Experiments in Opera is a composer and performer-driven festival, featuring recent and new works with unorthodox answers to the traditional questions about how to connect words, story and music.  The festival runs May 10 & 11 at Roulette – we talked to two of the composers – Aaron Siegel and Jason Cady – who will be presenting work on Thursday, May 10.

ROULETTE: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.
AARON SIEGEL: I am going to be sharing two excerpts from my opera-in-progress called Brother Brother. The piece is about the Wright Brothers and the several years after their first successful flight at Kitty Hawk.  I wrote the libretto for the opera and decided that there would be a chorus of ‘fates’ who narrate some of the work and help to keep it at a dramatic distance.  The fates set up the story with an opening chorus called “There’s Always Mom” which outlines some of the major themes of the work — relationships, faith, how we make our lives work, etc..  The second chorus that will be heard at Roulette comes from the end of the first act, when Orville and Wilbur Wright leave their home town and the US and spend a bunch of time in Europe.  The other two main characters, a fictional set of brothers, Red and Blue, also face an exile of sorts as they leave their home.  There is a sense that in order to get on with their lives, these characters need to leave their environment of origin.  This last chorus “The Silent Puzzle” explores this anxiety.

R: Do you consider yourself more a composer or a performer?
AS: I have always considered myself a performer along with being a composer, even when the bulk of my activity over the last couple of years has  been composing.  I really try to imagine how the musicians playing my music will interact with it as they are performing.  I think my experiences playing other people’s music has given me a sympathy for performers.  They really need to buy into the music in order for it to work.  So, I like to keep my performer ‘hat’ on in order to give the music the kind of challenges and meaty qualities that make it attractive and fun for musicians.

R: Do you do other things aside from music?
AS: I like to read a lot of fiction, which is one of the reasons I am so interested in creating more operas as a composer.  Fiction writers can explore their wholly created worlds in a direct and literal ways that are unavailable to us composers unless we are working with language, images and stories.  I really enjoy a good story, and well-written characters, not to mention the mood of a book or scene.  Good novels are also expertly timed, something that I appreciate as an artist working in a time-based medium.

ROULETTE: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.
JASON CADY:  Happiness is the Problem is a two act opera and comic book, or as I call it, a phono-graphic novel. My collaborator, Nadia Berenstein, and I sketched out the plot and the characters and then we improvised the dialogue. We recorded our improvisation and then we transcribed and edited it. Nadia and I each performed a character and our friend Amy Cimini performed the role of the third character. Then I took our script and set the words to music to be sung, and Nadia drew the graphic novel.

R: What was the last music you listened to?
JS: The new Mary Halvorson Quintet CD “Bending Bridges.”

R: What is music?
JS: Sound related phenomena presented within an aesthetic context.
I always disagreed with the common definition that music is “organized sound.” First of all some music is not exactly organized. And there are many organized sounds that we would not call music. For example speech is organized sound. Car alarms are organized sound. These things can occur in music, but in and of themselves we would not call them music. What makes something music is the context in which it is presented. When David Tudor sat down at a piano in a concert hall and performed 4’33” it was music because it was performed within the context of music.

R: Do you consider yourself more a composer or a performer?
JC: Composer.

R: Is there an event or experience that led you to start in
experimental media?
JC: Finding Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz” album in the Flint Public Library by accident when I was a teenager.

R: Who do you see as instrumental in your development as an artist?
JC: Richard Lerman

Or watch an interview with Cough Button