Organizing operas in limousines and train stations, writing operas in the spirit of Bugs Bunny, singing whispering premieres, teaching young songwriters that it's really Bartok who brings the 0,1,6y back, Marc Lowenstein has a rich, vibrant and eclectic career.
Marc is the founding Music Director of the Industry, Los Angeles’ groundbreaking and widely acclaimed experimental opera company. With the Los Angeles Philharmonic he recently conducted the premiere of his and Yuval Sharon’s new performing edition of Lou Harrison’s fantastically colorful Young Caesar. Also with the Industry, he has conducted Anne LeBaron’s enormously fun Crescent City, Christopher Cerrone’s deeply moving Invisible Cities, three iterations of the new opera workshops First Take and the recent workshop production of Andy Akiho’s Galileo. He has been the Industry’s Music Director for In C by Terry Riley and Hopscotch, the mobile opera for 24 limousines which the New Yorker described as, "Awe-inspiring. One of the more complicated operatic enterprises to have been attempted since Richard Wagner staged The Ring of the Nibelung in 1876. Hopscotch triumphantly escapes the genteel, fenced-off zone where opera is supposed to reside.”
Marc composes music infused with a searching sense of narrative and mysticism. Focusing on larger scale works, he was one of the principal composers of Hopscotch, writing scenes for limousine interiors, an outdoor park, and an abandoned theater. He has written long form pieces based on concepts of Jewish and Buddhist meditations including this for Jodie Landau and wildUp, T’shuvah for improvising Bassoon and string quartet, and a ’Cello concerto, T’filat ha-Derech. He has written an opera based on the movie The Fisher King, and is at work on a family opera called Little Bear.
Marc has been Music Director for several opera premieres including John King’s Cage-ian Dice Thrown, and the American premieres of George Aperghis’ breathtaking L’Origine des Espèces, Veronika Krausas’ dramatic The Immortal Thoughts of Lady MacBeth, Stephen Oliver’s cross-cultural Peach Blossom Fan, and Murray Schaeffer’s Loving. He conducted on New York City Opera’s Vox opera workshop program for four years.
Marc also conducts the Gurrisonic jazz orchestra and has a deep interest in cross-genre and cross-cultural musical styles, avoiding the word “musics” at all costs in favor of the more apt word “music.”
Marc has sung about twenty five opera roles including Madeline X in the premiere of Foreman/Gordon’s What to Wear (which is not only findable on youtube, but, in a postmodern sense, oddly reminiscent of Marc’s first stage role at age 13 which also was in drag). Marc has been active as a performer of contemporary vocal music singing on the Ojai festival and on the Monday Evening Concert series. He has been called “a terrific singer” (LA Times), an “assured conductor” (New York Times) and “raptly lyrical” (New Yorker).
He has recorded on Naxos, Industry Records, Innova, Poobah, Bedroom Community, Q Division, Nine Winds Music and Three Kids music.
Marc is an educator at heart and loves reading and writing about the multitude of reasons and ways we love music. He holds the Roy E. Disney Family Chair in Music Composition in the Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts.
“There is a quartet of terrific singers, dressed alike and looking like a kind of postmodern Andrews Sisters, except one sister is a brother in drag — Marc Lowenstein.”
—Los Angeles Times
"Gerald Steichen, Brian Garman, Steven Jarvi and Marc Lowenstein were the afternoon’s assured conductors. The musicians of the City Opera Orchestra clearly relished the challenges of playing these difficult new works, and did so very well."
—Anthony Tommasini New York Times
"Awe-inspiring. One of the more complicated operatic enterprises to have been attempted since Richard Wagner staged The Ring of the Nibelung in 1876. Hopscotch triumphantly escapes the genteel, fenced-off zone where opera is supposed to reside."
—New Yorker
“A masterpiece of logistics and a remarkable fusion of variety and consistency. Hopscotch has broken the fourth wall with a vengeance, not merely freeing opera from the opera house, but making its heightened expression the sound of real, everyday and inner life.”
