A few weeks ago I got email about VOX 2007 "Showcasing American Composers". This is a weekend of panel discussions, workshops, and performances of new music primarily sponsored by New York City Opera. I had been planning to spend this past Saturday in NYC anyway to go to the Met (the Museum, not the Opera) and tickets to VOX were free. So I schlepped down to the Skirball (say that slowly) Performing Arts Center at NYU last night just to see what I could see.

I got there a little early so I went to the men's room first (good thing – there was no intermission in the 2.5 hour plus program) and who was going in as I was going out but the Maestro. Not surprising. He is very much attuned to what is new and current in music in NYC and, with him, the Monmouth Civic Chorus has imported a lot of it to Red Bank. He was more surprised to see me than I him. I am not exactly an NYC-niste. He was spending the weekend listening to the new works – he really commended a John Zorn piece he'd heard that afternoon that had featured Kiera Duffy, a former MCC Messiah soloist. He was also looking forward (or looking with foreknowledge?) to the evening's final piece, which would feature Jody Sheinbaum (soprano) who shone at the Monmouth Civic Chorus's benefit concert two weeks ago.

The evening consisted of four nominally half-hour presentations of four new works. The host/moderator was WNYC's John Schaefer who hosts their New Music evening program and is really very well-informed and fun to listen to.

The first work was excerpts from "Golden Motors" by Derek Bermel. This was the story of a family of auto workers in Detroit in circa 1980. Supposedly they didn't foresee that there jobs would shortly be going down the toilet. Is that possible? I kind of lost it when the ingénue and her boyfriend sang a wistful paean to the Ambassador Bridge which leads to the bright promised land of Windsor, Ont. Sheesh. Mr. Schaefer did a little Q&A with the composer and librettist. Did they consider this "opera" or "musical theater"? They were not ashamed to embrace the label "musical theater". Good choice, because it was barely that. The music was monotonous and the theatre was cliché.

Second offering: "The Theory of Everything", music by John David ("J.D.") Earnest, libretto by Nancy Rhodes. Apparently some of this had been presented last year at VOX 2006. I foresee an annual event because it will take a long time for this opera to gel. The opening scene was a physics lecture at the University of Sao Paulo (why there?). The physics was actually factually presented. But then the evil department dean (hiss!) came in and told the young charismatic professor that he needed to hew to the university's official teaching policy - thou shalt be boring - or else. That was fakey. But more fakey was that neither the YCP nor the dean seemed to mind that he was apparently carrying on a relationship with a freshman coed. Maybe at Sao Paulo U. they don't have a policy on that. The YCP mentions that he plans to go study a primitive Amazon rain forest tribe (the Q'ero, pronounced like the corn syrup) who have an ancient cosmology surprisingly akin to modern physics' string theory. I'm thinking: Yippee, Act 2 will be faux indigenous tribal music. Based on the later Q&A, this actually appears to be the plan. But we were spared. In fact the second excerpt was the high point of the VOX evening. Rachel, who it turns out is the YCP's wife, is a documentary producer. She has a really fantastic aria in which she retells a story of being on a boat (off the Jersey shore) that almost sinks in a storm. She has an out-of-body experience that causes her to question how she perceives reality before she and the others on the boat are rescued by a polish freighter. Soprano Lauren Skuce sang Rachel's aria beautifully and made the whole story vivid and believable. She and the aria were rewarded with some brava's.

Third offering: An "operina" by 86-year-old Jack Beeson based on a fin-de-siecle treatise by Mrs. Frances Hoyle-Pogle on the Delsartre method of musical elocution. "Practice in the Art of Elocution" purports to be a rehearsal at which an artiste of the repertoire (soprano Wendy Hill) uses Mrs. Hoyle-Pogle's exercises as a warm-up and to help select music for an upcoming recital tour to the Midwest. (She decides that for that audience she had best not program James Whitcomb Riley's When Cigarettes to Ashes Turn, nor any tangos – but that they might appreciate something from "Hee-a-watha")
This was meant to be an entertainment, and it was. Beeson wrote intricate new settings to some rather hoary 1900-era poems that were meant to suggest the birth of modernism. Our fictional diva and her accompanist worked together valiantly to tackle the first exercise piece – a setting of a Rupert Brooks poem about seasickness that per the musical directions was to have "spume" on the middle beat of each 7/4 measure.

I wish I'd ducked out after "Elocution". I don't think the downpour outside had started by then yet plus I would have caught an earlier train home. Oh but I would have missed "The Darkling". Only twenty minutes of this seventy-five minute work were presented. The entire work will be performed in Germany and Poland this summer. To the extent that those two nations still have collective guilt for the Holocaust to expiate, they deserve to experience the entire piece. A quartet of singers (including Ms. Sheinbaum), a string quartet, a reader, a filmed presentation of a prior choreographed production, and pre-recorded (why?) readings and music compete to be the most boring and inscrutable element of the production. The bass sings a very long aria about how inadequate his winter coat is while his blurry video image sings along a split-second behind. Colline's "old coat" this ain't. I was actually thinking more kindly of the Ambassador Bridge song by this point. At the Q&A the "adaptor and director" and the poet of the text had much more to say than did the composer. They had more explaining to do, for sure.

So I don't know. I'm curious to see whether the sea aria from "The Theory of Everything" makes it into the repertoire. It should. And I'm sickly curious about the hinted-at rain forest scene. I'd definitely enjoy seeing "Elocution" on an upcoming program. But I don't ever want to see "The Darkling" or "Golden Motors" in full production. I guess I got my money's worth for a free ticket.

If you know of any upcoming new music performances or just want to argue, you can drop me a note.