This past summer (July 2024 to be precise), I found myself on a personal/professional roller coaster the likes of which I never would have imagined when I discovered that several of my compositions had been plagiarized by a teenage scam artist halfway across the world. Not only plagiarized, but passed off as his own compositions, to the point where he had them performed *in concert* by prominent, talented professional musicians in his home country.
This kid plagiarized my music by copying it off of my scrolling-score YouTube videos, admittedly an arduous task that could prove he has the necessary work ethic to write his own music. But here’s the kicker: in spite of the fact that he could have just copied my music without me ever knowing of his existence, the whole time that he was plagiarizing me, he was also writing me lengthy emails, kicked off by an anonymous, out-of-the-blue fan letter:
The story has several more unlikely (and frankly, insane) twists and turns. I’ve recounted it in full detail to several friends and colleagues in private, but now it’s very much a matter of public record, as it’s been voluminously chronicled by Hugh Morris in VAN Magazine.
Because my plagiarist was/is a minor, the editorial team at VAN decided to redact his name and any identifying details, and I’m honoring that same policy here on my website. If you’re a composer who read my story on VAN and you’ve gotten an email similar to the one above, please do send me a (non-anonymous) message, because I’m not the only one who got plagiarized. (For more on that, you’ll have to read the article.)
Also unmentioned in the article — and rather unfortunately, in my view — were the specific works of mine that got caught up in this whole affair, and for the benefit of readers who have navigated their way to willcwhite.com in the hopes of finding out more, I’m happy to assemble them below:
My piano sonata, a huge, dissonant, virtuosic work, is the piece that I first discovered had been performed under false pretenses. I don’t think I can convey my level of shock when I watched the video of this work being performed in No one’s home country. As is mentioned in the article, the most galling thing was when No one bounded on stage, handed the pianist a floral bouquet, and took several bows. (That’s not even counting his speech!) It was the first time I had ever even seen what he looked like.
This next one was actually kind of funny. No one changed the title from “The Seafarers” to “The Mariners,” quite unaware, I’m sure, of the additional layer of irony: the Mariners is the name of Seattle’s professional baseball team.
As far as I know, there was no public performance of the Bagatelles, but after No one had been exposed, he admitted to having plagiarized them, and I can only presume he was trying to pawn them off as his own and arrange a performance.
Lest anyone feel sympathy for me, let me assure you: I’m not the victim here. For me, this has wound up as a wild, unforgettable story. The victims are No one’s friends and family, not to mention the musicians he duped into playing my music under false pretenses.
BACEWICZ Overture for Orchestra BARBER Prayers of Kierkegaard BARTOK Concerto for Orchestra
This program hangs together awfully well, I think: the Bacewicz and the Bartók were written in the same year (1943). Bacewicz was stuck in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, while Bartók had escaped to safety in the U.S. But of course, he was never really comfortable there (here) and was ill basically the whole time. Meanwhile, Barber, a natural-born American citizen, was commissioned by the Boston Symphony in 1943 to write his piece (identical details to Bartók) but it took him 10 years to fulfill the commission. Prayers of Kierkegaard almost never gets performed.
Majesty
HANDEL Zadok the Priest HANDEL Dixit Dominus BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7
This is an all-banger concert. Handel was Beethoven’s favorite composer and it’s easy to hear why.
Messiah
HANDEL Messiah
I say this every year and I mean what I say: it never gets old. When it all goes well, it’s like riding one of those enormous waves off the coast of Portugal, or so one presumes
Innocence
WEBER Overture to Oberon MAHLER Selections from Des Knaben Wunderhorn SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 5
There’s a real train of musical thought and influence here. Mahler was so thoroughly into Weber that he basically recomposed Weber’s opera Die Drei Pintos and I think he was sleeping with Weber’s granddaughter or something? One of you musical history buffs will have to fill me in on that. As we all know, Mahler was the major influence, symphonically speaking on Shostakovich. The Weber and Mahler pieces are both about an age of innocence (i.e. childhood.) The Shostakovich is about professing one’s innocence to parties making accusations of guilt.
