To My Talented Lady Friends: An "Improv Opera"

Hey Ladies,

I miss you, and I'm sorry I've been so engulfed in my thesis to hang out as I'd like... however, I have a two (or maybe even ten)-fold efficient idea which should be fun and hopefully productive.

So in my thesis there is a film. In my film, there is a diluted narrative. In the diluted narrative there is a history of morality. In the history of morality there is a group of women who serve both as spiritual leaders in their community and as prostitutes. In reality this seeming division of self was perfectly legal in Medieval Europe. Today's mindset would look at this type of pairing as hypocrisy, but I'm trying to use it to show how people (especially women or minorities) make meaning out of a marginalized life in society. Culture forms in the mythology people make and need to have meaning in life (rather than life being objectively or universally meaningful in the context of societal laws) and become more fully human or transcendent. But at the same time, morality is prescribed by those in power to unintentionally make a slave class for themselves to feed and survive on, which is the animal part of human nature, to survive by eating those lower on the food chain. It is inevitable and glossed over by human idealism as something people can transcend with enough effort and presence of mind. I disagree, and believe, like Nietzsche that chaos is necessary to meaning and we discover meaning in life through art.

There are 4 characters in the introductory scene of the film. They are all nuns/ladies-of-the-night who serve their community as nurturing, earth-mother sympathizers of the downtrodden, rather than as tradeswomen of sensual goods and services. Because they embrace the chaos of the animal they are humble. Nonetheless they are shamed because they are powerless to survive at the hands of the moneyholders, who by their capacity to requite, that is, reward and punish, can prescribe morality which both condemns their way of living and enforces it. The moneyholders are mainly men in the rich church inside the town who have cast their cloister into the woods to perform their spiritual rites to society in the confines of a humble tent.

I know this is probably more philosophy than anyone wants to read this early in the morning... but here comes the practical and fun part:

I have images to show you, which are not final but which should give you the mood of the opening scene. With those moving images in mind, I want to create an organic improv piece with 4 voices. These voices should begin as your actual voices, so in that sense you'll have to play a character, but since the piece is written in the fake language, what I would like is ostensibly what we did with Literacy, to have a list of these fake words to choose from and through your compositional sensibilities, we form a musical conversation. In a way, you might think this piece would be better for trained singers, but I don't. And in fact, I think it would be cool to have your instruments in this piece too, as sort of a secondary mode of individual voice. In the opening scene the elder nun (most like Leonardo of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, if this analogy makes sense) gets into an argument with the nun of a fiery, angsty disposition (the Raphael character) over the death of their youngest sister (who could have been the Michaelangelo character, but whose sudden absence simply leaves a lack of unity among the others). A fourth nun takes the role of the Donatello character, and contemplates the sister's death quietly and with gentle reserve. Its a funeral scene but unlike Leah's In Morning piece, does not resolve quite yet. If after the erupting first movement it makes sense to pick up instruments, and I hope it does, there should be a second wave of mourning without voices that I will carry into the next scene which is devoid of human characters.

The sister who has died has given birth to a baby in this first scene which is the catalyst for the eruption of the argument between the two nuns. The story follows the child as she grows up in this scenario without the socialization of other children and makes art of what is "too real" incorporating dreams into reality and bestowing the form of her growing up with an aesthetic fashioned from the abstraction of real visions of this life.

So it's in essence a Piece, and a Piece I'm serious about - And it needs 4 voices (I can be the 4th if necessary). I think it would be cool to supplant those individual voices with instrumentation in the way that to speak to each other, Leah might just as naturally pick up her Saxophone as vocalize the script and Jessica might pick up hers and yell back with it. Basically, where in all technically received films (popular and/or critically acclaimed films, that is) there is a track for dialog and a track for incidental music and the music must always be suppressed just like the music of opera is (according to Nietzsche, for whom opera was the popular film of his time) suppressed by the libretto because the clarity of the words is the most important thing to an audience of theatre-goers.

For my thesis, I want the dialog AND the music to BE THE SAME THING. For this Piece, the words are only important in the sentiment they are producing for and between the performers, the rhythms they are then forced naturally into creating, and the musical form they are exalting over time. For this reason it will only be important to practice the language to the degree that it should feel natural like playing an instrument. The literal meaning of the words does not matter except in the feeling they cause in the performer uttering them. They should move fluidly through moments of tonality and periods of texture and rhythm.

There will then at last, be one long organic piece with 5 movements (which now reminisces of Leah's interest in the 5 stages of grief, and makes me feel this can not be done without Leah in the natural role of the elder nun) that will loosely follow a script in lieu of a score while I orchestrate the instrumentation and shifts in mood/dynamics with image cues. We will need to practice a lot, because this in essence will be like an opera... but practically speaking I credit everyone participating as a Composer as that's the nature of improv and collaboration. The way I see it, this is a history of the culture of women and only through a ritual performed by us as a group, is it going to create that mythology.