It can free us to notice moments of genius around us, it can open us up to moments of genius that can pass through each of us, collectively and individually, filling us with wonder and joy.
this is a meditation on the connection between mindful compassion and mystical longing and the title comes from a cabbalistic use of the Hebrew word for 'this' that can denote the un-nameable one-ness that surrounds us at each present moment. The texts include an excerpt from The Song of Songs that can be read as a desire for mystical union, a poem by Rumi that is a reflection on compassion and freedom from longing, and the famous six syllable Sanskrit mantra associated with the bodhisattva of compassion. When searching for a way to balance an end for the piece, the om manipadme hum mantra reminded me that the Dalai Llama has said that one way to sum up his religion of kindness and enlightenment was simply to treat everyone he meets as an old friend. This saying in turn reminded me of a a stanza from a poem by H.N. Bialik that beckons a tired friend to repose and peace and I end the piece with a setting of that poem (in part derived from a previous setting by Moshe Vilensky).
When thinking of all these things, I kept thinking of prayer wheels and mantras. For some Tibetans, writing a mantra or prayer on a wheel and then spinning it has the meditative effect as saying that mantra as many times as the wheel spins, and this in turn lead me to think of the spinning religious dances native to the Sufi traditions that Rumi is associated with. That lead me towards using about four different very repetitive drone-like mantras. And around those, different dance rhythms and melodies alternately float above and engage in the mantras as a way to express the seemingly paradoxical coupling between a deep yearning and a compassionate lack of desire, between seeking and peace.
The Little Bear is an opera about what fairy tales reveal about the psychology of time, change, loss, and love. The story revolves around Sarah, a twelve year old girl whose parents and uncle tell her three fairy tales. Sarah and her family comment on each story as it goes, sometimes divining quite different morals. The first story is Little Red Riding Hood which begins humorously but quickly becomes quite dark before being rescued by a raucous ending. Sarah wonders what happens after the happily ever after, and while her father, William, tries to deflect, her uncle launches into the story of Rumplestiltskin which, unfortunately, also quickly changes from funny to foreboding. Tired, Sarah asks for one more story. Her father demurs, but Sarah insists, and William tells a quiet, shadow puppet version of Beauty and the Beast, while Sarah falls asleep.
In an epilog, Sarah, now thirty years old, sings a lullaby to her own baby, telling a fantastical fairy tale version of her life’s story with music from all three stories mingling.
When I was a child, one of my reading obsessions was Andrew Lang’s series of color Fairy Books. At an early age, I sensed that the stories swirled with primal desires and fears. The monsters and princesses and many characters in the stories resonated with the colors of my world and echoed the fierceness, the togetherness, the honor, the humor, the caustic post-traumatic stress, and the radiant love of my own family.
When I was a little older, I realized that one reason we keep rereading and reframing these stories is that they can bring us back to our own early times when we construct our primal emotional narratives. In bright primary colors fairytales explain things obliquely, offering us templates for our imaginations. Wild young love? Check. Good and Evil? Check. Deep personal bonds? Check. Fear of separation? Check. Enormous physical and emotional danger? Subtle traps? Everywhere.
And now, now my own children keep asking for stories. Made up stories, true stories, stories about previous generations, princes and princesses and happy kitties—there is never enough. My wife is the master story-teller and I love it. And our children revel not just in the wildness of the telling, but also in the connection it fosters between us.
As I look outwards at our wonderfully re-invigorated era of new operas, I notice that there are not very many works being written about or for children and families. Over the past few months, I’ve realized some of the reasons why this is so: it is indeed tricky and delicate bringing the intensely bright world of childhood stories into operatic drama. It is difficult to know what best captures the stark, strong colors and keen craziness of being a child—or a parent for that matter.
I wasn’t sure how to begin. I didn’t want to write just for children, but I also didn’t want to avoid musical languages that may evoke a certain childlike aura. Though I have deep respect for the art of Disney fairytales, it didn’t seem quite honest of me to write in anything like that style. And I didn’t want to modernize fairy-tale opera precedents, but I didn’t want to avoid them either. In fact, it has become clear to me only gradually that one of the challenges of writing Little Bear is finding a way around an ever-present, almost-zen paradox of trying not to avoid anything as I write.
