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Adventures in Digital #2

The Theory and Practice of Podcast Opera : part 2 (of 3)

An expanded transcript of a Composer Commentary podcast, by Martin Ward, exploring the creation of the digital opera serial Road Memoir.

Whilst changing the Road Memoir podcasting schedule from two to twelve weeks meant that each episode would need to be longer (a choice which afforded the opportunity to explore a secondary character narrative) it also meant that, from originally planning to complete all the writing, recording and mixing before the series began, I would now create and record the opera whilst it was running. I had four episodes written and recorded (but not mixed) before the podcasting began on July 24th and from then on I spent twelve weeks juggling the three jobs of writing, recording and mixing, whilst having to meet the weekly podcasting deadline. This was also the school summer holidays, which put a family camping holiday in the middle of the series, meaning the podcasting of two episodes had to be managed, along with website updates and social media, from my mobile phone (I was determined to leave the laptop at home) on a French campsite with very patchy wifi. They were a couple of stressful days.

In advance, I had made a detailed multi-colour spreadsheet planning the three months work. This changed a little but not much during the creative process and over time the production of each episode settled down into a basic routine that went like this ...

1. Write the libretto.

2. Compose the music.

3. Input into Cubase and edit at the same time, just using piano sounds for now and finalise the tempi.

4. Create Vocal Score in Sibelius.

5. Email VS and an mp3 to Billie Robson, the singer. Giving her as much notice as possible, ideally at least 5 days.

6. Recording session with Billie (in which she sang with the Cubase file and a click).

7. Vocal editing session, sorting through the different takes.

8. Designing and placing the sound effects.

9. Arranging and "orchestrating" the musical accompaniment.

10. Mixing.

11. Mastering (via 3 sets of headphones of differing types, price points and qualities).

12. Mixdown and Data Stamp the mp3 metadata to iTunes standards.

13. Upload and Publish Podcast in Blubrry.

14. Make a pdf of the episode libretto and text.

15. Update my website with podcast widget and libretto pdf.

16. Social Media and email promotion.

This timetable, duplicated twelve times, was organised to dove-tail so that on any one day I might be working on three different aspects of three different episodes. By the midway point it had become second nature as to what was needed and what came next and the spread sheet was more or less redundant.

Planning work flow like that is important to just get the job done but I think it's as important to plan the artistic and creative goals and methods before you begin. As an inexperienced librettist, I'd devised a four-point method for the libretto (the sung words) of each episode, which I hoped would bring balance to the content and allow for poetic character insight - which is essential and unique to opera - whilst keeping the story moving forward. To that end, this is the checklist I printed at the top of each scene as I was writing...

Every episode should contain each of these in some small part :

1. STORY : move the development of the story forward.

2. MEMORY : contrast present experience with past experience (as the story is set in the near future, remember that  character "past experience" is "everyday experience" for the audience – play on that).

3. REFLECTION : allow time for pause and poetic musing on changes in predicament and/or surroundings.

4. ACTION : character must take action that moves her story forward.

And in a further note :

Also bear in mind that each of these narrative elements should also occupy a slightly different sound and music world, with unique palettes of sound and music for each – helping the audience in navigating different types of story-telling at a subconscious level.

In retrospect I'm pretty pleased with how the libretto plan turned out and that each episode does demonstrate elements of each of the four forms. It keeps moving forward through the characters actions, with a speed that ebbs and flows (which I like) and there are also moments for poetry and reflection, which, as I've said, I believe is an important aspect of any work that calls itself "opera".

My musical plans ended up taking a slightly different course though. Whilst I made certain to mark the changes of purpose in the text with changes of tone or tempo or colour in the music, my plan to accompany the four types of text with four different, defined sound and music worlds didn't really play out. I think that this was largely due to the addition of the spoken Investigator text, which required a very different sound world to the sung sections. That meant that those sung sections required less contrast within them. Also, once I got into the nuts and bolts I decided that I wanted each episode to explore different groups of sounds, with the piano as the constant instrumental voice. This was a decision in reaction to the sometimes confined musical palette of live chamber opera (where budget always restricts performer numbers). I wanted to explore the far wider range of colours that might be possible with a work such as this. This is clearly the opposite of what my initial plan suggested but it also reflects the conclusion that I came to whilst working on the piece, that what was most important at those moments of change in the text : from Story, to Memory, to Reflection or to Action, was that there was simply a coordinated change in the sound and music. What the sound or music changed to was not actually that important in the grand scheme of things and a freer approach in fact allowed the music to keep moving forward into new ground, as the story and the main character evolved and did the same. I did identify some musical motifs early on but without making explicit connections between them and character or narrative. Instead I used their occasional returns to loosely bind the accompanying material together. With this approach, rather than by recycling a coded palette – which the audience may, or (more probably) may not pick up on – I believe the piece feels more creatively fertile.

