PRIOR INSTALLMENTS

Put good shoes on my feet and I’m not only moving but I’m traveling to unexpected places. I’m in the middle of plotting an opera and people keep asking how did you get this project started much less get this far?
Here begins a travelogue pastiche of the work-in-progress opera
Gertrude Stein Invents A Jump Early On. This installment shows the bootstraps—how did this poet, composer, and artistic director get involved in this project?
Click Here To Read

Whereas the first installment of my opera story moved around the map of the United States, Europe and North Africa, this part of the story of Gertrude Stein Invents A Jump Early On is more a head trip. People keep asking me, “how does one get from poetry to opera libretto?” So without getting into the blood and guts of my quirky creative birthing process, I will provide the basic ingredients that spur or spurred me on within the philosophic framework Gertrude Stein set out for her writing, including her considerable theater work which numbers 80 plays and libretti.
Click Here To Read

Webster’s New World and American Heritage dictionaries define the word collaboration as either two or more artists or scientists working together on a joint project or a person or people cooperating with the enemy. To fully appreciate The Steiny Road to Operadom, one must keep in view both of these definitions. As I hinted in my last essay, collaboration can be a difficult kind of relationship. To offer perspective about my collaboration with composer William Barfield and artistic director Nancy Rhodes, I will also talk about the collaboration between Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson.
Click Here To Read

© 2003 Aviar-DKA Ltd. All rights reserved (including authors’ and individual copyrights as indicated). No
part of this material may be reproduced, translated, transmitted, framed or stored in a retrieval system for
public or private use without the written permission of the publisher and the individual copyright holder.
For permissions, contact publishers@scene4.com

.

All articles are archived on this site.
To access the Archives