Audience Participation

Hey, who needs a break from all the doom and gloom that's been dominating the music biz lately? I do, for one, and a comment on a recent post (from a gentleman who believes that new music has been useless and unlistenable roughly since Schönberg came along) got me thinking about the uphill battle we still have to fight to convince today's audiences that most composers got over the whole "noise as music" thing years ago, and a lot of great young composers are writing stuff that's just begging for exposure to a mass audience.

Case in point: my friend Geoff. One of several composers I've commissioned solo viola music from over the years, Geoff has lately been dedicating the lion's share of his time to projects aimed at children. At the moment, he's working on a set of string quartet albums that help young musicians develop their ensemble skills while at the same time allowing them to play "real" pieces of music. And a couple of years back, he actually wrote an entire opera for kids. This wasn't some dumbed-down piece of pop crossover masquerading as opera, either - it was very serious music on a very unserious subject: namely, bugs. The Bug Opera premiered in Massachusetts, and has since been performed by a few professional regional opera companies around the US. There's even been interest from overseas - a company in Stuttgart is awaiting a German version.

The plot of The Bug Opera is pretty simple: the main character is a mosquito who finds the idea of sucking blood disgusting and mean. But of course, if she doesn't suck blood, she'll die, so the opera finds Mosquito embarking on a quest to resolve this primal conflict. On the way, she meets a pack of mindlessly gluttonous caterpillars, a deadly and unrepentant spider, and a paper wasp who becomes sort of her Jiminy Cricket. It's the kind of piece that, when you see it performed, your first thought isn't "My, what intellectually stimulating music, and such a wonderful lesson in the complexity of life!" No, the first thing you think is: "That is just way cool. Why didn't anyone think of this sooner?"



Interestingly, Geoff (and his librettist/wife, Alisa) developed the opera in the same way that they're developing the string quartet project: by holding dozens of workshops and mini-performances with kids around the country while the pieces are still being written. The idea is that, if you write a piece for kids while sequestered in your home, you won't know whether you succeeded until opening night, and if the audience isn't impressed, well, too late. So by giving kids a chance to interact with bits and pieces of the work as it's being put together, Geoff gets instant feedback which he can then use in tweaking and improving what he's doing.

I actually had the chance to be a part of one the workshopping moments for The Bug Opera, at the summer camp I've written about before where Geoff and I both teach. Along with a few other faculty members, I sang the caterpillar's "Eat, Chew, Chew" chorus for the pre-teens at the camp, and Alisa (who is also an accomplished coloratura soprano) sang the spider's creepy come-hither aria. All the while, Geoff had a video camera trained not on the performers, but on the kids, to get a record of their reaction to all sorts of musical and dramatic moments. It's amazing how much a child's face can tell you about whether or not you've captured their imagination.

Geoff's latest project (the string quartet thing) will actually be getting a workshopping of its own this summer at Minneapolis's own MacPhail Center for Music, before moving into its final phase of composition and eventual public performance, which should happen in 2010. It's not the sort of high-profile project that gets a composer labeled The Next Big Thing, but it's one more example of the amazingly diverse place that the music world has become these days, and of the creative approaches musicians, composers, and others are taking to get their work out into the public ear.

[Full disclosure: In addition to being a good friend of Geoff's, I also serve on the board of Hybrid Vigor Music, a small non-profit company that provides support and guidance for both The Bug Opera and the Quartet Project. I have no financial stake in any of it - I just think what Geoff is doing is worth sharing.]