Fugue for Three Voices

There�s no point waiting around for the Met to call, or even Seattle Opera, if you have the urge to compose an opera: you have to take the reins and produce it yourself. Three local composers who have written, staged, and performed their own music-theater works sat down recently with me to compare notes about how their operas were born and raised. Hope Wechkin by day works in the palliative care program in the UW School of Medicine; her one-woman hospital-set opera Charisma is opening Feb. 22 at ACT. Garrett Fisher, in spacious, ritualistic theater pieces like The Passion of St. Thomas More or Stargazer (on the life of Galileo), examines the clash of the individual with power; his Psyche is premiering in May. And Byron AuYong, whose Stuck Elevator was workshopped at Theater Off Jackson last June, explores issues of ethnicity and cultural identity; his upcoming work draws on the story of Seung-Hui Cho, the fatally troubled Virginia Tech shooter.

I�ll post our chat in four parts, running up to Charisma�s opening night on Friday. Here�s Part I, in which is discussed Chagall, C.S. Lewis, "word ragas," and vaudeville.

Wechkin: [Charisma] is a work that�s been in progress for a long time with writer Margaret Shafer. Margaret is a therapist who I met professionally—the first time we had a conversation, it was about Bach and Thomas Mann, and then we just became friends totally independent of our work. Basically, we were playmates—I really haven�t had that kind of relationship with another adult for a long time. We weren�t on the mission of, oh, we gotta do a show. . . My idea originally was that she was going to create some story and I was going to find music that would somehow tie in, pre-existing music composed by a "real composer." I actually remember going to the music library one day and coming back sort of overwhelmed and frustrated. I had played and improvised stuff for her—she�s not a musician, but she�s a very keen appreciator of music. I said, "Well, I can�t find what I�m looking for," and she was very confused: "What are you talking about? No, that�s not what we�re doing—you�re writing the music. All that stuff you were improvising for me and playing—you�re going to write it for me and that�s going to be the show." That�s actually not what I had in mind, and she said, "Well, I�m not doing this if you�re just going to find somebody else�s stuff—that�s not really interesting."

I had done some composition in college, but not formally, and I had always thought of myself as a performer. But really what I wanted to do was play the violin and sing at the same time—I was more of a frustrated singer/songwriter/guitarist chick who never learned how to play the guitar. . . Things weren�t taking shape and I felt kind of anxious, so I sent Peggy a kind of draft of the structure. And she said "That�s just not how I work. I have no idea how this story is going to go, and I�m not going to know until I�m done with it." So that was a tremendous leap of faith for me, to give up on structure.

We decided that the basic idea was going to be that there was a patient in a hospital, a narrator, and then all of these visitors. . . From that she would start feeding me different characters: "This is the demented lady�s song, the crystal healer�s song, the doctor�s song." It wasn�t until I had composed a lot of music that the story actually emerged.

We had this other influence, this Chagall painting, Blue Violinist—this boy who�s playing the violin on a rooftop and he�s sort of flying. So the whole idea of flight and that sort of magical quality came to figure very largely in it. The show actually grew out of friendship, as these things often do, and the shared idea of the importance of magic. [To Fisher:] Does that have anything to do with the way you work on your own pieces with the librettist, letting the story take its own shape vs. knowing what you�re going to do ahead of time?

Fisher: I often come up with something musical first: some hook or something that I might not even like at first, but a week later it�s still there. . . the spirit of whatever the piece is. The subject itself hasn�t presented itself, necessarily, the plot or the narrative. It takes hold at the sound of the melody, or a chord—I start with the music outward.

For example, for Stargazer, I had an aria I�d written. It wasn�t tied to any plot, but. . . I had an image of Galileo�s daughter sitting by his bedside, even though it�s not in the opera at all, and then I heard that aria. Sometimes I don�t understand why the music has to be this way until I start working with other people, like my sister [choreographer Christy Fisher]. And then it makes sense.

I�m currently working on Psyche, based on the Greek myth, sort of on C.S. Lewis� book Till We Have Faces. Psyche is this beautiful mortal who inspires the envy of Aphrodite. I really loved that story—it�s so mysterious, not like his other books, which have this whole Christian thing going on. It was like a puzzle when I read it.

AuYong: I�ll address this question too—of an organic way of coming into a story vs. having a story and setting that, because I feel that those are the two ways of making music-theater: you have a book that you set, or you have a variety show, which comes out of vaudeville. And now where I�m at, I�m so interested in the vaudeville model, just having a repertoire of different works. And then out of that arises a performance. . . if you can find a narrative that that attaches to, that build an arc, a passageway for the audience to get through. I�m much more prone towards that than a book, even though I think it�s very powerful to base things on stories.

Seattle Weekly: But then how did Stuck Elevator come about—wasn�t that something you saw in a newspaper?

