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I came to Pittsburgh to walk in the footsteps of Josh Gibson, the hero of my opera, and to meet with a scholar and a great grandson. It's been an overwhelmingly rich and productive trip so far, and I wish I had the brain cells and energy to formulate one of those really juicy blog posts I sometimes write. But if a picture's worth a thousand words...


Started my day with a terrific meeting with the preeminent scholar of black sports in Pittsburgh (and one of the major Negro League scholars anywhere), Rob Ruck. Rob's book Sandlot Seasons has been hugely important in developing the plot of the Summer King. He was kind enough to look through some of my materials, give me historical feedback, and even help me work through several thorny plot points. But I forgot to get a photo with him! So here's the lovely inscription he gave me.

At Rob's advice, I then moved on to the nearby Carnegie Library, where I combed through folders on the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Homestead Grays and Josh Gibson. But before long I switched over to the microfilm machine and searched through some old issues of the Pittsburgh Courier, making some photocopies along the way. How to describe the thrill of seeing all these wonderful players and teams and personalities coming to life, Saturday after Saturday, jumping off the screen with all their vividness and sudden incontrovertible realness. I could have spent all weekend.

Struggling with my map, I then intended to move on to the Heinz Historical Center, where I was hoping to investigate the Western Pennsylvania Sport Museum. I was running low on time, though, and couldn't resist the draw of the Hill District, where the Crawfords used to play, and the Crawford Grille was the center of the universe. You can imagine I almost drove off the road when I saw this marker. I parked the car and ran over to check out Ammons Field (which has officially been renamed "Josh Gibson Field," although I didn't know it then.)

Can you stand it? The field's been moved, reconfigured, and will soon be renovated all over again, thanks to the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Josh Gibson Foundation. But on this patch of earth, Josh Gibson first played ball with the Pittsburgh Crawfords in 1929. This is the air he gazed upon from his catcher's crouch. There wasn't a soul in sight as I stood in front of the backstop, listening for ghosts and taking in the spectacular sunny afternoon.

After going to the Homestead Grays for a few years, Josh came back to the now-professionalized Pittsburgh Crawfords in 1932. The team was owned by famed numbers man Gus Greenlee, who built the nation's finest black-owned stadium at the top of the Hill on Bedford Avenue. I went looking for the place (the stadium was torn down in 1938, and soon after replaced by projects). A man on a stoop saw me with my camera and pointedly asked me what I was doing. I explained about my pilgrimage, and I entered into some nice conversation. But he let me know "I'm not prejudiced, but you are a white guy, and up here that's unusual. People might get the wrong idea if you point that camera around without explaining what you're doing." Duly chastened, I climbed a little further up the hill to this patch of grass, right next to the projects, where several people told me Greenlee Field once stood. Some of the finest baseball ever played happened under this sky, atop this soil.

This is the site, but I don't think the actual building, of Gus Greenlee's second version of the Crawford Grille. This is not the location of scene 4 of my opera. That happens in the original Crawford Grille, which is now covered over by the Mellon Center, a great arena that I gather more or less wrecked the Lower Hill District. Still, on this quiet, almost deserted corner, much great jazz and baseball chatter must certainly have taken place. The building's for sale now, and I wish someone would bring it - and the too-quiet surrounding neighborhood - back to life.

The numbers game lives on! But I think this version is legal (Gus Greenlee's wasn't).

In the afternoon I was the guest of Sean Gibson - Josh's great grandson and the director of the Josh Gibson Foundation - at a tailgate party put on by the Amen Corner, a venerable Pittsburgh organization (so-named, by the way, not due to any religious affiliation (this is not Rick Santorum's Amen Corner) but because they used to, and probably still do, end all their meetings by saying "Amen.") What an incredibly gracious and generous host Sean was - and what an absolute thrill it was for me to talk with him about his work and his family, and a little of my work too. This party took place in a parking field outside of PNC Ballpark, where a Pirates game would soon be played.

Here's Sean signing a shirt won by a very lucky raffle winner. It's a replica of Josh Gibson's shirt from Vera Cruz Mexico, where he played the entire 1941 season. This is now available in a collaborative production by Nike and the Josh Gibson Foundation. It's not just because a scene from the opera happens in Vera Cruz that I absolutely MUST have this jersey! Wait until you see it on me.

Here I am with the two illustrious Gibsons at the entrance to PNC Park, where they've mounted a very nice tribute to the Negro Leagues. Thanks to Sean I even got a private screening of an informative film (co-created by the same Rob Ruck who appeared early in this photo essay about Gus Geenlee and Cum Posey and their baseball legacies in Pittsburgh.