Invention
BACH Invention a 3 (arr. Swingle Singers) LAURIDSEN “Quando son più lontan” from Madrigali WHITACRE Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine GARRETT The Lesson DETT O Holy Lord BURTON A Prayer BRISTOW At harbor, waiting for wind [world premiere] KEYT Nizina [world premiere] SAMS “Stone” from The Earthmakers BACH “Confiteor” from Mass in B minor
I may be on the cusp of understanding how to program a choir concert. It’s been a hard road, but I think I’m getting there. Bach bookends can’t be a bad idea. Then there’s three sets: Lauridsen-Whitacre, in which I found pieces by the kings of contemporary choral music that I actually like; Garrett-Dett-Burton, a little tribute to my friend Marques who is very much a Friend of Harmonia and has introduced me to great music; Bristow-Keyt-Sams, three extremely worthy Seattle composers.
Mass in B Minor
BACH Mass in B minor
Do I really need to say anything?
Spring Rites
BELLINI Overture to Norma R. SCHUMANN Cello Concerto MENDELSSOHN Die Erste Walpurgisnacht
I have a growing soft spot for Early Romanticism. When’s the last time you heard this — or any — Bellini overture in concert? I chose this overture because of its thematic resonance: Norma is about druids, and so is Die Erste Walpurgisnacht. Speaking of which, that’s got to be the most unjustly neglected piece in Mendelssohn’s output. It’s spooky, silly, campy fun from start to finish. And the Schumann cello concerto? Come on!
While I was in Chicago last month (to give a slew of pre-concert lectures for the symphony), I took one evening to record a piece that’s been in need of a recording for quite a while now, “O Clavis David,” for choir and organ:
As to the recording session itself, all I can say is, if you hire the right people, you’ll get a good product, and thankfully I had a friend who knew all the right people to hire.
Of course, where organs are concerned you don’t just need the right person playing (which I had) but you also need the right person to record (ditto) and you darn well better make sure you’ve got a quality instrument in an excellent acoustic.
This recording was made at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, which boasts a blazing hot E. M. Skinner organ. When I walked into the church and heard the organist practicing his part, I practically thought he was going to knock my ears off my head.
Luckily he pulled it back (just a little) for the session, but saints alive is that a phenomenal instrument. The piece was written for the Flentrop organ at St. Mark’s in Seattle, which couldn’t be more different, but that’s the thing with writing for the organ — you do your best to make a piece that will work in many different settings, because you never know what you’re going to get.
This first appeared as an essay on Tone Prose, a weekly Substack newsletter about the world of classical music.
The other day I was perusing the r/Seattle subreddit and I came across a question to the effect of: “My boyfriend and I want to get dressed up and go out for a fancy evening. Where in Seattle would we feel comfortable?”
The answers were predictable: “oh Seattle is so casual, you can wear whatever you want, nobody cares.” Indeed, that is true: in Seattle you can wear whatever you want and nobody cares. But I have a sneaking suspicion that’s not what the questioner was really asking.
What the questioner wanted to know is: where can we get dressed up and go out for a night on the town *and be surrounded by other fancy people*?”
Now, one of the answers on the thread actually did suggest the Symphony and the Opera, and it’s not a bad answer, because those spaces are, at the broadest level, fancier than most spaces you come across in Seattle. But truth be told, most symphony goers dress “smart casual” at best, and certainly not in anything that could be said to resemble formalwear.
If we’re being honest, that’s the case in most concert halls and opera houses throughout the country, and indeed the world, though overall fashion standards are perhaps a tad more elevated in Europe and Asia than they are in North America.
People in the Classical Music Industrial Complex are always talking about how we need to make the experience of going to a performance more relatable, more easy-going, more casual, because that will connect with real people. And indeed, many orchestras, including the Seattle Symphony, have given up their white ties and their tails and adopted the All-Black Visual Succubus attire.
Now a slight tangent: I have a friend, a real dweeb of a fellow, who’s very into swords and sandals and fantasy. He decided to level up his involvement in his hobby and participate in a LARPing weekend. That stands for “Live Action Role Playing,” and it’s becoming a bigger and bigger thing. The idea is, you and 250 other losers dress up as characters from medieval fantasy, go camping out in the woods, and essentially bring a D&D campaign to life, complete with props, magic powers, multiple “lives”, strength/healing levels, baddies, bosses — the whole thing. The way I understand it, it’s historical reenactment meets video games meets kink play.
These LARP people take the whole thing rather seriously (as you might imagine) and so you have to send a photo of your costume even to get approved to participate. I thought it all sounded absurd (it still does) but what my friend said is that on Saturday at 10:00 am, when everyone showed up on the field of battle to start the game, he was overwhelmed by the power of seeing so many other dorks all dressed like warriors and elves and wizards.