AuYong: Yeah. It�s going to be part of a trilogy. The most famous Asian-American of 2007, unfortunately, was Seung-Hui Cho, so I thought, OK, he got his three days of media attention, similar to Ming Kuang Chen [a delivery man who was trapped in an elevator in an abandoned building] who got his three days when I was living in New York. I know I have to do something with this material, and the way I tell stories is through music. . . I have to get to the truth of it through my own songs; that�s why it takes so long, a lot of thinking and dreaming and agonizing.

Similar to Hope, I realize I have to work with friends—I can�t have collaborators who I can�t hang out with, because that�s really awful. So Aaron [Jafferis] and I [have] written other works together, and we�re still writing Stuck Elevator. What you saw in June was definitely a workshop—us coming at it from all different directions but not as organically as we can, not as operatically as I�m interested in, not as theatrically as he�s interested in. And I think the text is the thing that throws everything into disarray.

Wechkin: Did you write your own text?

AuYong: No, Aaron did.

Fisher: For Agamemnon and Thomas More I did. [But more recently] I�ve used what I call "word ragas": I create this improv structure and give it to a poet. It�s very loose. So he�s a collaborator, like a singer is a collaborator singing a raga. I give a lot of leeway. So Thom Schramm, who wrote for Stargazer and for Psyche, has created his own forms within it too. I try to let the music be the spirit of the piece, and then let the words feed off it in a way that�s very free. So he�s come up with these amazing forms which are like haiku, and have different rhyme schemes thrown in; he uses puns a lot and he tries to create a certain number of meanings in each word. But the music always is the backbone.

Wechkin: I found it so totally liberating to not be responsible for the words, and it really felt like my birthday every day: "What is she gonna send me?!"

SW: Did you give anything back to her, make any suggestions for changes?

Wechkin: You know, it�s funny, you hear about collaboration, I thought it was going to be this hair-pulling, wrangling, gut wrenching thing. And maybe it�s because Peggy is most notably a poet, but the words just sang. Even the parts that aren�t songs are so poetic and so musical. . . I couldn�t believe how it sort of wrote itself. Poetry and music seem to brush up against each other, they�re intertwined, they�re natural. Theater has all these other requirements: that there�s movement and that the audience feels like we�re going somewhere. So how to balance that need for movement with wanting to kind of bathe in the music and poetry—that�s where the tension is.

AuYong: You can�t have 20 ballads in a row.

Wechkin: Then it becomes a song-cycle.

Fisher: I feel like the logic of words is so different from the logic of music, and for Psyche I�m trying to delve into where they meet. . . there�s not only the meaning you�re trying to convey, but the sound of the words and the rhythm—how do you combine all that?

AuYong: But your work is also inherently sacred in feel, so there�s a timing that�s separate from a kind of mundane theater.

Wechkin: It has this very sort of elevated, contemplative aspect to it.

Fisher: Probably because of that, I�m not thinking of "theater" in the same way that you might. In the end you�re trying to create a piece that moves people, and the topics you�re using are more real-world. If people come to something of mine and expect that, they�ll probably be thrown.

SW: But to a certain extent Stargazer was like that—the conflicts of the individual vs. politics. There was a contemporary resonance that was more overt than in your other works.

Fisher: For the first time [in Stargazer] I started working with a different writer, instead of using my words, which tend to be very spare. . . I was working with Ken Cerniglia, a dramaturg, who said, "Why not try to branch out and bring in these other layers of poetic meaning?". . . Stargazer needed that, because it�s a very complex story, and it�s really easy to make it good vs. evil and the church is bad and Galileo was right—

Wechkin: But he was right.

Fisher: In the end, he was right, but my point was not so much whether he was right or wrong but the story of how it happened. . . so I needed a poet who could really delve into the history and create haiku based on it. That rhymed.

SW: When you got text from [Schramm], did you ask for changes? Was there any back-and-forth?

Fisher: I don�t think I changed anything he wrote that was spoken. We worked together: I had this one melody that was part of the "hook" of the whole piece. It�s a very difficult melody to set words to—it goes high and low and all over the place. . . he did it and then I listened and said, "I need to move it this way."

SW: So when it was just spoken, it was his department, but when you had to combine it with your notes, you needed to make alterations?

Fisher: Not necessarily, because I feel that his words fit into a larger whole which I�m somewhat responsible for. . . For example, word quality I worked a lot with. I have this rule that you have to only use "positive" language. Which doesn�t mean you can�t be angry or have negative feelings, but when you say it you only use certain words. . . I use rules like that to develop the drama, because by only saying certain words, you�re alluding to others. Those rules dictated how he shaped his piece.

SW: What stage are you at with Psyche?

Fisher: We basically have found all [the performers] except one. But I have the overall structure laid out, we have the written-out parts, we have the libretto draft, which I think is basically finished. So now we just have to rehearse it. And rehearsing it, everything will change. . .

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