Composer Blogs@Sequenza21.com
Composer/keyboardist/producer Elodie Lauten creates operas, music for dance and theatre, orchestral, chamber and instrumental music. Not a household name, she is however widely recognized by historians as a leading figure of post-minimalism and a force on the new music scene, with 20 releases on a number of labels.

Her opera Waking in New York, Portrait of Allen Ginsberg was presented by the New York City Opera (2004 VOX and Friends) in May 2004, after being released on 4Tay, following three well-received productions. OrfReo, a new opera for Baroque ensemble was premiered at Merkin Hall by the Queen's Chamber Band, whose New Music Alive CD (released on Capstone in 2004) includes Lauten's The Architect. The Orfreo CD was released in December 2004 on Studio 21. In September 2004 Lauten was composer-in-residence at Hope College, MI. Lauten's Symphony 2001, was premiered in February 2003 by the SEM Orchestra in New York. In 1999, Lauten's Deus ex Machina Cycle for voices and Baroque ensemble (4Tay) received strong critical acclaim in the US and Europe. Lauten's Variations On The Orange Cycle (Lovely Music, 1998) was included in Chamber Music America's list of 100 best works of the 20th century.

Born in Paris, France, she was classically trained as a pianist since age 7. She received a Master's in composition from New York University where she studied Western composition with Dinu Ghezzo and Indian classical music with Ahkmal Parwez. Daughter of jazz pianist/drummer Errol Parker, she is also a fluent improviser. She became an American citizen in 1984 and has lived in New York since the early seventies

Visit Elodie Lauten's Web Site
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Grand Opera revisited

I happened to watch a DVD of Verdi’s Don Carlos, a French production with superb voices and subdued staging (no garish costumes here...) and up close on the screen, the hyper-acting and extreme emotional expression meant for the stage got me thinking. The operatic language manipulation actually helped: even though the libretto was in French, which is my mother tongue, I was unable to follow the lyrics without subtitles, and this actually made it easier to listen to because I followed the music rather than the story. Opera singers go for sound effect rather than accuracy of pronunciation, and the old-fashioned plots consequently become somewhat irrelevant and only serve as vehicle for those magnificent voices.

Indeed, the Western tradition of vocal performance is powerful, even to someone like me who loves Chinese opera and Noh theater. A heroic premise is required to launch the voice into grand mode, and in our world, what’s heroic? The operatic form was created as entertainment for the European aristocracy that supported it. As a consequence, its stories revolve around values such as honor, pride, obedience and social status versus motives such as passion, anger, jealousy, revenge, cruelty. Some operas were downright political (Da Ponte for Mozart, Tosca, Fidelio) and they survive as such. But many humorless librettos border on the ridiculous, unlike Shakespearean theater which is actually existential – Hamlet still qualifies as a skull-loving punk. Grand opera was already out of date nearly a century ago, when the Marx Brothers released A Night at the Opera. I observe television commercials as a barometer of mass-media propaganda, and I noticed one recently featuring a fat lady on a balcony holding a high note, outlasted by… a pink piece of gum.

Between the heroic and the ridiculous, what is the place of grand opera in our modern sensibility? Strong emotion itself seems out of date. Emotion belongs with shrinks. It is something nasty, something that makes you dysfunctional, inefficient, disabled. As perceived in the mass media, our society is sentimental, not emotional. People will cry over a cat who saved its young from a fire (from a story on the news), but crimes of passion are in the realm of psychiatric evaluation. In our highly policed society, the heroes are the detectives, the crime scene investigators, the scientists, the doctors, rational-minded people who keep their emotions in check - not the people who commit violent crimes. The problem is, how does ‘just the facts Maam’ translate into heroic delivery?