All posts by : annahurd

April is a good time to bring Jesus back to life. I actually didn’t plan my composition of Resurrexit for the Pittsburgh Symphony to overlap with Easter, but it certainly seemed well-timed when I arrived at the Ascension just a few days before the holiday. April also brings a very special Mercury Soul at a new venue, featuring Thievery Corporation’s Rob Garza, and the final KC Jukebox at the Kennedy Center this season. Here’s an overview on the various music-making that’s growing like weeds this spring:

Resurrexit: September 2018 premiere at Pittsburgh Symphony

Maestro Manfred Honeck has created a unique ‘spiritualism in music’ series at the Pittsburgh Symphony, thoughtfully enhancing works such as Mozart’s Requiem with ingenious theatrical elements that draw from the dramatic power of the church. When he asked for a 10-minute piece touching on this topic, at first I was stumped at the challenge of composing a ‘spiritual opener.’ Works of this length tend to open concerts with energy and excitement, qualities not often associated with religious endeavors.

But then I considered the Resurrection and the musical opportunities it offers. I was intrigued by a three-part structure that begins in a dark Middle Eastern cave; flickers magically to life as Christ re-animates; and explodes into ecstasy at the Ascension. Narrative forms are primarily about pushing me to write music I’d never considered, and I’ve certainly never approached a drone-y, exotic, and dark musical space suggested by Jesus’ entombment. For this section, I’m forcing myself to stay simple and unbusy, restraining from the impulse to throw notes at the page and instead focus on creating three highly distinctive orchestral textures: a morphing drone; a chromatic and bending double-reed solo; and eerie orchestral scamperings between the phrases.

The moment of re-animation is signaled by the entrance of an instrument never before heard in a concert hall, the Semantron. It’s a long plank of wood suspended from two beams, hit with giant mallets to create the most euphoric kind of banging. I encountered this instrument when researching Eastern chants of the Byzantine era. At the start of one of them, a magnificent accelerating banging erupts from a highly resonant cathedral. The slow acceleration to a white-hot speed so perfectly suggests a spirit flickering to life. This instrument appears between quotes from one of the most beautiful Eastern chants, Victimae Paschali.

And the Ascension? That’s where I am right now, so you’ll have to tune in closer to the premiere in September.

Merucry Soul featuring Rob Garza: April 27 (Great Northern, SF)

I met Rob Garza while curating a Kennedy Center show featuring the renown Thievery Corporation. He’s a soulful musician who, along with his musical partner Eric Hilton, has ingeniously integrated Brazilian rhythms into electronic music.

Lucky for us in San Francisco, Rob lives here and knows everyone in the SF club scene – and he jumped at the chance to perform some of his new solo work on Mercury Soul. We’re pairing these tracks with a string orchestra and some other classical instruments, and all this is happening at a new venue for us : the Great Northern. Mercury Soul does very well at DNA Lounge, where we will continue to perform, but we wanted to try a venue that Rob has a strong connection to.

To complement Rob’s new work, we are presenting a program of Latin American composers, everything from Astor Piazolla’s Bandoneon Concerto to the kinetic Dancón by Arturo Márquez. DJ Justin Reed and myself will be dropping a huge variety of Latin-informed beats, so it’ll be a very uplifting and exciting show.

 JFK Jukebox: April 25 (Kennedy Center, DC)

Everyone at the Kennedy Center is looking for ways to celebrate the John F Kennedy in this centennial year of his birth. There are so many cool entry points into his legacy, from the space program to his internationalist vision. For the season’s final KC Jukebox, my new-music series that experiments with new formats, we’re offering a program of music informed by JFK’s civil rights legacy.

Carlos Simòn has a touching tribute to victims of police violence, while Ted Hearne and spoken-word poet Saul Williams offer a strikingly original work with the Mivos String Quartet. The recently rediscovered composer Julius Eastman’s Joan d’Arc for cello ensemble will be a DC first, and David T Little’s provocative Electric Proletariet is performed by his band Newspeak. Our groovy post-party will be graced by the amazing DJ Moose, so definitely come ring in the end-of-season at KC Jukebox.

February brings the premiere of a new ballet of The B-Sides and a Mercury Soul club show based on “the color of sound.”  But before the exhilaration of both of those public events, I had to hole up in the cave-like privacy of recording studios to put the finishing touches on two upcoming albums, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs and Mass Transmission.

Ask any musician: recording is both a delight and a demon.  All of us love the chance to permanently freeze, in a kind of crypto-animated suspension, the millions of details that makes up a piece of music.  The many variables of live performance are wonderful in a concert hall, but at some point all musicians want the chance to put the genie in a bottle.  And in the process of recording lies a certain kind of madness.

