POST 2

 

Dear Mr. Bernstein,

 

There are so many things I’d like to say to you. How did you do it all? Your life has become the model for the 21st century artist. Your music is dynamic, lovely. Your passion for education has become the model, and is a benchmark from which we judge a program’s success. (I think you’d be happy with El Sistema, but I digress....)

 

Your opera Candide was done in 1982 at New York City Opera, and your opera A Quiet Place will be done this Fall, 2010.

 

This segment of Candide makes me think about how as emerging composers we view success:

 

 

Ahhhh....patience. Yes, something I can always learn more about. But it is also the invaluable lesson that life is the sum of all parts, and that steady work equals a full life of art.

 

This reminds me of a similar statement from Cage in his book Silence:

 

In this same way, I have learned from your life, and from that of many masters. 

 

I am currently writing to you from a plane...back from New York to San Francisco. I am savoring moments from the VOX week, replaying music in my head, and wishing like all good things, that they would never end. But that is New York, at it’s best, instant community, at its hardest, transient souls depositing glory, and then on to new journeys. 

 

Mr. Bernstein, one other thing that strikes me is that most of my colleagues are composers with diverse careers. Each has a will of steel, and has not waited for opportunity. Some are composer/conductors, composer/producers, and others composer/performers. All, to some capacity, are educators. It reminds of over ten years ago, when I co-founded the company I still direct, VisionIntoArt. There was no clear path at the time for what I wanted to do, which was to create a school beyond a school, a place where I could take my career into my own hands, commission artists to play, create, and live across disciplines. Fast-forward ten years, and boy do I feel like I’ve found my place in opera!

 

The VOX lab/festival was designed to give us a view into all sides of creating an opera. 

 

Steven Mosteller, the assistant conductor assigned to my piece,  was attentive, kind, and brilliant at working across styles, from classical, to improvisation and folk. He created parallels that we all found useful, e.g. between Helga’s blues dripped voice, and “expressive flatting” in baroque practice. Most pointers were universal: phrasing, diction, breath, arc....

 

Lunch with patrons was next. The patrons I am assigned to are energetic lovers of opera. Ken Kaiserman tells us about receiving a MET subscription at his Bar Mitzvah and being hooked ever since. He loves everything but Puccini. (I wince as I had just mentioned that my favorite recent MET production was actually Minghella’s Madame Butterfly--the use of puppetry for Sorrow’s role, and a mirrored ceiling completely entranced me)...Susan Kaiserman’s introduction to opera was Woyzek. These are incredibly intriguing people.

 

 

The panels set up prior to each day of the festival allow us to reach out to the new opera audience, which is an open, lively one. My panel is with VOX producer Beth Morrison. She asks wonderful questions; one is specifically about muses. Most certainly, my singers who joined me on stage, are muses for me. Hila Plitmann’s timbre, range and acting push me to write better music...her performances leave me always in bliss, as she delivers soulful and perfectly nuanced interpretations. Helga Davis is a woman with a four octave range, a deeply hued and richly bruised voice that allows audiences in to see her soul. She is personal, and regal. This conversation reminds me of a great book about muses: Francine Prose’s The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired. An interesting tidbit (from Bibliofemme): At the age of eighty (in 1932) Alice Liddell (from Alice in Wonderland) was awarded an honorary doctorate (perhaps the only ever doctorate in musedom) from Columbia University. As far as history was concerned, her inspiration to Charles Dodgson (Carroll) was her life's greatest achievement...Today, we have different perceptions of muses. They are artists in their own right, full personas: take Suzanne Farrell to Balanchine, or Yoko Ono, to Lennon. 

 

Another question from the audience was one I found quite important to any young composer in the audience:

 

“Is it will, or inspiration that drives a composer?” 

 

Both. But without will, one cannot survive in today’s society. Times are increasingly difficult for artists. The rejections are plentiful, but they are also our learning blocks. The moments of acceptance and joy, such as the one we were about to embark on, are the ones that tell us yes, you are good enough (for now), and then on, to more rejections. This is the life of any artist. The great MacArthur winning artist/composer Trimpin actually shows off a massive file of rejection letters in a recent documentary film made on him!

 

 

 

 

 

If only Mr. Bernstein, you could say to us: You are an artist.

 

to each performer: Do you have any idea how beautiful you each are, breathing life into new art?

 

The festival had a buzz, and was filled with an interesting cross-section of producers, patrons, and concert-goers. The films created by Greg Emetaz that go before each opera selection are all hits. If you have not seen them yet, you should!

 

A few of my personal highlights:

 

Du Yun’s ZOLLE is inventive, passionate, and as crazy as she is. She uses walkie talkies to manipulate sound and create a distorted image of time and place. Hila Plitmann is masterful as narrator. Hai-Ting Chinn, who I had recently seen in the Wooster Group’s La Didone, was brilliant. Du-Yun coached her movements, which were sparse and essential; the minimal staging was enough to give you a port into her dreamy and eerie world.

 

Missy Mazzoli’s Song from the Uproar is a steady bloom of unfolding passion. I feel like I am reading Eberhardt’s burnt-edged journals on the set of Minghella’s movie, The English Patient. 

 

David T. Little and I both took part in Carnegie Hall’s Professional Training Workshop where Dog Days was first commissioned in 2009. To see it grow is wonderful. His rock edge and masterful writing skills unite pathos and wit to characters that are perfectly etched out by the great librettist Royce Vavrek. They are a team to watch.

 

Michael Gordon’s Aquanetta boasts unbelievable singers and the spectacular and driven ending aria ends the festival brilliantly. He has such a gift for energetic and perfectly arced works: if you don’t know Potassium for string quartet, listen immediately.

 

Truth be told, there are to many good moments, and to many great minds to mention.

 

Summing up the experience, I would really love to address any artist or person reading this who may ask, as I often do, what does it take to pursue a career in the arts?

 

My high school “Destiny” class teacher Howard Hintze once said, “You must create beauty, because you are capable of it.” (And yes, I took a class called Destiny, and when writing my own--and having recently read and loved Out of Africa  I gave myself the same tragic end as its heroine who died at 40-- and now that I am in my 30’s that totally freaks me out!!!)

 

But, really, what I’d like to say comes perfectly worded by the great Jonathan Safran-Foer in his book,  A Convergence of Birds.

 

Thank you to my family and friends who cried during Oceanic Verses. Art should allow us to cry, to feel. It frames our own personal experiences and provides us with protection, a shield, a window. I am after all, a part of all I have met.

 

Thank you to the NYCO opera family for giving us this platform to express ourselves.  At best, art precedes social change; it illuminates and allows people to feel; it can encourage us to think in new ways, to reflect deeply, to evolve.  As the great writer, Solzhenitsyn, said at his Harvard address, the only way we can go, is up.

 

yours in thanks,

Paola Prestini, composer