Tiny Alligator Music

Concert review: Brad Lubman conducts American music at Wien Modern

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 18:05:57 -0400

I’ve recently started reviewing concerts in my newly-adopted city of Vienna for the blog I Care If You Listen.

An excerpt from my first review:

I have sometimes found performances and recordings of Elliot Carter’s music to be physically trying, requiring me to gird myself against the onslaught of hard edges, dissonance, and overwhelming complexity, leaving me to enjoy them only in very intellectual terms. But in this performance of American composers at the Wien Modern festival, Brad Lubman’s clarity of interpretation, as well as the truly astonishing acoustics of the Musikverein allowed all of the pieces on this program to reach listeners with absolute clarity, hard edges removed and full of interesting and beautiful sounds. The program was well-selected, with a coherent progression of ideas that mostly displayed the strengths of the Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich (Lower Austrian Tonkünstler Orchestra).

Read more

"When This War Ends" video is online

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 09:59:00 -0400

I’ve posted video online from a recent workshop performance of two scenes from “When This War Ends,” an opera that I’m writing about the Canadian experience of the recently-concluded war in Afghanistan.

Video is here.

For more info on this project, you can read John Terauds’ excellent preview of this concert on his very excellent blog.

I’m writing an opera about the war in Afghanistan. This...

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 09:53:07 -0400

I’m writing an opera about the war in Afghanistan. This scene is about Richard Colvin and the testimony he gave to a parliamentary committee in 2009 about the treatment of detainees that had been handed over from Canadian forces to Afghan forces. More excerpts on my website at http://tinyalligator.com/listen

Building a Country at Gunpoint Has Failed. This, and more...

Mon, 28 May 2012 19:41:41 -0400

Building a Country at Gunpoint Has Failed. This, and more odd-metre olympics on Thursday, May 31st at the Al Green Theatre. 7:30 pm.

BRITNEY BOMBS! So in the opera I’m writing, there’s...

Thu, 24 May 2012 22:22:55 -0400

BRITNEY BOMBS!

So in the opera I’m writing, there’s a scene where our hero, a Canadian journalist, is embedded with Canadian troops in Kandahar. On the battlefield, all is very quiet. Until… in the distance, they hear the siren song of… who could that be? The voice gets louder, and louder, and then, around measure 131, the bombs start to fall….

[you may want to turn your headphones down]

Just me and my printer in the long, dark night.

Mon, 14 May 2012 20:33:46 -0400

I’m heading into another series of late nights with my printer. I feel as though about 45% of my career as a composer so far has been spent like this: printing scores and parts, re-printing them when I discover that I’ve done the page turns wrong, taping or hole punching, repeating the whole thing when I do my last proof-read and discover mistakes. This time I’m starting miraculously early- four days before rehearsal!- and have learned from many past papery mishaps. I’m also printing for a much smaller pile of parts for this concert- 10 musicians instead of my usual 21. But still. I know myself. I’m sure to make a mess.

I feel quite loyal to the giant, antique printing machine that lovely Jennifer Ryan donated to the Alligator Cause awhile back. This old scanner-printer-faxer (fax! remember that?) has a very comforting purr that, as 2 am turns into 3 am, often begins to sound more and more like a decent substitute for sleep. Despite my best attempts to control the chaos, the floor of my studio inevitably ends up covered in hole-punch confetti, bits of tape, mangled parts that got caught in the feeder, and abandoned socks (the more tired I am, the less I chose to wear socks).

I complain now. But I can see myself in thirty years, shaking my head at a bunch of glossy young musicians with sleek touch-screen e-music readers, flicking page turns effortlessly and snickering as I squint to read the score off some sort of magic holographic conducting desk. I will shake my head at them, and reminisce about the the good old honest days, when the nights were long and the printers creaked, back when we used real trees to make real music.

Some Important Questions You May Have About My Winter Vacation

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:07:06 -0400

I just spent the most amazing 8 weeks in a cabin in the woods at the MacDowell Artist Colony, writing an opera about terrible things. During this residency, I wrote and orchestrated the music for three of the eight scenes in my libretto, which is about the Canadian experience of the recent war in Afghanistan. The text in “When This War Ends (Or, Some Important Questions You May Have About Our Recently-Concluded Engagement in the Graveyard of Empires)” is adapted from several sources, including reporting by my brother, Globe and Mail journalist Graeme Smith, as well as the parliamentary committee testimony given by former Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin.

Why write an opera about old news?

The war in Afghanistan is an event that I did not experience. It is strange that I did not experience this event. It moved, changed or ended the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. But I am writing an opera about not experiencing a war; about how it prickled the edges of my life, but changed nothing; about how strange it is that this massive cataclysm did not affect me. This was not our grandfathers’ war.