Take, for example, the Herculean task of making a live recording of my Jobs opera.  Six principal singers on stage; a chorus of sixteen; an orchestra in the pit; electronic sounds and an array of acoustic guitars – all these elements interact in an indoor-outdoor theater perched in the high desert during monsoon season.  Plus, there are six giant panels dancing around the stage that create quite a rumble.  In live performance, these variables create excitement; in the recording studio, you’re constantly scratching your head and trying to create a perfectly balanced eco-system.

The expertise in making a live opera recording is therefore a highly precious commodity.  Luckily, Santa Fe Opera works with the experts at Soundmirror, a Boston-based company where I spent a week last month.  Surrounded by an array of stunning speakers, with the producer Elizabeth Ostrow and engineer Mark Donahue, I listened carefully to a lyrical guitar solo that seemed accompanied by both the Breath of God and a small earthquake.

“We haven’t de-noised yet,” Mark explained, apologizing for the high desert wind and the rumble of sets.  That would be the easy part.

The hard part was getting the interaction between vocal, instrumental, and electronic elements just right.  This opera has an important electronic soundworld made up of the pops, beeps, and whizzes of early Apple computers, along with some pulsing techno and some floating Buddhist ambience.  My inclination, when putting an album together, is to push for a visceral mix that pops out of the speakers. I like more presence to the electronic sounds, and a more dynamic mix to the orchestral palette, than is acceptable to the highly specialized engineers of classical music.

That’s where you hopefully find the happy medium.

Many times during my week in Boston, Mark – sitting at the mixing board – would gently push back.  Classical music engineers passionately believe that one of the points of listening to a classical album is to experience the warmth and beauty of true acoustic resonance.  This is what makes them experts in setting up microphones in exactly the right places, or in creating seamless edits in the middle of a delicate bit of resonance.  So between me and Mark, with Elizabeth acting as the pro moderator, we found a way to have both yin and yang in this album.  Mark agreed to push the mix into a more visceral zone in some parts, while I tried to chill out and let the warm acoustic passages feel as natural as possible.  The resulting album feels like it travels all the way from ambient electronica to the classical concert hall and back.  When it comes out this June, see if you agree.

A few weeks later, I found myself in the unbelievably grand interior of St. Ignatius Church in San Francisco recording Mass Transmission with Capella SF, a new chorus led by Ragnar Bohlin of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.  Mass Transmission tells the true story of a mother and daughter communicating over the earliest long-distance radio transmissions between Holland and its colony, Java.  Like the opera, this story is told by a complex mix of vocal and electronic sounds, with the special additional element of a massive pipe organ.

The organ plays the role of the Dutch Telegraph Office, churning out mechanistic 16^th-notes while the chorus sings the words of the mother and daughter.  The electronics, built from the strangely organic sounds of short-wave radio, inhabit the white-noise medium through which the mother and daughter speak.

Few things are as tricky to record as an organ, due to the latency from keyboard to pipe.  The magnificent Isabelle Demers performed the organ part with characteristic coolness under pressure.  It’s hard to imagine how an organist has to play continually ahead of the beat in order for the pipes to spit out the sounds at the right time, an even greater challenge when locking to an electronic beat.  On top of it all, we were recording in a beautiful though cavernous cathedral that added a 3-second reverb trail to every note.

Maestro Ragnar Bohlin kept things together with his uniquely Nordic combination of precision and charisma.  His ability to draw stunning sounds out of a chorus is unparalleled.  For example, the central movement of the piece, “Java,” calls for some exotic vocal effects from the men, a kind of “Hhuwoom” that can sound plain wrong if not done exactly right.  Ragnar patiently coaxed them to the correct balance of pitch and punch.  I enjoyed working with him on Mass Transmission two summers ago in Brazil and am so thankful that he’s delivering on his promise to record the piece.

With those two albums in the can, I can now focus on the upcoming Mercury Soul at San Francisco’s DNA Lounge, entitled Prismatic: the Color of Sound.  We’ll explore a variety of music inspired by color from Michael Torke, Jennifer Higdon, Joel Hoffman and the renown Alexander Scriabin – whose concept of a “color organ” will be reinvented in this show around a remix of his music for musicians, DJs, and lighting.  The show also includes a set from beloved steel drum ensemble Pankind Trio and appearances by the ensemble Steel & Ivory, along with the many surprises and cameos for which Mercury Soul is known.  Mercury Soul’s kinetic shows bring electronica and live musicians together in thumping club environments, and this event engages the ears and eyes in powerful and unique ways.

Last but not least, I’m hoping to drop into Chicago to see the Joffrey Ballet premiere of a new ballet based on The B-Sides, my symphonic suite that drops into five surreal landscapes.  The ballet is by choreographer Nicholas Blanc, who created a ballet for Mothership for New York City Ballet that beautifully captured the work’s hybrid musical language.  For this premiere, I created at Nic’s request an ambient shimmering opening soundspace – “Nic’s Netherworld” – that unfolds for several minutes before the orchestra enters.  During my five years working working at the Chicago Symphony, I loved popping into the Joffrey Ballet to catch all manner of things, including a recreation of the original Rite of Spring.  It’s a huge honor to have a large piece created for them.