Just once, I’d like to have that experience in the concert hall. I think a major symphony orchestra could at the very least try a single concert where a fancy dress code is enforced. We’d get to experience music the way our grandparents and great-grandparents did. You could even program period-appropriate music. It wouldn’t even be that hard! Start with a 1950s night where the audience just wore regular suits, ties, and dresses, and play a mix of Arnold Schoenberg and Leroy Anderson.
But there’s a real chance to level up, and wouldn’t it be fun to go to a concert where not only the orchestra, but also hundreds or thousands of audience members were wearing white tie and tails, ball gowns and jewels? We could have Brahms and Tchaikovsky and Offenbach for a treat.
Yes indeed, concerts should be LARPing – Listening Attired (as) Reactionary Posh (human beings). Now that’s my idea of a good time!!
Last month, I (along with like, 120 other people) gave the world premiere of my latest work, also my biggest work, also my first stab at something akin to an opera, a piece called Cassandra:
And now I’ve got a problem, because I want to do it again.
Well, I don’t necessarily have to do it again; I’d be more than happy for someone else to take the baton, not to mention all the behind-the-scenes planning and production work that would be required to mount it.
The piece is an opera-oratorio, which means that it could be presented in a concert setting or in a fully-staged production. But naturally, I want the whole enchilada: costumes, sets, dancing, acting — all of it.
Cassandra was very well received, probably the greatest triumph of my career thus yet. And the number one comment I got was: “when are we going to see it again?” (sometimes rendered as “when are we going to see it on stage?”)
And the truth of the matter is: probably not until I decide to program it again! Big pieces are a tricky business for a composer, and this piece is big in two dimensions: it’s too long to convince someone to put on a symphonic program and the orchestra is too large to convince someone to mount operatically.
Those are the very few of my pieces that have achieved liftoff and gotten past the orbit of my immediate circle of performer-friends. And hey, that’s not to besmirch the colleagues of my acquaintance who have done what they could to champion my music — I am eternally grateful to them all!
But the thing is, I just don’t know many people who would be in a position to mount a piece like Cassandra. I’ve had many folks suggest conductors I could get in touch with, and that’s very kind of them, but here’s the thing: if you know a conductor who would be open to examining this work, YOU need to get in touch with them.
Composers are considered the least reliable sources on their own music, and nobody is ever looked upon with greater suspicion than a composer trying to promote a large work. Asking someone to spend an hour listening to a piece of new music is a hard sell on its own.
So you, you out there, if you were at the concert, or you watched the recording, and you heard something special, and you know someone in a position of programming authority who would even be willing to give it a listen, please give me a little help. So far, this piece has achieved a 100% success rate in engaging an audience and leaving them wanting more. In the past month, I’ve encountered many people who were at the concert, and they have shared with me their genuine enthusiasm for this piece, and I can tell the difference between real emotion and mere politesse.
And while you’re at it, see if you can get them to program a big festival of my stuff that includes all those other pieces too. 😉
About a week ago, I attended a performance of Arthur Honegger’s third symphony, the “Liturgique” and I was drawn to this little quote in the program notes: “Composing is not a profession. It is a mania — a harmless madness.”
I think that’s bang on the money, so I dug up its source, a little book called I am a Composer, and I thought I’d share some other choice quotations. Honegger is refreshingly realistic (cynical, even) in his perspective about life as a composer in the modern age (1952), and I couldn’t get enough of it.
Let’s start here:
The profession of composer of music offers the peculiarity of being the activity and the preoccupation of a man who exerts himself to manufacture a product which no one is eager to consume. I might even compare it to the manufacture of top hats, button shoes, and whalebone corsets. The contemporary composer is therefore a sort of intruder who persists in stubbornly trying to impose himself at a banquet to which he has not been invited.
And now onto the process of composition itself, this masterly metaphor:
To be as frank as possible, a great share of my work eludes my conscious will. To write music is to raise a ladder without a wall to lean it against. There is no scaffolding: the building under construction is held in balance only by the miracle of a kind of internal logic, an innate sense of proportion. I am at once the architect and the spectator of my own work: I work and I judge.
When an unforeseen obstacle arrests me, I leave my construction and sit in the seat of the listener, saying to myself: “After having heard the foregoing, what shall I hope for that will give me, if not the thrill of genius, at least the impression of success? What, logically, must happen to give me satisfaction?” And I try to find the next step, not the banal formula which would occur to everyone, but, on the contrary, an element of freshness, a rebound of interest. Step by step, following this method, my score is accomplished.
