Listen as Libby Larsen talks about the origins of jazz opera.
Running Time: 2:58 minutes
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Larsen - Jazz Opera Audio Transcript
It's interesting to me that your “Picnic” is a jazz opera. I don't know of many prominent jazz operas out there. The only thing that comes to mind is Gershwin and “Porgy and Bess,” which is still quite different from what you've done with “Picnic.” Tell me a little about the history of jazz opera and the scarcity of jazz opera.
Well, there is very little history of jazz opera. There is Scott Joplin's “Treemonisha,” but that is ragtime not really jazz. There has been Gershwin, yes, and Bernstein, trying to look into what is jazz and what it means to romantic art forms.
...I can write like Schoenberg or I can write like Debussy, you know, but I want to write like myself. And so I began that journey to write like myself by trying to understand where American English comes from, American English as opposed to British English. Really, American English has been developing for the past hundred years but has really only been recognized as its own language apart from British English somewhere in the 1950s and early 1960s. It's really from language where we get music, and when we listen to ourselves speak American we'll recognize right away rhythms that we’d call jazz rhythms, or syntaxes that we’d call jazz syntaxes that we hear in jazz.
The history of jazz opera really doesn’t reflect this. Most of the pieces we look at in the operatic canon as being ‘jazzy’ are sort of attempts held at arm's length to put a frame around jazz and use it to the benefit of a character in a story. Once composers like myself, who have been trained to recognize the abstract elements of what makes music music — pitch, rhythm, architecture and emotional impact, that's what makes music music — can begin to recognize what makes jazz jazz or what makes contemporary classical American music American sounding without quoting a single folk song or “Yankee Doodle” then we can begin to work in a musical language that really is the language or our own culture. It really doesn't matter what the instrument, what we're talking about is pitches, rhythms, architecture and emotional impact. That's what has not yet been studied in opera, and that's what I'm doing in “Picnic.”