1 On Composing the Opera “The World Is Round,” by Paul Paccione Paper delivered at Western Illinois University, April 17, 2015. Introduction On December 11 and 12, 2014 the School of Music presented the first performances of my opera “The World Is Round.” The opera is based on a book by the American writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Although I have composed in many different genres of vocal music, this was my first opera. These performances were the culmination of a three-year long creative project that began with a spring 2011 sabbatical leave. Composing an opera presents many challenges for a composer. Unlike abstract instrumental composition, opera is a synthesis of musical, textual and theatrical elements - a combination of aural, visual, temporal and spatial art forms, each of which possess their own characteristic features and demands. Composing an opera is a long and complicated process. This process can best be described as an act of discovery. The various stages in the process form an organic continuum that begins with the original conception of an idea and culminates in the staged performance of the opera before an audience. My presentation will consist of a brief description of each of the steps in this process and conclude with a scene from the opera “The World Is Round.” 1. Towards A Concept For An Opera Before I chose a story to serve as the basis for the opera I needed to decide what kind of opera it was I wanted to compose. Since this was my first opera, I decided to work within set limitations. The opera would be no longer than 60 minutes in length - a one-act chamber opera with few scene changes and a limited number of characters. I wanted a compelling, accessible, straightforward narrative. I was looking for a text ripe with both dramatic and musical possibilities. I wanted a theme and subject that was timeless and removed from contemporary events and current trends in popular culture. I began to look for a story and text among folktales, fairytales and children’s books. Rather than a romantic psychological drama, the opera I envisioned would be an entertainment. The idea of opera as an entertainment designed to give pleasure was an important criteria in my choice of a story. 2. The Book And Its Author I eventually found such a text and story in “The World Is Round,” a children’s book written by one of the twentieth-century’s most fiercely modernist writers, Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein is best known for her experimental use of language, as exemplified in her most well known and quoted phrase “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Her experiments with the English language, at the beginning of the twentieth-century in Paris, mirrored that of her
2 close friend Pablo Picasso with cubism, as well as composer Igor Stravinsky’s own experiments in music and theatre. In her writing, Stein strove to achieve a literary plasticity divorced from narrative sequence, consequence and traditional meaning. Her innovative, distinctive, repetitive style is characterized by her use of words for their own sake. Stein showed little interest in fixed meanings - sound and rhythm are the basis of her writing. She was interested in the numerous associations that words and their juxtaposition could produce musically as well as grammatically. Stein wrote novels, plays, essays, and she wrote two children’s books, the first being “The World Is Round,” which was published in 1939. The year 2014 marked the 75th anniversary of the publication of the “World Is Round,” by Young Scott Books. The book is a poetic exploration of the everlasting moods and wonderments of childhood. The first printing was on pink paper in dark blue lettering, with illustrations by Clement Hurd. The text consists largely of a blend of unpunctuated, idiosyncratic poetry, prose and songs arranged into thirty-three short chapters. The book is a correlation of sight, sound and sense and, as such, it offers ripe material for an opera. I was inspired by the innocence and overwhelming sense of fun and playfulness of Stein’s language, which in many ways I found reminiscent of the language of nursery rhymes and children’s songs. Stein has a terrific ear and she is very musical. Sound and rhythm are the basis of her writing. She, herself, said that she “liked to set a sentence for herself as a sort of tuning fork and metronome and then write to that time and tune.” She often referred to her poetry as a “hymn.” In this regard, the poet John Ashbury has described Stein’s poetry as: “A hymn to possibility; a celebration of the fact that the world exists, that things can happen.” It is best to read Stein aloud and to trust your initial instincts. “The feeling is of the words themselves, a curious immediate quality, much as in music,” wrote the poet William Carlos Williams. As a playwright, Stein conceived of the theatre stage as a circus ring – an area of magical possibilities, high fantasy and romance, sealed off from objective reality – a particular area that radiated, in Stein’s words, “a great deal of glitter in the light and a great deal of height in the glitter.” In basic terms, opera is theatre - a play that is sung and accompanied by instruments. It is a fantastical concept based on artifice, and it is larger than life - we usually don’t sing out our thoughts in real life. “A credible situation in opera,” said the poet W.H. Auden, “means a situation in which it is credible that someone should sing. Only one thing is essential, namely, that everything be a little over life size, that the stage be a space in which only the grand entrance and the grand gesture are appropriate.”
