Video: Green Angel Workshop Performance and Reflections on Reflecting on Work in Progress
Below is the video of the workshop performance of the opera I am writing collaboratively with Adam Strickson ‘Green Angel’. This project encompasses a lot of my interests and the chance to collaborate with non-musicians. Since this performance many things have changed, corrections been made, improvements to our working and rehearsal process contemplated and new ideas thought up. So, with this in mind, why might I want to share work in progress?
Firstly, comments are always welcome and constructive. It is nice to know what people liked and didn’t like. Over the last few months I have used my twitter account to talk to a number of people with different backgrounds and interests about opera, but not specifically about my own work. Although this piece is not a commercial venture as such (it reflects research done by both Adam and I and will form part of both of our PhD projects), the reasons someone may or may not like something can tell me a lot about what has been successful or not in my writing. Also, despite having identified changes, new ideas, and improvements, there is still a lot of what we produced in March that I am happy with, and I think the musicians are excellent, so I want to share this video as an achievement in its own right.
As someone who does research through practice I very much recognise the importance of self-reflection. As I think about this previous performance I also need to put it into the context of the final performance we are working towards and make sure that my ideas have been coherent throughout. As such I decided to write this blog post to introduce the themes of the opera and consider them in the context of the work we have already produced.
Opera usually employs some amount of convention, this is what makes it opera and not music theatre, and indeed noh theatre also employs its own important conventions. In my usual compositional life convention is something I try to avoid but on this occasion it’s something I have to accept is necessary to make the piece work at all. I must decide how to work with two often conflicting sets of conventions, how to utilise them, and decide what they can be used for. The place this is most important is characterisation and in turn the characters themselves are highly influenced by the themes of the opera.
There are three overriding themes in the piece which I very much see to be linked: our contemporary relationship with nature, the construction and destruction of identity, and metamorphosis. The libretto presents these themes as a journey: from storytelling (the first act, in the video) to singing; from autumn to spring as in all noh plays; from black to green. Reflecting on whether these themes really run through the first act as they do the libretto helps me to conceive of how the music should develop. Reflecting on what these themes mean for me and my research helps me conceive of how the music should develop to reflect me research.
Considering the work I have done in the light of further thought on these themes stemming from now reading the full libretto is difficult. The libretto itself reflects many of my personal research interests which themselves overlap with noh conventions: the use of quotation, reference to the past, the use of a constantly growing web of relations and interrelations. This itself has grown out of Adam Strickson’s and my collaboration. As the work itself as evolved the demands of the first act on its music have evolved to make it more than a stand-alone piece of work: 20 minutes of music which encompass storytelling, expectation, and the hidden seeds of the conclusion of the opera.
The most obvious thing to me, when watching the recording, is how any production can be improved by a more efficient rehearsal process and much more clarity on behalf of the composer/writer/director and others. Writing this blog post it has also become clear to me that many things may be interesting to me but not to others reading this. They belong, properly-thought out, in the music of the opera and are precisely the reason I choose to do research through practice and not always through written forms of communication. Rather than writing for several pages on the opera itself, I choose to reflect on the usefulness of such self-reflection in research. Embarking on this exercise may not have resulted in a post that focuses much on what the opera itself will become but has facilitated clarity that enables me to continue with the research as a whole.
Many thanks for bearing with me; more posts that are really about opera shall surely follow.