Okay people, how well do you know me? One of these players is a major character in my opera. One is my cat. And one is none of the above. Submit your guesses via the comments field and win yourself an undisclosed prize.

Oh my word I'm exhausted after all that! Good thing that, thanks to Priceline, I get to come home to one of the best hotels in town, right in the center of Downtown. Tomorrow I go to Homestead, the Heinz Center, and Josh's grave. Oh, and then Maine. Nuff said for now.

Continue to Pittsburgh trip part 2.

Now that autumn is upon us, and school’s in session and I’m planning a big research trip to Pittsburgh this weekend, I thought – what I need now is a new television show. Mom reminded me that the new Bionic Woman series, which has received its share of hype, started tonight, and so I decided to check it out. I’m that generation that remembers lying in my parents' bed, or even Omi’s, eating sliced yellow apples and watching Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner in their respective bionic person series. I even had one of those Steve Austin dolls, complete with the removable arm patch that showed all the bionic circuitry underneath. I also spent afternoons running about and making ch ch ch ch sounds. But who didn’t?

So I tuned into the Bionic Woman, and it was okay, in a sort of glad-to-know-it’s-out-there-don’t-need-to-tune-back-in kind of way. They have a couple of actors from (the far superior) Battlestar Galactica, and I guess some good special effects (but nothing really out-does ch ch ch ch), but not a compelling story or innovative style.

But dagnabit, I got sucked into the NEXT show, the 10:00 one, and A) watched my night go down the toilet and B) fell in love. My word, NBC’s Life is a terrific show – and it had a great pilot. It’s about a cop, Charlie Crews, who was framed for murder and then spent 12 years in prison getting the tar beat out of him regularly before getting exonerated. So he gets out of prison with this big settlement, part of which includes getting his old job as a cop back. And get this: while he was in prison, the way he coped? He got all zen and stuff. Like all accepting, and even at one point he says something about “the universe making fun of us.” Oh, and he’s developed these uncanny crime-fighting abilities. Not exactly super powers, but an almost preternatural intuition, and an ability to really talk to people (and sort of turn them to jelly). There’s also a sub-plot, unveiled in the pilot’s final shot, of him trying to figure out just exactly who framed him (he has this big wall of photos of likely suspects, and we get to make an important connection as the shot pans from face to face).

I guess it wouldn’t be so good if not for the performance of Damian Lewis as the screwball-zen uber detective Charlie Crews. As brought to life by Lewis, Crews is one of the most interesting television characters I’ve seen in years. He’s kind of twitchy, at peace with the world but still with some simmering inner demons, and he’s also quite funny. As he speeds around in his unmarked cop car, trying to be all zen, he tells himself “I am not becoming attached to this car.” It’s so cute. He also happily takes a bite of an apple after he watches his friend completely crush the car with a tractor late in the show. He’s so cool!

So that’s tonight’s message. Good tv to be had. Oh, and I’m betting it will probably get canceled after 4-5 episodes. Just like Daybreak, which was just as smart.

Brad Snyder’s 2003 book Beyond the Shadow of the Senators is, quite simply, the best book I’ve ever read about Negro League baseball. Since this is the stuff I think about most lately, Beyond the Shadow has slightly blown my world apart. Snyder chronicles the parallel stories of the Homestead Grays and the Washington Senators. For several years in the 1940s the Grays, a Negro League team based near Pittsburgh, played occasional weekend “home” games at the Senators’ Griffith Stadium, at times completely outclassing the park’s more regular inhabitants. Snyder’s tale is a behind-the-scenes look at the integration of Major League Baseball, with absolutely stunning, fleshed-out portrayals of some of the major players in that struggle other than Jackie Robinson. Snyder’s ability to bring to life black journalist and integration crusader Sam Lacy, or lifetime Negro Leaguer Buck Leonard (who ultimately declined Bill Veeck’s invitation to join the Major League St. Louis Browns when Leonard was 45 with wrecked knees), or slyly segregationist Senators owner and co-founder of the American League Clark Griffith stems from the fact that he (Snyder) has seemingly consulted and internalized every relevant source in the world. Normally a book whose every chapter had more than 100 footnotes would not speak to me in this way, but Snyder’s footnotes are almost as interesting as the body of his text, and just imagining the hours he must have spent crouched by microfilm readers examining old pages of the Pittsburgh Courier or the Washington Afro fills me with awe. In a genre (historical books about the Negro Leagues – if that is indeed a genre) in which the same quotations and anecdotes recur and are reprinted with regularity, there was an astounding percentage of fresh material here. And Snyder’s principal characters emerge as deeply nuanced human beings, not caricatures. Snyder tackles some of the thorniest aspects of integration – including the fate of the Negro Leagues post-Jackie Robinson, and Branch Rickey’s (the savior who signed Jackie Robinson) exploitative rading of Negro League rosters. Some of the larger insights that Snyder had to offer I have to keep to myself – as they are actually central to the theme of my opera. On that note, on page 246 of the book is a photo of Josh Gibson that I’d never seen before. Taken in 1946, when Gibson was already fading into alcoholism and frequent psychotic breaks, it captures a seemingly gaunt Josh, assuming a dramatic, kneeling pose with a bat. His body still seems to contain some power, but his face is all worry and unease, and he looks literally as though he is fading into history. Taken by Ernest Withers, it purports to be the last extant picture of the great man, and like the book that contains it, it seared me to my core. It still sends chills up and down my person as I stare at it and type this, and fills me with a renewed sense of purpose. So read this book (and look at the pictures). But please don’t then write an opera about what you’ve read. ‘k?