This is the funniest one I’ve come across so far, where he talks about his work as a professor of composition:
My class always begins — and you can confirm this — with a little speech of which this is roughly the substance:
“Gentlemen, do you sincerely wish to become composers of music? Have you reflected carefully on what awaits you? If you write music, you will not be paid and you will not earn a living. If your father can afford to support you, then nothing prevents you from putting black marks on paper. You will learn that, wherever you go, what you value above all other things will have but a secondary importance for others; they will show no impatience to discover you and your sonata. Your only excuse is to write honestly the music that you wish to express, to bring to it all the pains, all the knowledge, which a man of probity would give to the most serious actions of his life. Suppose for a single moment that you thirty-seven men are — I do not say men of genius, but of talent — and that each one writes in a single year one worhty composition which deserves to be produced; that would unloose a veritable catastrophe in the musical world.”
And finally, the opening quote fleshed out into its full paragraph:
Composing is not a profession. It is a mania — a harmless madness, because it is rare to see an unknown composer give way to violent demonstrations and disturbances of the public peace, unless in a concert hall at the performance of a rival’s work. More often he is preoccupied, distraught, saddened by the proofs of incomprehension on the part of his contemporaries. If he is not ridiculous because of his arrogance and presumption, he will be as timid as a person afflicted by some abnormality which, it so happens, is not constantly on exhibition for all to see. And there you are!
How copyright law promotes bad behavior in the world of classical music
This post is slightly adapted from an edition of my newsletter, Tone Prose. Subscribe for more ranting and raving!
I’ve got a concert coming up on April 6, 2024 which will feature the premiere of my new opera-oratorio Cassandra, but the program is equally exciting because it will bring me once again into collaboration with the great young pianist Joseph Vaz. Joey’s going to play Rhapsody in Blue, and having received the performance materials for this work, I’m struck by outrage, and I wish to make it known!
The publisher of Rhapsody in Blue, European-American Music, has abused its copyright privileges to offer a substandard product to interpreters of this work, and thus made the correct execution and performance of Gershwin’s music much more challenging than it should be. And while I (Will) am happy to name and shame EAM, they are simply representative of the industry-wide malfeasance. The real problem though, is the law itself.
What is Copyright?
Essentially, a copyright is a monopoly on a piece of intellectual property, such as a book, movie, recording, or, in the present case, a piece of music.
Now I don’t think you have to be the most rapacious libertarian capitalist in the world to reach the conclusion that monopolies are bad. But you don’t have to be a pinko commie tool to think that a limited monopoly granted to an artist might be good. After all, if you create an original work, shouldn’t you get some period of exclusivity in which to exploit your creation?
The first copyright law in the United States, the Copyright Act of 1790, did just that: it gave authors exclusivity on their works for a period of 14 years with an optional 14 year extension. That, I will grant, is a reasonable way of doing things. Of course, if you create a successful bit of IP, you’ll want to exploit it for as long as possible, so as corporations came on the scene and lobbyists started doing their dirty work, the original copyright provisions got distended to grossly disproportionate forms, culminating in the famous “Sonny Bono” Act of 1998. Cui bono? Sonny!
[A brief aside: don’t let Sonny Bono’s cameo on The Golden Girls fool you — he was one bad hombre. Aside from his rotten-to-the-core copyright extension act designed to protect Disney’s copyright on Mickey Mouse, he was also a raging NIMBY exclusionist zoning champion as mayor of Palm Springs, and gave Newt Gingrich PR advice.]
The Baroque State of U.S. Copyright Law
In the US, we are currently operating under a dual copyright regime:
For works created prior to 1978, the maximum copyright duration is 95 years from the date of publication, or 120 years from the date of creation, whichever is shorter.
For works created in or after 1978, the maximum copyright duration is “life of the author” + 70 years.
As to the question of Rhapsody in Blue, attentive readers of Listener Laurie’s comment will have noted that 2024 is the centennial of this great masterpiece of symphonic jazz. So, you might ask yourself, shouldn’t the music be in the public domain? Can’t you just download the parts from the Internet Music Score Library Project? Why does a publisher have to be involved at all?
Enter Ferde Grofé
First thing first: the original score of Rhapsody in Blue *is* in the public domain, and you *can* download it from imslp. The problem is, the original version of Rhapsody in Blue isn’t the version that anyone actually plays.