So instead focussing on aversions that can too easily paralyze creativity, I have been trying to continually renew a more positive aesthetic. One positive answer I found is the incorporation of flamboyantly non-Western music styles into the actual storytelling portions of the plot. For me these seem to mirror the bright colors of the original stories: The Little Red Riding Hood scene presented here uses Middle Eastern drumming, the Rumplestiltskin will use West African bell patterns, and Beauty and the Beast will be centered around repetitive Indonesian cycles. More generally, and perhaps more importantly, another positive answer to the challenge of writing a fairy tale opera has been the pursuit of a strategy which I like to imagine the creators of Bugs Bunny or Spongebob must enjoy: writing for children but being silly on an adult level as well—amusing oneself at the same time. This, I hope, can help me find a voice that effectively echoes both my own and my children’s love of stories.
The word derech in Hebrew means “path” and the prayer along the way; the T’filat ha-Derech refers to a traditional traveler’s prayer that asks to “cause us to reach our destination in life, joy, and peace”. If a concerto can have a plot, the sense of this piece is that we are always on the way, at every moment, much of the time unrelentingly, sometimes in stillness. Sometimes living in the same repetitive motion over and over again, caught in a flood of whirling echoes. Sometimes distracted, sometimes, if we are fortunate, in happy repose.
The first movement is a dance, alternating between a simple Phrygian tune and more raucous interludes reminiscent of a sort of wild, rickety junk-yard funk.
The second movement shown here is a meditation on a two-note figure in the ’cello that spins off into the other voices, filling out and becoming wilder and wilder. The ’cello responds in turn to their new ideas, eventually leading them into a tolling, closely repeating chorus before climbing back somewhere up into its original notes.
The final movement is based on a very short piece I wrote several years ago in memory of my mother, a cellist herself. I had become interested in Yemenite music and wrote a brief dance echoing some of the clangorous rhythms I heard in that music. For T’filat ha-Derech, I took that fragment and filled it out, adding a sort of orchestrated reverb as I went, and striving for the same kind of aesthetic that I love in some of the joyously meditative electronic dance music I hear these days. At times the tune disappears and reenters, and when the cadenza is finished, it falls gently into a much slower coda, an attempt at gratitude and resolution, an attempt to portray the hopes of the original prayer.
T’filat ha-Derech is dedicated to my son, Zev.
Video Credits:
Derek Stein: 'cello
Conducted by Marc Lowenstein
Recorded live at REDCAT
Nietzsche Aria
This aria is from an opera based on the screenplay to the movie The Fisher King. The story is a fantastical, urban update of the old Celtic myth and is about the redemption of loss and pain through simple acts of kindness.
In this part, Jack, having just lost his job and girlfriend, drunkenly wanders the street. A small boy tries to be kind and gives him his Pinnochio doll. Jack, singing to the doll, becomes increasingly bitter and attempts suicide.
After this aria he is rescued by Parry (aka Parsifal), and the story of their mutual salvation begins.
The percussion section is playing a junk set of found objects that roughly match the pitches of the lower instruments in the orchestra. The vocal part is quite free and is instructed to be sung freely and with the tone subservient to the bitterness of the mood.
Video Credits:
Grady Cousins: Baritone
CalArts New Millennium Players
Conducted by Marc Lowenstein
Recorded live at the Getty Center
T'Shuvah
T’shuvah is based on two dances. The first is one I heard chanted by a young boy in a Morroccan synagogue in Paris many years ago. The text was the well known ‘v’ahavta...’ prayer (‘and you shall love...’), and I remember marveling at the simplicity, the foreignness and the familiarity of the tune. The second, a faster one, I wrote, and it is influenced by Hassidic wordless melodies as well as Middle Eastern inflections. They are both meditative and repetitive.
As such, the piece seemed from the outset to demand improvisation. I was thus especially pleased to write this piece for Sara Schoenbeck: her improvisational voice is rich in love and skill. Just as I felt at home in an old and new world in that synagogue twenty years ago, so I felt at home writing for Sara and trusting her improvisation.
