I Would Write

MAN
If I could write to
you of everything I would,
list all of the small thrills
(years from now they will be even moreso)
of someone else in my arms, no,
in front of me, where I can drink
for my memory.
I would show you that the
water is only shin-deep and
impossible to drown in, that
we could probably swim for
ages in front of others without
encountering a shred of shame
and from the shore we would
just be having a splash.
I would draw in fine detail
the stairway behind the bar,
the almost closed bathroom door
through which I glimpsed the
finery of another.  These and the
heat in my room from
the vent in the floor–my
mattress positioned just so
and our feet every morning cooked.

MAN and WOMAN
I would write to you if I could

WOMAN
For several hours, I’ve waited.
Waited among menacing chairs, one
of which I haven’t moved for at
least a week–the shadows even
on dark days essential to
the gravity of the room.
I heard the sink in the
window and others voices from
the corner where there is
no one.  When you were here
last, we padded from room to
room in ghostly quiet.  Everything,
you said, was how it appeared
to you in dreams–something that
scared me since it is
all too real for me.
The tower bells ring every hour.
Caruso rattles from the back courtyard.
I can only wait for you.
If I could, I would write.

The Song of the Dream Awake

MAN
Last night I buried my
head in my grandmother’s
neck–breathed deep of
the long afternoons we
spent idling beneath the
lemon tree by the
gravel lawn, the faint smell
of the sun mingling with
that musk that smells so
much like embalming fluid.
To my surprise,
she is still here, walking
beside me on the way to
work.  My stride is slower,
more ponderous, while the
man besides me rushes
ahead having been given the
gift of forgetting.
It appears that most
are that lucky–
firmly in today’s world of
their newspapers or at least
only temporarily aloft in
the cloud of their consumption.
I count myself among them
most days.
What did I forget this morning?
I dropped my coffee
on the rug, lingered on the
steam shadows in the shower
and imagined the brusk embrace
of an older woman–her skin
and bones a welcome luxury.
And these are only the moments
I remember, the ones I commit
to the page in my hurried reasoning.
There are more, hovering just
beyond my grasp, but there,
as the water retreats from the shore…

The Experiments in Opera Spring Series will be presented at Roulette in Brooklyn on May 10-11, 2012. The two-day event will pick up where the January 2012 inaugural concert left off, with full versions of Jason Cady’s Happiness is the Problem and Matt Welch’s Borges and the Other.

In addition, two of the choral excerpts from my own Brother Brother will be featured on Thursday May 10.  I am excited to be working with singers Amanda Sidebottom, Patrick Fennig, Jonathon Hampton and Thomas McCargar.

Visit experimentsinopera.com for more information.

Visit roulette.org to buy tickets.

The Experiments in Opera collaborative has its inaugural festival at Le Poisson Rouge on January 16, 2012. My chamber opera-in-progress, Brother Brother, will be one of the featured works on this festival along with other excerpts from new works by Matthew Welch, Jason Cady and George Aperghis.

When Matt, Jason and I first got together to plan this project, we talked about how hard it was to work on large-scale operatic pieces knowing that the opportunities for full productions don’t come around often and that when they do they are really expensive. Despite these odds, our mutual interest in experimenting with the form of opera–of telling stories, molding music, shaping movement and images–outweighed our hesitancy and we decided that we couldn’t afford not to write the music that we wanted to! Instead of going at it alone, though, we theorized that it would benefit all of our works individually (and the community at large) if we could figure out how to share resources, ideas and stages.

The Inaugural Experiments In Opera Festival on January 16, 2012 is just the beginning of this process, but already it has proven revelatory. Instead of wondering when we will be asked to share our work, we know that we will be able to make the opportunities for ourselves to continue developing our experiments. And, since we have made the development of other operatic works a priority in our programming, our efforts will help support a larger community of artists working in the world of music, words and story.

This is by far the most exciting thing I have going on right now and I sense that it will have a great impact for years to come. Please join us on January 16, 2012 as we shape a dedicated community of artists and our experiments.

Visit experimentsinopera.com to learn more about the festival program and artists.

