Karl Cronin

It’s her fault

Last year I filled out an application for an opera composition incubator lab in NYC in which I was asked “where is opera ‘going’?”

It was in answering that question that I decided to firmly launch into composing pop operas, because my answer of where opera “is” and where it’s “going” all had to do with pop music. The spectacle of music videos and stadium stage shows. At least in America. The work that is happening at the Paris Opera is another story (they are actually pushing the envelope on the traditional stage).

When I wrote that Judas was the best opera I saw last year, I realized that I had indeed crossed over to the other side. The rest of my year has been settling into this truth and shaking out the habits that I picked up in the contemporary performance cult. Shake it out. Shake it out.

 

 

Playa

I just received confirmation that I will be in residence at Playa for the month of March. I’m excited that this adventure will kick off my year of residencies/launching of my music.

I’m going to use the time and space in this remote cabin in the high desert to complete the piano-vocal score for The Wild Men AND the string quartet arrangement.

I will post photos and updates as I have them.

 

NY Fashion Week Pick #1: St. John

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I have a vision of performing music for one of Rick Owens’ shows. I’m not sure when I’ll send him a CD, but as soon as I hit upon a music gem I think he would enjoy, I’ll contact his people.

In the meantime, I have to glean the activity of fashion week from blogs and the NYTimes. I really enjoyed the NYTimes blow by blow, but was bummed I could drag and drop the photos into this post. Fashion is about selling clothes, not locking images beyond downloading bars. How can I covet that St. John necklace if I can’t see it?

Speaking of St. John, this was the winning look.

Inspire me towards sheen, tassley dangling things, and chunky red against a sea of blacks and whites.

Fashion Forward

Today I had the great pleasure of diving into a collaboration with artist Theo Knox. We have been discussing music videos for many months and our mutual interest – two-spirit fashion. Theo has a great eye, and I’m psyched he will be helping me move my style forward.

The big discovery tonight was … OMG where has Rick Owens been all my life? I am on a one track quest to meet Rick and write music for one of his shows. Sheer brilliance.

The other discovery was some options for what I can do with my hair once it finally grows long enough. Here are a few of the inspirations that are encouraging me not to cut a single follicle.

Owning the voice

Today I participated in a workshop sponsored by the Academy for New Musicals. Eight writers presented 15 minutes of their work and then received feedback. I was participating as an auditor. After over a year of working on my first work of music theater, this felt like the first day of class.

There were many learnings/observations, but one of the key things I could see across the projects was the relationship between the writer and their subject. The gay men had gay characters, the middle-aged women had middle-aged women protagonists. There were exceptions, but if the work was the writer’s first full musical, it seemed to land squarely in the camp of their personal topography. The writers with more work under their belt started to move beyond.

It raised this question for me about how the particulars of our subjectivities guide our art work. I keep coming back to Tennessee Williams and Sam Shephard. I feel like both wrote squarely in their voice. I don’t believe I’ve ever read a Tennessee Williams farce set in ancient Greece. Nope. Straight up drama in the south time and time again. And I love it.

There’s an emphasis in the pro theater development world to crank out technicians who can work it for any project. You’re a composer? Great compose…this. I don’t fully jive with that, so I’ll see how my development in this composer-dramatist direction pans out.

New scoring practices

I keep a journal for harvesting my observations, discoveries, and results of my artistic experiments. After an enlivening conversation with artist-scholar Michael Morris last month, I recently began exploring a new form of journaling that incorporates words, musical scoring, and physical movement notation. Words orient us in one way to a specific situation, music another, and movement scoring provides even greater clarity as to the somatic/kinetic/relational specifics.

Here is a page from my Quartet in C, which I wrote as a document of experiences I had in Georgetown, CO. I’m exited to begin incorporating more movement information and am considering Laban (although I’m a little scared about the learning curve).

PAGE 1 (Quartet in C – Karl Cronin)

Busoni is da man

I’m three pages into Ferruccio Busoni’s A New Esthetic of Music and my hand is already tired from underlying.

Here’s a snippet about music:

It touches not the earth with its feet. It knows no law of gravitation. It is wellnigh incorporeal. Its material is transparent. It is sonorous air. It is almost Nature herself. It is – free.

Maybe, like, art history?

So, I don’t know what I’m looking at here. I mean, I know it is an image. An image of a painting.  A JPEG. But what’s really happening here? I know that dude’s an angel and that other dude is Jacob. I know because that what is said in the title of the image. Jacob wrestling an angel. Was is it “an” angel or “the” angel? I’m not sure who this angel is. Is it some special important angel I’m supposed to know about? Like Gabriel? I’ll Google it later.

OK, so I don’t know what is really happening, like, historically, but I can tell you what is really happening, like, interpersonally. Jacob has his hands around the angel dude’s waist, in this like really deep lunge slash tango “shall we dance” kind of thing. Hips are pressed together. Super homo. And every muscle on his body is tense. Like, more than is needed to wrestle the angel. It’s not really effective to tense every muscle when doing something athletic. Maybe that was the style then.

OK, so the angel, he’s totally not having it, or so we think. I mean, yes he’s “pushing away”. But look at the tension in his fingers on his left hand. Or shall I say, lack of tension. He totally wants Jacob. Which is probably why I found this on some homoerotic image Tumblr thing.

Now, on to the most important bit, where they hell are they? I vote for eastern New Mexico. Anyone else with me? Or somewhere else like that in, I don’t know, Spain. I’m sure they have mesas or something like that there, maybe in the middle, where it’s dry like our central plains here in the states. It’s dark and I’m going to vote for dawn. For some reason it feels more like dawn than dusk to me. I don’t know why, and I can’t even tell you how those two differ, but maybe it’s because I want to believe they’ve been fighting all night long, and not just getting started.

 

Connected

A few nights ago I was sitting at a table with a few other people. We were sharing a meal. Wine was passed. We were not intimate. We were not friends. We were strangers. We tried to be friendly, but it was stiff, awkward. I don’t know what we were thinking. What were we expecting?

At this table there was a man who was talking about big ideas. Big, BIG ideas. I know that my ideas are small, so I was worried I wouldn’t be able to jump in.  What I have to offer is so small, but I offer it with all my heart.

I opened my mouth. I interrupted him. I interrupted him because he wasn’t stopping. I blurted out several half words. Little chirps. Meep Meep Meep. Finally he stopped and I blurted out several full words, linked together in some sentence. I don’t think I said anything substantial, but I talked about my small ideas. The ones that have to do with here, now, this, us. How it is not hard to blur the lines between I and you, the experience of we being right there, if you open your palms, if you slow your breath, if you dance like a tree, allowing you respiration to move you. Simple. Bam. Connected.