S04E02: Curtis K Hughes, Composer and Librettist

Ensemble pianist Tae Kim sits down with composer and librettist Curtis K Hughes to reminise about Let’s Make a Sandwich, Say It Ain’t So, Joe!, and what he’s working on during COVID-19!

Support us on Patreon

Join our Agents Provocateurs monthly memberships to help create experiences infused with new music, theater and imagination!

Tae Kim: Hello Guerillas. This is episode two season four of Guerilla Opera Podcast. My name is Tae Kim, ensemble pianist, and I will be your host for this episode. As you might have noticed, the last podcast was erroneously labelled as the fifth episode in season three rather than the first episode of our new fourth season. My apologies for the error. Today we are here with Curtis Hughes to talk about, well, making a sandwich! Thank you for joining us today. Your first collaboration with Guerilla Opera was “Say It Ain’t So, Joe”, a light tragedy reimagining the vice presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden in the 2008 election. Aside from the obvious difference in topic, what was the experience like the second time around, with … (0:50) in “Let’s Make a Sandwich”?

Curtis Hughes: Well, it was certainly good to have the memory and the experience of having collaborated with Guerilla Opera once before on a larger scale project. Although this project shared with the older project that it was quite strange in it’s conception, an odd concept to try to implement, at the same time knowing who I was working with, both in terms of the organization and in terms of the individuals, really helped give me the confidence to do some things that I otherwise wouldn’t have dared to attempt, both sort of musically and dramatically. It was such a wonderful idea to highlight the role of a director in a production by having two different directors direct the same material, and I was excited about that from the get go, but we needed to come up with raw material to kind of link the whole thing together. I was thrilled to be in the early discussions where we settled on a very strange common point of reference, which was this informational film about how to make a tuna fish sandwich; an open faced tuna fish sandwich, I should clarify.

Tae Kim: [laughing] A rarebit, apparently.

Curtis Hughes: [laughing] Yeah, a tuna rarebit. I have to credit a former student of mine, who’s a fantastic composer by the name of Ethan Parcell, who as a first year undergraduate student wanted to compose some music to go along with this film that he had found on Youtube. This was ultimately a project he did not pursue, although he has pursued many very interesting projects since then. Suddenly that film came back to mind, a couple of years later, when Guerilla Opera was searching for subject matter. I kind of brought it up not necessarily thinking it would be taken all that seriously, and then Rudy seemed interested, Mike seemed interested, everyone in the organization seemed on board with it. I did check in with my former student, made sure that he had no plans to do anything with this material, although if he had I’m sure it would have been something completely different from what Rudy did and what I did. So that’s how it got started.

Tae Kim: Wow. How was that process, coming up with an opera just based on that four minute infomercial?

Curtis Hughes: Well I certainly separated the process of writing the libretto from that of writing the music, in the past sometimes I’ve gone back and forth, when I’m not collaborating with a poet or librettist, or somebody who’s writing words. If I’m supplying the words, which is something I’m not always comfortable doing, it’s often a back and forth, some music, some words, to try to make them fit together. But for this I sort of wrote what felt like a short play, like a very very compact one act play, and then proceeded to set it to music and felt free to make many changes to it as the music seemed to compel me to do.

I’m not a playwright, I’m not really much of an opera librettist, but for some reason with this subject matter, writing the libretto was amazingly quick and not too strained. Partly because I think I knew that Guerilla Opera would throw themselves into realizing this with such conviction that it could be quite strange and both darkly tragic and comic at the same time, and that everybody would be comfortable with that. I think there was some Samuel Beckett in the mix as I was trying to write, maybe some Ionesco, Caryl Churchill, certainly, other playwrights I’m familiar with who I think probably informed what I was doing a little bit.

Tae Kim: It flows so nicely, for sure, but of course the two directors had completely different takes on it. Did having those directors affect the writing itself? Not necessarily the libretto-although maybe the libretto too-but did having that in the back of your mind affect the compositional process?