3 3. Writing The Libretto The word “libretto” is Italian for “little book” and it refers to the script of the play. The central character of the book, and the opera, is a little girl named Rose (whose favorite color is blue). Rose is on a journey of personal discovery, not unlike that of Dorothy in the “Wizard of Oz,” or “Alice in Wonderland.” Carrying a blue lawn chair in her arms, Rose’s journey takes her to the top of a distant mountain. Rose is in search of meaning and her own place in a world that is round and filled with wild animals, night skies, spiders, bad dreams, mountain peaks and things that move about in the night. Rose is forever questioning the meaning (the “why”) of everything that is around her. She questions anything that pertains to her identity. And she often expresses herself in song. Why am I a little girl And why is my name Rose. And when am I a little girl And when is my name Rose. And where am I a little girl And where is my name Rose. And which little girl am I. For Rose, the world is a confusing place to understand and her persistent questioning is in part the result of the instability and arbitrary nature of language itself - the difficulty in labeling and describing the things in the world accurately the way they are accurately. This, after all, is the subject of Stein’s writing. The other principal character is a little boy named Willie. Willie is self-assured. He relishes the confusion around him - he literally dives into it. My name is Willie I am not like Rose I would be Willie whatever arose, I would be Willie if Henry was my name I would be Willie always Willie all the same. In addition to Rose and Willie, the opera includes a Chorus of eight Owls, a Girl in the Moon, a Narrator and a stuffed lion whose name is Billie. On stage throughout the opera, the owls serve the function of a Greek Chorus. The narrator is both storyteller and guide, who comments on and participates in the drama. Economy of means was my guiding principle in writing both the libretto and the music. By its very nature the musical setting of a text adds length to the text and in adapting the book to the stage it was necessary that I eliminate a large portion of the text. Although the skeletal plot of the book is fairly straightforward, for Gertrude Stein, the story takes numerous twists and turns and Stein does her best to undermine the narrative flow. Events in themselves rarely interest Stein – rather, it is their way of happening.
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I treated the original text as a general model that I could adapt to fit my own particular needs. It was my goal to eliminate anything that might impede the flow of the dramatic development. I eliminated all embellishing aspects of either the story or of a character that might prove distracting on the stage. This included Rose’s tendency in the book to cry whenever she became confused. It is one thing to read that a character cries – it another to see a character actually cry on stage. The challenge in boiling down the book to its essential elements, was to present the essence of the story while preserving Stein’s original intentions as well as her innovative approach to story telling and language. The opera is divided into four scenes or tableaux. The function of the tableaux is to clearly outline the dramatic framework of the opera – to present what was absolutely essential for the audience to know. I reduced the plot to a standard three-part dramatic form: Exposition (Tableaux I-II) – Development (Tableau III) – Resolution (Tableau IV). Tableaux I: Rose and Willie: Rose and Willie are introduced separately through song. Rose is very uncertain and confused about who she is and she expresses her concerns in her songs. Willie, on the other hand, is certain about everything and his songs express his self-confidence. Tableaux II: Billie the Lion: In this tableau Rose and Willie begin to discover their feelings towards one another. Willie gives Rose his newly found stuffed lion, whose name is Billie. Rose and Willie wonder about wild animals and, in particular, what it is that makes them wild. Eventually, Rose returns Billie the lion to Willie. Tableaux III: Rose and the Mountain: Rose resolves to climb to the top of a blue mountain. She takes only a blue garden chair with her on her journey. Once she is there, Rose will sit in her chair and see everything around her more clearly. She travels through the night and hears many strange and scary things moving about. Rose perseveres and arrives at the mountaintop where she sees a green grass meadow and a rainbow. Rose walks through the rainbow. Tableaux IV: There. Rose sits in her chair, looks around her and writes in a little blue notebook Gertrude Stein’s immortal phrase “Rose is a Rose is a Rose.” She then sings. But soon she is lonely. She misses Willie. When night falls she sees a searchlight in the distance from the top of another mountain. It is Willie. She calls to Willie and he calls back. Soon they are reunited and they live together happily ever after. What initially attracted me to this book was the poetic nature of the language and its musical possibilities. Alliteration, pun, assonance and rhyme form a large part of the Stein’s text. The individual songs in the opera include a wide range of verbal structures that are built on both logical and illogical repetition, counting games, word displacement and phonemic play. As an aid to setting the text to music, I wrote the entire libretto out on the page in the form of poetic verse, rather than in prose form as it appears throughout