Today was one of those painfully beautiful Maine fall days. Painful because the autumn is but a blink of an eye here, where all the colors and foliage and fauna (whatever the heck fauna is) radiate at their brightest before abandoning all hope and falling dead to the frozen dirt for six solid months of winter. In my maturity I’m reaching a place where I can almost truly enjoy days like these without constantly returning to what it is they signify. And they signify this: summer is gone. Somehow I let it get away from me, I couldn’t stop the clock from moving forward, the days from turning slippery and sliding away. It’s okay, it’s the here and now and I’m not totally averse to that. But I do have to confess that I’m one of those people who could probably lead a pretty full life without having, say, a job, or actual responsibilities in this world. Don’t get me wrong – papa loves his work, but he also loves days like today, spent at the shore, reading about Negro League baseball, feeling the mist of the waves and free play of my imaginings, and likes many of them strung together like a necklace. And the notion that it’s gonna get cold and wet and hard and that that’s gonna last a really, really long time, is, at this moment, something of a tough pill for me to chew.

But chew it I must, so get over it I should. (thanks Yoda)

I’m gearing up for a trip to Pittsburgh – a pilgrimage of sorts. The time has come to visit Josh Gibson’s grave, and see all the various sights that are, actually, no longer there to be seen. I’ll have to channel them. Spots like Greenlee Field, the first black-owned stadium, home of the Pittsburgh Crawfords and built by Gus Greenlee. That team burned so bright from 1932 to about 1936, but by 1938 Greenlee had money trouble, the team disbanded, and they tore that stadium right down. I think there’s a housing complex there now, but I’ll stand as close as I can get and just try to listen to the whispering winds or something. I’m not sure what one does on these sorts of pilgrimages, but I hope to find out. I’ll meet with Rob Ruck, authority on black sports in Pittsburgh and author of the excellent book Sandlot Seasons, and I’ll sneak to the University of Pittsburgh’s library and try to make photocopies of the Pittsburgh Courier, the nation’s biggest black newspaper back then. All this in an effort to really put the finishing touches on the Summer King libretto. I have some new found momentum these days, and also more people waiting for the darn thing to get writ. So that’s where my head is when I’m not bemoaning the loss of summer.

I also have some plans for this website, and this blog. My dream is to create an independent, stand-alone blog, something like argh-a-blog.com, and then massage this place into a slightly more sterile and professional storehouse for all my composerly propaganda, you know? But all this stuff takes so much time. So don’t hold your breath.

Sorry for absolutely no photos lately. But I confess it’s somewhat liberating.
Peace.

Been hopping back and forth a bunch between dear old Maine and the big city. Yesterday we did a recording session at City College - a place at which I used to study, and later teach. Turns out my recording engineer was a student of mine about 5 years (or 1500 students?) ago. After the latest round of Summer King performances I wanted to capture the quality that had been going out over P.A.'s, body mics and a fake piano in more hospitable acoustic environs. The recording - which I hastily edited today in time to submit to New York City Opera's VOX program - came out quite well. I'll post it up here one of these days.

Also, the guy who assailed me on his baseball blog - Paul Moro - turned out in the end to be a pretty decent chap. To do penance, he interviewed me (via email), and submitted some really intelligent questions. It's not every day I get interviewed by someone who actually knows something (quite a bit, actually) about Josh Gibson. The interview is up and looks great - you can read it here.