The title, T’shuvah, means "returning" in Hebrew. The word has mystical connotations relating to a source to which one can strive to return. The word also means "repentance," implying that repentance is linked with both tangible and spiritual action; that in fact there may be little distinction between the two. Funnily enough I’m not sure what any of this has to do with the specific notes of this piece other than that since music can seem to take up where words leave off I should leave it at that.
Video Credits:
Sara Schoenbeck: Bassoon
Erick KM Clark: violin
Daphne Chen: violin
Kira Blumberg: viola
Lynn Angebranndt: cello
In the Theater
In this scene from Hopscotch, the audience was invited into an abandoned theatre by an older Lucha. She pieces together her memories of having been there years before to see an opera with her now disappeared lover, Jameson.
This scene was written knowing that the soprano would be on the upper balcony of the theater and the two violins would be about one hundred feet away, below that balcony, while the tenor would be still farther away on stage, in full costume, lit only by a single ghost light, singing Orfeo’s Possente Spirito.
There were two interesting challenges: writing the scene so that there could be some alignment without being completely dependent on exact coordination, and writing the scene so that it could be cut short if the mechanics of the larger opera demanded it. Ultimately, I thought both challenges helped the expression of the scene which attempts to portray the fragility of even the most passionate memories.
Jennifer Lindsay, the soprano, and the ensemble who this scene was written for did the scene 24 times on each performance day. There were a lot of stairs.
Jennifer Lindsay: soprano
James Onstad: tenor
Erick KM Clark: violin
Mona Tian: violin
Recorded by Lewis Pesacov live at the Million Dollar Theater
In the Park
In this scene from Hopscotch, Lucha and Jameson are on a date at Hollenbeck Park. As they get to know each other, the park turns into a magical landscape made for romance. They are falling in love and are hopeful for a future together.
One thing I loved about the scene was that, depending on which direction you were traveling this route, you could enter the scene from the the main character’s young and hopeful quinceañera and exit into a completely darkened limousine with a soundtrack of her mid-life delirium, or you could take the opposite route. Either way, the framing of this their first kiss was exquisite.
Before Erin and I ever started writing scene, we walked around Hollenbeck Park, figuring out how the plot and the music could interact over such long distances, and thinking about what elements could stroll with the singers and audience, and what elements should be fixed in place. And from that beginning, before anything was written, it became clear that absolute musical coordination was not only not possible but not desirable. There would be moments of rhythmical tightness and moments of free falling interdependence. This matched the experience of walking around a park and hearing different sounds cross-fade over time, but more importantly, this musical ebb and flow was a fabulous and activating metaphor for the dance of two characters realizing that they are in love.
Pulling off this combination of tightness and freedom in performance was no easy thing. I could not have written this scene without personally knowing the excellent performers who each individually brought the enormous skill, great flexibility, and frank endurance that made this scene possible. I am ever indebted to them for coming along on this ride.
From the LA River to the Bradbury Building, from rooftops to abandoned parking lots, from inside an Airstream to the back of a limousine zooming through the unsuspecting city streets, The Industry’s audacious mobile opera Hopscotch took Los Angeles by storm in Fall 2015. With 24 cars, 126 diverse artists, 6 composers, 6 writers, and 1 unique purpose-built architectural space where the entire piece was streamed for free, our Hopscotch was a once-in-a-lifetime event.
We realized that site-specific concerns, at timesextreme, were actually wonderful opportunities to turn audio and musical challenges into unique modes of storytelling. The music direction became an exploration in ways to shape sound across unusual distances and times and also an exploration in how much control to give up. Directing the music’s hallucinatory, out-of-sequence narrative also included supervising the improvised animation scoring as well, working with my good friends in Gnarwhallaby.
Although we recognized early on that we would never be able to mount this production again, we made an expansive recording of Hopscotch, now available on The Industry Records, which showcases the diverse range of musical and theatrical ideas at the heart of the original production and which, with the website, allows you to reenter the world, a thousand gates leading to one great Path.