Check in next month for updates about my busy March at the Kennedy Center!

Each year the venerable classical music publication Musical America recognizes a handful of artists, and this December I had the honor of accepting the award for Composer of the Year alongside luminaries such as conductors Andris Nelsons and Francisco Nunez, soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, and violinist Augustin Hadelich.

I couldn’t help but think about the many teachers and mentors responsible for the five of us standing together at the Carnegie Hall ceremony. My composition teacher John Corigliano, for example, during my three years under him at Juilliard, helped me understand creative musical forms and the different ways to animate them. I’m also very grateful to several conductors for their mentorship, such as Michael Tilson Thomas, whose discussion over long walks and obscure listening assignments made him part composition teacher; Riccardo Muti, who helped me understand the power of drama in the concert hall; and the maestro who commissioned my first piece, Robert Moody.

And lest we forget that music begins at a young age, I have to mention Hope Armstrong Erb, my piano teacher from St. Christopher’s School. Mrs. Erb heard my earliest compositions and challenged me to write a piece based on a music theory assignment, resulting in the majestically titled Rhapsody on a Theory Exercise. So we made a deal: if I practiced piano more, she’d mentor me in composition. From that moment on, I started to learn that art benefits from hard work.

I think about Mrs. Erb when I think about some of the challenges we face in classical music, from diversifying or audience to bringing in new listeners. So much of the attention within the field is focused on the end of the pipeline, with darts thrown at big institutions such as Carnegie Hall or The Kennedy Center. But we all know that very little will change without more music education in this country.

Every major institution offers lots of educational outreach, but much of this reaches kids as one-offs such as symphony field trips. These are fine outreach programs, but we simply need more instrumental education – more middle school bands, more high school orchestras. The challenge of learning to make music with a piece of technology called an instrument is very relevant to 21^st Century life, and the discipline that comes with playing scales or improving tuning carries all the benefits of any athletic endeavor.

So if someone has boatload of money, get young Americans playing music together. Many of them may not pursue a career in music, but they’d be given a life in music – a lifetime of understanding the sounds coming over Spotify or on their iPod playlists. And they’d learn a lot about working with others in real time while playing in orchestras.

Orchestras are one of our great community bodies, and in encountering so many of them when attending performances of my music, I’ve developed a nuanced perspective on institutions. Being at the end of the classical music pipeline, they’re often maligned by arts writers – “classical-music culture…for the most part cowers in the face of modern life,” in the words of one. Folks like this have very little understanding of what is actually going on in the field beyond the 30,000 foot level. They lob grenades at, say, the Met Opera for the demographics of its directors, but they should spend at least as much ink focusing on the bounty of great things happening all over the country. Write about the Oakland Symphony and its vibrant, diverse, and often sold-out concerts at the Paramount Theater; or the astonishing rhythmic ability of the musicians of the Memphis Symphony (and the world-class concert hall they perform in); or the work of smaller institutions, such as Gabriella Lena Frank’s composer institute in Boonville, California.

In short, we need to hear more about the really fine things happening in classical music. Travel budgets for arts writers are non-existent, so the field could use a foundation to create a travel fund for arts writers, something with a very simple online application. Small-scale things exist, but we need something big. This one thing could do more to improve the arts conversation in this country than anything else. (The Rubin Institute may be the best-positioned to do this.)

Institutions are both maddening and inspiring, but I have patience with them because, after all, that’s my medium. If I want to birth a piece of symphonic music, I have to deal with administrators, unions, musicians, and sound guys (“So uh, we saw your tech rider but did the opposite because of the unique layout of our hall…”). We should hold institutions feet to the fire, but let’s give equal energy to celebrating the exceptional things happening in classical music. After all, we in the field need are ambassadors to those outside it.

The symphonic season kicks off in the Fall with orchestras showcasing some of their most exciting work, and it’s a great time to see what’s happening in the field. As I look ahead to the National Symphony Orchestra’s performances of Auditorium this month, followed by a DJ gig at San Francisco’s famed LoveBoat, I’m also reflecting on memorable things I’ve seen and heard over the past few weeks.

Maestro Brett Mitchell opened the Colorado Symphony’s subscription series with characteristic panache, pairing Beethoven with my The B-Sides and a fanfare by Kevin Puts. Launching his music directorship with a mix of new and old shows demonstrates the vivid programming of this dynamo. Mitchell rose to prominence at the Cleveland Orchestra, where he jumped in for last-minute appearances to much acclaim, and he always has his ear to the ground, listening for compelling American voices. But I’d never seen him conduct until last month.