Throughout the creative process I entirely avoided listening back to podcast episodes and in fact I didn't re-listen to anything until two weeks after the work was complete. This was primarily because I wanted the music to keep moving forward and I wanted to avoid past musical ideas invading my current thoughts. The story itself is about making decisions in the moment, living with them and moving on. I'm quite into the idea of exploring ways of mirroring story elements in the creative processes I use, so it seemed an apt approach to try to reflect that constant forward story movement in my methodology. Truthfully, I was also a little bit scared I might not like everything I'd done and I couldn't afford to be worrying about that whilst I was writing - with any other piece I would have had the chance to go back and re-write or edit but with this one, once I'd clicked on "publish podcast" it was out there and there was no going back.

By moving away from traditional opera methods it was easy to feel like I was breaking new ground but contemporary culture exists in so many forms that no sooner have I stepped out of "opera" than I'm tripping into another existing genre or artform. With an aural serial like Road Memoir comparisons with radio plays are obvious but, though there are definite similarities, I feel that Road Memoir is a freer artistic expression and I'm particularly glad not to have had a specified episode duration to work to, as would certainly be the case with a radio play. 

I really didn't concern myself with episode durations when I was creating and it's pretty clear to see as the episodes range between 5'39 and 14'05 in length (although the latter was an intentional double-episode rather than a massive over-run) and most episodes are between 6 and 9 minutes long. It was my intention from the start to make the most dramatically important episodes, at the beginning and the end of the series, double-episodes. The first episode had to establish the two voices, both in themselves and in how they fit together; it had to do the same with the sound and music; it also had to explain the Real World history and relevance of mobile phone evidence, the facts of which underpin the whole story; it then had to establish the woman's character and starting position in the narrative before throwing her headlong into the jeopardy which would begin her journey; and it had to finish with a cliffhanger which would hopefully leave the audience wanting to come back for episode two. Listing all that, I'm exceptionally pleased that it was only 10 minutes long.

Meanwhile, I knew from early on that I wanted the final episode to be more like an epilogue, set some time after the rest of the series and tying up at least the question of the woman's survival, if nothing else. Therefore, the penultimate episode had to be the story climax and it also had to finish with a final cliff-hanging point of jeopardy. I liked the idea that the episode would start with a misleading period of calm - the lull before the storm - putting the audience on the wrong foot, before spiralling into a confusing and noisy chaos of words and sound - to really take the listener on a journey within the one episode and hopefully leave them struggling with the weight and quantity of what they'd just heard. In order to achieve all that was going to take time and even without the first 4 minute song, which could almost stand alone as an episode, the following scene, which unifies the two narratives and characters geographically on the beach and in the same dramatic moment (even if they are actually years apart in time) doesn't feel long at 10 minutes given the amount of information and story it holds. There's about thirty tracks of sound effects alone in that sequence. It was a pretty intense week, arranging and mixing all of that.

In the final episode, the main part of which is just for voice and piano, I hope that the use of the piano throughout the series kind of comes into focus. I see the piano as a part of her character, almost on a par with her voice, a constant that remains at the end - as the danger and fear ebb away - and that last episode maybe hints at one of the ways I'd like to imagine the opera working in the future: as a live event, for solo soprano and piano, with recorded sound, music and spoken text.  As self-contradictory as that idea might sound, given my earlier insistence on conceiving and writing a work purely for digital media, I can't help finding myself now, after sharing the final episode, wondering what lies ahead for the piece.

In my next “Adventures in Digital” blog I'll explore what that future might be for this work and draw some conclusions from my experiences in creating it.

[renegadehymnal-blog]

Adventures in Digital #1

The Theory and Practice of Podcast Opera : part 1 (of 3)

A transcript of a Composer Commentary podcast, by Martin Ward, exploring the creation of the opera serial Road Memoir.

Road Memoir is a digital opera podcast serial, written by Martin Ward and produced by Renegade Hymnal. It was created, recorded and podcast in summer 2017. It features the voice of the soprano Billie Robson.