Well, it’s not *no one* who plays it — in fact, there’s a very cool recording of the original version, scored for Paul Whiteman’s dance band in 1924, performed by George Gershwin himself on a piano roll, with MTT conducting. (The tempi are nuts.) But Gershwin didn’t *orchestrate* the Rhapsody. That job was left to American composer Ferde Grofé (of “On the Trail” fame). Grofé revised and expanded this version in 1926, but it wasn’t until 1942 that he scored it for a normally-constituted symphony orchestra, and that’s now the version that “everyone” plays.
Material Interests
This 1942 version of Rhapsody in Blue remains under copyright until 2038. Which means that the publisher, European-American Music, retains a monopoly on the performing materials for another 14 years.
As we all know, the problem with a monopoly is that the monopolizer has no incentive to provide their customer with a decent product or service, and that’s exactly the problem here. First off, I placed Harmonia’s rental order for these materials back in May of 2023. I signed a contract that stated exactly when the sheet music was to arrive. That date came and went, and when I contacted EAM, it turned out they had lost track of the order.
Then things got worse: EAM sent me a freshly printed set of parts. These parts were engraved in 1942 using 1942 technology and 1942 Broadway notational conventions. When you first glance at the music on the page, it doesn’t look too shabby. But take a closer look:
Notice, for example, that after the first line of music, the clef is never re-printed, and neither is the key signature. That’s very poor indeed. The problems don’t stop there though: these parts were written so that the piece could be performed with any hackneyed, ill-constituted civic band, and so the parts are laden with cues to such an extent that they are almost impossible to read. This tendency reaches its ne plus ultra in the first violin part, which is clearly designed as a quasi conductor’s score for concertmasters who are also the leaders of their bands.
Errata
And now for the pièce de résistance: EAM doesn’t just sent the parts, they also send a printout of the 30-page errata list of corrections that need to be marked into all the parts.
Just think about this for a second: the parts were engraved in 1942. This errata list was compiled in 1990. That means that the publisher has had 34 years during which they could have re-engraved the piece so as to incorporate all these corrections.
But why would they? That might cost… oh a few thousand bucks I guess? It’s so much easier to make the renters of this material do the work themselves (as I did.) Who are the renters going to complain to? What competitor are they going to turn to? There is none — that’s the whole point of a monopoly!
Bad Actors, Bad Incentives
This whole thing reminds me of the problem with drivers.
Bad drivers should certainly be held to account for speeding and running stop signs. It’s antisocial behavior that can easily get people hurt or killed. But the real criminals are the transportation engineers and urban planners who have designed the road infrastructure that encourages speeding. The real criminals are the lobbyists who have been working on behalf of the auto manufacturers for a century to ensure that America is designed for car dependence. The real criminals are the lawmakers and politicians who have created a permissive legal structure where killing someone with a private automobile isn’t even considered a case of criminal conduct.
Preaching, Practicing
I’d be a fool if I didn’t mention that I, as a publisher of my own music, try to do everything that EAM doesn’t. First off, for the most part, I sell rather than rent. People can buy my music directly from this web site, print out their own copies (in whatever numbers they like) and perform it to their heart’s content. I also try very hard to make sure that the editions offered on this site are free from mistakes (though I am convinced it is a metaphysical impossibility to get them all.)
First up, Clarinet Quintet, op. 55, a piece that I wrote as a birthday gift for my college buddy Jeremy. It was commissioned by his siblings for his fortieth birthday. The birthday gift was the first movement. The second, third, and fourth movements were gravy because I wanted to make it into a full work. (Much the same thing happened with my trio for horn, viola, and piano.)
What was fun about this project was that I had the first movement premiered (with Jeremy in the audience) in Seattle by some friends over the summer. Hearing the first movement clarified for me what I wanted to do with the rest of the piece, and the latter movements were composed very quickly.
The demo recording was made in Portland with musicians from the Oregon Symphony, most notably their principal clarinetist, James Shields. It was a very fun day featuring a huge assortment of baked goods from Shoofly Vegan Bakery. God I miss Portland’s vegan food scene. Seattle doesn’t hold a candle.
Next up, 11 Bagatelles, op. 56 for solo piano. I also composed these in 2023, sporadically during the months of April through July (between writing the first movement of the Clarinet Quintet and the later movements.) They were written for my great piano muse Joseph Vaz.