Mitchell knows how to iron-out the myriad subtleties of an intricate piece like The B-Sides while staying focused on the larger arc. In the two acoustic movements “Aerosol Melody Hanalei” and “Temescal Noir,” for example, he stayed focused on the long-lined melodies while bringing out lots of nuances in the constantly-shifting metrical bed. In the electro-acoustic “Broom of the System,” I’ve come to expect that orchestras will need a few run-throughs before acclimating to the mercurial rhythms of the “future clock.” But Colorado played it near perfectly on its first run-through. It’s a fine orchestra with a mature and confident young maestro at its helm, and the crowd and vibe in the hall is hip.

On the East Coast, I dropped into the Kennedy Center to hear the National Symphony open with an all-Bernstein program. In my third year as composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, I find it’s so useful to experience the place in all manner of shows and repertoire. We’ll all be hearing a lot of Bernstein during his centennial year, and I just hope we get the full range of the composer, as we did at the NSO Ball.

The central work was a version of Bernstein’s Mass for cello and orchestra, a challenging piece that becomes more distant as it unfolds. The decked-out audience seemed a little deflated at hearing Yo-Yo Ma play something other than a showpiece, but the inclusion of this work gave gravitas to a concert that featured primarily lighter fare. Hearing the Mass also put Candide Overture and Symphonic Dances from West Side Story in greater relief. In the context of hearing the Mass, I listened to a collection of Bernstein’s Broadway songs with new ears.

Like the Colorado Symphony, the NSO sets sail with a new music director this year. Gianandrea Noseda is in his honeymoon phase right now, and you can sure hear it in the way the musicians play. The Symphonic Dances were especially vivid: the brass and percussion really know how to swing (they certainly play a lot in that rep under principal pops conductor Stephen Reineke). Kudos to Noseda for taking on a program that lies a bit outside his comfort zone, and I look forward to hearing him conduct a big range of repertoire this year at the NSO.

Another quick visit “in the field” brought me to the 20^th anniversary concert of the Chicago Symphony Orchetra’s MusicNOW series, which I ran for five years with composer Anna Clyne. It’s the good hands of Elizabeth Ogonek and Samuel Adams now, and they were gracious to bring back many of the former composers-in-residence for this show. The players did a fine job on my study in miniatures The Life of Birds, a short work for mixed ensemble conjuring different aspects of the aviary. Over our five years at the CSO, Anna and I were so grateful to see the audience grow and respond so favorably to our experiments in concert format. I’ve taken many of the things I’ve learned in immersive stagecraft to my KC Jukebox series at the Kennedy Center, but it’s nice to see the MusicNOW series still going strong.

Looking ahead, I have an eclectic few weeks in front of me. I’ll be returning to the Kennedy Center to perform my baroque thriller Auditorium with the NSO, then heading home to spin techno at the SF Loveboat right after a performance by Moby. All the while, I’ll be tinkering away on my fanfare oratorio Children of Adam.

Auditorium takes the premise that an orchestra, like a person, can be haunted. Ghostly remixed recordings of baroque period instruments trail the live orchestra, with riffs being passed across the void like on a giant Oiji board.   What begins as a haunting unfolds into a kind of ‘techno bourée,’ with the two musical entities reaching an ethereal resolution. The piece was written for the San Francisco Symphony and premiered by Pablo Heras-Casado.

After Michael Tilson Thomas directed me to some obscure 18^th Century composers (classic MTT maneuver), I conceived of a work that would approach not only the style and musical mannerisms of that period, but the actual instruments themselves. I composed neo-baroque music for the wonderfully strange instruments of that era, then remixed that material in ways that could never be played live. Chords swoosh on, melodies flicker like poltergeists. It will be exciting to perform this hot-off-the-press work with the NSO.

And what’s up with the Loveboat? This is a hugely popular San Francisco mini-festival that runs Halloween weekend. Run by Robbie Kowal, aka Motion Potion,the event features a great mix of artists from across the electronic universe. I perform on Saturday October 28 on a shows that includes The Polish Ambassadors and Moby.

Whether it be on shows like the Loveboat or my own Mercury Soul events, I enjoy the chance to DJ through big systems for reactive crowds. It’s great to be informed by a variety of genre just through iPod listening, but being active as a performed in a different space is good for both mind and body. It keeps my DJ chops sharp while also giving me a fresh perspective on how we experience music from all cultures.

Bernstein, in his own way, is a model for this kind of omnivorous stylistic appetite.  At 100, his diversity of music still seems fresh.  I’m looking forward to hearing him throughout the Kennedy Center and beyond this year, with an eye to both his music and the music yet to be written.

As the 2017-18 season awakens, I look ahead to upcoming performances and premieres still glowing from an enchanting summer in Santa Fe. Here are some reflections on the premiere of The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs and an overview of performances and new projects for the coming season.

Wrapping up Jobs

The last week of performances of my opera in late August were both exciting and poignant. For one thing, we were performing to sold-out houses in front of an incredible mix of first-time opera audiences and, interestingly, 2nd- or 3rd-time viewers of the piece. Strong word of mouth propelled this opera to become one of the best-selling productions in the history of Santa Fe Opera of any era, and the energy in the audience was palpable every night. I once had to check on some tickets left for friends at the box office right before a show, and moving through the lobby was like going to a revivalist church at Christmas. Such infectious electricity infused everyone.

