Book Review: Edgar Istel - The Art Of Writing Opera Librettos: Practical Suggestions (1922)

Not that I have been researching weeks and weeks, but until today (since 1922) there is no other book on exactly this topic - opera librettos. Moreover the German original is not available, not even antiquarian, from which this Dr. Thomas Baker has translated it. Odd. Without wanting to rain on Amazon's parade (hardback / paperback), the full text is available online and free over here.

In one word: the book is very, very good. Back in 1922, the intellectual's and artist's world was entirely all right in Germany, it has never been that way since. Istel's book is therefore moist with a spirit of brilliance, precision, self confidence - this man plays in a league which nowadays resides somewhere else, and also in other genres. Istel regards himself (and rightfully so) as member of a network of composers and other intellectuals/artists which show the world the ropes, at least in classical music. Gluck, Mozart, Wagner, this all is still almost presence, and Istel and his friends and colleagues know the problems involved in writing operas of such a weight first hand.

This can be seen, for instance, from the fact that Istel is at no point reluctant to tell what is working and what is not. Not a trace of weakspirited or relativistic-postmodern "do it this way, or do it that way, but in the end everybody has to find his own way". At the same time, of course, not schoolmasterly, there is always the awareness that it could nevertheless be done in a completely different way. Thus one is not too much disturbed by his exaggerated adulation of the grand masters.

I give just an example for his clear advice: more that four or at maximum five leading parts are too much for the listener, and the support parts may not be psychologically complex. Support parts are types, the act always the same, never surprising, and they do not develop. Period. Or an example for a rule how to avoid dramatically dysfunctional libretti: the plot must be intelligible without comprehending the lyrics, just visually. This means to write not only with the ears, but also with the eyes. This is helpful.

Leitmotifs in NOWHERENOW #2

In the NOWHERENOW soundtrack not only the (but two) figures entertain a signature melody. Instead, I have attached motives to the figure's returning emotional states, central goals and character traits.

One of the professor's character traits remains musically uncommented, namely his queerness. The bizarre labatory of the mad professor is so unaquivocally visible that I didn't want to cap it all, and thereby reiterate the obvious.

The first leitmotif denotes the journalist's loneliness. The latter is not consciously felt by him initially, but the music is meant to conceive this view to the recipient. The motive is presented with the first fade-in in a straightforward manner:



+ The Journalist.mp3

The "loneliness motive" appears again in, e. g., Euphory, Triumph, Fight from bar 99 played by the Glockenspiel, where it contrasts the journalist's decision to support the professor by following him into the water in order to stop him. In the Final, bar 25 ff. or letter B, respectively, the process of insight of the journalist from his own failure to diving into the professor's phantastic vision is driven by this motive.

A necessary condition for being a leitmotif is its repeated appearance, in order to construe the reiteration of a thought. This condition is not quite met by the motive for the journalist's cynisism; it is a guitar lick consisting in no more than one repeated note emanating from his headphones:

+ Headphones Music.mp3

The "Where Do I Begin" of NOWHERENOW is played by four celli, put in 9/4 time signature, which is the motive for the professor's vision:



+ The Professor's Vision.mp3

This motive appears whenever the professor's eyes are shining. This is the case, e. g., when he explains the spaceship's function to the journalist, or (at double tempo) when he finds the spaceship's key after all, and performs a jig. In the Final the motive becomes the accompaniement for the "fantasy triumphs over cynicism"-melody, whereby we have reached the final leitmotif.

The ending of the film remains quite open. By contrast, the music unambigiously sounds like a professor who is hovering on air (Final, bar 42 or letter E ff., respectively):



+ Accomplished.mp3

In the middle of the film the professor already feels as if the start was a success. From bar 89 in the "Triumph March", the motive is (in slight modification, because of different harmonies) passed through the brass voices, subdivided into half bars.

What film music can do

On this year's Summer Academy of Forum Scientiarum I have been presenting excerpts from the short film NOWHERENOW. The snippets were underlayed with different pieces of music in order to show how drastically perception of what is seen on screen can be influenced by it. This posting includes part of the workshop material.

To begin with, here's five different soundtracks for the first one and a half minutes of the film. As the snippets are meaningful in this blog posting only, they are password protected. The password for all videos simply is: blog.

The first example features the original soundtrack, on which I've been posting recently:

The illustration music beginning with the fade in is meant to introduce the journalist as a rather pitiful character, in spite of his arrogant appearance and his indifference towards the sublimeness of the sea (at first, he pees, then he puts up his headphones). The music on his mp3 player, in contrast, is no comment but what the guy on screen is in fact listening to: too complicated, cold, pretentious.

To approach the possibilities slowly, the second soundtrack is children's music (first from Die kleine Hexe, secondly from Pinocchio). Here, not more is to be shown than our inclination to accept even such a contrast.