Curtis Hughes: Yes, I’m not sure I knew who both of the directors were going to be at first. Eventually I knew, and I knew Copeland from his work with Guerilla Opera on prior productions, though I hadn’t worked with him personally, and I had never met Giselle before. It was great to work with her, and they had such incredibly different approaches. It’s probably good that I’d had this experience once before of writing an opera with a fair amount of stage direction, in which the stage direction wound up being changed quite a bit in performance, so that although I was imagining the staging quite specifically and precisely while I was coming up with the material, I also knew that it probably would be changed. I’m sort of thrilled that what happened was that there was one interpretation that was more or less true to what I had written, in a sort of straight forward, comprehensible way, and one which was more sort of aggressively defying what was on the page. Those two kind of played off of each other in a way that interested me a lot. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on that contrast.

Tae Kim: I would think an opera would have multiple directors in its lifetime, but not necessarily on the same night, same stage, and with the same cast. What was that like, working with two directors simultaneously?

Curtis Hughes: As I recall, I was purposely not involved in the early stages of the production being put together, which is probably good, it’s probably too many cooks in the kitchen, but as I recall the directors did not interact. They may have had rehearsals on the same days, I’m not sure, but they certainly were not at the same time, the rehearsals were not concurrent. Only the cast knew, really in detail, what was going on in both versions. The instrumentalists had some idea, but were I think visually focused on learning their parts and trying to stay together, so they weren’t able to entirely watch how things were playing out onstage. The actors, the singers, the cast did an amazing job of keeping it to themselves. Maybe they discussed it among themselves, but they did not, for instance, let on to Giselle what Copeland was up to, and they didn’t let on to Copeland what Giselle was up to. So it could have happened that both directors might have done something very similar, but the way that these productions played off of one another was something that I think everyone was purposely kept in the dark about until late in the process, which I think was by design. I think that was part of the idea, it’s “Let’s Make a Sandwich” but it’s also sort of “Let’s Make a Sandwich” where one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing.

Tae Kim: Right, that’s fascinating. So when did you actually come into play in the production, it must have been towards the end then. Did you end up just seeing the final product?

Curtis Hughes: Well in a sense I had no meaningful involvement in the production, I was there to correct musical mistakes, catching errors that I might have made in the score for instance, but more or less it was just me helplessly watching it play out, which was really a totally unique experience in my professional life, and a really wonderful experience. Not easy at times because, well, I remember one time Giselle said to me: “I’m going to mutilate your aria”. [laughs] The funny thing is I think she intended on preparing me psychologically for how much her direction was going to be different from what I might have foreseen. I was disturbed by that comment at first, but at the same time I had seen Copeland’s version coming together, so I knew that whatever happened to the aria in one case, it was not going to be the only time we heard it. The mutilation she was referring to involved ketchup, and bread, and other things.

There was one thing that I had involvement in later on, in the phase during which I was mostly helpless. I did feel that there was a logic to Copeland’s version being presented first, and then we would hear Giselle’s version. Even making that declaration I think went to some degree against the spirit of the project, which was to kind of allow things to play out without that sort of intervention, but I think that ultimately it was a good decision to do it that way.

Tae Kim: How was the experience different from “Say It Ain’t So, Joe”?

Curtis Hughes: Different again in that I knew more about who I was working with, and I could rely on knowing that things I had tried out in “Say It Ain’t So Joe” could still work, or similar technical things could work. It’s also a much smaller piece of work for me, I mean it’s less than 20minutes of music, as opposed to 70 minutes of music, so it was a very focused process for me. Fewer singers, fewer instrumentalists, there was the added element of the prerecorded electronic sound that gave it a different feeling. I think it’s really important for people to see the “Let’s Make a Sandwich” video beforehand, or else they’ll have no context.

Tae Kim: You know, I don’t think I’ve seen the video, because usually as an ensemble pianist I’m just given a score, I get the rhythm, I try to get the notes, I try to get the singers together, and that’s all I see, and the next time I see them it’s the final production. I remember seeing it and just kind of going, this is bizarre, what does this have to do with “Let’s Make a Sandwich”, and I never thought to think that I should have watched the Youtube video. So before this interview I ended up watching the video, and I’m like, oh, it makes sense now.

