What appeals to you about opera, as opposed to other forms of music? I love opera. This is my 18th opera, and I'm just always sort of quietly composing an opera. I compose in all the classical genres — symphonies and chamber music and art songs — but I do love opera. It gives a composer's brain the opportunity to manipulate time in several different ways. This, of course, is the composer's art, how to manipulate time using musical notes and tone.
In opera, because you have several characters all of whom are developing throughout the story, each character has their own sense of how time flows and how tempo flows. Let's say I'm working on a quartet. I'm working in four different tempos, all of which need to be controlled by one tempo so that the conductor can keep the music together. If you know much about quantum physics, composing an opera is kind of a quantum experience for a composer because there are several different lives unfolding in several different timeframes. Yet when you, the audience member, are attending an opera you need to feel as if you are participating in a whole unit of time so that you can live the life of each of the characters.
What about “Picnic,” the play, drew you to it and led you to envision it as an opera? I have loved the play “Picnic” since I first saw the movie “Picnic.” I must have been eight or nine years old. When I saw the movie, I completely fell in love with the story and became quite fascinated with it. So much so that I sought out and bought a first edition of the play, and for years and years and years I've had it in mind that “Picnic” really could be the quintessential American opera. Not Americana, no, but American opera.
What draws me to it musically is that it is set in 1953 and that happens to be a crossroads in jazz. It's a time when the jazz of Louis Armstrong's era and the jazz of Benny Goodman's era and be-bop were really all coming together. I could see those three parallel universes musically. I have based my music for the opera “Picnic” in that delta, where the three kinds of jazz mix and clash. They happen to be generational. If you know the play well, then you know the genius of William Inge in understanding that jazz and music as it was developing in the early 1950s and late 1940s, mirrored what was happening in American culture about that time. … You have, what in the '50s was really tremendously clashing themes in America represented in three kinds of jazz and classical music clashing all together. Now they all meld together and they become the quintessential American voice, which is not one or the other but all. So “Picnic” has for years been a muse to me for trying to understand American music, where it comes from, what it is, how it's formed — meaning its pitches, its harmonies, its rhythms. And it's also been a muse to me in looking at American culture, the crossroads of American culture, which are deeply embedded in this play. And yet, I think, often missed in many productions of the play.
So this is a play that lends itself to dwelling in emotions and themes, and opera is an art form that allows you to dwell, deeply, in a single emotion, a single theme, at a time. That's what drew me to “Picnic,” and in fact I've been drawn to it as an opera subject since I first began composing opera in my late teens. I was just waiting, waiting for the right time.
You've been asked to compose an opera. Where do you start? I think it surprises many people that what doesn't come first are the notes. Or the words. What really comes first are the proportions and the personnel. Most operatic composers really want to have the libretto there before they begin working hard on the score. That's because in the end the timing falls to the composer, and if you don't have the frame of the house, it's very hard to start building the rooms. And that's also why there are so many tales of composer-librettist clashes. In some very famous instances the librettist and the composer have agreed on everything and the librettist sends the libretto to the composer and the composer begins to work, and finds that they really do need to make some cuts or changes in the libretto in order to make the piece work, whereupon the librettist stands pat and tries to convince the composer that the libretto works and that the composer's got to make the libretto work. So you have tales and tales of composer-librettist clashes about who actually gets to own the timing of the piece. There's an opera, “Capriccio,” about this very subject.
David and I, though, we've had a wonderful time, at least from my point of view. First of all, we started with the perfect play; the proportions were already taken care of for us. Then David is so completely experienced at moving bodies around onstage, and he's a singer himself, that the way he worked with the play to create the libretto I think really even surprised him. It just works. … The process is so much more dynamic, I think, than most people get a chance to experience, and not at all the ivory tower process that is so often represented in movies, for instance. It's just a lot of work, and it's a great deal of fun.
You've written several operas based on classic texts, for instance “Frankenstein.” Why do you feel that it's important to make the story such a prominent part of modern opera? It's terribly important. Given my druthers I'd very much like to compose some really abstract, expressionist operas, but I've come to believe that human beings are hard-wired for narrative. We have a beginning and an end, and we search for narrative all day in our lives — the menu we're going to make for dinner, the beginning and the end of this phone call — we practice and are hard-wired for narrative. Now at certain points in time, for instance in the late Romantic era, you hear of the great symphonies and the great abstract, non-texted music. A certain segment of human beings wanted to listen to themselves through the abstract syntax of music without words. But with the proliferation of radio and CD and now to iPod, it's very hard to hear untexted music; you really have to go looking hard to get some music that doesn’t have words with it.
We're losing the ability to hear ourselves through untexted music, really losing the ability. It's something I've spoken about and I'm quite concerned about. … A story like “Picnic,” as well written as that Pulitzer Prize-winning play is, is a narrative on the surface, but it opens the doors for every single person who connects to the narrative to create their own narrative in relationship to it. So that's why it's important to me. I do want to communicate what it's like to be alive through the music that I write.
