Operatic storytelling

I’m awful at blogging regularly. My apologies.

On Monday we went to the opera, which was a lot of fun. We saw Verdi’s Il Trovatore. Now, this opera, has the peculiar feature that most of the action in it occurs offstage. So we’re told about everything that has happened, from a duel, to a battle in which one character is left for dead, to a gypsy woman being burned to death and setting a revenge plot in motion.

“Hannah,” you’re saying, “this violates every rule of storytelling I’ve ever heard.” Well, yes. And also no. While Il Trovatore isn’t one of my favorite operas, it got me thinking about the conventions of operatic storytelling, which are very different from the conventions of novels.

Novels are about showing what happens. In some ways, they’re the best possible format for that: even movies, while they can show you what people do, can’t describe how they feel about it. Novels let you portray the particular experiences of your characters in excruciating detail.

Operas are about telling — singing, in fact. The entire style is built around people telling you what’s going on. Action isn’t particularly important in operas, because it’s hard to sing in the midst of an action scene! There isn’t really dialogue — mostly arias, which are essentially soliloquies, in which the characters talk about themselves.

This is interesting. It means that all operas are essentially about storytelling. (The program notes for Il Trovatore noted this, and that the first act of the opera is taken up entirely with characters telling each other stories.) The story isn’t just what the actors do and what happens to them: it’s how they tell it (sing it). The libretto provides one expression of what the character is doing/has done/will do. The music adds another layer. You don’t go see an opera to find out if the soprano will kill herself at the end (she will). You go to see what she has to say about killing herself, and how she says/sings it. The way they tell the story is as much a part of the story itself as the actual events are.

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Improvising

Today I’m going to do two very stupid things. First, I’m going to talk about a musical skill I don’t have, and try to tie it back to Monday’s post. Then, I’m going to attempt to connect it to a bad writing metaphor.

Ready? Here goes. Let’s talk about improvisation.

So, on Monday, I admitted I don’t like jazz, partly because I lose track of the melody in improvisational materials. I may be revising my opinion on that a bit, and I’d like to listen to more jazz and see if I appreciate it more with a better understanding of its structure. Because I’ve gotten really interested in improvisation. And the organ is to blame.

We went to some amazing free organ concerts in Köln over the summer, and at one the organist performed an entire improvisation (15 minutes or so) on a hymn tune (Lobe Den Herren, if you’re keeping track) that she was given on the spot. I was blown away. I want to be able to do that.

I haven’t had any formal training in improvisation, per se. But I decided to play around with it this morning while I was practicing. I’m already thinking ahead to Advent (the Lutheran church has so many good Advent hymns!) so I decided to play with “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” I think it’s a really good tune for improvising on, actually, because it’s simple and repetitive, and doesn’t depend too much on a tight harmonic structure (read: can hold up to weird, crunchy harmonies) to be recognizable and sound good. Plus, it’s beautiful and haunting. Also slow. Slow is key, at the moment. 🙂

So I started playing with it, with my tiny bag of techniques I could think of. Mostly, this consisted of repeating short phrases in each hand and the pedals in some kind of crunchy canon, while holding a lot of notes out. I found it really helpful to keep the page with the hymn in front of me, so that not only did I have the melody, but if I got stuck I had a harmonic structure to fall back on. (The kind of free-form improv I was doing is easier, I think, than trying to reharmonize a hymn for singing. I keep playing with that, too, but my music theory knowledge isn’t good enough to think through the chord progressions on the fly, and I don’t trust my ears, because I like weird harmonies too much.) “O Come…” also lends itself well to sort of semi-minimalist techniques (it’s a really repetitive tune), which my minimalist self really enjoyed playing with. (E,G,B,B,E,G,E,G,E,G,B,B,B…)

So: improvisation is fun. And I have no idea how I would do it on a hymn not based on a chant. (Although I’ll probably try Lobe den Herren and Lasst Uns Erfreuen, which are tunes with similar features, at least, soon. Ooo, or maybe “It is Well With my Soul”…) On to the bad writing metaphor.

I’ve already mentioned that I’m not a major outliner. (OK, last time I talked about this I discussed my long synopsis for Elves in Space. Turns out, I kind of started ignoring the synopsis halfway through. Heh.) I think pantsing (i.e. writing without planning, by the seat of your pants) is a lot like improvisation. You have a basic tune (premise) to start with. And you usually start an improvisation pretty straight for the first measure or so. Then, as you write, you add complications, but in a very local way, without a clear picture, necessarily, of the global movement of the story. In our musical metaphor, that’s the fact that you have to work your way through the tune sort of chronologically in your improvisation.

Time out to note: obviously, you can do way more sophisticated improvisation than this. I’m talking about the kind I was playing with, where you basically work your way from the beginning of the hymn tune to the end of it, adding complexities to each phrase as you go in order. That’s all my brain can handle.

So you’re improvising a phrase at a time, i.e. writing based on what makes the most sense and is the most exciting for the particular scene you’re in. But you can’t completely ignore the larger picture. If you’re improvising musically, you have to think about where you are in the tune, how soon you’re going to end, whether you want to bring any elements from the beginning back at the end, and so forth. If you’re writing, you have to think about where you are in the arc of the story. When I write, I usually have a few major plot points in mind, and know when I want them to occur, basically. They’re the analogue of the phrases of the hymn that I know I want to work into my improvisation.

What do you think? Is this a valid or useful writing metaphor? Any nifty tricks for organ improvisation I should know?

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