Curtis Hughes: Right, both Rudy’s opera and mine are both sequels, in a sense, to the video.

Tae Kim: You can’t feasibly make “an opera” literally from that four minute infomercial, I mean I guess one could, but it would be too short of an opera. I remember the feeling of watching that show live, I was so dumbfounded, but in awe too, just because everything was so vastly different in so many ways.

Curtis Hughes: If there were a substantial portion of people in the audience who hadn’t seen the video, I imagine they were extremely disoriented. In any future presentation of it, I think that’s an absolutely essential ingredient.

Tae Kim: But to be honest that didn’t really bar me from enjoying the pieces, just because the productions were just so convincing, and they were so different, even though the music was exactly the same. You’re just kind of thinking, wow, this is fascinating, it’s so fascinating how two people can have such vastly different ideas of a single entity, in a sense. That’s why I thought both productions were really successful, in the sense that they evoked such a wide range of emotions from the audience. What are your thoughts on the two productions?

Curtis Hughes: I try to imagine what it would be like if I didn’t know the music, and I didn’t know the libretto, and certainly, if that were the case, the first of the two is the one that I would be able to make more sense of, which again is why I think it’s good that it was the first of the two. It was a really wonderful decision on the part of Guerilla Opera to pick two directors with such different sensibilities, I think, for that reason. If I had seen the second version of the opera first, Giselle’s version, I know I would have enjoyed some of the complete surreal sort of disorientation I would have experienced, but I think I especially appreciated that having had a little bit more ground to stand on in the first version. Copeland also was able to sort of play up some of the slapstick in a way that I really appreciated. There was a certain amount of almost comic timing built into the music, that sort of was invariable, and I loved finding out that different directors could make different flavors of comedy out of those moments without actually having to change anything in the score.

Tae Kim: I thought that was so wonderfully done. What were some of the most enjoyable moments?

Curtis Hughes: There were many enjoyable moments, that first discussion with Giselle certainly was memorable, that line I already quoted to you. [laughs] “I’m going to mutilate your aria.”

Tae Kim: [laughing] I wonder if you’re’ ever going to hear such from a director.

Curtis Hughes: You know I think when I’ve told that story before it sounds like I’m trying to garner sympathy, but in fact it was a wonderful moment in many ways, I was unsettled by it but I was also kind of excited to find out, what does that mean.

I enjoyed witnessing the sort of befuddlement of the instrumentalists as they gradually became aware of what kind of mayhem was going on around them and was going to be going on around them, watching it dawn upon them, especially as they had such varying degrees, roles, sort of in the drama, they became incorporated into it, and certainly it was fun to see that play out. Also getting to know Rudy’s opera and hearing it over and over again, because I think I heard his opera ten times, including multiple rehearsals of the different versions over the last 10 days or so, and the way I started to hear linkages between the two operas musically, which of course were also fortuitous, not planned, that was fun to start to hear those things, and to see how the different characterizations were influencing each other across the different operas and the different productions of them.

Tae Kim: Wow. Biggest challenges?

Curtis Hughes: In composing or in production phase?

Tae Kim: In anything: production, composing. I would imagine that composing could not have been easy either, especially going off of that four minute video about making a tuna sandwich.

Curtis Hughes: Coming up with the idea of how to make a short play as a sequel to that was more deciding what not to do and narrowing it down, and that was difficult. There was not, over all, a lot of turmoil in generating that part of it, but in the follow through; making it musically cogent in the ways that I wanted it to be, and sort of scattered in the ways that I also wanted it to be. Certain things that I had to figure out how to notate that I hadn’t tried before; with all of the sort of comical music involving the man in the sandwich shop who Brian Church depicts, who’s adding confusion to the scene, there’s this thing that keeps happening with a drum beat accompanying him that’s always playing in the wrong tempo relative to the rest of the music. So just a bit of a technical challenge, figuring out how to notate some of these things that I wanted to have happen.