The music establishes a children's film, and if we'd zap into something like that it would not occur to us that this is no children's film. Naturally, in the next scene a girl with a Pippi Longstocking outfit appears. We buy into the music even if the picture does not match.

The next music added turns the film into a whodunnit:

A suspense atmosphere with threateningly billowing surface and a Harmon mute trombone (from Früchte des Nichts) is anxiously asking which terrible thing is going to happen soon, and on the headphones there is a "battleground the morning after" music (aus Die Judith von Shimoda). Interestingly, the headphones music does not seem to be what the protagonist is in fact listening to, but one commenting on the horror of the oncoming deed from the audience's perspective. I would not be surprised if the man, a hitman rather than a journalist, would, after voicing "excuse me!" produce his automatic pistol.

The next music added is one more step into the same direction. Instead of a hitman we here might have a serial killer:

The sacral illustration music (from Novemberszenen) does not match the totally un-meditative scene, so that it thwarts the interpretation of what can be seen. The putatively reserved arrogance is then best reinterpreted into mania. Such a contrasting has been widely used since Hitchcock. Now, the headphones music seems more like his actual mp3 player: he stimulates himself. Instead of the clean pistol the professor is more likely to be assassinated with a more emotional thing, maybe a wire sling or an axe.

My favourite example is the following one (with a world hit by Burt Bacharach and a snippet taken from D'Angelo):

The illustration music is obviously not "into the scene" any more, but an explicit comment. The journalist all of a sudden is a likeable rascal dogged by bad luck. On his mp3 player he fancies music which is so cool as he wants to be.

Finally I have to offer three different music additions to an "action" scene from the same film. To begin with, there is a classical (Tchaikovsky symphony) dramatical music which has been heard like this thousands of times as accompany of action scenes since the times of silent picture:

Because important details of the scene do not yield action seriousness (the calm see, the professor's measured treads, the professor being an old fogey and not Bruce Willis - consider however the shaky hand camera and the 100% action compatible journalist), the music has an ironical impact. The sequence reminds me of a Monty Python film.

Conversely, it is easily possible to make the scene part of a comedy in spite of the fisticuffs, the hand camera and the drama on the journalist's face and in his acting. Here's the same sequence with Schützenfest from Die kleine Hexe:

To conclude, consider the same scene again, now with the jazz standard Unforgettable, sung by the unforgettable Nat "King" Cole:

Matching the winking Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head version of the beginning, we here have the jinx back again. To me this sequence is like from a Woody Allen film. Technically speaking, this music does not emphasise one of the visible aspects of the scene and makes forget the rest, but adopts a third attitude of its own.

Expert's positions on intellectual property and the future of music

Some plain text by OLG Düsseldorf judge (in German, sorry):

Elektrischer Reporter – Thomas Hoeren: “Der Kampfbegriff Geistiges Eigentum ist falsch.”

Did I mention that my pityfulness with the music industrie has its limits...

Highly relevant: the Blog of David Kusek, one of the authors of The Future of Music, which is the standard treatment on the future of the music industry in the light of digitalisation and globalisation. The man is vice president of the Berklee School of music and co-developed the MIDI standard decades ago.

Thought from behind - the first minute in NOWHERENOW

Well, the short film has already been presented to a conservatory audience last week... but for the final DVD and festival application version there will be additional brass recordings with Philipp Haagen. I affirm to uploading more music then! For now consider some text and a couple of sound bites around the beginning of the film.

NOWHERENOW begins with a fade-in of the journalist standing at the beach, somewhat lost, and relieving himself. He is looking for the professor whom he plans to interview. As he cannot locate him, tramping along the beach, he puts on the headphones of his mp3 player and listens to - well, he listens to what? He listens to some hard, analytic, urban, over-ambitioned, difficult music which is no fun but which he is anxious to like. That is, something like the music of Steve Coleman / M-Base ;-)

It would be a lost opportunity if the mood music for the first shot which is, volume-wise, below attention threshold and thus introducing the journalist as a loner on a subconscious level, and the loud and thus consciously perceived mp3 player music were unrelated and juxtaposed just like that. Could not these two pieces of music in fact be one and the same, only having totally different impacts when listened to individually?

Like this one: on Michael Brecker's disc "Now You See It, Now You Don't" there is a track named Escher, which, guess what, deals with Escher's picture puzzles. A triplet swing part (i.e. each quarter note is subdivided into a quarter triplet and an eighth triplet) is overlaid with a binary funk part which quarter notes correspond to the quarter triplets of the swing tempo (thus the swing is 33,33% slower than the funk). Those two grooves integrate to one song, with each meter.