"A masterpiece of logistics and a remarkable fusion of variety and consistency. Hopscotch has broken the fourth wall with a vengeance, not merely freeing opera from the opera house, but making its heightened expression the sound of real, everyday and inner life." —Wall Street Journal
Young Caesar
Young Caesar is Lou Harrison’s wonderfully accomplished portrayal of homosexual love as deeply human and deeply humane. It started as a small gamelan puppet opera and gradually morphed into a work reaching towards the full operatic stage. This edition, by Yuval Sharon and me, was a labor of great love, made in cooperation with the Harrison estate and Lou’s original collaborators. It was made in the faith that this unique and glowingly beautiful work can now deservedly enter the operatic canon. This edition’s orchestration combines Harrison’s original desire to use his just-intonation and Asian instruments with his later, more traditional operatic elements. We were thrilled to work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in bringing this work to the stage and furthermore making an excellent recording that we trust will help send this work in to the canon where it deserves to be.
Invisible Cities
Invisible Cities was an experiment in using advanced technology to tell a deeply human story. The singers and dancers moved throughout Los Angeles’ Union Station. Each had a monitor through which they heard the orchestra which was in a separate building. The soundstreams were mixed and sent out to the audience’s headphones. As a result, the rehearsal process necessitated ensuring that the singers could be confident without seeing me and that the orchestra, with their remote hearing of the singers, felt secure enough to be luminous in return. Also, as a result, I never saw the actual show until the DVD was released by Industry Records. That magical detachment fit perfectly with Chris Cerrone’s wonderful setting of Italo Calvino’s warm post-modern masterpiece in which reality seems impossible to separate from its magical perception. Chris’ music echoes the imaginative psychological space of the novel and as such, the beautiful historical train station itself became a partner in the journey, deeply validating the technology that made the work come alive.
"A startlingly ambitious project by the venturesome opera company The Industry. The idea of putting on an opera in a train station where the characters can be nearly indistinguishable from everyday people in the waiting rooms is a strange and alluring subversion. It would not have been hard for Sharon’s herculean act of coordination and inventive production to overwhelm Cerrone’s delicate and beautiful opera. Importantly, it didn’t. Somehow, even the performance, conducted by Marc Lowenstein, remained sensitive in so intimidating a performance space." —Los Angeles Times
In C
In C was another part of the Industry’s Highway 1 series, a project dedicating to bringing works of the California School of American experimentalism to new dramatic life. We performed the entire aleatoric work four times without pause, using different combinations of sixteen singers and six instruments in the middle of swirling air dancers and Danielle Agami’s ATE/9 dance company. The accessibility of the Hammer Museum’s courtyard meant that the show attracted a widely diverse audience, something central to The Industry’s mission. My favorite moments in the productions was when small children would play with the air dancers and then run over to the live dancers. The look on their faces as the dancers acknowledged them and danced with them was priceless.
Crescent City
Crescent Cities was a great cacophonous joy to bring to life. The music by Anne LeBaron is a wonderment of wild colors, weaving together zydeco, gospel, voodoo drumming, and ancient Korean traditions to create an unforgettably phantasmagoric score, and the orchestra was in a loft above the swirling scenes, each set in its individual commissioned sculpture in the middle of a large warehouse. One scene of Anne’s piece magnificently features the Partch Chromolodeon which divides the octave in 43 equal steps. Another scene involved club music and another featured a musical saw. It was incredible. And I’m still not sure what happened to the costumes. They were quite... memorable. (If you’re interested, ask Timur.)
The recording of Crescent Cities is available on Innova Records.
"... fantastical layers and robust vocal writing, a perspective that is always changing and always captivating.” —Los Angeles Times
"Fascinatingly staged by the über-creative Yuval Sharon.” —Stage and Cinema
Gurrisonic Orchestra
The Gurrisonic Orchestra is an ongoing project of Jose Gurri-Cardenas. In his words it is an “Avant-Garde New Music, Experimental Large-Band, Modern Creative Avant-Prog, Experimental Chamber Orchestra, Pan American-Forward-Thinking Monster Band Music, Chamber Orchestra of Vision." I couldn’t agree more. It is a fabulous time to be making music in Los Angeles, and I feel very lucky to work with of some of its very finest creative improvisers. Conducting a Jazz Orchestra with such fiercely good inhabitants of the borders between Jazz, experimental music and folk traditions is a happy occupation, and I always learn something exciting and new about collaborative possibilities when I play with Gurri.