I’m not all that experienced as a composer of electronic music. I’ve dabbled in electronic music for more than 20 years without being satisfied with what I’ve come up with; I think I’ve got one composition for prerecorded sound and solo instrument that I’m actually happy with, and everything else I’ve thrown out the window. So coming up with electronic sound for this that was intended to be somewhat evocative of the time of the original video, almost to sound like electronic experimental music of the 1950s, was an interesting challenge. I wound up finding a mock software platform that sort of mimicked a 1950s era electronic music studio, and was using very basic building blocks like sine waves to create something that hopefully would sound dated in the right way.

Tae Kim: Very cool, very cool. It definitely added another dimension to the opera. Especially from the Copeland point of view, I thought the opera felt linear in some ways, but the electronics helped coming out of that linearness. I thought that was really well done to be honest with you, and of course Giselle’s take on that same effect was a whole other way of adding another spice to an already bizarre way of understanding the word sandwich I guess. It was marvelous. Do you have anything else to add about the opera?

Curtis Hughes: Well, I know that you’re interviewing me not the other way around, but I am curious whether it’s something you want to talk about, I mean you’ve been responsible for making many miracles happen with productions that are coming together on a tight time table, and I’m wondering what your experience was, and I’m curious what you found most challenging in this instance.

Tae Kim: My job is pretty simple, I always get the score, whenever they said they’re going to send the score. So I get the score, and I cry a little bit [laughing], because of all those lines, and I try to play them on the piano, but like I said, everything is just so bare bones in what I do. I rehearse with the singers and that’s it, maybe Mike will be there, to help with the rhythm here and there, but I’m just sitting there, getting the notes down, getting the rhythm down, making sure that the singers are ready to go over to sing with the instrumentalists. So I don’t get to see any staging, nothing. I see them as just regular people, like I would see them on the street, and then I go to the show, and that’s my next step, I’m just always blown away by the production of it. It’s always from the very beginning, and I don’t see any of the process in the middle, and then I see the end, and it just blows my mind all the time.

Especially with something like this, I remember getting both scores, and I knew Rudy beforehand, but even then kind of trying to see how both of the pieces were different in so many ways, obviously, but I could kind of find some of the links here and there, and I’m kind of thinking, that’s actually pretty fascinating, having come from a single source, a four minute infomercial, there’s somehow that linkage. I’m sure it’s not as if you guys sat at the same table like okay we’re going to link this together, that wasn’t the case, but it was really fascinating to see even the little snippets of commonalities between the two pieces. It was a lot of fun, because it’s about the same subject, but it’s a completely different take on it. Now of course, many years later, I have a better understanding of it, especially after watching that video. I’m like oh, a rarebit, I get it.

So, putting the spotlight back to you, with the looming presidential election, are you writing another opera based on the coming debates?

Curtis Hughes: I am not, but I am intrigued by the opportunity to hear and see Joe Biden in a one on one debate context like that again. Sort of a musical interest, among other things. [laughs] But no, that was something to do once, and I get asked that question a lot, and I’m so glad that my second opportunity to work with Guerilla Opera was something so totally different.

Tae Kim: Right, right, because I don’t know how true this might be, but in music history class I remember learning about Dmitri Shostakovich, and he is always introduced as the twentieth century political composer, and I’m thinking something like this when you tackle a presidential debate, especially now, when the state of the country is like this, then I guess you end up being labelled in that sense as a “political composer”. Were you ever labelled as such after that opera?

Curtis Hughes: I even labelled myself as such quite some years beforehand. In the early odds I was writing music that I considered to be political, I even was the co organizer of a political music small scale festival of sorts on two occasions, and realized that that I did not want to write music that had a polemic kind of aspect to it. By the time I wrote “Say It Ain’t So, Joe” I was very interested in political subject matter, but not in espousing a particular political view, even though I have strong political views. To me, “Let’s Make a Sandwich” is not a political statement, and neither is “Say It Ain’t So, Joe”, but they’re informed by politics.

Tae Kim: [laughing] I do prefer a closed sandwich.

Curtis Hughes: Yes, exactly, that’s the debate we need to be having.

Tae Kim: Do you like it open, or would you like it closed?