As the performances wrapped up, both cast and creative team seemed to realize the uniqueness to our bond. Many opera productions are plagued by infighting or drama due to the large personalities that inhabit the medium, yet we were thankfully as close-knit and collegial a group as any could remember. A lot of the credit goes to our fearless leaders, director Kevin Newbury and conductor Michael Christie – their positivity infected everyone. But a great deal of the credit also goes to our stunning lead, baritone Edward Parks, who created the mammoth role of Steve Jobs while remaining gracious and mellow offstage. The cast included two families – Sasha Cooke (Laurene) and Kelly Markgraf (Paul Jobs), and Garret Sorensen (Woz) and his son Jonah (Young Steve) – as well as the lovely Jessica Jones and the magical Wei Wu. He made us all smile both onstage and off.

I was also a bit wistful to see my performance of the electronic part come to a close. Being a performer in the orchestra pit gave me not only a shot of adrenalin every week, it also offered special insights into the piece as I consider minor nips and tucks. There is no better way to understand your own music’s strengths and weaknesses than performing it yourself. But as much as I love being part of the performance, I carefully design each piece to work with minimal extra tech requirements – hence the “laptop part” for a future percussionist. As the piece moves to Seattle, San Francisco, Indiana University and beyond, it needs to live on its own. But I’ll always cherish those nights in Santa Fe when I’d climb behind my rig in the pit, with a crackerjack cast and God on our lighting team (there’s a sunset in Scene Three that always looked especially beautiful through the back wall).  To keep me from a post-partum meltdown, a busy schedule this year awaits:

2017-18: Kennedy Center, Mercury Soul, Chanticleer…

The third year of my composer-in-residency at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts features a variety of appearances, starting with the National Symphony’s performance of my Baroque thriller Auditorium Oct 12-15. This piece haunts the modern orchestra with original neo-baroque music composed for period instruments. Premiered by the San Francisco Symphony, this is the work’s East Coast premiere.

Also at the Kennedy Center is my KC Jukebox series, which features new music in new formats. Each show features immersive production and ambient information to educate the audience, as well as post-parties with DJs to allow people to debrief in a fun space. We open on Nov 15 with German electronica due Mouse on Mars, the heirs to Kraftwerk. Their music is ear-tingling mix of funky industrial techno and alluring sound design, and it will be thrilling to feature them at the Center.

On Dec 8 we feature music and visual art in a show called Eye/Ear, with Christopher Rountree conducting a wide range of music by Marcos Balter, Anna Clyne, Timo Andres, and Jacob Cooper. Later in the spring (April 25), as part of the year-long celebration of John F. Kennedy’s centennial, we present a show called JFK Jukebox featuring music in response to civil rights challenges. The highlighted work is by Julius Eastman, a newly re-appreciated composer who early minimalist experiments show a unique musical mind. We also hear from Carlos Simon and from David Little’s band Newspeak, which performs Electric Proletariat.

A central part of the Jukebox series is this year’s inaugural Direct Current festival at the Kennedy Center. A huge range of new works from all manner of art forms will be presented, including on two Jukebox events. California Mystics offers music from California visionaries past and present, with music by legends Lou Harrison and Steve Reich complemented by electric cellist Zoe Keating, the Junkestra of Nathaniel Stookey, and my own Mass Transmission. The festival also includes a Jukebox presentation of Mercury Soul, with music by Derek Bermel, Ted Hearne, Missy Mazzoli, and Jennifer Higdon. I’ll be presenting my own Digital Loom and also DJing with Chicagoan Justin Reed.

Not far from DC, my hometown of Richmond, Virginia is premiering my first work for chorus and orchestra for the Richmond Symphony’s 60^th anniversary. Children of Adam is a high-octane collection of exuberant American celebrations of creation, with a special focus on secular poets exploring sacred themes. The work also includes creation texts from Native Americans of the Virginia area, as well as completely novel celebrations of the creative power of the Industrial Age from Carl Sanburg.

Elsewhere, the legendary Joffrey Ballet is premiering a new ballet Feb 7-18 on The B-Sides by Nicholas Blanc, who first choreographed my Mothership for New York City Ballet. The superstar chorus Chanticleer tours my new work Drum-Taps around the country on a program responding to armed conflict. And in San Francisco, Mercury Soul presents three classical-meets-club shows at the DNA Lounge. Our first, on Nov 17, is entitled “Burlesque & Beats: the 1920’s French Underground” and features imaginative collisions of cabaret, burlesque, and EDM.

That’s enough to keep my mind from drifting into too much nostalgia for the high desert.  The season is on!