"A bunch of amazingly good musicians.“ —Louis Andriessen
"Exciting, blissful, brilliant, life-altering... for all of its complexity, for all of its many nuances, there is also a surprising, welcoming accessibility to the sounds produced by Gurrisonic Orchestra. These musicians, as they go through their paces, exude an enormous amount of warmth, inviting you without hesitation to join them on their thrilling ride. You’ll want to accept that invitation—again and again." —Jazz Times
First Take
I am very proud to be involved in The Industry's First Take. I met Yuval when I conducted on the program he ran at New York City Opera called VOX. It was a wonderful program which showcased fully orchestrated, un-staged excerpts from new opera, and when Yuval moved to Los Angeles eight years ago to start The Industry, we talked about how best we could model a program after VOX, how best to continue the tradition of creating exciting opportunities for composers, librettists and audiences. The result is First Take a biennial West Coast workshop of new American operas designed to give audiences a taste of the wide range of ideas in opera today.
The inaugural run of First Take took place at the Hammer Museum in 2013 and featured works by Pauline Oliveros, Mohammed Fairouz, David Brynjar Franzson, Ellen Reid, Aaron Siegel, and Alexander Vassos. Our next iteration took place at the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts in 2015 and featured the legendary Joan La Barbara to perform works by Jason Thorpe Buchanan, Nomi Epstein, Jenny Olivia Johnson, Anne LeBaron, Andrew McIntosh and Paul Pinto. In 2017 the works of Laura Karpman, Dylan Mattingly, John Hastings, Nicolas Deyoe, William Gardiner and myself were featured.
This video is from the most recent First Take and shows an excerpt of Nick Deyoe's Haydn's Head. The work is delightful and extremely well crafted. It is a rare example of music that both displays a modernist, complexist style and also portrays a wide range of emotional expression. From arch humor to pathos to frustration, desire, and broad comedy, if you only see one puppet opera based on a real-life story of digging up the skull of a famous composer to phrenologically divine the nature of creative inspiration, this is the one to see.
“I had all the way through a feeling that I need to leave an opera on an overtly gay theme between two men of status and character,” said Lou Harrison. “ There is a pride in fact, over a long period of time, to see that I do this well.”
Young Caesar was to be an opera that treated homosexuality not as exotic or threatening but as natural, honest, a normative, and human. But while the subject matter was straightforward and humane, the opera’s musical form and language took several restless iterations and progressed through three different versions, its roots in Asian music, American experimentalism, and traditional opera all commingling in different proportions until this final, posthumous edition.
Harrison’s love of Asian music was part of his lifelong attraction to beauty. To him, there was nothing “exotic” about the music— rather, the attraction was natural, honest, affirmative, and human. From an early age, he investigated percussion instruments with John Cage in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and after living in New York for a while, he returned to California in his thirties and became further enamored with different tuning systems and homemade instruments. His early compositional journey toward Asian music was a natural extension of his enthusiasm for the maverick experimentation of Henry Cowell and Harry Partch. He traveled to Asia in the early 1960s, absorbing the musical cultures as much as he could, and said that, unlike some who see Western civilization as ending at the California coast, “I’m one of those who simply went across the ocean. I don’t see any reason for stopping at the California coast.”
One thing making this journey easier was that many Asian musical traditions, especially Indonesian music, neatly paralleled Harrison’s own focus on timbre and melody. And like Harrison’s own music, those traditions pay relatively little attention to anything close to Western harmonic complexity. Indeed, the absence of functional harmony in Harrison’s music gives room for his melodies to unfurl over large units of time, sometimes in repetitive cycles that gently fall in and out of sync with other simultaneous melodic sequences.
These processes are evident throughout the opera. Overlapping rhythmic cycles sometimes function as a sort of bed over which recitative takes place, or sometimes they function as a more tightly controlled foundation for some of the choruses and arias. The overall effect is similar to different-sized wheels gradually turning within one another, which provides architectural elements that can support the progression of the story.
