Small proto-mammals who feed off of T-Rex corpses: The opera

I’m putting together a schedule/timeline for the opera project I’m working on – basically what has to be learned/put together/designed/made/finalized by when. It’s a bit up in the air because I’m still waiting to hear about something that, if it happens, will take up a lot of my time between now and April, so will change the opera schedule a bit.

But anyway, when I was at the Penderecki concert last weekend I got to thinking about the nature of what I do compared to what they do.

I don’t know if this is the same elsewhere, but here in the Canadian music establishment there is The Right Way to Do Things. This involves putting a variety of “safe” standard and Canadian music on the programme, getting a large grant, having a cocktail fundraiser, getting a very nice poster designed, putting it up only indoors and in places that the right sort of people might see, sending out postcards and emails to your mailing list, having your publicist draft a press release and send it around to the media, getting some airtime on CBC if you’re lucky, renting a nice hall, charging at least $25, probably $35-$50 for tickets, and if you do this infrequently enough that it’s a special occasion, you get a decent to full house and talk to your audience about how you hope they’re enlightened by the wonderful musical experience they’re about to have.

All well and good. It works for the old guard, everything except the “enlightened” bit (expecting to be enlightened by music is like expecting to have one’s cancer cured by a suspension bridge), partly because they have secure grant funding and an audience built up that likes what they do and is comfortable with going to a more-or-less new music show every two or three months.

But if you look at my list above, the 2nd step (“getting a large grant”) is what the rest of the steps are contingent upon. All the rest of that stuff – hiring a graphic designer, getting nice glossy posters printed, renting the Koerner hall or Glenn Gould Studio, paying the musicians, paying the big-ticket composers and soloists – costs a lot of money, and even $45 tickets won’t bring enough of it in. Like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the big guys need to eat a lot. And if the food supply gets even a little bit smaller they are dead.

Contrast that to what I’m doing now. The production process for my operas is something like this: Write librettos, find composers to set them, practice them, cajole a friend into being the director, find a space that you can afford to rent on your own to perform in, make the website yourself, make the poster yourself, make a zillion cheap photocopies of the poster, put them up yourself, make the props and sets with your sax player who’s also a visual artist, make the costumes yourself, get a friend to run lights, write the press release yourself and send it to the press yourself, promote the event online with social networking etc., then go and perform it, charging $10 tops at the door. Oh, and your husband runs the door.

It’s Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, on steroids. Not only am I the creator and performer of the work I’m the graphic designer, costume mistress, publicist, webmaster, and poster monkey.

What’s bad about this (as I know from other less ambitious projects) is that it’s really, really tiring. It takes lots of time and energy and effort. But the upside is that, unlike the T-rex ensembles that can only function if given large sums of cash, I can do this with nothing but a couple of hundred dollars to rent the performance space and a modest photocopying/Value Village prop budget. If the figurative comet (perhaps a 95% cut in arts funding) comes, the T-rexes will be gone in an instant, but I, like the small proto-mammals that survived the impact that killed off the dinosaurs, will still be here, and will still do my thing.

It would still be sad that the big ensembles were gone, don’t get me wrong. Ben disagrees with me, but there are things you can do with a really giant ensemble that you can’t do with one soprano and a saxophonist, no matter how good or versatile they are. For example, I had an idea of setting an opera in an FLDS compound, with a giant cast of plural wives all in those hideous prairie dresses. It would be awesome, but of course impossible without a vast amount of money that I could never hope to raise. No, in spite of the weird class issues, the hypocracy, the snobbery, I’d be sad to see the Canadian music establishment go. They do good things and play good music (at least some of the time) that wouldn’t otherwise be played. But it comforts me, and not just for my own selfish reasons, that even if it does there’ll be something here that will eventually turn into a new establishment. Just like we no longer have T-rexes, but we do have elephants and hippos and humans, among other unwieldy and difficult-to-feed top predators.

Why TVO drives me crazy

Yesterday at the CAPP rally I saw Steve Paiken, a TVO personality/host. He was there with a woman who I think may have been Belinda Stronach. I’m not sure. She was blonde, very well dressed, obviously wealthy and privileged, and very out of place. Anyway, it got me thinking about TVO: TV Ontario, a public broadcaster that I used to watch quite frequently. Hey, I didn’t have cable, and out of the 9 channels my antenna picked up TVO had the best reception. They also showed “Rosemary and Thyme” and other weird British crime dramas of which I am a fan.

How can I describe the general tenor of TVO’s programming to someone who’s never seen it? TVO exists for middle-aged privileged hippies. It shows you things that make you feel like you are engaging in culture, like you’re making a difference, like you’re a broad-minded liberal person. They show random British programmes, political roundtables, nature shows, documentaries, classic films, public lectures (I’m listening to a TVO lecture podcast right now) and the kind of kid’s programming that kids hate watching. And in spite of the liberal orientation it is in its own way deeply reactionary.

Why do I say this? What’s my beef with TVO, considering that I used to watch it before I got rid of my TV and I still consume some of their content in podcast form?

TVO is reactionary because it is a walled garden, a zoo for culture. It is a media ghetto for people who live in $750,000 houses and take eco-tourist holidays to Bali but think of themselves as rebels. That is their viewer, and that viewer’s subjectivity is firmly embedded in just about everything they do. Sure, they air documentaries about the plight of Walmart workers or Shenzen factory employees or struggling farmers in Africa. Sure, they cover these things in a sympathetic and social-justice oriented way. But always as others, always as “Look at these poor deprived people! Don’t their lives suck compared to your comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle?”* Which is funny, because poor people seem like the most likely of all income groups to watch TVO, because you can still get it if you don’t have cable and it doesn’t run commercials. (That’s why I watched it, and at that time I was pretty poor.) Yet these people are clearly not the audience they have in mind. Now I don’t know what a public broadcaster who considered their primary audience to be people who make $7/hour would look like, but it sure as hell wouldn’t look like TVO.