Curtis Hughes: I remember on one of these concerts of political music that I had to put together, this was in the George W. Bush years, there was a composition for solo bass drum-no I think it was bass drum and saxophone-by another composer, that was incredibly abrasive and acoustically very interesting, and I was really enjoying hearing it during the dress rehearsal. It was fortissimo bass drum hits and screaming multiphonics, and to my ear very interesting. Then during the concert the composer introduced the piece saying this piece is about McCarthyism, and I sort of all of a sudden felt deflated, it suddenly took away so much from the music, all of a sudden the music was merely an expression of rage about McCarthyism. Not exactly timely rage, given that it was the early 2000s. If somebody wants to write music where the possibility is encouraged to sort of read these things into it, I think that’s great, but I’m not wanting to be as a listener or as a composer constrained by a particular, very specific political sentiment.

Tae Kim: Especially going from “Say It Ain’t So, Joe” to “Let’s Make a Sandwich” that has to be--that’s a different road, man, I have to say. One’s, you know, a serious topic, and I’m not saying a rarebit isn’t a serious topic, but do you feel like you had to cleanse yourself from the political writing of an opera?

Curtis Hughes: I suppose, maybe to some degree. I wrote a piece of chamber music as a sextet after “Say It Ain’t So, Joe” called “Verbiage” which used melodic lines that were transcriptions of political speeches in a way similar to what I had done in the opera although without the voices. Elizabeth Warren actually was one of my transcriptions that I used. I thought I was getting away from being political by simply using that as musical material and not using the recordings of the politicians. I subsequently decided if that piece is ever going to be performed again, I actually should use the recordings of the politicians, to make it a little clearer what I was trying to do. Certainly it was refreshing to write something operatic, that did not in an overt way touch on politics.

Tae Kim: Not to mention, I love tuna sandwiches, you know? I hope you like tuna sandwiches too.

Curtis Hughes: As it happens I do, but I think there is actually a lot of politics of the time that this video as a cultural artifact contains.It’s an infomercial of sorts, they didn’t have the term back then, but it seems to me that they’re trying to find the way to prepare a tuna sandwich that requires the maximum labor for a woman in the kitchen, you know. It’s not a quick way to make a tuna fish sandwich, there are easier ways to go about it.

Tae Kim: Yeah, I see what you mean. I remember watching the video, finally, and just kind of thinking huh, things were pretty different back then.

Curtis Hughes: The patronizing tone of the announcer, and everything else.

Tae Kim: Well that was what, 70 years ago, oh my goodness. Do you want to talk about anything else, do you have any other projects coming up that you’re excited about, that you want to share?

Curtis Hughes: Well, it’s difficult always to know what to compose when we don’t know what live performance is going to look like in the near future, but I’ve got older, longer term projects that are coming to fruition. I’ve got a CD project that’s coming out in March, maybe that’ll be around the time that we start getting back to live performance as well, but there is one vocal work on that disc that is neither political nor absurdist; it’s a “Twin Peaks” inspired composition that I wrote a couple years ago. It sets some text from Proust but it’s really about “Twin Peaks”, the TV show. Not that you have to be a fan of the show in order to make sense of the music. In that case I wouldn’t ask people to watch dozens of hours of television in order to prepare to listen to it. The piece is called “Tulpa” and the disc will be coming out in March on New Focus, at least I believe it will.

Tae Kim: How did Covid affect your writing? For me as a pianist I have ups and downs, there are some good days where I have a lot of motivation, inspiration to practice and to learn more, but there are some down days where it becomes just when am I going to perform, who am I going to perform for, and when I don’t have the answers to those questions it becomes kind of discouraging. I wonder if you’ve had a similar experience during these trying times.

Curtis Hughes: Yes, so, it’s really fun to have this conversation right now, it’s a high point, a bright spot in the middle of isolation, to get to talk as musicians. I like to maintain the bright tone but really it’s hard to say anything positive about doing creative work right now. I have not found it to be an inspiring time--I need some isolation to be a good composer, or to be consistently creative--but not knowing what the future holds makes it very difficult to know what to do. I’ve written some solo pieces, I’ve written some small scale things. It’s a good time for revising old pieces, kind of taking stock. It’s a great time for self doubt. [laughing] It’s a great time for second guessing oneself.