This Commentary assumes that the reader has listened to Road Memoir and it therefore contains some minor spoilers. To listen to the work go to http://www.martinwardmusic.com/road-memoir

Hello, my name is Martin Ward. I'm the creator, writer, composer and producer of Road Memoir. As a composer, my background is in writing for the stage – particularly opera, theatre and ballet - and especially in creating dramatic work. I come from a music college education and I worked for the Royal Opera House music department after leaving college, so the traditions of western classical music are well instilled in me but recently I've been increasingly wanting to explore how opera in particular might develop in the current and future digital age.

By digital I'm not just talking about the use of digital technology in staged productions - through video projection, lighting and sound - I'm more getting at exploring the ways that opera can exist and embed itself within digital media. Particularly the digital media we carry around with us, literally or virtually, in our phones and iPads and laptops.

There is obviously a role to be played by technology in promoting stage productions (via youtube, websites and social media) and more recently the screening and streaming of live or filmed productions is clearly bringing the artform to a wider audience and that's all fantastic but still what these methods are presenting is the traditional staged work. In contrast, what I'm looking to explore is the creation of work that uses this media and these devices as the platform - the digital stage - for which it is specifically created and on which it is "performed".

Increasingly we experience the world through our phones - news, art, culture all come to find us. You receive a notification, you tap on that and away you go. The immediacy of that is exciting and stealthily addictive. So I wondered what it would be like to attempt to bring that same immediacy to a dramatic musical story, to have the work come to the audience rather than making the audience go and find it. The prospect of being able to embed a work within or alongside the normal everyday interactions of the audience's digital life, to have some control over when that "performance" moment happens, and to have that as a storytelling tool, is all quite enticing too.

For this piece, which is really a first stage on that journey, I chose what is intentionally quite an easy step to begin with, by using podcasting as the medium for the "performance" of the work. I say "easy step" just because the podcasting platform is well established and the process of uploading episodes; and for those episodes to then automatically migrate into iTunes and other podcast providers; and to gain a global reach therefore, is all quick, painless and pretty simple. Given the creative challenges I was imagining, ease of delivery was an important factor.

I decided early on that I wanted to make an episodic piece – what I started with was an idea for a work that was really more like a song cycle than an opera. The inspiration I was taking was from works like Schubert's Winterreise, where a narrative is told by a single character in the first person and the songs are about moments in a journey, extremely intimate glimpses of personal experience or emotion or memory that end up saying something profound about the world they are set in.

I had also been wanting to write a piece about refugees for some time. By way of research, I'd read a lot of refugee stories and testimonies online and thought that I'd try to concentrate on what was common to the refugee experience, avoiding the bigger pictures of the political causes and the wider humanitarian ramifications of refugee crises, stripping away geographical or historical setting and any backstory that wasn't completely personal to the single character that I would focus on. So, by taking this route in, the piece is largely about how a person is not in control of their own fate, things happen that are outside of their control and they react, often without the luxury of understanding the context or the bigger picture and often in the only way they can, they literally have no choice other than "run and live, or stay and die" and those survival choices lead them in certain directions and they have to then live with where they end up. So in this piece I wanted to create a character and then put those kinds of life or death moments in her path and let her snap decisions in those moments lead her journey, whilst I concentrated on showing how it must feel to constantly be that helpless and afraid and threatened.

An intriguing factor in writing a piece that will likely be experienced through a phone, probably on headphones, is the intimate one-to-one nature of that communication, that connection, and I decided pretty early on that that needed to be embraced by the work. That this needed to be a story and an approach which tied in with that intimacy and used it to it's advantage. Hence the idea that every voice you hear in the opera, be it sung or spoken, is being sung or spoken into a phone. I hoped that that might draw in the listener, make them feel more involved in the drama.

It's a decision like that that marks a kind of break through in the development of a work because immediately other things fall into place. So, straight away I knew that the woman's voice had to be recorded up close in a dry space and then had to be mixed without reverb (to sound as it would on a phone recording made outside) and I also had to create the sounds that phones pick up other than your voice. So there's the natural ambiance of the surroundings – be it a city, or a wood, or on a beach – as well as more specific sounds of other people or vehicles or of movements like footsteps, the sound of the wind on the microphone even, all of that went into making it sound authentically like a phone and also into creating a sense of the character's surroundings. A lot of this is quite subliminal because the listeners ear instinctively homes in on the words and obviously there's the music in the mix as well but I really came to believe in the power of that subliminal sound - the ear takes it all in and interprets it, even if it doesn't flag it up to the conscious mind. For instance, a dry-recorded voice accompanied by just a natural ambient recording of wind blowing through trees can have a significant emotional impact. The changes in ambiance also really helped to chart the journey from one episode to the next and I constantly used them to give a sense of place before using any words to fill in detail.