Joey started agitating for more piano music in the lead-up to the highly successful New York premiere of the piano sonata I wrote for him. I thought he was crazy to ask for more. I don’t think of myself as a person who has facility writing for the piano, and he’s given me all sorts of guff about not writing “pianistically.” And yet, he kept asking, so I kept writing. (He’s asked for even more!!)
Joseph recorded these tracks in New York at the Manhattan School of Music. It was a great weekend; I came to town not only for the recording, but also to see Here We Are, the new Sondheim show. The night after the recording I went and screamed my heart out at Uncle Charlie’s with my friend Tim, as I am wont to do.
Last up is an older work, or, shall we say, a piece that has been in development for several years now, my Suite for Solo Cello, op. 36. It’s a little embarrassing to admit that, when I first wrote this, large chunks of it were extremely difficult, maybe unplayable; I should have had a better sense of the cello’s capabilities given my heritage as a violist.
I’d been trying to interest cellists in this piece for a while, but I think they maintained a polite distance because of the challenges. What I really needed was a cellist to workshop the piece with me, and my friend Ryan Farris finally stepped up to the plate this past summer.
We worked on the piece over a the course of a few months, making all sorts of adjustments and re-writes and recorded it in August. I give Ryan all the thanks and credit in the world for pulling off what he did, but I’m still planning to make an alternate arrangement for two cellos. I think it will be a more successful work.
I have to admit though that I love hearing the struggle of the piece in its current incarnation. It’s craggy and austere, and part of me thinks I should just let it exist as the stunted, gnarled oak that it is currently.
A post-mortem on Stephen Sondheim’s posthumous production
I went to New York this past weekend to see the world premiere of Here We Are, the musical that Stephen Sondheim was working on at the time of his death in November, 2021. If he’d only been alive to complete it, it would have been wonderful. But he didn’t, so what we have is an incomplete masterpiece.
The existence of a masterpiece left incomplete at the time of its author’s death compels a question upon the people left responsible for the work: what’s the “moral” way forward? Do you let the public hear it in its incompletion? Do you guard it? Do you destroy it? How do you do the right thing?
Before I get into the solution proffered by Sondheim’s estate and his co-creators — and my opinion thereof — let’s take a brief diversion into musical history.
The Classics
The two most famous incomplete works in the classical canon are Mozart’s Requiem and Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony.
In the case of the Mozart, they did the wrong thing: the widow Constanze brought in two of her late husband’s colleagues to comb through his remaining sketches and bring the work to completion. Franz Xaver Süssmayr did the lion’s share of the work and wrote some of his own original music to fill in gaps (including complete movements) where no Mozart sketches existed.
This collaborative version of the piece was accepted into the repertoire early on, and it now has a performing tradition of well over two hundred years, so most folks have decided to be okay with it (including me.) But in recent years, musicologists have come to think that they know better than musicians who actually interacted with Mozart while he was alive, and it seems that new completions are cropping up with increasing regularity. This is doing even wronger things.
In the case of Schubert’s B minor symphony, the unfinishedness was leveraged as a selling point (doubtless due in part to the romanticized history of Mozart’s Requiem) and even though Schubert left behind a third movement in short score (and even about a hundred measures in full score) this movement has never caught wind, though it has been completed by scholars. The completion has occasionally been performed and it has been recorded, so you can listen to it right now if you’re interested. This is doing the right thing: the greater public can hear what Schubert actually wrote, and the cognoscenti can listen to a realization of what Schubert might have written, understanding the context full well.
The Stage
Opera offers more gray areas than purely instrumental music, because a composer generally composes the music of an opera to a fully-formed pre-existing libretto. So if the music of the opera is close enough to the finish line, it can be possible — and justified — to finish the piece by bringing the composer’s work to its logical conclusion using sketches and grafting on music from earlier in the show (particularly in music dramas that use leitmotivs) as was the case with Puccini’s Turandot and Berg’s Lulu (one of Sondheim’s favorites.)
I think both of those completions fall into the “do the right thing” category because it would be such a loss not to be able to hear the work that these great artists did write, but you can’t just truncate the story ten minutes before its conclusion. In theory, you could stop the music and have the singers simply speak the rest of the libretto, but this would be jarring to the point of distraction in a thru-composed work and would completely ruin the effect of everything that had come before.
However, this is not the case with musicals, and this brings us to the curious case of Here We Are.