5 most of the book. As a result, the poetic line in the libretto became analogous to the musical phrase. One of Stein’s working methods involved the collage-like cutting up of different fragments of everyday conversation, removed from their original context and rearranging them structurally. I applied a similar collage-like technique in converting Stein’s original text into a libretto. 4. Composing The Music The poet Robert Frost said: “The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.” Stein possessed an acute ear and she was able to make music out of what Robert Frost referred to as “the sense of sound,” - that is, vocal inflection is often more important than the words themselves. What has always interested me about text setting is the idea of musical characterization. “How does a composer characterize a phrase, musically?” That’s what Stein does in her writing. She plays with different kinds of characterizations of not only the same word, but of different words and she combines them in very interesting and unexpected ways that are very musical. In setting Stein’s text to music it became apparent that, in most cases, if the words were set correctly for their sound value the meaning would take care of itself. It was my goal to highlight Stein’s language through the music and to provide her words with an emotional underpinning. In this sense, the music conveys the unsaid emotions of the characters and sets the tone of the scene. The music provides the words with a meaning that allows the audience to identify with the emotions of the characters. The music provides emotional and psychological insight that words alone could not provide. The score is a combination of neoclassical, minimalist and lyrical elements. It consists of a stream of thirty-three highly characterized musical miniatures that I number consecutively throughout the score and divide into four tableaux, The result is a collagelike juxtaposition of various different types of musical material. The entire structure is built up from smaller recognizable, highly characterized, musical numbers that form a narrative whole. All the smaller units stand in significant relation to one another. Like Stein’s text the music frequently relies on the repetition of small musical phrases. The music emphasizes a circular, repetitive structure and a number of the songs are in the form of a musical round. The music itself is primarily tonal (diatonic) and I treat the tonal materials in a manner similar to the way that Stein treats words. There is a great deal of motivic repetition both between and within the individual movements. The tonal musical elements are treated as abstract objects that can be juxtaposed in different ways outside of any traditional function. The reiteration of a single chord and musical motive often serves as the basis for an entire movement. I treat the musical material in the same playful way she treats words -- treating the materials of tonal music (scales, chords, fragments of tunes) as plastic objects – removed from their traditional tonal context and function. So that while
6 the material is both tonal and melodic (that is, diatonic), through repetition the music can go anywhere without having to follow the rules of traditional musical language. In composing the music I was primarily concerned with writing lyrical and memorable melodies – transparent and clear-cut melodies whose rhythms were based on the rhythms of the text. “The World Is Round” is ultimately a tale told in song. Lyricism is the essence of the songs in the opera. In order to achieve this the text must be thoroughly intelligible. Important considerations for setting the text to music include directness of melodic statement, sensitivity to vocal tessitura and the use of open and closed vowels in different registers of the voice and achieving a proper balance between the voice and the orchestra. Another aid in making the text intelligible, especially when working with an English language text, is to work with words of no more than two syllables. The first impression of a character is decisive and provides the dramatic value of a character. The “World Is Round” presents various vocal types working together and striving toward the same end. The way in which the roles are distributed among the various