Why am I ranting about this here instead of Scintillator?

Because even if I haven’t written here much I’ve still been thinking about stuff. Right now all my individual projects are in their infancy, in the getting-off-the-ground stage. But when they get off the ground, where are they going to go?

What I do isn’t commercially viable, isn’t something the mainstream media and cultural channels are interested in. But there is a parallel media, a parallel set of institutions that are supposed to be there for stuff that doesn’t fit into the mainstream.

And they’re all kind of like TVO. Don’t know why, but they are.

So let’s hope some kind of massive EMP takes out the satellites but leaves the Internet untouched; then we can start over and do it right.

*And even though my house is worth much, much less than $750,000 and I’ve never been to Bali, my life is still way better than any of the oppressed people I listed. It’s also much better than it was when I watched TVO.

Things to include in the recording project

Plan C

Poems to include in spoken word/lounge CD:

Soldier
Tie the knot tighter
”Will you think…”
Sax solo
”I was restless…”
There’s some other old stuff that’s not on the web yet; I need to dig through some old files (some of which are ACTUAL files, not notional/digital constructions) to find them.

Music I wrote at least the lyrics for to include:
Melancholy Inventory, and maybe some other stuff from the operas
Dream
More PRO stuff, but probably in cabaret form: Letter from London, Elevator, Impostor, some other things

Other not-quite-poem-somewhat-story-like-things:
Ground state
Exodus
Another prose poem I wrote that starts “On one of the streets near where I live…”

Other music to put in there:
Kurt Weill songs: September song, Speak Low, My ship, Barbara Song, Lost in the Stars, How Much I love you*)
Other standards: Sugar in my bowl, What’s new, I’ve got it bad
Weirdo one-off novelty songs if needed (Rainbow Connection, anything by Fred Spek)

Now tell me: would you buy it?

*”Like a dachshund abhors revolving doors, that’s how much I love you.”

The beginning: Two projects

In the aftermath of the PRO Cd release, I am once again free to think and plan and do new things. At least until the Christmas insanity begins.

Two things I am working on to begin work on Plan C:

Opera For One

(This title will probably be scrapped because it sucks, but I needed to list it on a resume so that’s what I came up with.)

This is my own gesamtkunstwerk, except instead of being both poet and composer I am libreticisst and performer. Three short operas for me plus one musician (Jen Wardle, saxophone) with librettos by me and music by three composers.

The operas are:

Time will erase – about the life and work of Anna Akhmatova, a very successful poet in pre-Soviet Russia who faced unbelievable hardships under Stalin. At one point in time it was too unsafe for her to keep written copies of her poems, so she would write them, memorize them, then burn them. That is, as they say, hard core.

Electric Eel – Dame Edith Sitwell, an eccentric poet and novelist, is giving a lecture recital tour of America when she and her assistant are in a car accident. Hopped up on morphine, she goes on with the show but veers wildly and erratically around her intended programme, revealing more of herself than she intended.

Milk and Honey - A puppet opera about the life of Tammy Faye Bakker.

All of the libretti have been complete since the summer; Time will Erase is a completed score that Jen and I have started to work on; Milk and Honey is a completed score though we haven’t gotten into it yet; and the music for Electric Eel is still being written but should be complete soon.

To do:

- Find an actually interesting name for the project.
- Find a director.
- Visual design.
- Make a website.
- Find a space.
- Finalize a schedule.

Unnamed recording project

This is still largely notional. I’d like to make a recording something like the Literary Supplement podcasts I occasionally put into my Complaining with Kay feed – a combination of my poems and songs.  Instead of using archival recordings of the music like I’ve done in the podcasts I’d like to make new recordings of standards and unaccompanied repertoire.

Right now I need to select the material more than anything else, then work on getting the recording made, mixed, and distributed.

I’m creating a category for each of these projects – Opera Project and Recording Project – so you can follow my progress in each by clicking the appropriate category link.

Let us define some terms

Welcome to Plan C: The Blog.

Let me explain a few things.

I am a classical singer who specializes in new and contemporary music. After winning a big competition about a year and a half ago, I’ve spent a large amount of time, money, and effort trying to get someone in the opera world to pay attention to me.

In other words, I’ve been trying to sell out.

No one’s buying.

No interest, no gigs, nothing. No one cares.

So I’ve been rethinking things. When I started doing this, I made a couple of plans. Plan A was “Become a famous opera singer”.

Plan B was, “If you fail to become a famous opera singer, get more academic qualifications and teach privately full-time”.

But I never stopped to think, “Is either of these things really what I want?”

The answer is, “Not really.” So it’s time for Plan C. Plans A and B were both answers to the question, “What CAN I do?” Plan C is the answer to the question, “What do I WANT to do?”

In other words: Instead of continuing to bang my head against the gate and drain my resources trying to bribe the gatekeeper, I’m going to take another path. I’m going to break down the wall.

So of course I don’t quite know what that is/means yet. But this is the place where I intend to find out, to work out my ideas, to post works in progress.

Oh, and just so we’re clear, the “secession” I’m referring to in the tagline is the Viennese art movement of the late 19th century, not the Confederacy.

I plan to post here about twice a week. You can read my closer-to-daily blog at http://scintillator.wordpress.com.