieces from my opera the way they play Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever or Fučík's Entrance of the Gladiators.  Pieces from my opera could become the 21st Century's standard Wind Band set pieces...

There is a slight problem with my developing an opera - regardless of whether I go for the chamber music ensemble or the Concert Band version:  I'm not a composer.  I don't know the first thing about writing music,*** or orchestrating it.  I'd have to either hire someone to do that for me, or try to find someone who is happy to "collaborate" on this project.

I've been listening to Two Steps From Hell lately while doing some web-site migration grunt-work (I find tedious tasks at the computer easier to complete with dramatic music), and now I'm wondering what my opera would sound like with their kind of music driving it.

They don't do chamber music, or Concert Bands, but I don't think I care.

Their kind of music is what you hear in the ads for movies - not the movies themselves, but the ads.  Also, ice-skating routines and artistic gymnastics.  It is, quite frankly, awesome - and often much better than the real music in the movies that were advertised.

I think it would sound very, very good.  I also think it would be a pretty good fit.  A lot of their music has vocal pieces that are in a style I call "wordless words" - that is, it sounds like someone is singing words, but it's not in English or any other language.  Esperanto, sung to that kind of music, would be earth-shatteringly good, I expect.

So, if Thomas Bergersen or Nick Phoenix is reading this:  Call me - we'll talk.

There's another problem with this opera idea, though, and I'll talk about that in another post.


* It really, really does.  French opera sounds great.  Italian opera sounds awesome.  But there is something about English that just sounds daft when you try to sing it in an operatic way.

** It's likely to be a crap performance, having had such limited rehearsals, but if I know Esperantists they won't care.  No, really, they won't.  They have no standards - they're worse than a church youth group.

*** Actually, I do know the first thing, just none of the other things.

Things found in notebooks: Advice for conference papers

I'm cleaning my desk.

I've been wanting to clean my desk for quite some time.  I've been very slowly decluttering it on and off for a few months, but I've reached the point where I must clear the decks and dust (and dust, and dust and dust), and wipe away the dirt and grime.

I'm also finding all sorts of pieces of paper I kept for some unfathomable reason, and a bunch of half-filled notebooks from over the past 7 years or so (and I haven't even gotten anywhere near my filing cabinet yet).

One notebook I'm just going to throw out (even though it still has plenty of blank pages) is the one I used for a course I did back in 2011.  There's a spot of interesting advice in it, though, and I'm noting that here because I think it's worth noting somewhere:

"Never do the conference paper first."

The woman who gave us this sage advice noted that conference papers were easily adapted from journal articles, but journal articles disappear from your list of "things I can actually muster up the energy to do" once the conference is over.

If you write the journal article, then adapt it for a conference, you're then just left with the task of finding a publisher for the article, rather than doing all of the work for the article.

Having recently co-written a conference paper that we were totally going to turn into a journal article to get published (totally), and then singularly failed to put even the smallest amount of work into writing the article, I can see her point.