This is an inherently selfish point of view for an opera about a war; I am taking it nonetheless in an attempt to force myself into an awareness of my own naïveté. I also wanted to notice the inadequacies of some of the sources that brought me into contact with this war, and with the shortcomings my own consumption of other sources. Official information provided to Canadians about this “mission” was completely veiled and useless (when it was not detrimental). When I did bother to read the news about this war, I would briefly wonder about it, and then become distracted before I made it to the end of an article, or before I could follow up on my own questions. In doing so, I was violating my most basic duty as a citizen in a democracy: I was not wondering; I was not trying to understand. So, by writing this opera, I begin to question.

What does it sound like?

Because I’ve had so much time at MacDowell, I have tried a lot of things in these three scenes that I otherwise would not have had the time, technique or courage to write. Some of these new (at least, new to me!) sounds will be successful; some will undoubtedly not be. I have tried to take advantage of the luxury of having four opera singers, a string quartet, a percussionist and three jazz musicians (guitar, bass, saxophone) by writing interesting melodic and harmonic material that occasionally leaves space for improvisatory exploration.

When can we hear it?

Three scenes from “When This War Ends” will be performed in concert on Thursday, May 31^st, 2012 by Spectrum Music. The concert will feature a pre-show chat, where I will interview Globe and Mail journalist Graeme Smith and former Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin. I will ask them how they feel about my turning them into an opera, and what will happen, now that this war has ended. The chat begins at 7:30 pm. This will take place at the Al Green Theatre, Bloor and Spadina, Toronto. Tickets at http://www.spectrummusic.ca/

Views from two bedroom windows on opposite sides of the world: a comparative analysis

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:36:34 -0500

Last week:

This week:

So I’m in India! So, wow.

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 07:41:19 -0500

So I’m in India! So, wow.

The Ford Brothers’ Bling Won’t Build a Real City

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:08:15 -0400

People like shiny things. Human beings seem to have an inherent dislike for well-worn normalcy. From a young age, we can’t wait: we can’t wait for Christmas, for the cookies to come out of the oven, for school to be over.

Most people learn, at some point, that shiny things are not necessarily real. Being a grown-up means appreciating the space between the shiny things in life, understanding the value of realness.

I am dismayed when I hear that the Ford Brothers want to turn my city into what is essentially a cruise ship filled with shopping malls. This is not a plan for a real city. This is a plan for a place where people who wish to feel rich arrive, drop some money in one single area, and never go anywhere else. This plan will not enrich our city. It will enrich a few developers, and a few American companies like “Bloomingdales and Macy’s.”

Building a good city, a real city, is like building a career. It takes time. You have to get to know your work, learn to understand your own strength, and be nice to people. You have to take time to understand who people are. You have to make your best, most sincere and concerted contribution to the world without worrying about it taking too long.

The Ford Brothers’ proposal does none of this. Instead, it whines that the currently-planned development is going to take years, that it is not going to be shiny enough. It wants to cover our city in plastic. It screams “please like us!” without providing the substance that would be a reason for anyone to do so. This plan wants the corner office before it has learned how to work the photocopier.

What dismays me even more is the timing. Jack Layton, rest his soul, taught us how to build real things. His determination and focus on Parliament Hill showed that he understood the time and effort required to build a substantive country. His work in Toronto showed that he knew how to meet people, listen to them, and understand who they are. He knew how to make a place for people to live, not just a place for them to shop.

By cynically trying to play politics with the provincial Liberal government ahead of the upcoming provincial election, the Fords will simply turn more people away with their insincerity and greed.

At Jack’s funeral on Saturday, our city shifted. The streets were filled with people who had admired his work towards building a country with substance. This momentum now needs to be directed squarely at Toronto City Hall. We know what a real politician feels like. What we have in office right now is just plastic.

Towards the Land of Things

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 17:50:31 -0400

In Which I am having post-minimalist thoughts, post-production.

I had a great nerd-out this week with composers Adam Sherkin, Alex Eddington, Brian Harman, and Mitch Renaud. Our topic was post-minimalism, and as we started, it became apparent that our first task was to define post-minimalism. The scores that we brought in as examples of the style included elements of hard-core minimalism, but all seemed to use this minimalism less as a style to be adhered to than as one compositional tool available to be exploited. Minimalistic concepts were found to be in cahoots in various scores with post-modernism, DJs, drum and bass, theatre music, neo-romanticism…. From what I remember, the only conclusion we came to was that we will need to reconvene in 50 years, to see if we can make sense of the jumble of new sounds we were hearing. (Perhaps the others can provide a more conclusive conclusion for me?) But it was great fun to think about sound on such a basic level: what is a style of music? How many people have to practice the same style for it to become a movement? Where are its edges?