A surprising document appeared in my inbox a few days ago: a copy of a letter I wrote in 2000 to my manager Monica Felkel at Young Concert Artists. Writing just after graduating from Juilliard, I alluded to meeting “Brad, who is number 2 at Santa Fe Opera and currently in charge of new productions, commissions, etc … he requested some music and materials.”

Over the seventeen years since then, that seed became a tree that, just a few weeks ago, bore fruit with the premiere of The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs. Many visits to this wonderful opera house ensued, initially to see world premieres but eventually to see just about anything. Jobs may appear to be a first theatrical endeavor by a symphonic composer and DJ, but in fact it is the result of many years of hard work and false starts. Here are some thoughts about the process of bringing this piece to life over the past month.

First of all, many people do not realize how long I have dreamed of an opera premiere. My career has appeared to focus on electro-acoustic symphonic works, which are highly informed by my work as DJ (which also has impacted my role as a curator with institutions from the Chicago Symphony to the Kennedy Center). But I’ve always fixated with special passion on opera, the only artform to unify so much theatrical media simultaneously. And as the narrative nature of my symphonic work indicates, I’ve always been interested in telling new, wild stories with music.

Several embryonic works led to this moment, from a medieval mystery play produced at Juilliard to an opera about a California writer spiraling into personal crisis workshopped in Aspen. (That latter work was presented to Brad about ten years ago; the polite response was I think you’ll have something else.) Those experiences taught me some important lessons: first of all, find a resonant topic; and then, find a world-class librettist.

Mark Campbell took on the challenge I laid out to him with an opera about Steve Jobs, which he had some initial ambivalence about. But he quickly fell in love with the complex, duel protagonist-and-antagonist role of Steve Jobs, and then (just as importantly) with the soulful figure of Laurene Jobs and the mystical character of Kobun, the Buddhist spiritual advisor to Jobs. Mark’s libretto is a master of new storytelling, with a non-linear form tethered by rock-solid dramatic themes.

During the premiere process, Mark and I became something of an old married couple, working out issues behind closed doors and then going to the creative team as a solid unit. After years of this opera living in our heads, it started to come to life in staging rehearsals run by gifted director Kevin Newbury. Whenever I had a question about a particular piece of staging or direction, I’d whisper into Mark’s ear for a quick consultation. Does Jobs really need to wear a single black turtleneck throughout the show? Is it clear when this scene takes place? Is Laurene too static during the fiery argument scene? Mark and I would quietly work out our issues and then, as a unit, take our concerns to the team. I never wanted any daylight between me and Mark during rehearsals; there’s simply too much going on to have competing opinions between librettist and composer.

As we got into the dress rehearsals, Santa Fe Opera constructed a special ladder that I could ascend from the pit, where I am stationed with my electronic gear, so I could check balance in the hall and watch staging unfold. (SFO has a unique moat that runs between pit and audience – a kind of “fourth wall” stream – and I felt like I was passing through a theatrical portal every time I went over it.) Many times I would run out and have a quick chat with Mark and Kevin, giving feedback from fresh eyes.

Kevin Newbury was the perfect director to bring this piece to life. He is a master at assembling a strong design team. Due to the subject matter of this show, we needed a dazzling, high-tech production that would take as through time and space in a unique way. He brought in production designer Vita Tzykun, who created a mesmerizing series of lighted panels that glide around the stage, along with lighting designer Japhy Weideman and projectionist Ben Pearcy. I learned a great deal watching these four people work at each tech rehearsal, which in Santa Fe occur in the wee hours of the night. Lighting storms would play out in the desert behind the stage while, onstage, the magic of stagecraft would unfold.

The biggest question for me was about pacing and clarity. Could I unfurl ninety minutes of drama in an elegantly executed arc? Would the most important elements be perceived amidst all the glorious detail of orchestration, lighting, and theater?

In symphonic premieres, sometimes the sensation of oversaturation settles upon me. In your head or in the safety of your studio, a particular melody or sonority might be the musical focus; but amidst the swirling of eighty other instruments, ideas can get lost. Carefully composing clear, cravable ideas that are transparently orchestrated is the obvious solution, but you have to take risks in order to continue to develop as an artist. Risk-taking means that some things might not work and need adjusting. In an opera, the listener is buried by so much information – music, words, staging – that oversaturation is one of the greatest risks.

There were many, many adjustments made to the orchestration and electronics in the rehearsal process. Creating little windows of silence around specific words was one solution; another was to omit unnecessary over-doubling of the voice; and still another was to whittle-down the volume of accompaniment. The principal singers were especially helpful on this front. Sasha Cooke, our star mezzo-soprano, had just premiered my Passage at the Kennedy Center, so we had a very efficient process. The amazing Ed Parks was a great collaborator, and I made quite a lot of adjustments to Steve Jobs’ big “vision aria” so that the aria would fit him like a glove. I found ways to have the orchestra appear and disappear rapidly around his soaring lines.