Words and Music
The development history of this show was chronicled quite ably by Frank Rich writing for Vulture. To sum it up, the team (Sondheim, writer David Ives, and director Joe Mantello) had been working on the piece since the early 2010s. Lacking any real production deadlines, Sondheim did what he was wont to do and chipped away at the songs bit by bit, putting it together in a procrastinatory fashion.
In September of 2021, Sondheim went on Colbert and announced that the project was picking up steam again, and that he hoped it would be produced in the coming season. Two months later, the day after Thanksgiving, he died.
When Sondheim died, he had written all the songs and scene for the first act, as well as the first three numbers of the second act. That’s a substantial amount of material, enough that a case could be made for going forward with the project. But how to go forward? Should they fill the gaps in the second act with reprises from the first? Should they hire a composer to write ersatz-Sondheim, perhaps based on his sketches? Should they simply end the show with the third song in the second act? What’s doing the right thing — by Sondheim, by the producers, by the audience?
To the immense credit of the producers of Here We Are at the Shed, the solution they have chosen is both the simplest one and the right one to boot: after the third song the second act, the second act of Here We Are becomes a straight play bereft of singing. As you may have read in the Frank Rich piece, the final 45 minutes of the show do include a few instrumental cues based on earlier music, but these cues come fewer and further between as the show continues, such that the greater part of the second act feels notably different than everything that preceded it.
These Are My Takes
I love everything that Sondheim wrote for this show, and I am eternally thankful that the show has been produced so that people like me can have a chance to see and hear it. But there is no question of it being a completed work — it is not. And I say this in spite of what Ives and Mantello told Frank Rich, namely that this “two-thirds sung, one-third spoken” concept was a deliberate dramaturgical decision made by the creative team prior to Sondheim’s death, on the grounds that the material demanded it.
Their claim is that because the characters in the second act find themselves stuck in one place, it doesn’t make sense for them to keep singing. My counterclaim is that this is complete and total bullshit.
I’m not saying that Ives and Mantello are necessarily lying, because it’s possible to believe that they had actually reached such an agreement with Sondheim. The scenario I imagine is this:
With a production announced and a deadline finally looming, Sondheim was struggling to finish the score (par for the course with him), and his co-authors didn’t have the deftness of touch that Hal Prince and James Lapine had had in compelling him to work. So they created a well-intentioned excuse that would let him off the hook, but also let them move forward with the production, and Sondheim leapt at this “gentleman’s agreement.”
That may well be what happened, but if it is, I think it’s important to acknowledge the reality that these three creators chose to enter into a shared delusion for practical purposes; this was not a path born of legitimate artistic values.
All you have to do is watch the show to reach the conclusion that it was meant to have been musicalized. There’s nothing in the libretto after that third song of the second act that is so radically different from what preceded it that it begs for dry recitation. In fact, there are several moments that positively cry out for songs, the two most notable being a long conversation between two characters about the meaning of life, and the very end of the show, where you’d expect a big reprise.
Now, assuming that my hypothetical scenario was what actually transpired – that there was a tacit agreement to move the show forward as a musical-play hybrid and thus let Sondheim off the hook – I know in my heart of hearts that Sondheim would have seen this version and written the remaining songs in show. Sondheim had a long history of building the plane at 30,000 feet (not unlike most other musical theater writers) and there are many spectacular examples of him writing his best work on short notice during previews (“Comedy Tonight”, “Send in the Clowns”, “Children and Art”, etc.) I think it’s a good bet that he would have completed the show even more brilliantly than he had begun it.
So my one and only complaint in this whole saga is that Ives and Mantello are propagating this white lie that the show as it stands is what Sondheim really wanted it to be. It’s just not, and that’s ok. These guys have done the right thing by mounting the show with the songs that Sondheim wrote and letting us see the rest in draft form, thus allowing us to understand the full shape of the piece. But there’s no denying that it goes from color to black and white.
Once again, I’m purely grateful and not at all sorry that I got to experience Here We Are. (Speaking of which, they should have gone with Sondheim’s title, Square One.) I doubt this show is going to get produced many more times. Maybe they’ll take it to London, and perhaps a few regional theaters will mount their own productions, but this work can’t be said to be part of the canon. I’m sure they’ll film it, and I hope they’ll release the video and audio recordings.
Here We Are is a little world unto itself, but it’s a stump. It will always be a stump, but with this production, we can appreciate it for what it is and imagine what it might have been.