This is a pretty fun time to be a composer. As I confirmed in our discussion this week, we are intensely lucky to be writing music in a Western Classical tradition now; this is a time when so much has been built up in this art form, so many sounds discovered and tools provided, so many barriers between sub-genres broken down. As a composer, I have instruments, techniques, performers and ideas available to me from literally all over the planet and all throughout human history. I have unparalleled access to information about music, and brand new ways to document what I create and provide it to an audience. Many times, I think this panoply of stimuli leads me to act more as a curator than as a composer. It also opens up all of the questions of classification mentioned above.

These questions come at an interesting time for me. A few months after the monumental effort that was “Safe and Healthy Homes for Children,” I am still feeling a little lost musically. In post-production now (recordings coming soon!), I am completely baffled by the recording of this concert. Over 65 minutes of music, I pretty much pulled in every style of music that I know how to write (and a few that I discovered, listening back, I do not yet know how to write). In the end, I seem to have produced a series of études about the edges of various contemporary pop music styles; this work is the outlines of some musical shapes that remains slightly obscured to me. Here in the Land of Outlines, I have written music that is so many different things that it is not actually a Thing. What remains now is for me to reason my way back inside to the Land of Things, to clarify the intention of each individual musical shape. It’s time for me to start being deliberate about classification.

To do this, I am going to step back from the current compositional track on which I’ve been careening lately. “Safe and Healthy Homes” will mark my last self-produced show on this scale. I’m going to take a break from Alligators and focus on writing music for smaller ensembles for the next year: upcoming projects include a piece of art music about contemporary wars for chamber strings and male voice; I’m also working on a pop music/performance art collaboration with poet Linda Besner and singer/songwriter Abigail Lapell about model trains (model trains!). With each of these projects, I am hoping to find myself more in the centre of each respective musical style, instead of mucking about with outlines. I look forward to reporting back in a little while from the Land of Things.

——-

Footnote: There are MANY people to whom I owe very much for the time and creative genius they gave me for “Safe and Healthy Homes”. A more thorough thank you will be forthcoming, but right now, the work that Gary Gray is doing on the recording of the show is foremost in my mind. I can’t wait to post the recordings online shortly- Gary has somehow managed to make it sound like we spent days in a professional studio, instead of doing the whole thing live in one shot in a theatre…. Thank you Gary!

Guest Blog Post no. 2: The Clue is in the Title.

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 09:04:56 -0500

By Susan Bond

While Safe and Healthy Homes is in some ways a reflection of Caitlin’s personal experience and situation in Brooklyn, it’s also a meditation on a larger state of affairs. Living on a meagre (but greatly appreciated!) grant that didn’t allow her to work meant that she wound up living below the poverty line in a country with almost no social safety net.

Caitlin was disturbed to see that the local government thought it more responsible to post warnings not to lick the walls in older low-income areas (such as the one Caitlin was living in) than to provide health care for the citizens or provide for the clean-up of contaminated areas. On a surprisingly visible level, the community was unable (or unwilling) to provide safe and healthy homes, be they for children or any other members.

Those of us watching the concert on Sunday are from (or at least in) a fantastic city that can sometimes feel very small, in a country that can seem, well, kind of bland. Like the woman from the shoe in the first half of the concert, we can be tempted to strike out for more adventurous climes, but to do so we have to give something up. Specifically, we have to give up a city and a country that care about their constituents enough that they have the goal, though not always met, of providing them with health care and adequate housing. It’s a hard bargain, and one that we haven’t been willing to make.

———————————

Tiny Alligator Music presents

Safe and Healthy Homes for Children

A song-cycle for jazz orchestra and three voices

Sunday, March 13th, 8:00 pm

The Alumnae Theatre, 70 Berkeley Street

(near King St. and Parliament St.)

$20/$15 for students, seniors and arts workers

buy tickets now at www.tinyalligator.com/events

Guest Blog Post: What on earth is about to happen on stage on Sunday, March 13th?

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 22:03:45 -0500

By Susan Bond

Caitlin’s note: Susan is a fantastic Toronto-based dramaturge who has been kind enough to help me sort through the jumble of ideas I have had about this show. She helped me to fix the libretto before I began reorchestrations this fall. Below, she miraculously pulls together my song cycle into one coherent narrative for you. Amazing!

