Opera

Départ Malgache  Words by Kenneth Koch

First in a series of short operas in collaboration with poet Kenneth Koch, based on his book, One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays

From The Composing of the Heliotrope Bouquet  Words by Eric Overmyer

The Composing of the Heliotrope Bouquet is a poetic imagining of a legendary meeting between the ragtime composers Louis Chauvin and Scott Joplin. The opera opens as dawn breaks over the House of Blue Light, a New Orleans sporting house. The women prepare to sleep as a drunken customer staggers home. Joplin, who has spent the night there, awakens and sings an aria about his troubling dream.

Scene One: Joplin’s Dream

from Found Objects Words by Roger Tréfousse

Found Objects is written in a “found” language, and depicts a summer trip by car from New York to Maine. The text is made up of “objects” such as roadside signs, newspaper headlines, overheard scraps of conversation and distorted fragments of popular songs, and is taken directly from the outer landscape, sometimes literally, sometimes filtered through the unconscious.

Music provides the subtext and the opera depicts an inner journey. The traveler experiences the supercharged New York City summer, the interstate at night, a surrealistic interlude at a Holiday Inn and the incomparable beauty of the Maine seacoast. A whole range of emotions is triggered by the landscape and, at the same time, projected onto it.

Driving along the interstate, the traveler is both fascinated and repulsed by the phantasmagoric bombardment of images coming at him from all directions. The mood grows calm as a beautiful sunset colors the outskirts of the city. Back in New York, the traveler longs for a way to reconcile conflicting desires, as a blazingly hot summer day turns into cool twilight.

Scene 3:  Maine to New York/ Scene 4: New York (part one)

Chamber Music

Fantasy on the Name Ben Weber
for flute, celesta and cello

Fantasy on the Name Ben Weber was written in memory Tréfousse’s teacher and friend, the composer Ben Weber, using the same orchestration as Weber used for his Prelude and Nocturne for Frank O”Hara.

Three Selections from Balanced Boulders  Words by Spencer Holst
for flute, tuba and percussion

Commissioned by legendary New York writer Spencer Holst, in honor of the publication of his last book, a collection of very short prose poems. Each section begins with a reading of one of the poems, following by a corresponding piece of music. The piece can also be performed without narration.

From the Jackson Pollock Suite

The Jackson Pollock Suite is drawn from music for Amanda Pope’s PBS documentary, Jackson Pollock: Portrait. Each piece is related to a specific painting by Pollock. There is also a solo piano version of the music.

Piano

Don Bachardy Paints a Portrait
from Synesthesia/Fusion: 3 Painters Portrayed

Synesthesia/Fusion: Three Painters Portrayed are musical portraits of my friends, the painters Mark Kostabi, Darragh Park and Don Bachardy.

Debussy famously spoke of seeing music in color, a kind of synesthesia, and this was my goal in these musical portraits: exploring the mystical connection between sound and visual form—and it’s led me to a very new way of using harmony in my music. It’s also inspired me to try and create a feeling for those mysterious, almost unknowable realms that are so powerfully explored in all of their paintings.

Don Bachardy painted my portrait at his Santa Monica studio, and my musical portrait is based on that extraordinary experience. For well over an hour, you sit as still as you can; he looks up at you, then down at his canvas, sometimes looking up and down quickly, sometimes more slowly—it’s as if you’re having a profound, completely wordless, conversation. You sit looking out at the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains; that landscape is present in the music. Beautiful portraits of his life-partner, Christopher Isherwood, hang on the studio walls–they lived together in this house for over thirty years, and I felt Isherwood’s presence very strongly when I sat for Don. He’s somehow also there in the music.

Film

Trouble at the Laundromat,  from the Showtime film Elliot Fauman, PhD

Musical Theater

From Raft of the Medusa   Words by Joe Pintauro

The late Joe Pintauro’s play Raft of the Medusa — along with Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart–is one of the first dramatic works dealing with the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. His play went on to a successful off-Broadway run at the Minetta Lane Theater, and has received many productions since then, including a production in London at the Gate Theater in Soho which garnered rave reviews from the British press.

Raft has a deep humanity, embracing men and women, gay and straight. When Joe approached me about writing a musical with him based on the play, I was honored to be asked to write songs for a musical that would deal with such deep and important material. I felt that a musical version would be able to reach so many people — like Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City or Jonathan Larson’s Rent.

Amsterdam

In a flippant moment, a wealthy member of the group observes that euthanasia is legal in Holland, and proposes a daring plan. “Let’s all go to Amsterdam,” he says. “They put you to sleep–I’ll pay for all the tickets.” The others respond by singing this song about all the other places in the world that they’d rather go instead—“We’re not ready to be dead already!”

San Francisco

Frisco, the youngest member of the group, plays a pivotal role in the dramatic development. He possesses an ethereal, almost otherworldly beauty, and along with his openhearted and powerful spirituality he serves as a poignant symbol of the terrible devastation and destruction of the AIDS epidemic. He dies at the end of the play, and the others sing this song as the curtain falls.

from Hoosick Falls  Words by Jane DeLynn

 Hoosick Falls is an hour-long absurdist musical farce which plays with ideas of gender fluidity. The book and lyrics are by Jane DeLynn, who has been confronting ideas of gender identity from her first published novel in 1970s through her latest novel Leash (in which she “ attempts to “think the unthinkable and speak the unspeakable.”)  Here she addresses these issue in a much lighter tone.

The musical takes place in a locale very much like the south of France that is not, in fact, the south of France. There are ten characters, five of whom are named Tom. They fall in and out of love with each other, in a series of mistaken identities, misunderstandings and changes of gender. All is revealed at last, and everyone finds someone to love as the curtain falls.

 I Love You