New Piece for Rhymes With Opera

Happy summer, everyone! Now that I’ve successfully defended my dissertation, I can finally come back to my composing life–a place I have sorely missed these past nine months!

I have a few exciting projects on the horizon, the first and foremost being a new short opera that I’m composing for the experimental Baltimore collective Rhymes With Opera, to be premiered in spring of 2010. The piece is mostly in fragments and sketches at this point, but I’m slowly starting to see it take shape, and I’m really enjoying the challenge of finding a way to tell a deeply emotional story using very few instruments, and in such a way that it can be performed in multiple unique settings such as the ones RWO tends to select: parks, warehouses, cafes, and other unconventional spaces. I’m also still deciding how long the piece will be, and what kind of scope it will encompass: will I explore background details about the characters, or will I dive right into the action? Will I focus primarily on the emotional journey, or will I provide more of the structural narrative–something I don’t usually do? How much video will I use (if any), and to what extent will the video direct the action or simply provide an evocative counterpoint to what happens onstage? (Will there even be a stage?)

Stay tuned for more details as they unfold……