As the title tells us, Safe and Healthy Homes for Children is about being brave and leaving home; but in many ways it’s more a story about leaving home and being brave. A deeply personal work, Safe and Healthy Homes came about during Caitlin’s year living and studying in Brooklyn. The title is taken from a Public Service Announcement about lead paint - one of the traumas of big city living that Caitlin herself got to deal with (a line in her lease forbade her from licking the walls).

The piece starts with our hero(ine) still safe at home: it opens with her (a Sapphic fragment voiced by all three singers) lying in bed; safe, certainly, but isolated and somehow restless. The second movement is the longest, and in many ways the focal point of the work. It is a setting of “The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe”, a short story by indie darling Sheila Heti from her work The Middle Stories. In it, the protagonist takes stock of her current comfortable (but still lonely and kind of boring) life, and decides to leave home. The moment of her decision is filled with excitement, and the actual leave-taking is a moment of triumph.

If the first half of the piece is about leaving home and what makes us do that, the second half is about being brave among the danger of the outside world and the unpleasantness we’re faced with when we try to live there. Unlike the first act, the majority of the second is set to Caitlin’s own words, drawn both from her own experiences of living and working in Brooklyn, and other hostile environments. The exception to this is the sixth movement, a setting of a poem by the American novelist John Updike. “Vibration” expands the reach to more of the outside world - instead of just dealing with the nightmare that Brooklyn can be, it shows the unfriendliness of a more general urban landscape. It also serves as a good bridge to the last movement, “Public Service Announcement no. 2” in which our heroine considers the larger world, and possible homes that may or may no be healthy and safe.

It takes a village to raise an Alligator

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 09:15:18 -0500

Wait. I hate to jinx this, but let’s just pause to appreciate this fact: it’s four weeks before show time, and nothing seriously major has gone wrong yet. This is a first in Alligatorland.

I know, there’s still lots of time for things to explode. And yes, I’ve only handed half of the score to my copyist, I’m still unable to lift my left arm high enough to conduct (after an epic tumble on some ice last week- I really wish someone had videotaped my fall, as I must have been fully airborne for a good ten seconds, and I could have been an overnight Youtube sensation….), we’re seriously over budget, and I’ve been so busy writing the show and dealing with logistics and working two jobs and writing the music for my March 4th Alliance Francaise concert that I haven’t done laundry in way too long….

But I’ve been really encouraged by the support I’ve been receiving from everyone so far for this show. A last-minute save from Meredith White kept me from printing 300 posters with spelling mistakes on them; Jason Logue hired the world’s best sub for a rehearsal; Carissa Neufeld not only took care of renting us a bass drum, she is carting it to rehearsal and gig along with her own set of vibes; Graham Scott saved the day by hosting the new Tiny Alligator website on his own hosting service, when mine was about to charge me a stupidly-high monthly rate; Lina Allemano managed to heal from her own epic ice tumble so quickly that the newly-bionic woman isn’t missing a single rehearsal; many, many new friends have been coming out of the woodwork with helpful suggestions and connections; and I’ve got an army of awesome volunteers coming to help me plaster the city with posters next weekend (want to join us?).

I’m sure I’m forgetting someone right now, but I will continue to be very very grateful for everyone’s help as I head into the final four weeks of crazy. And I will be able to walk a little more slowly, and watch out for ice, knowing that there are such awesome people backing me up.

"As a composer, I need to take specific, pointed risks; as a conductor, I need to be assertive,..."

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:53:05 -0500

“As a composer, I need to take specific, pointed risks; as a conductor, I need to be assertive, confident and comfortable with these compositional risks; as an administrator and concert presenter, I need to be efficient, organized and loud.”

- Me, describing on a grant application how the grant money would magically make me into three super-humans. In fact, it has just made me into one sleepless human. Why, Caitlin, why?

"…When you’re making art, there’s a leap of faith that’s involved…..."

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:54:02 -0500

“…When you’re making art, there’s a leap of faith that’s involved… blind faith in fact. You can’t see the outside of what you’re doing…. You have to accept the fact that you have to do it brick by brick.”

- Julian Schnabel, in an interview with Eleanor Wachtel, on “Wachtel on the Arts” on CBC Radio.

An Open Letter to Our New Mayor

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:28:09 -0500

Citizens of Toronto:

You can send this email, or create your own. Keep it polite, but let him know that transit riders are now his customers. As a self-proclaimed “customer-service” focused man, he needs to know that scrapping Transit City would be a devastating shame.

———-

from Caitlin Smith <caitlin@tinyalligator.com>tomayor_ford@toronto.ca
date1 December 2010 21:25subjectTransit plans

Dear Mayor Ford,

I’m extremely concerned about your plan to scrap Transit City.

