Redshift Radio Interview Spring 2021

For Opera Canada, April 2021 - Dear Singer.... Advice from Rodney Sharman

What do you wish singers understood more about learning and interpreting new music

“What I hope singers understand is how much I love working with them and how deeply I appreciate the care and devotion they offer when learning and performing my music. I feel honoured and humbled when performers memorize my music. Among performers, dancers do this as a matter of course; dancers and choreographers often astonish – even scare me – with their musical insights into my work. Among musicians, singers are foremost in memorization, and not just in opera.

“Their care and devotion are reciprocated. When I write for a specific singer for the first time, I ask about vocal range, potential dynamic range within each register, where ability to articulate words is best, where it disappears, register breaks, what ‘sweet spots’ exist in their voices, strengths and weaknesses. I had the great pleasure of working with Valdine Anderson in 2001. Before writing for her, I asked specifics about her voice. Valdine was among the most sought-after new music interpreters at the time, with already dozens of premieres in North America and Europe. She told me no composer had ever asked her this before! Brett Polegato was the baritone soloist, but I already knew his voice rather well. The resulting Vancouver Symphony performance of Love, Beauty, Desire led by Andrey Boreyko was ravishing.

“When I begin, I often do not know for whom I am writing, even in music theatre. The piece isn’t cast yet; I know only the desired vocal type. When I began writing Elsewhereless*, I wrote the part of Antoine for a tenor who would sing Messiah solos well. Benoit Boutet was cast in the role, a French lyric tenor with a beautiful mid-high range and tremendous acting ability. I had to rewrite nearly half the part to suit his strengths, again with marvelous results. More recently, From the House of Mirth** was begun without specific singers in mind, followed by a cast change once the singers had been selected mid way through its composition. I wrote for a wonderful group of singers: Scott Belluz, Graham Thomson, Alexander Dobson, and Geoffrey Sirett. It was in writing From the House of Mirth that I was dragged into the 21st century. I had to transpose a short song for countertenor Scott Belluz by only a half-step, changing something good into something that made his voice float effortlessly. I have beautiful, clear hand-writing and can copy music as quickly as anyone using music-notation software. To recopy the transposed song took me three hours, something that could have been accomplished in under a minute with computer. It was then I hired a teenager to teach me music software.

“I AM A CHORAL SINGER, AND SING ALL MY VOCAL PARTS AS I WRITE THEM.”

“Singers should know, however, that sometimes music cannot be transposed because of the instrumental parts, which have imperatives of their own. In those cases, I happily re-write music for singers I admire. A lute song originally for new-music specialist Catherine Fern Lewis, who has the uncanny ability to sing music exactly as I imagine it, was successfully re-written for splendid American countertenor Reginald Mobley, with whom I worked when I was Composer-in-Residence of Early Music Vancouver’s New Music for Old Instruments. Cathy likes the version I wrote for Reggie well enough that she often chooses to perform it.

“My closest singer-collaborator is mezzo Barbara Ebbeson, for whom I have written nearly all of my cabaret songs. I often write cabaret text as well as music, and I have taken Barbara’s personal life (and mine!) as impetus for comic and tragic songs. With the years, we have both changed and grown as artists, but here I have the special advantage that her voice is about an octave above mine, and almost anything I write that sounds good when I sing it will sound great when she sings it. I am a choral singer, and sing all my vocal parts as I write them.

“I am currently finishing Showroom, a chamber opera for Ensemble Continuum with libretto by Atom Egoyan. Continuum’s Artistic Director, Ryan Scott, invited me to choose the singers with him, which makes a great difference and is more rare than one might imagine. I am writing for a dream cast: Carla Huhtanen, Andrea Ludwig, and Nicholas Higgs. Composing is so much easier with their voices in my mind’s theatre.”