This spacious lack of concern with Western harmony gives further space to let new and alternate tuning systems ring out and express their own subtler contrasts. The D-major just- intonation tuning of his homemade metallophones means that normally similar triadic constructions sound very different from one another. For instance, a B-minor melody in D-major just-intonation tuning is a wildly different color than what one would expect in an even-tempered tuning system. And finally, the additional Asian instruments each assert their own tuning world. Somehow the combinations throughout the opera are either spare enough or clamorous enough that they just work.
The original version of Young Caesar was, in a nod to Balinese tradition, a puppet opera. Importantly, it had unusually extensive recitative sections that Harrison explained had to be understood in the context of Chinese Opera narrative traditions. The score called for the homemade instruments that later became the American gamelan; an assortment of Chinese, Korean, and Indian instruments; and a few Western instruments as well. Although the music was wonderful, the premiere at Caltech was scandalous, perhaps not so much for the subject matter as for the explicitness of the puppets in a socially conservative theater. The opera languished.
The 1988 Portland version shortened the recitatives and, furthermore, added choruses, which not only took over some of that narrative function but also contributed moments of repose, just like in traditional Western operas. In addition, to make the work more performable, the non-Western and homemade instruments were replaced with a lovely orchestration for a Western chamber orchestra. The production was delightful, but still the work seemed incomplete.
Several years later, the version John Rockwell worked toward realizing at the Lincoln Center Festival seemed to be heading still further toward a Western-flavored work. This time Harrison added about seven arias, bringing Young Caesar closer to the kind of Western opera aesthetic that pauses for the characters to express their emotional states. The arias are beguilingly simple and short, some of them sneaking in a chromaticism that contrasts with the more basic modality of the earlier versions of the work, giving a deeper emotional contrast. They still maintain a hybrid aesthetic though: musical virtuosity is never the object, and the arias are permeated with an austere, aching beauty. Still, the work was a little long. With Harrison’s desire to be as inclusive as possible—to incorporate different kinds of tableaux, and to gleefully include seemingly every possible gay stereotype—the opera didn’t quite move.
In this edition, Yuval Sharon and I have attempted to bring Young Caesar back to its joyful, colorful origins. We have kept the new choruses and arias and trimmed the recitatives. We have reintroduced all the non-Western instruments alongside the orchestra, reserving them for the second act in order to add a large-scale structural element.
We encountered some tricky decisions and reconciliations between different editions. For instance, there originally was a slow migration in the modes of some of the movements from one performing version to the next. The new modes, however, sometimes didn’t work with the reintroduced non-Western instruments, so we reverted to the original musical modes along with the original instrumentation. We were comforted knowing that Lou Harrison himself constantly revised the work, and we felt that we were continuing his own trajectory as honestly as possible, being true to his vision, and hopefully leaving a work that will live in the repertory.
Toward these ends, we have been greatly aided by many of Lou’s friends. Bob Gordon, the librettist, instinctively grasped what we were trying to do and was immensely supportive. When dealing with a new cross-cultural musical form, the pacing can be very tricky, especially when there are varying concepts of musical and theatrical time in the different musical cultures represented. Trying to find the right edits and tempos was a delicate dance, combining the best of the Asian and American aesthetics.
In these and in so many other matters, both Bob Gordon and Bob Hughes, the conductor of the Portland version, were generous and kind with their detailed advice. And finally, this work would not have come to life without the support of Eva Soltes, founder and director of Harrison House Music, Arts and Ecology, who, with love, guided us through the thicket of the existing documentation of all the different extant versions.
Bill Alves summed it up this way: “Lou Harrison dedicated his life to bringing beauty into the world, and those of us who remember his warm generosity, his integrity of spirit, and his irrepressible joyfulness, owe a great debt of gratitude that he did.” Editing and recording this new performing edition of Young Caesar was a wonderful encounter with that joy and integrity. We deeply hope that this edition will help Lou’s spirit of warmth and humanity endure.
