Blog Archives - hand2ear: music, etc.

'Cliff House,' a chamber opera

4/19/2022

I recently completed a draft of a new chamber opera, which runs about an hour and 45 minutes. It is a kind of 'book of the dead' of an opera singer, Melina, who (after her death) finds herself in the house that she grew up in, with her grandmother. She moves through the rooms of the house, encountering situations and people from her past life, and demons who mock and impede her. By the end, she has made it to the beach in front of Cliff House, and there is a final reckoning.

The piece requires a cast of about 12 singers (some parts can be doubled) and an instrumental group of 4 players: cor anglais, trombone, piano, and violin. The music is full of stylistic references to Italian opera; sometimes ironic and sometimes sincere. There is a lot of humor in the music, but it is quite serious, ultimately.

Moving to Italy is the plan

4/19/2022

We are packing up the house in preparation to selling it, because we plan to move to Italy some time this year. We needed to downsize anyway, because we don't want to saddle other family members with the detritus of our lives, and I really needed to organize my hundreds of compositions and digitize everything. That is mostly done, at least.

We hope to move to Ravenna, a medium-sized city about 100 miles south of Venice. It is on the Adriatic coast and is bounded by flat farm land. It is famous for the mosaics in its churches; also there is a music festival every year, a great library, and a branch of the University of Bologna.

Of course there are a number of things that could derail our plans; the war in Ukraine, Italian bureaucracy, black swans of other kinds.

As I said, it's a plan.