This is Jane, consortium commissions, and more
Lots of new music and news today, but first, happy spooky season!
A scene from This is Jane, my opera-in-progress with composer Angela Elizabeth Slater, was performed at the Aspen Music Festival in August. We had an overwhelmingly positive response and are continuing work while also seeking funding and support. In This is Jane, we explore the history and effect of Chicago’s revolutionary Jane Collective—as the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation was known. Between 1969 and 1973, before Roe v Wade legalized abortion, more than 11,000 women with unwanted pregnancies called a number, asked for Jane and got safe, if illegal, abortions. Drawing on historical sources, interviews, and members’ memoirs, This is Jane chronicles the work of the Jane Collective, depicting the experiences of six Jane members who arranged abortions, kept clients and staff safe, learned to provide abortions themselves, and persevered through raids and arrests. An epilogue addresses the need for new abortion aid networks since the 2022 Dobbs decision overturned Roe.
Watch our scene here, and contact me if you’re interested in helping us bring the full opera to the stage.
I also have two consortium commission projects up and running! In a consortium commission, multiple people pay to have a work created, and get exclusive performing rights for a period of time. It’s a great way for musicians to be involved in the creation of new music, and a great way for creators to have their work compensated and performed in a lot of places.
The first of these is The Tardigrade Presents the End of the World, an opera project with composer Jessi Harvey.
The Tardigrade Presents is a forty-five minute, three-act work that spans the genres of opera, musical, and art song; addressing past and present extinctions through the deep-time wisdom of a tardigrade and the story of toads; with the goal of inspiring hope through humor and real-life environmental success. It’s for four voices, available in transpositions for any voice ranges; piano; glockenspiel; oboe; bass clarinet; and cello and/or bass. Alternative instrumentations will be provided as needed to allow for maximum flexibility.
The second is a werewolf-themed song cycle with composer Samantha Hogan called The Refrain and Three Gibbous Songs.
The Refrain and Three Gibbous Songs is a cycle of four vocal works chronicling the transformation of a human to werewolf and back again, the beauty and drive of the wolf, and the nature of the night. The works—The Refrain, “More than Half but Less than Full”—which uses a motif from an actual wolf call—”Waxing,” and “Transfigured (in the) Night”—can be performed in any order or combination. The full cycle will run about 40 minutes.
Both of these pieces are rated as medium difficulty, and are perfect for students, community outreach, and recitals or in combination with one-act operas or works.
Finally, if you missed the news last month, my new poetry collection A Registry of Omens is out from Red Ogre Review Books! Here’s the marketing blurb: Learn how to defeat malicious fae, sing to the capelobo, protect your loved ones from the snallygast, consider the remains of anthropodermic bibliopegy, and make a call on the wind phone. Drawing from folklore and fact, archaeology and maps, and a life spent in forests and libraries alike, A Registry of Omens offers poems, songs, and a monodrama inspired by the supernatural and macabre from around our world and beyond. Clip into your climbing ropes, set your deadman anchor, and follow me.
I give 50% of all poetry sales to Room to Read, so buy lots of copies. :)
Here’s to a beautiful autumn, friends, full of music and books and s’mores and bats winging over the moon.