Douglas Geers

Composer, computer musician, and university professor--Douglas Geers has won many prestigious awards for his multi-media musical works and his dazzling electro-acoustic performances. Still, Mr. Geers has found a unique challenge in composing the music for Calling, an opera that recounts one downtown family's experience of 9/11. Since 2007, he has collaborated closely with the opera’s “guiding spirit,” Wickham Boyle (writer and director), helping her to appropriate her book (A Mother's Essays from Ground Zero) to an operatic medium. After much artistic gestation, and meticulous editing and honing, Calling will finally have its world premiere as a full-length opera at La Mama Theater beginning September 12th.
In a telephone conversation on August 25^th, Mr. Geers shared how he came on board this project, and also offered his perspective on the new opera. Here is an excerpt of our conversation.

How did you become involved with the project Calling: An Opera of Forgiveness?

Douglas Geers. Wicki [Wickham Boyle] put together an ecological fashion show in 2005, and I came on board [to produce the music]. It was really a blast doing this. So at the end I said to Wicki, ‘I would like to do something else with you. Just let me know if there is a project that you think you would be interested in doing. And she said, Well, you know, I’ve been wanting to turn my book [A Mother’s Essays from Ground Zero] into an opera.’ So we began chatting and meeting about it.

How closely have you worked with Wickham Boyle during the development of the opera?

DG. Very closely. We have really been a dynamic duo meeting usually at her loft in Tribeca to go over the shape of the story and the particularities of the text itself. The story is very much her story, and the music is very much my music, but we have been very collaborative. It’s been a very close back-and-forth the whole time.

Tell me about the unique challenges involved in composing the score for Calling?

DG. Things had to be done subtly. [Nine-eleven is] such a hot-button topic that the music had to be rich and worthy of this event. I wanted to show a richness of emotions and the conflicting personalities. We didn’t want to paint pictures of good guys and bad guys rising against each other. We didn’t want to make it too vocally cliché.

How do you begin to evoke a suitable melody and harmonic ground for such an iconic event?

DG. Avoiding clichés is a big part of it. I am a former writer--I actually started writing stories as a kid, not music. So I very much think of narratives, with a kind of topography of rises and falls, and tension and release. There is a role for technology in the piece as well. I’m using electronic sounds to give the music a kind of dimension, to blur the line between sound design and music, with environmental things going on that are actually musically composed. There is always this sense of the unresolved pervading the atmosphere. A lot of the experiences that day--of those of us who were in New York at that time--were about trying to reach our families and our friends.

Parts of the opera have been workshopped in New York City and in other US locations. Has the composition and the opera evolved over the months?

DG. Yes and no. I think that for me the process of creating a piece, especially a piece of this scale, is really about creating a world and coloring in the world. So the first piece we did last June [at the Cornelia Street Café’s Serial Underground] was really me trying to set sticks down on the ground, and saying, ‘This is where our world is going to be, and these are sort of the limits and the parameters that I see going on in this world. Things change on the fly for sure. It’s definitely been a process of finding the correct voice. And it’s really fantastic to have had audience feedback, to have those performances as a crucible for testing things. There’s been quite a bit of editing from the original materials that we performed last year. But there’s been a continual sense that we know where we are going. I think it has been a process of honing the original vision.

You will be performing the computer in the opera. How is it playing such an ultra-modern instrument alongside more traditional musicians?

DG. It’s really fun. I am a former classical guitarist. But I always had a thing for gadgets, and technology. So once I discovered electronic music, it just felt like the way for me. The computer as an instrument is really interesting. I find it exciting because it can be repeatedly redefined, and honed. You know--a violin is a fantastic and a beautiful instrument. But pretty much a violin is a violin. Whereas with a computer, depending on what software you’re running, or what interface you’re connecting to it, it can be a percussion instrument, or a melody instrument.

What's your biggest challenge as a computer musician?

DG. The thing that I have had a bit of a problem with is the apparent utter lack of physicality that often the computer brings [to a live stage performance]. I go to concerts where people are playing computers only, and what you see on stage is a few nerdy people hunched over laptops. I think there is something to be said about how one thinks and acts upon one’s instrument. And this is something that I’ve been investigating the last couple of years. My current line of work is that I’m giving the remote commands from the Nintendo Wii, and I can be waving this wand in the air, so that creating the music can become much more inherently gestural. Instead of typing, or moving a mouse to create a volume curve, I can swing my arm up and down, or rotate it in circles, or wag it back and forth.

Has this been successful?

DG. Yes, definitely. One of the things that drove me to this is a few years ago my wife and I took tango classes. And it was fantastic. I’m not very physically coordinated, but I really like dancing. And I thought tango was like the jazz of ballroom. It’s so improvisatory. I thought, this is great. This feels good. How can I find a way to put this into my music-making? I don’t think it would be a smart thing for me to be tango-ing about the stage in a performance. But this [gesturing] would be a move in that direction.

Many theatergoers pigeon-hole opera as rather high-brow and stuffy. Could Calling perhaps change some attitudes towards opera?

DG. Well, first of all, the high-brow, stuffy aspect of people’s perception of opera is sort of an unfortunate social creation. Some of the greatest operas are amazingly compelling, very intensely dramatic works that are visceral and gripping, and in no way stuffy. That being said, there is definitely this feeling among contemporary audiences that opera is this rarefied thing. But one of the things we’re doing [in Calling] is playing with vocal stylizing. So that much of the time there will be singing with a really full-throated operatic voice. But in lighter moments, or more intimate moments, there will be some people who sound more Broadway, and other people who sound more opera. I am incorporating a lot of influences from jazz and pop music, but also not discarding what I find lovely from the tradition of opera. I’m trying to form an amalgam of voice that picks and chooses from [all] these, and of course I’m trying to make something new. I want it to feel honest, and direct, depicting the diversity of New York City.

The full-length opera premieres at La Mama Theater beginning September 12th.

http://www.callingtheopera.com