DanielSonenberg.com

Here we are by the falls. Yes I know it's old news, but doesn't the photo just warm your heart? These are two people with a lot of driving ahead of them. And a lot behind them too. But there's not too much more to say about that. I suppose there may be some parallel between engaging in such a long trek and composing an opera. I mean, I love those drives where, because the distance is just so ridiculous, you stop clicking off the miles and just float along, rubber on pavement, zen-like and accepting. Each little mile, no matter how expertly conquered, is a wee nothing in the scheme of things. Hundreds preceded it, and hundreds will follow in its wake. That's the opera too - especially for a slow and temperamental composer such as myself. Each day I pound away at my various tools and instruments, keyboards, computer, voice, ears, speakers. Working things out, hearing and hearing, singing and shouting, assuming all the roles, old, young, soprano, tenor, baritone. Sweat and sweat and pounding and sleeping and eating and reading and walking and waiting and figuring. And a good day's yield is fifteen seconds. You write fifteen seconds a day for the rest of your life you'll find yourself with a lot of music. So maybe you could lend me a chunk or two? Oh don't worry, it'll fit right in. In the six minutes that open this exquisite mess I've got Debussy, and jazz, and gospel, and lots of noisy dissonant stuff, drum set, and never far off, the trusty old octatonic. I tell my students to stay focused, and to try to limit their materials and be economical, just like every old composition teacher has preached for the ages. But I'm a maximalist and a spaz in real life, and when this opera gets unsheathed I'll have to be one of those "do as I say not as I do" type of guys who can become a bore. But then I'm hoping the computer, the inner computer, is working it all out. There are thinkers and feelers when it comes to making stuff. I know a lot of people who can sit there and tell you the why and the what it means till they're blue in the tooth, and then there's me and the other dweller in that there photo above - people who work from a place of not knowing, and who don't seek to explain away every dangling participle (whatever one of those is), and who spend a lifetime coming up with lies to answer the question why this purple or that tritone, and what does it mean?