UPDATE:
My friends Kyle and Colm and I recorded a conversation for Kyle’s podcast after seeing the show for the second time, and you can listen to that here:
The time has come for me to present Harmonia’s upcoming concert season, in which every single program fills me with exuberant happiness at the prospect of being able to conduct such wonderful music. If you’re in Seattle (or if you remain partial to livestreamed concertizing) I would encourage you to subscribe today!
The season theme is Prophecy and if that doesn’t pique your curiosity, I don’t know what will!
Glory!
SHOSTAKOVICH Festive Overture POULENC Gloria MUSSORGSKY arr. RAVEL Pictures at an Exhibition
Find me a more festive season opener than this one — I dare you! What I like about this concert is the elegance of the nationalistic equation: Russian + French = Russian+French.
The Seasons
HAYDN The Seasons
When I tell my buddies in the orchestra world that I’m going to do The Seasons this year, they have no clue what I’m talking about and they just sort of brush it off. But this is a huge work! It’s an evening of four choral symphonies, which also function as a quasi-opera. It’s Haydn’s most Mozartean work—certainly from a melodic standpoint—but it’s built upon Haydn’s rock-solid compositional prowess and its infused by his never-ending font of inventive creativity.
Messiah
HANDEL Messiah
I have yet to get bored of this piece in spite of conducting it every year. Now that I know it quite well, it’s a rush to perform it. The piece has so much dramatic tension, and if you time everything just right, it spins out in an unbeatable progression. I continue to have fun at the harpsichord (see what I did there?) and my continuo partners and I seem to be finding more Vivaldian possibilities in our approach to the score with each passing year.
New Paths
BRAHMS Hungarian Dance No. 5 R. SCHUMANN Manfred Overture C. SCHUMANN arr. WHITE Three Romances for Violin BRAHMS Symphony No. 2
The idea here was to look at the prophesy from a music-historical lens: when Robert Schumann met the 20-year-old Johannes Brahms, he wrote a very intimidating article called “New Paths” in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung in which he hailed Brahms as the future of classical music. It kind of psyched Brahms out, but thanks to the persistent mentorship of Clara Schumann, he was able to fulfill this promise.
Oracles
LASSUS Prophetiae sibyllarum S. BRISTOW Winter Solstice [world premiere] J. FRENCH Hear My Voice J. S. BACH Der Geist hilft unsrer Schwachheit auf C. KREEK Psalm 137 S. ROSSI Al Naharot Bavel
Like so many choral programs, this concert features a wide variety of works, but the main event is Lassu’s Prophetiae sibyllarum, a cycle of twelve motets that are composed in a highly chromatic language reminiscent of Gesualdo. These pieces get written about all the time, but not so rarely performed. I’ve been wanting to perform Salamone Rossi for quite a while, and I’m also delighted to have another premiere by Harmonia’s collaborative / orchestral keyboard player Sheila Bristow.
Rhapsody
BERNSTEIN Candide Overture GERSHWIN Rhapsody in Blue WHITE Cassandra [world premiere]
OK, this is obviously a super fun one, and it’ll be even more fun because my boy Joey is coming out to do the piano solo in the Gershwin. So what’s this Cassandra thing all about? Well, it’s going to be a big one. An opera-oratorio modeled (in some ways) on Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. I’m working with my cousin, a Latinist, on the libretto. This will probably end up being my single largest-scale single work.
And if you are inferring from the various verb tenses in those last few sentences that I haven’t finished writing it yet, you’d be correct!
The Ordering of Moses
COLERIDGE-TAYLOR La caprice de Nannette DVORAK Largo from Symphony No. 9 R. NATHANIEL DETT The Ordering of Moses
This program has been brewing in my mind since my time as assistant conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony. Dett’s Moses, a major oratorio that combines Old Testament scripture with African American spirituals, was premiered by the CSO in 1937. The premiere was broadcast on the radio, and there’s a famous story that the radio station switched away from the concert mid-stream due to complaints from racist white listeners calling in.
To the best of my knowledge, that rumor has never been substantiated, but it’s interesting that it was still floating around Cincinnati when the orchestra revived the piece in 2014. I worked hard on that concert and I’ve been enamored of the piece ever since. I’m thrilled to finally be able to bring it to life, though once again, I won’t be conducting it, as I’ve invited my friend Marques L. A. Garrett to do the honors.
