(Because I'm home from shul trying to recoup from this blood-pressure problem....)
An inventory of the projects which I'm planning on working on at some point in the next hundred years as composer/writer....I suppose all related to Voices of Washington as extensions of what we want to do normally (though I suppose that some are only in a more extreme tangential way). People have asked (though not too many), so I'm putting it here in public for anyone who wants to look and see precisely what goes on in this odd head of mine. This is here so that others can think about them, send comments to me about them, and no doubt so people (myself included) can mock them occasionally as well. Azai Geyt Das as we say in Yiddish. If you want to do something worthwhile with your life, then be prepared for lots of people to tell you that everything you do is ridiculous:
Project 1: Voices of Washington - not just the name of my chorus, but also the name of its charter large-scale project. I have in outline form a series of 26 songs (though possibly a 27th is also going there). We are going to do for DC what Sufjan Stevens did for Michigan and Illinois and Aretha Franklin did for really big hats. Even between Bo Diddley, Chuck Brown, Jelly Roll Morton, Aaron Sorkin, George Pellicanos and Gore Vidal - no musical or literary artist has ever given a genuine sense of exactly what life means in DC. This piece isn't meant to capture it down to the last detail, just to give the essence of the type people who are drawn to DC, who stay in DC, who ultimately make the city what it is. In October, when I begin work on the project in earnest, I'll post all the outlines here.
Project 2: The Psalms - The Psalms of the Old Testament are pieces of consolation and fear which people have used to give meaning to their lives for the last three-thousand years. I wrote a eight-part Hebrew choral setting of Psalm 1 in the summer of 2009, and have been stuck on Psalm 2 until today. What I realized was that if this piece doesn't want to be monotonous, its reach has to be as broad as possible - set in as many possible languages and styles as possible. But my goal is eventually for the entirety of the 150 Psalms of David to be set, and set for a capella chorus and extremely minimal instrumental accompaniment.
Projects 3, 4 & 5: The "Jewish Operas"
Project 3: The Brothers "Karamovsky." My relationship with Dostoevsky is like mine with Wagner, aka I don't like him, yet I find myself totally obsessed by him. This piece is a way to get at least one of them out of my system. No, I'm not going to learn Russian (nor at this point could I ever with my learning ....ahem..... disabilities). This will be set in English (und a bistle Yiddish), in a small orthodox Jewish community like the one around which I grew up. The essence of each character will stay intact, only they'll now be orthodox American Jews. Dostoevsky's long-winded filler will be replaced by (hopefully not long-winded) music, we'll strip the action down to those incredible scenes that make him a writer worth reading, and the resolution of the murder mystery will be completely changed. Part of FD's accomplishment was that he showed that all the pure drama which could be derived from stages in Greece and England could be transferable to novels about backwater Russian places. Let's at least try to see if somebody can do the same for Pikesville, Maryland. By the end, nobody may even realize that this is based on Brothers Karamazov because the point is to get as little Dostoevsky and as much Pikesville as possible. By the end of this opera, everybody should know exactly where you shop for the best kosher meat, exactly where you go for the kosherest dry-cleaning, and the exact differences between the Satmars, the Bialodrevners, the Chabadniks and the Agudites. Ultimately, this is the only one of the three for which the end result could be considered an opera in any real sense, but an opera it will be and hopefully with the kind of enormous wallop one generally associates with it.
Project 4: A Tale of Two Liars by Isaac Bashevis Singer. A sort of Yiddish theater revival show - halfway between vaudeville and old school Broadway, but with a script entirely in Yiddish (how I will write it with my 500-words of Yiddish intact I don't know). Based on a short story by my favorite writer, it will very much a dark comedy and will be set exactly as Singer wrote it - it will be like a tour of everything that was awesome about Yiddish culture. In no way will this be a hagiography, one of the greatest attributes of Singer's writing was how well he punctured the myth of the Shtetl as a type of utopia. Right up until its destruction by Hitler, life in the Pale of Settlement was medieval and grounded in obsessive superstition. But, superstition can make for charmingly unique characters and hilarious situations. So here it goes....
Project 5: "The Greenies" (meaning greenhorns): 100 years in the life of a Jewish family, scattered all around the world in attempts to find greater opportunities. The story will have a narrator who recounts the lifestory of each character as the century goes along. It's a chance to integrate musical styles and material from every corner of the world. The stories are probably not done linearly, and the music is probably not an opera in any sense that we understand it. It's much closer, probably, to a very large Oratorio or Cantata. It needs an orchestra with some very exotic instruments, a chorus of approximately 100 people, each of whom has a solo as a different family member, while the chorus at large portrays the world at large. I have no idea how one would go about doing this project yet in a way that wont go on endlessly, but I think it's my very best idea.
Project 6: American Classical Music. This project is ultimately the most important ambition I have for Voices of Washington. The idea is to make whatever little dent we can in the way people hear music in America so that these odd and false distinctions between classical and popular can fall down. We are going to sing as catholic a repertoire as I can possibly give the group: everything from the most incredibly inspiring music to music that is just a bit of fun. But ultimately, the most important distinction we make is for those pieces that are great enough that they can stand up against the greatest music from other cultures and eras. I put Offspring in VoW's repertoire as a way to make the singers not take this too seriously, but I have us sing Sam Cooke and Don McLean because I want singers and audiences to realize that this is music that is every bit as great and beautiful as anything by Bach or Mozart. Really, project 1 is part of this. But for the future, I would like for Voices of Washington to sing less of my original music and be a showcase for all sorts of other people's talents.
...and I think these are enough projects for one lifetime....adjustments to the inventory will be made accordingly.
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