I wish I could do something with my operas

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I wrote them between 1996 - 2004, but they've basically just sat on the shelf since then, due to my relative poverty to get them performed. Getting them published is nearly impossible, because few if any music publishers will even look at / listen to unsolicited works. And even if they were published, that wouldn't magically cause performances to come about, which is what I actually want to happen. I think I'll just have to wait until some great day in the future when I'll hopefully have the money to fully produce them myself. That way, I can retain creative control, so that no one changes them / screws them up.

If I'm missing anything, in regards to ideas / possibilities / thoughts, please let me know.

demonstrate your compositions to creative artists. if they are captivating and unique, whoever hears them will realize that they are worthy of display.
if you make a song which people very much like, it is difficult to stop them from wanting to be involved.

Are they scores? You can give them to me and I can synthesise them for you. Hey, it's close enough - it's why I have my studio. It's so I can put together my grand compositions.

I actually did that, when I hired professional musicians through the American Musicians Association to perform one very small instrumental piece in a sound studio. (One small piece was all I could afford at that professional level.) They were all very impressed with it, and asked me as to the origins of my inspiration, as was the sound engineer himself. But I can't pay such professionals on a full-scale basis, meaning what it would cost to have the entire opera(s) performed live. And I wouldn't dream of asking them to do it gratis. They have bills to pay just like everyone else.

I've synthesized about 20 of the individual pieces myself already, but operas need so much more than that... For starters, you need singers. Voices can be synthesized, but sung lyrics cannot be. And good singers are expensive, especially when you need a lot of soloists PLUS full choral groups. Second, you need the visuals. In an opera, you HAVE to have the visuals -- the stage action, the props, and the costumes. And I'm no Pixar animator, so that's out. Thirdly, the music must be played by humans. If it wasn't classical -- indeed, opera -- you can let synth slide. Modern music positively welcomes synth. But the hearer must hear and thus feel the emotions of the performers when it's a Romantic period work. And finally, it must be performed live. It is an opera, and the audience must be emotionally invested to the full. Both of those thing indicate live performing.

I couldn't have picked a more challenging genre to produce a musical work in, that's for sure.

Good luck with this...

I'm an opera fan myself, so I'd love to see you succeed

How about producing small pieces of an opera and showing it around to build up interest? If you could manage to just nail one good song, that might be enough to turn heads. Find a good festival to show it off at, and best of luck!

I believe I've found a solution to the problem mentioned in the OP. I'm going to work with a good, longtime friend of mine, who is also an experienced professional webmaster, to create a website promoting my operas. It will feature audio demos, an introduction written by myself explaning the origins of the operas and what they are all about, a blog for writing my progress updates toward securing live productions, and a donation center. Hopefully, and indeed probably, some of the visitors will read my introduction, listen to the samples, and think something along the lines of: "Okay, this guy seems legit, the music sounds fine, and I'm in a good mood. Sure, I'll donate $5."

I think this method has enough of a chance of success for me to at least try it. I've never had my own dedicated webpage before, so I'm naïve to that experience. If nothing else, it will be fun to have that.
Anyone with advise/experience, feel free to post your two cents.

Last edited by Ragtime on 09 Apr 2009, 10:58 am, edited 1 time in total.

One word- advertise! I used to run a webcomic off a private domain, and it took me like a month to realize that no one was ever going to read my work if they didn't know it was there. So I didn't just tell a few friends and hope they'd tell a few friends, I told absolutely everyone. Seek out social groups and make sure you mention your site (forums are good places to start- hint hint). Maybe give a bit of alluring hype about the cool things out there, get people interested.

That's an excellent suggestion. That hadn't yet occurred to me, but you're right. These operas are the things I've always been most passionate about in my life, so I have plenty of energy for publicly promoting them -- despite my usual Aspie instinct to demure in front of strangers.

Heya Ragtime; as a musician, composer and teacher, if there is anything I can do to help out please let me know.


M.

Thanks, M. Encouragement is the best help, and you're providing that already.

Keep in mind that community colleges often have excellent performers looking for ways to showcase their talents (vocals); here in AZ there is a recording school that has provided opportunities for projects in the past. Look for education to provide outlets to get parts of it completed, and I might suggest starting with synthesized sounds and real voices to begin with (which I hate, being a musician, but it is a practical solution given the advancing in sampling and sound production with Sibelius and others). If you need an example input, let me know and I'll send you a sample of what it can do now.


M.

Oh?

I think in reference to getting correct syllabic sounds; could do a synthesized voice, but it would not provide articulation... and voices which provide speech would not have the melodic capabilities - this is at least my experience working with vocal pieces.


M.

Actually, I've also gone this route before. I had a music professor friend who rallied some of her most willing students to play a few of my pieces for a recording, which I then converted into a "demo" CD. I paid them what I could afford to, and they were happy to do it, and to have participated in hopefully premiering a new work. But, I tell ya, you might be surprised at how underwhelming a "demo" CD of an opera -- a work meant to be performed both live and visually -- is. If it were, say, a symphony, on the other hand, then an audio recording would be a perfect fit: you'd only have around 4 movements to record, and a symphony is audio-only (unless you're a purist, who simply must see the players). But with opera, "audio-only" and "recording" are both bad fits, and result in definite diminishments of the art of the genre. You're removing entire dimensions of opera when you force an opera into a CD. My operas are holistic -- they only consist and hold together when performed with all of that genre's dimensions, including the visuals and the stage direction. The art is not only in the music -- not hardly! It ALL has to be there: the music, and the stage art and direction, in a live performance. I've done the lesser steps and the half-measures already, and long ago, too; now, I want to actually live-perform the operas. Yes, it will be difficult to arrange this. But I am ready to try. It was also difficult to write two operas with no formal musical training, but that didn't stop me. I studied books and asked questions from the experts until I got it just right. It took a lot of patience and perfectionism, but I made it -- thank God.

Last edited by Ragtime on 10 Apr 2009, 12:55 pm, edited 3 times in total.