classes of voice is an important consideration. The class of voice must be in correspondence with the character. Rose is a lyric soprano and her songs cover a wide range of musical expression. Willie is a tenor whose songs are grounded, self-assured and energetic. Moongirl is a soprano and her music is ethereal. The Owls alternate between birdlike polyphony and hymnal homophony. The orchestra is also another character in the plot. It attunes the listener to the mood and atmosphere of the work. The orchestra is directed towards both the singers and the audience. “The World Is Round” is scored for a relatively small orchestra: one of each wind instrument (flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon), strings (violin, viola, cello and double bass), electronic keyboard (celeste, harpsichord, organ) and percussion (triangle, castanets, snare, glockenspiel, wind chimes). The size of the orchestra was in large part dictated by the narrow confines of the orchestra pit in the theatre where it was to be performed. The chamber music-like texture is clear and transparent. The orchestration consists of a wide variety of instrumental textures given the limited instrumentation and I tried to make the orchestra sound larger than its actual size. My goal in the orchestration was always precision, lucidity of musical statement and transparency of texture. Opera is rooted in a rich musical tradition and it is capable of including a diverse range of musical styles. The music in “The World Is Round” pays homage to that tradition and the score makes passing reference to an eclectic range of musical styles and genres. These include stylistic references to the music of Bach and Erik Satie, individual operas by Ravel (L’Enfant et Sortileges), Purcell (The Fairy Queen), Stravinsky (The Rake’s Progress), Puccini, Verdi, Mozart and of course Virgil Thompson who, in1927, wrote the music to the groundbreaking Gertrude Stein opera libretto “Four Saints In Three Acts.” Reference to popular and folk music genres include children’s songs, Shaker spirituals, Protestant hymns, Norwegian folk music (kulokk), Irish bagpipe music and popular dance music.
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Composing the music and preparing the score entailed a multi-stage process: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Compose piano/vocal score Midi-keyboard realization of the piano/vocal score Prepare performance copy of the piano/vocal score Annotate piano/vocal score for orchestration Compose skeletal outline of the orchestration Finalize the orchestration Prepare orchestra score and instrumental parts for performance
5. Staging and Performance No opera is completed at the writing table and only direct contact with the sound and staging makes things clear. This involves extensive collaboration with the stage director, musical director, stage designer and director of lighting prior to the actual rehearsals of the score with the musicians. The final score provides only a general outline of the stage direction, scenic and and lighting design. The staging of the opera was a second creation in itself and the Director of Staging was involved in the process from the start. He had complete freedom and control of its realization. Frequent consultation with the musical director resulted in numerous changes in the original tempo markings. The Director of Lighting and the Scenic Designer were each provided copies of the original book and subsequently based their design decisions on Clement Hurd’s original illustrations. The opera is only really finished in the final rehearsals when all aspects of the production are brought together for the first time. 6. Analysis of a Scene Tableau II from the opera is approximately 10 minutes long. The scene opens with Rose and Willie playing with their stuffed animals. This leads them to question why there are so many wild animals in the world. In other words, why are they around, and what it is that makes wild animals wild? In their questioning of the instinctual behavior of animals, Rose and Willie begin to become aware of their own instincts and physical attraction towards each other. The expression of their underlying feelings toward each other is mediated through a stuffed lion whose name is Billie. In coming to terms with their own instincts and feelings, Rose and Willie tease each other and play various games in which Billie is exchanged back and forth between them. The scene reaches a climax in Rose’s Puccini-like aria “Oh Willie,” a love song in which Rose tells Willie she is the real lioness for his affection. Penelope Shumate sings the part of Rose and Terry Chasteen sings the part of Willie. Eight W.I.U. vocal majors sing the part of the owls. Richard Hughey is the musical director and conducts the Western Illinois University Symphony Orchestra. Finally, I want to acknowledge the Estate of Gertrude Stein for its permission to use Gertrude Stein’s text.