There have been many other crucial players in this premiere. Maestro Michael Christie provided crucial suggestions from the beginning. From suggesting vocal space around certain words or balance adjustments within the orchestra, Michael has become a true partner. My music distributor Noah Luna provided key on-the-ground help with orchestral parts. Sound designer Rick Jacobson successfully juggled two dozen mic’s, three guitars, and my circus act of electronic sounds. My ears in the hall were on the head of conductor Ryan Haskins, who continues to give me highly detailed info about electronic and orchestral balance. Assistant director James Daniel and choreographer Chloe Treat were essential collaborators in getting those giant monoliths to dance onstage.

We’re not even halfway through the run. An additional show was added to accommodate the demand, something I didn’t even know was possible, so I’ll be in Santa Fe a little more than I expected this month. Which is fine with me, because I’ve fallen in love with this enchanted town and its superb opera house.

One curious aspect of writing an opera about Steve Jobs: he continues to haunt me.  Indeed, he continues to haunt everyone.  As the creative team and cast rehearse The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs in preparation for its premiere this summer at Santa Fe Opera, we find his presence inescapable. Most of this opera has been created on his computers, most of communication relayed through his devices. In fact, most people reading this – and on this planet – probably feel a strange kinship with a man who impacts us daily. Just check your pocket.

The sleekness of the devices Jobs created – which we all carry like miniature monoliths – underscores a fundamental tension in 21^st Century life: how do we simplify human communication on such beautifully minimalist devices – when people are so messy?

This tension exploded in Jobs’ own life. In both his work and his life, he strove to hide all the ugly wires with sensual exteriors. Whether it be the cancer he tried to control through diets, the refusal to acknowledge his first daughter, or his imperious management style, Jobs sought to control his life as forcefully as he did his software. But as Jobs learned, life doesn’t have one button.

That tension is the stuff of opera.

This medium can get to the essence of his story in unique ways. Unlike film or literature, opera has the ability to present many characters’ thoughts simultaneously. Themes weave together, disparate musics collide. A dramatic version of this approach, which is a kind of extreme version of Wagnerian leitmotif, is essential in an opera about a man who revolutionized human communication. The primary roles in this work – Steve Jobs, his wife Laurene, confidante Steve Wozniak, girlfriend Chrisann, spiritual advisor Kobun – are associated with highly distinct music. As they interact, their musics will blend almost like on a DJ rig.

The other reason that Jobs’ story is so well suited to opera: it’s a non-representational medium. A poetic approach can illuminate a story in deep ways. For example, Mark Campbell’s masterful libretto presents the story in kinetically non-linear, almost ‘pixelated’ manner. Any one of these short scenes seen own its own, like a single pixel, is but a flicker of light. But arranged together, these pixels animate an image, a life. The juxtapositions that occur in this kind of storytelling help us understand a man who transformed from a hippy in an apple orchard to a mogul at the helm of the world’s most valuable company.

Indeed, new storytelling techniques are a part of every element of this piece.  The electro-acoustic score not only animates the inner music of Jobs, but also that of his spiritual advisor Kobun – a key figure in Jobs’ life-long search for inner peace. Unlike the quicksilver electronics and acoustic guitar that run underneath Jobs, the sound of Kobun is calm and mystical. Prayer bowls, gongs, and chimes swirl through the electronics whenever he is on stage. Other characters, such as the key figure of Laurene, are illustrated very differently. She’s oceanic strings and grounded harmonies, since she represents the ‘ground’ between the positive and negative charges of Jobs.

The production continues this new storytelling. The opera opens in the early garage of Steve Jobs and his adoptive father, but soon the walls of the garage fly apart and become projection surfaces that form a kaliedosopic range of spaces. These giant panels are a beautiful collision of 21^st Century technology and old stagecraft. Each looming panel is invisibly moved by people, yet each one has tracking technology that allows high-definition projections to continuously project images upon it while moving in all directions.  This tracking technology, developed in motion-capture for films, has not yet been explored in this medium.

This dynamic set us to tumble spaces seamlessly into other and deepen the narrative.   For example, if you look carefully on the shelves of Jobs’ boyhood garage, you see all the components that would later be transformed by the iPhone: a projector, a telephone, an 8-track player, a camera. When the walls of the garage fly apart, we see Jobs in 2007 holding the first iPhone at its launch.

Technology, in fact, has always been an important element of opera, as well as the orchestra. After all, pyrotechnics and moving scenery were the Lucasfilm of their age. But all of these new techniques, from music to libretto to production, are in the service of the story, and this story is about a man who rediscovers what it means to be human. That journey is guided by his wife, Laurene, who so crucially acted as the ‘ground’ between the positive and negative charges of Jobs.

From the moment he began tinkering in his Los Altos garage, Steve Jobs looked to a future where computers would change the way we interact, where these devices would become as friendly as pets. But in changing our world, he changed too – and sometimes forgot that life is not as streamlined as his devices.

