Heavy access of the John Nugent opera (to which I wrote the libretto) in my archive yesterday, all the sound files (piano and orchestra) accessed twice, plus 19 downloads of the libretto. Makes one wonder if a music class somewhere is looking at it.
Piano/Vocal score.
4 comments:
Was this opera ever produced?
Not yet. The music is wonderful.
Wonderful? :)
Thanks Charles. I like the music for this as a base, but, in my opinion, there are some things I feel I could have done better.
I have been thinking lately of revising the orchestrations. There are places I notice I threw the balance of the orchestra off a little...
However, it still makes me laugh when impresarios tell me the orchestra is too big to be producable, as if I didn't know the required instrumentations for all those perrennial operas they are so fond of performing...
For instance:
Dark Mission requires only two more players than La Boheme.
On the other hand:
Dark Mission requires far fewer musicians than almost any Wagner music drama (for instance, Wagner tends to require at least six Trumpets, whereas DM only requires three)
For Puccini and Wagner both, the woodwinds are written in threes. DM utilizes woodwinds in twos. However, this will probably change in revision. There were many places I needed that third Flute, but I was actually trying to keep it down. The revision will be the DM orchestrations the way I wanted them.
Where DM goes beyond Boheme is in the percussion, as I use several more percussion instruments for the Cayuse (such as the tom-toms)
The only rejection from impresarios to annoy me, really, is the claim that they don't have time in the Season, because they need to do Boheme again. Or Traviata. Or any of the other perrenials which are not only sublimely beautiful but also thoroughly overperformed LOL.
This reminds me... Several impresarios told me they might have time in 2008... We're almost there now. Perhaps I need to blitz all these again in order to remind them they said they'd look at it while choosing the 2008-2009 Seasons...
Another common criticism I found on opera fan webboards is that I don't know how to distinguish between characters in the music. This is why I have been working extra hard at this in Varmints and in Maupassant.
However, even listening to it with a critical ear now, I can see few musical similarities between characters.
This is in addition to my constant statements that I saw DM as having only two characters: the cultures involved, and wrote the music accordingly.
However, as characters shift between being closer to one side of the cultures to the other, the music for that character shifts as well. A perfect example of this is Five Crows's aria at Scene Thirteen. Or even Timothy's entrance aria, which I remember you loving so well. It is the most musically simple piece in the entire opera (Timothy's youth and the opinion of the Missionaries of his culture), but it is also a little closer to the Missionaries' music than, say, to Tiloukaikt's and Tomahas's, which represents the conservative warlike factions.
I must pause to again state my regrets that Westernization and Tribal Mixings have caused the death of traditional Cayuse music.
One of the first things I did, if you'll remember, upon accepting the project was to write the only Cayuse reservation I knew of... There was nobody who remembered... At least I had field recordings of the Nez Perce and other surrounding Nations. So I just mixed the styles to try and approximate...
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