On a practical level, I tried to record as much of the sound myself over the course of the creation of the opera. My Olympus LS-5 Recorder has been a constant companion on dog walks for the last few months. A lot of the woodland ambiance and sounds – footsteps for instance – are recorded in a wood near my home in Bedfordshire. I needed to EQ out the drone of the M1 motorway which is about 5 miles away and record between passing planes but that's pretty much unavoidable wherever you go in the UK. For the beach sounds I spent an afternoon at Dunwich in Suffolk. I thought it would be quiet on a weekday but it ended up being a really sunny September afternoon with lots of retired people walking their dogs – so not quite the desolate coastline I was after but, if you're patient in the recording and prepared to work in editing the sound files in the studio, you can make it work.

So all of the initial development and thought and planning was happening early this year and the creative work didn't really begin until after I spoke to Bill Bankes-Jones at the start of May and he offered to present the piece as part of the Tete a Tete Opera Festival in July and August. This was important not least because, as a podcast opera, there wasn't an audience in existence. Unlike staged work where an established opera audience simply follows the companies and theatres which produce the work they like, monitoring the websites and the brochures, etc. I was aware that no-one would be looking for this, that podcast opera didn't exist as a thing and so, partnering with a new opera festival would hopefully flag up the piece to the kind of audience who are open not just to opera (and that's already a small enough proportion of the population) but also to contemporary opera that's exploring new ground and new methods and unconventional stories.

Figuring out my approach and the details of the story, creating the characters, writing the libretto, all that took some time, not least because I was kind of inventing the form of it as I went along. And from an initial idea of having short episodes (two minutes maximum) daily for two weeks it was suggested that it would work better as weekly episodes. This made sense with the established podcasting routines and I hoped to attract seasoned podcast listeners – something that I don't think really happened actually – and it also felt like it would buy me a bit more time as the series would then be spread over 12 weeks and so I agreed on that change and took a step back to see how that might alter the possibilities for the piece. I decided (and this was a decision that I almost came to regret) that with weekly instead of daily episodes I'd have to increase the length of each (to five to six minutes), to keep the audience engaged, and that I should include a second voice...

This second voice was the spoken text role of The Investigator, which had come initially from an idea that if the opera mixed sound and music maybe it should also mix sung and spoken, to create a fuller sonic picture. I'm also a fan of parallel stories in films and books and it occurred to me that having someone investigate the woman's experiences at the same time as we hear her living them, might be interesting, and might make it possible to bring more insight and context to her story whilst also underlining how little she is really aware of what's going on around her during her journey. This seemed to be an addition which would add real depth to the piece.

In the next blog I'll talk about the writing and composition of Road Memoir and some of the conclusions that I've taken from the process.

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Renegade Hymnal : Manifesto

Renegade Hymnal is a small arts organisation which aims to devise, develop and produce new works of opera and music theatre. It’s main focus is on chamber-scale works which use imaginative and innovative means to tell contemporary stories. Wherever possible those works will also involve inventive learning and/or participation elements for audiences and communities.

Whilst the projects developed by Renegade Hymnal may be varied in subject matter, methods and forces, they all align with the RH ambitions to create dramatic musical works that :

are controlled by a clarity of concept.

connect with and speak to audiences in ways that are challenging yet accessible.

are inspired by modern life, with a now-ness of tone, subject, attitude and language (both literary and musical).

are light, nimble and fleet-footed, feeling that they belong within the layers of modern life.

explore facets of contemporary communication, relationships, culture and character.

have a flexibility which means that they can be presented in traditional performance spaces but can equally come alive in unexpected settings.

exist organically within the folds of technology and media that permeate our everyday existence. 

whilst they may appear fleeting and immediate, still have behind them a depth of thought that has to be rigorous, relevant and purposeful and composed in every detail.

As a producer Renegade Hymnal seeks to guide works through the early stages of development and creation before identifying and acquiring partners who can see the works into full production.