His journey to rediscovering true human connection is the story of this opera, and I invite you to come experience it at Santa Fe Opera.

How do you set a President to music?

I confronted this challenge when the National Symphony Orchestra commissioned a new work on the occasion of John F Kennedy’s centennial, which occurred on May 24. Working inside a ‘living memorial’ has been a strange and beautiful experience over the past two years, but nothing has approached the uniqueness of commemorating a man whose very spirit inhabits the building. The result is Passage, a work for mezzo-soprano, orchestra, and electronic sounds. Here’s how it came to life.

Commemorative works, let’s be honest, can ring a bit stilted. Even one of the most beloved, Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait, plods along too much for me. Whether because of subject matter or the use of narration, the orchestra feels like a backup band, not the main event. I wanted to write a piece that would both commemorate JFK and live beyond the occasion of its premiere, and – just as important – stretch me artistically. And the orchestra is always the main event.

So I quickly abandoned the idea of narrating JFK’s speeches and decided to use the speeches themselves: the actual recordings of his voice, which carry so much more personality than the words alone (as stirring as they may be). Pouring over his many utterances, from the topic of civil rights to national defense, I found myself most drawn to his moonshot speech at Rice University.

This is one of the most audaciously ambitious moments in all of history – and, unbelievably, it succeeded. When JFK said “we choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard,” he catalyzed the entire country to achieve something that seemed literally beyond the reach of mankind. Listening to that speech over fifty years later, amidst our seemingly intractable world problems – from climate change to socio-economic divisions – I felt JFK’s aspirational vision was needed more than ever. This President defined the American optimism and aspiration that, sadly, seems a distant memory. We need more of JFK today.

To complement his moonshot speech, I wanted another voice in the piece, a more poetic perspective on American exploration. Enter Walt Whitman.

From my English major days, I remembered a mystical poem called Passage to India. What begins as an ode to the steamship explodes into a sprawling homage to American exploration and the limitless frontier. Whitman marvels at our ability to travel by ship to India, then by locomotive to California – then looks into the heavens and says “O sun and moon – passage to you!”

The piece crystallized: a setting of Whitman trailed by ghostly echoes of JFK’s voice, two perspectives on the expanding frontier from two American visionaries – President and poet. Technology has been a topic I’ve returned to in new ways, and the idea of juxtaposing two different kinds of American voices intrigued me.

I reached out to Sasha Cooke, whose voice I’ve fallen in love with during the composition of my opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs. The warmth of her voice, her expansive range, and her special understanding of American music made her perfect for Passage. She joined the project, and I got to work.

My biggest challenge: handling the recorded fragments of JFK’s clipped, Bostonian accent – both in terms of acoustic clarity, and in terms of integration into the orchestra. Human speech makes the listener hear differently, and I had to confront both technological and psychological barriers.

JFK speeches available online are not exactly high fidelity. They inhabit a very small spectrum and often are accompanied by crowd noise. Luckily, the Kennedy Center has special access to this kind of thing, and the resourceful Charles Lawson of  Public Radio provided me with much higher-bandwidth recordings.

Armed with these, I played through each clip in the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall with in-house sound engineer D.C. Valentine. Using a spectrograph and our ears, we identified which frequencies needed to be filtered out. We had to adjust so much, the resulting parametric EQs looked like mountain ranges. Then back in my California studio, I also slowed down, sometimes considerably, the clips themselves to make them more understandable.

Remarkably, all this surgical sound design results in something that sounds natural and untouched. But this is what you have to do when playing 1960’s speeches into a highly resonant space.

Next, on the orchestration front, I had to carefully orchestrate around each clip, making sure the orchestra was very spare whenever JFK appeared. Mid-range woodwinds, for example, compete directly with the human voice, so I kept them out the way. While the piece is primarily focused on the Whitman setting, each ghostly appearance of JFK’s voice needs to be understood.

I also had to very carefully weave the orchestra from foreground to background whenever JFK spoke, because the human ear instantly zeroes-in on speech when it’s present. This piece has plenty of busy music – steamship music, chugging locomotive music, even the music of a rocket launch at the end – but whenever JFK or news clips occur, the orchestra momentarily freezes.

On the Sasha front, I gave myself a special assignment: write some passages in her chiaroscuro range with almost nothing in the orchestra. When Sasha inhabits her middle and low end, there is so much color and warmth that over-orchestrating would be a big mistake. Having lived with her voice for two years while writing Jobs, I knew exactly where I wanted to feature her unique sound. There are also plenty of places where she sings at full force, with the orchestra churning underneath.  Passage is dedicated to Sasha, a brilliant collaborator and exceptional voice.

Walking through the Kennedy Center over the past six months while immersed in this project has been surreal. I might see a JFK quote chiseled on the wall and think That one has a lot of 700 Hz and some crazy crowd noise. I also think about his vision and, as well, the vision of Walt Whitman – and all Americans who looked to the ever-expanding frontier and said, “O further sail!”