The NOWHERENOW headphones music and the initial mood music can play simultaneously and melt down to an integrative piece although they are totally different, listened to individually. However, departing from Brecker, they both have the same meter. The Escher effect is instead accomplished by reinterpreting the harmonies of the journalist's mood music by different bass notes put forward in the headphones music. Here is the mood music:

+ The Journalist

The descant and a counter voice are performed by remote and heavily filtered solo celli which are, in their unsentimentally crotchety melancholy, inspired by Wayne Shorter's soprano saxophone play. Totally different: the poser music the journalist burdens himself with:

+ Headphones Music

In order to present the two pieces as non-accidentally belonging together I do not simply turn up the headphones music's volume. Rather, putting up the headphones exactly matches the first beat of the first bar of the form, and the subsequent cut exactly happens on the first beat of the ninth bar of the form. Hence the cut determines the duration of the eight bars. It follows that, given the 7/8 time signature of the music, the tempo of the song must be 111,7 BPM.

This is how both pieces sound together (you are in the journalist's shoes, that is, the headphones music is softly present with the headphones put down, but with headphones on the music is so dominant that background noise is completely masked):

+ Track 1

Just for fun, consider the headphones music with the synth solo I originally planned but which turned out to be to "fiddly" and, above all, in too good a temper. The guitar has no crunchy sound anymore accordingly. The track is longer; it lasts until the headphones are put down again:

+ Track 1 alt

(Drums: Christian Jung. All other instruments are played or programmed by me)

Music as a public good

On the occasion of the reading of this newspaper article (Tagesspiegel - Die Ideen der anderen- in German, sorry) I finally awoke to that, concerning the question of copyright violating pirate copies of music in the internet I am on the side of the pirate party. This applies to peer-to-peer networks as well as the illegal up- and download of copyright protected material on YouTube, MySpace, last.fm, iLike and so on. As a musician, I am of course torn, because I am making money out of my work’s copyright. The GEMA beautifully collects royalties for my stage music, and if I were more active in the music business this could be similiar for radio plays, CD sales and concerts with original compositions.

1) Neither, so it seems, it is possible to cut off illegal use of music, nor an understanding that it is unlawful or even morally objectable can be generated, at least on the factual level. I only have to start with myself: of course I listen to whatever I find interesting, of course I watch videos on YouTube which impossibly are legal, of course I trade and copy without limits and concerns.

2) I am reluctant to regard the use of any available music without acquirement of a license as morally objectable. The only thing that bothers me is that copying music is illegal, i.e. that I infringe upon applicable law. Apart from that my intuition is that music, at least good music, should be listened to by as many people as possible, especially by low income people of all nations. Music belongs to everybody, just as knowledge belongs to everybody. I shall belabour this analogy for the rest of this posting.

3) As it is also argued in the article: the artists are by no means the main profiteers of copyright but the media industry. Even if many an artist has made a fortune by royalties, this is a minor point all in all - at least for the vast majority of artists who not (yet) dominate the charts or the like. My pity on the media industry is limited, in particular as the big players are responsible for how mainstream everything got. In the area of knowledge (the analogy!), the scientific journals are even the only ones who make money: the scientific author does not get any money for his text.

4) If the scientist does not make money from his copyright: how, after all, does he make a living, and what does this mean for musicians? The scientist, if he succeeded, has a position at a university or research instituion. Good and sufficiently many publications are a prerequisite for a successful application, so that his economic existence is very well due to the quality and quantity of his published texts. In most cases his salary is paid by the public authorities, which is justified by that his work as a scientist (and academic teacher, ok) benefits commonality. Expressed economically, the state’s funding corrects a market failure, namely that the free market does not produce enough knowledge, from the society level.

Now if the society needs more or better music, what I take for granted, and if the society does not accept that music (leave aside the happy winners of a place in the sun of a shrinking music industry) is produced in the leisure time by music school teachers, taxi drivers or freeloaders relying on their life partners or parents, there is the need to think about structures transferring money from the tax payer to musicians as effectively and as target-oriented as possible. Musicians would thus be put into the position to focus on their work without being forced to the choice of day job or precarity. Thus reimbursement of copyright would be substituted by a „culture flat rate“ with income tax progression (that is, justice) on the revenue side.

How could, on the distribution side, quality and quantity of the musical output could be guaranteed, how good is the university analogy? Grants? Who is in charge of the decision, who sits in the jury? Is this an idea: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_du_spectacle?

New ways of marketing music

Here's a, to my lights, quite inspiring keynote by Mike Masnick at the Leadership Music Digital Summit in march 2009 about music marketing off copyright and author's societies, and indepentently from major record labels:

Leadership Music Digital Summit 2009 - Entire Mike Masnick keynote presentation, 3/25/09 from Leadership Music Digital Summit on Vimeo.

This makes one feel like giving it a try, what do you think?