Tae Kim: Tell me about it. This might be a little depressing but I think the question I’ve been asking is what’s the point, you know, what’s the point in doing this. But one thing that keeps me going is every two weeks we-Guerilla Opera-have a Zoom meeting. We say meeting but it’s more of a how are you guys doing, how’s everybody doing, and it’s to talk about essentially our lives during those two weeks, and to see how we can sustain this kind of work in these trying times. The great thing about those kinds of conversations is that you get to talk to people, because socialization is definitely needed I feel, as much as as a pianist I do feel the isolation. I’m sure for you as a composer, we both need some sort of isolation to do our work, but like you said, during this time when the future is so muddy and so murky it becomes difficult to concentrate per se. Having to talk to Guerilla Opera and see how they are coming up with all these projects keeps me going in some ways too, just to see how I can do more to inspire and motivate not just me but others as well. That’s one of the reasons that I threw myself out there to do a podcast even though I sincerely hate my voice, to say the least. [laughs]

Curtis Hughes: I think that’s universal, I think everyone’s kind of shocked by the sound of their own voice.

Tae Kim: This is why I don’t listen to recordings, it’s fake news, it’s all fake news.

Curtis Hughes: Well it has been a great time for thinking back on live performances that have been especially exciting. From all the recent ones and going back some years, I was thinking recently of a performance that you and Aliana did some years ago of a big song cycle by Andy Vores.

Tae Kim: Oh, right. Cleopatra.

Curtis Hughes: It was an intimate crowd, and I don’t remember what time of year it was.

Tae Kim: I think that was the superbowl. I don’t think that we, as in the Patriots, got in, and I remember I did a concert with Aliana, so yeah, I think it was the superbowl.

Curtis Hughes: It was an extraordinary concert, it’s just one of my favorite live music memories to turn back to.

Tae Kim: Why thank you, my goodness. She’s wonderful, a couple years ago we did a concert over at the Boston Conservatory, it was an alumni concert. Basically it was to showcase improvisation in some ways. I told her okay, come up with three words, and somehow she came up with three words, and we said okay, we’re going to do a four movement work, we’re going to improvise four movements. We just kind of came up with some ideas of what to do, and we improvised. It was just such an easy thing to do because she is just so easy going but so driven at the same time. It makes my job much easier, so I’m definitely lucky to work with her. I’ve been thinking about a lot of live concerts back in the days, and I’m hoping as a pianist maybe I can take advantage in the sense that I could perform with a mask on. Considering I never liked long concerts anyway, an hour long is more than enough. I do feel the need to perform more and more, especially the fact that aside from this keyboard that I have, which I got from my colleagues friend who lent it to me for a long time, I haven’t played on a piano for a good five months now.

Curtis Hughes: That’s hard.

Tae Kim: That’s affected me quite a bit. This keeps me going, you know, it’s a viable keyboard, but still, I want that piano feeling. I’m kind of looking forward to going back to work, and very scared at the same time. I really don’t know what’s going to happen.

Curtis Hughes: I have to trust that there are safe ways to do at least some of these activities, you mentioned the hybrid education.

Tae Kim: Yeah, I think we’ll do what we can. Even though it does sound bleak in so many ways, I think doing these kind of things, even this kind of podcast, it’s essentially some kind of outlet, at least for me, and just talking to you I’m already inspired in the sense that you have all these ideas of how to go about something as mundane as a four minute infomercial, and making an opera out of it. It’s quite inspiring, I’m learning a lot. Look, if Covid never happened, I would never be doing this, so I should be thankful for that, in that sense.

Curtis Hughes: This is wonderful, this is a lot of fun and I think this it is very worth doing.

Tae Kim: Yeah, I think so too. Well, thank you so much for joining us, and I hope to see you at the watch party.

Curtis Hughes: Yeah, I’ve got it in my calendar, it was wonderful to talk to you.

Tae Kim: Great, same here. This concludes this episode of Guerilla Opera podcast. Thank you for tuning in and hope to see you at the watch party of “Let’s Make a Sandwich” by Curtis Hughes and Rudolf Rojahn on September 24. Until then.