* Elsewhereless: libretto and direction by Atom Egoyan; Vancouver New Music, Tapestry
Opera, National Arts Centre, producers.
** From the House of Mirth: Direction and choreography by James Kudelka, libretto by Alex Poch-Goldin after the novel by Edith Wharton; Citadel & Compagnie, producer.

Rodney Sharman on Morton Feldman on the Guitar

Rodney Sharman on the Double Bass

How to Write for Orchestra

Art Song Lab Interview - Rodney Sharman

Interview and editing by ASL Co-Director, Michael Park

Morton Feldman's Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano (1994)

Feldman Program Note

by Rodney Sharman

Notes written for a performance of Morton Feldman's Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, Vancouver, Canada, on September 17th 1994. 

Morton Feldman's music is based in subtlety, perception and an intimacy with the materials of music. His definition of composition sets a standard for music: "the right note on the right instrument in the right register at the right time." A born orchestrator, he allows sounds to speak for themselves, revealing their inherent qualities of depth and beauty.

Morton Feldman (1926-1987) was in the vanguard of the New York art world in the 1950s. His warmth and humour made many friends, and his candour inspired both admirers and critics to passionate discussion. Among his most influential associations were his friendships with composer John Cage and the abstract expressionist painters Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Feldman moved to Buffalo, New York in 1971, where he taught composition and orchestration until his death in 1987.

In 1979, he began writing a number of long works lasting more than one hour. Perhaps the most important of these is his Second String Quartet (1984), commissioned by New Music Concerts, Toronto, for the Kronos Quartet, a work of transcendental beauty and himmlische Länge (heavenly length), over four and a half hours in one movement. It is a listening experience which surpasses the conventional notion of chamber music, more akin to Tristan und Isolde than the Classical string quartet.

Patterns in a Chromatic Field - Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano

In the twelve years before Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano was written, Morton Feldman produced sixteen orchestral works, beginning with On Time and the Instrumental Factor and ending with The Turfan Fragments. In the next six years he wrote only one orchestral work, Coptic Light (1986). Following the composition of his one movement String Quartet (1979), his first long work lasting a little over an hour and a half, Feldman seems to have hesitated, subsequently composing three works of more or less conventional length. It was only after the success of the first West Coast performance of his String Quartet in February, 1981, that he returned to explore the long piece with the composition of Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano.

The piece was completed May 13,1981. In Feldman's notebooks, it appears that he considered the title Patterns in a Chromatic Field, later settling on the title Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano. The return to the more poetic title was undertaken by Feldman's publishers after his death. (The same publishers prevented him from giving his work for violin and orchestra the title Why Webern?!!! Ironically, to please them, Feldman changed the title to Violin and Orchestra.) Morton Feldman was unhappy with the first performances of Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano, it is said that he lost confidence in the piece. By 1986, however, he referred to the work with affection and pride, probably as the result of better performances.

Feldman's harmonic language in the late seventies and early eighties was chromatic, influenced partly by his admiration for the music of Anton Webern. Feldman does not follow strict serial procedures for ordering the chromatic scale, rather he starts with a chromatic subset which he uses as his basic material. In Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano he begins with four notes: G, G#, A, Bb, which he presents in many guises through aspects of orchestration, registration or rhythmic patterning. These result in identifiable musical modules which are brought back at various times in the course of the work. With each return, the material is altered. In Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano the modules are frequently joined into a continuum in which the cello line is brought into chromatic relief by changes in the piano part. This modular form of construction owes an obvious debt to Stravinsky, but also to his own graphic scores from the 1950's which are composed on a grid.

Characteristic of the sound world of Feldman's last scores are the overall soft dynamic level and a preference for instruments with simple overtone structures, such as flute, celesta and vibraphone. In string writing, he often uses the mute as a way of thinning the sound. In Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano he calls for the use of the mute throughout. The frequent use of harmonics also results in a simpler and more veiled timbre.

© Rodney Sharman, 1994     

a sermon, a narrative and a prayer (1990)

from "COMPLEXITY"  (8-10 March 1990 Rotterdam)