As a taxpaying Torontonian, I would be very angry if the tax dollars that we have already spent towards this plan were thrown down the drain by changing course at this late date in the plan. As well, I feel that paying for a new subway line would be a shameful waste of our precious city resources.

The new LRT lines that the Transit City plan calls for are not a “war on the car”. Instead, they make commuting by both car and public transit more efficient. Dedicated streetcar lanes clear up roads and make it easier for everyone to get to work faster, and do so in a very cost-effective manner.

Please, don’t begin your new term with this shameful waste of my tax dollars.

Regards,
—
Caitlin Smith

that song stuck in my head

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 23:37:12 -0500

I woke up this morning with an earworm: the line from “Gemini” (off Ben Monder’s 1997 album with Theo Bleckmann, No Boat). It goes like something like this:

(Feel free to correct my transcription; guitar harmonics not indicated as such. Also, Theo Bleckmann sings this line. With his voice.)

It took me a full twelve hours to remember what the song was, who it was by, where the recording was; an unexpected earworm.

And strange, given that I haven’t listened to this record in months. I spent this week listening to and studying Bach (St. John’s Passion) and Webern (5 Lieder aus Der siebente Ring). These scores landed on my piano because I’m trying to come up with something to submit to the Aradia ensemble’s “Baroque Idol” contest. I’ve been searching for examples of interesting melodies that will shake me out of my usual habits. I’m also trying to figure out how to write something contemporary for period instruments, writing in a way that will be idiomatic enough to fit the context but not sound derivative. Maybe my pre-conscious mind last night was trying to tell me that the place between Bach and Webern is Monder… how will intervals like this ring on period strings?

They don't need no education; I am about to do some educating.

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 13:41:38 -0400

I was just sitting down this afternoon to draw up my first lesson plans for teaching at the Regent Park School of Music. Today is my very first day there, teaching clarinet, sax, and flute. I’m also going to be starting a jazz ensemble with them in a few weeks.

So imagine my surprise when I turned on CBC1 and heard an interview with the super-human Richard Marsella, Director of RPSM. The RPSM choir is singing tonight at the ACC with Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd fame.

What fantastic news for my first day there. I’m thrilled that I get to be part of such a dynamic and vital school. I almost fell out of my chair when Richard asked me to start this jazz ensemble with a focus on repertoire by living Canadian jazz composers. We will of course start with the basics, and I’m so excited to share the jazz classics that I love with these kids. But I am also looking forward to creating a solid book of beginner jazz charts by Canadians composers.

Also, the choir administrator in me is totally jealous, and I’m wrangling to get High Park Choirs’ amazing artistic director Zimfira Poloz together in a room with Wayne Strongman, who conducts the RPSM choir.

Ideas About Songs on Stages

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:38:00 -0400

Saw The Little Death, Vol 1 last night at St. Marks Church.

Seeing Matt Marks’ song cycle/opera/musical was a revelation for me. His songs are funny, poignant and musically enthralling. He and Mellissa Hughes (a Tiny Alligator favourite) treat Marks’ songs, and the stage, with total abandon. The show continues through next week.

Equally brilliant is the music video of the hit song from this show, “I Don’t Have Any Fun On My Own.”

A staged song cycle, executed with low production costs and an obvious joy for the performers to play is exceedingly exciting for me to discover, given that I have a song cycle sitting in my living room, waiting for edits and and an audience.

Along the same lines, I heard Corey Dargel perform part of his show Removable Parts at an Opera On Tap/American Opera Projects showcase at Galapagos on Friday night. Like Matt and Mellissa, Corey has a knack for going for broke while singing about uncomfortable things; his deadpan carried the audience nicely through his song cycle about voluntary amputation.

Both shows were a fabulous example of composer/performers following an outlandish idea with total commitment through to fascinating results. I’ve often come across ideas and thought, “yeah, but that’d never happen on stage….” This weekend has given me hope that music does happen, and happen very nicely on stage.

It also raised questions about opera. My companion thought that perhaps Corey’s piece, performed by Corey in his straight-toned pop voice, didn’t belong in an opera showcase. The Little Death bills itself as a “pop-opera”. Composers seem to be throwing that word around a lot lately, making the definition of new opera seem a little fuzzy.

I’ve been using it myself to describe a show that tells a story, has cooler melodies and harmonies than what I associate with musical theatre, and keeps some of the theatrical formalism of old-school operas.

But when ideas are that loose, how do we define something enough to persuade a venue to present it, and an audience to come and hear it?

———————-

Edit:

Another post about TLDV1, more eloquently put than mine:

http://soundtime.wordpress.com/2010/07/10/hey-lets-put-on-a-show/