Support the Experiments in Opera Kickstarter Campaign

By way of a lucky encounter with my friend and fellow raconteur, Dave Ruder, I got invited to participate in an upcoming performance of Robert Ashley’s early opera “That Morning Thing,” which will play at The Kitchen from November 19-21 as part of Performa 2011.

I have long been an admirer of Ashley’s work and, being in the midst of work on my own opera, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to learn more about how Ashley works. His operas have the special feeling of arriving fully formed from a distant planet, where everyone speaks with a mellifluous tone and has detailed stories and observations about things you think you know about or at least have some memory of (even if this is completely fabricated).

As it happened, our rehearsals for the piece coincided with my purchase of a new camera (which I am enjoying immensely). I have been documenting the rehearsals ever so slightly for the production blog, but thought I would share this above photo as a reflection of my excitement for the production. The photo is a response to some of the directions for the male performers in Act 3 who are asked to sit in the ways that “men do when they are thinking.” Having rehearsed this 5 minute section several times, it was hard not to see more clearly that, while men may have their own way of looking while they are thinking, women also have some close-looking variations of their own. I don’t know whether this observation is due to an actual relationship between physical gesture, or perhaps a reflection of the ways that “sexed” behavior (and here I am using ‘sex’ in place of ‘gender‘ per Bob’s preference) has changed in the forty years since the piece’s premiere.

To find out more, you will need to come out to the performance at the Kitchen….

Last Spring I participated in the FlashLight event associated with the Festival of Ideas for a New City and got to know the great people working on NuitBlanche NY. They have an annual festival called Bring to Light that features many, many video artists, musicians and performers all contributing to a huge happening event in the evening of a single night. This year’s festival will take place on Saturday October 1, 2012 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and I am working oan a new video/performance work called “Put Your Hands Together” to share at the event. The 2-channel video installation will be projected on opposing walls and will invite onlookers to clap along to some visual cues in the video.

This is where you come in!!

I am looking for 12 people to help me by coming to lead some of the clapping on the night of the festival. There won’t be any rehearsals, just come and clap! I will sign you up for a time slot in the evening (8-10, 10-Midnight, Midnight-2AM) and then you come and enjoy yourself. Email me at apsiege@gmail.com if you are interested and I will sign you up!

Put Your Hands Together at
Bring to Light NYC Festival
October 1, 2011
8:00 pm (or so) – 2:00 am
Greenpoint Brooklyn
www.bringtolightnyc.org

GROUP: 6-21-11 Performance from Aaron Siegel on Vimeo.

Last week, close to fifty New Yorkers downloaded the GROUP app for their iPhone and came out to the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate Make Music New York and the River to River Festival. Here is just a sampling of the word on the street.

WNYC Write-Up

CBS New York Preview

METRO NY Preview and Write-Up

DNAInfo Write-Up- Manhattan Local News

Video Report from SinoVision (chinese language television)

Brother Brother is an operatic work for percussion, strings, choir, soloists and actors that explores the enigma of brotherhood. The story, follows the lives of two pairs of brothers–one historical (Orville and Wilbur Wright) and one contemporary and fictional (RED and BLUE)—as they discover the character of their bond to one another.

CAST
Singing Roles
Mother Fate, Soprano
Wilbur Wright, Tenor
Orville Wright, Countertenor
SATB Chorus

Acting Roles
RED – Male Actor
BLUE – Male Actor
Distant Voices – Male and Female Actors

Orchestra
Vibraphone 1
Vibrapahone 2
Glockenspiel
Flute
Viola
Cello

DOWNLOAD LIBRETTO

RECORDING EXCERPTS
MANTRA Percussion: Joe Bergen – Vibraphone, Al Cerulo – Vibraphone, Michael McCurdy – Glockenspiel; Erin Wight – Viola, Mariel Roberts – Cello, Roberta Michel – Flute, Michele Kennedy – Soprano, Patrick Fennig – Countertenor, Jonathan Hampton – Tenor, Steven Hrycelak – Bass, Amy Lynn Stewart – Actor, Ryan McCarthy – Actor)

There’s Always Mom

Kitty Hawk (Brother’s Tears)

Interlude

The Silent Puzzle Played