{"id":2446884,"date":"2019-07-28T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-29T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=310226"},"modified":"2019-07-28T21:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-29T03:00:00","slug":"composer-missy-mazzoli-comes-to-aspen-with-proving-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/composer-missy-mazzoli-comes-to-aspen-with-proving-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Composer Missy Mazzoli comes to Aspen with \u2018Proving Up\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Missy Mazzoli<\/strong>
Courtesy photo<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Composer Missy Mazzoli has played rock clubs and classical concert halls, blazed a trail as an innovative and hip composer for 21st-century opera, and last year became the first female composer commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera.<\/p>\n

In her first visit to Aspen, Mazzoli is bringing a concert performance of her 2018 opera, \u201cProving Up,\u201d to Harris Concert Hall on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Based on a short story by Karen Russell and created with librettist Royce Vavrek, the opera is about a homesteading family on the prairie that is enduring a drought, struggling to survive and haunted by ghosts.<\/p>\n

Opera, Mazzoli said in a recent phone interview, is an ideal medium to connect people with stories that matter.<\/p>\n

\u201cOpera is a place for big ideas,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a place that has the scale and means to address a lot of complicated ideas. So in \u2018Proving Up,\u2019 we get at ideas about ambition, the nature of the American Dream and fate and these things that everyone is grappling with, especially now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like generations of artists before her, Mazzoli, 38, wanted to tell a story about the American Dream, but she wanted to find a way to do it without being heavy-handed or preachy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is about the American Dream but it\u2019s told in a way that involves ghostly children and this creepy villain,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s humor and lightness in it, as well. So it struck me as a way to talk about these issues through a compelling family story.\u201d<\/p>\n

The opera was co-commissioned by the Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha and Miller Theatre at Columbia University. It had productions in Washington, Omaha, Nebraska, and New York that transcended the often-closed world of opera and classical music, drawing attention in the mainstream of popular culture. Mazzoli \u2014 who has written music for the Amazon series \u201cMozart in the Jungle,\u201d collaborated with Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche on an instrumental album and was dubbed \u201cBrooklyn\u2019s post-millennial Mozart\u201d by Time Out New York \u2014 is uninterested in the delineations between pop music and classical audiences.<\/p>\n

\u201cI write for everybody,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Staging \u201cProving Up\u201d here in the American West, amid the landscape claimed by homesteaders, is profound for Mazzoli, who was moved by the audience in Omaha.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s beautiful to bring this opera to people who are descendants of homesteaders,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

But the history of the American West, like all history, was written by the winners and, in this case, by those who proved up and were successful settling the frontier.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost homesteaders were not successful and our opera is a story not told by the winners,\u201d she said. \u201cThat aspect creates a delightful tension when presenting it in the American West.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mazzoli\u2019s imaginative score incorporates the sounds of the West and of the homesteading era. As she was researching \u201cProving Up\u201d with Vavrek, she studied the instruments and the songs of the time, incorporating the guitars, harmonicas and fiddles that settlers could bring west with them in their covered wagons. She also incorporated the fiddle tunes of the 19th century and the actual lyrics of songs written to promote westward expansion following the Homestead Act.<\/p>\n

\u201cProving Up\u201d opens with a piece \u2014 set to new music \u2014 that borrows the lyrics from the 1848 composition \u201cUncle Sam\u2019s Farm,\u201d which called for settlers to head west \u201cfrom every nation\u201d and promised \u201cUncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm.\u201d Viewed through the political lens of the Trump era, it\u2019s a chilling historical artifact.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is this incredible resonance with what\u2019s happening today and this so-called immigration crisis,\u201d Mazzoli said.<\/p>\n

The composer also explored ways to create the sound of drought \u2014 using harpsichord, having strings players play with the wood of their bows, and calling on percussionists to play guitars with mallets to evoke the desperately desiccated soil.<\/p>\n

Mazzoli, who also gave a master class to Aspen Music Fest students during her visit, is currently at work on an adaptation of the George Saunders novel \u201cLincoln in the Bardo\u201d for the Met. She\u2019s also writing an as-yet unannounced other opera, which she expects to premiere earlier.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of my work \u2014 even my purely instrumental work \u2014 is inspired by human beings and the messes that they get themselves into and the amazing ways that we do or don\u2019t get ourselves out of them,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Operas take years to write and, if you\u2019re lucky, live on for years after their premieres in different productions. So, above all, Mazzoli is always looking for stories she\u2019s willing to live with long-term. The Russell story did that, as did Saunders\u2019 novel about the death of Abraham Lincoln\u2019s son in the White House, and the Lars von Trier film \u201cBreaking the Waves,\u201d which inspired her breakthrough 2016 opera.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe characters need to be interesting enough for me to still be able to find something in that story years after it premieres,\u201d she said. \u201cI look for complicated characters who do something unexpected, stories that tap into big ideas about the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Missy MazzoliCourtesy photo Composer Missy Mazzoli has played rock clubs and classical concert halls, blazed a trail as an innovative and hip composer for 21st-century opera, and last year became the first female composer commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. In her first visit to Aspen, Mazzoli is bringing a concert performance of her 2018 opera, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2446884","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-22 05:18:38","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2446884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2446884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2446884\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2446884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2446884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2446884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}