Apart from that, I’m just getting settled in here for another short autumn. School has started – I’m already behind on my grading – and I’m cherishing the prospect of an entire weekend without any plans. Oh I have scads to do all right, but tomorrow morning for the first time in what feels like months I’m gonna wake up when I feel like it, saunter out for a casual run, and then figure out what burning project is burning the brightest. Also may spend a little quality time with Judy Johnson.

I’m gearing up to have something pithy and meaningful to say in this space again. Just need to get some sleep first.

Hello - now three posts in the same month! There was a time when you could count on that I know. I do what I can...

It's been a fun few weeks. Back from Serbia, I've been shuttling back and forth between Portland (home of my lovely wife Alex, my job, and my lovely cat Judy Johnson) and NYC, where I've been lucky to have three staged performances of scenes from my opera mounted in quite unusual venues. American Opera Projects has been such a huge help in the continuing creation of this work, and this week's lovely article in the back page of the Wall Street Journal, by Heidi Waleson, already seems to be helping me generate some buzz for this project. I've found myself coming up in various corners of the blogosphere - in some cases being outright assailed for my nerve in having the great Josh Gibson sing opera (I put my two cents in, you'll see), and in other quarters getting just a little love.

Today, at the Fort Green Fest in Fort Green Park, in the midst of some excellent hip hop, rock, and world music acts, AOP presented twenty minutes of the Summer King to a boisterous festival audience chewing on local cuisine and basking in the blazing September sun. I'll admit I had some moments of fear as I considered the incongruity of my genre and the general tenor (no pun intended) of the event. And at first, I could tell that audience members were perplexed at the odd spectacle of opera in the middle of all this delectable mayhem. But maybe thanks to dear, departed Lucianno, the crowd had been just a little softened for me (I mean, who hasn't heard at least a few of the King's "high C's" over the past week?) Somehow or other people seemed drawn into my piece - this strange foreign vision of opera singers and baseball bats. Ultimately it was a really great place for me to be - a kind of reality check. Because in fact, it is my absolute hope that my opera is relevant and meaningful to every member of that crowd - intelligent, worldly, and hip as they all were. If my target is just the contemporary opera audience (as intelligent, worldly, and hip as THEY of course are) then I'm aiming at a pretty exclusive club. But if I can find a way to tell a meaningful story to an audience outside an art gallery in Prospect Heights, or before a screening of Bang the Drum Slowly, or in the midst of a kicking hip-hop infused summer festival, then hopefully I'm tapping into something important. I'm not saying I've actually completely figured it out yet - and I do cherish complexity and challenge and my fair share of dissonance, the kinds of things that are sometimes forbidding to those wary of opera, contemporary art music, or both. But ultimately I think the job of the opera composer is to tell the story, completely, honestly, and from the heart. It's a genre that allows its creators to put in every ounce of their fiber, every last ounce of vocal strength or finesse or ethereal delicacy, every conducting flourish, every staging innovation, every strip of compositional fortitude. And ultimately, despite its capacity for intellectual stimulation, I think opera is emotional at its core. I can probably count on one hand the truly emotionally transcendent experiences I've had at the opera. But each one of them has been transformative in a way completely beyond the capacity of any other art form. It's probably a strange genre for one to stake all his chips on, but at this point, what choice is there?

Does what mean I'm rich? Oh, that they're writing about me in the Wall Street Journal. Alas, I'm the only guy you know written about in the opera section of the Journal (and it should follow logically, no, I'm not rich).
Anyway - have a sniff...

Hello friends - does anyone still check in at this blog? I'm checking in just to let you know I'm alive. I've been off traveling the world - including two marvelous weeks in Serbia. You can read a bit more about that here (as well as fill your jones for my inimitable blogging - and some from my South Oxford Six colleagues...)

So I had some very nice performances of my new string quartet over there, and also made some wonderful friends. I will be posting more about it on the South Oxford Speaks blog, so if you have a burning interest check there.

It's that time of year again - labor day, school starts, gotta dust off my book bag and remember my inversions etc. It's funny that I spend the whole academic year teaching music theory, and then spend all summer trying to forget it in order to write music. A little ying and yang for you, or somefin.

So I'm sitting up here at the kitchen table in my boxers, letting the sun roll over me and noticing through the autumn leaves shaking in the wind outside the very same window. Autumn here comes and goes real fast. I'm battening down the hatches for it, but before I know it we'll be sealing up the windows with that vacuum sealed saran wrap stuff, and lumbering into the old boots. Even, heaven help me, wearing socks again!

Anyways, will try to post some more, get up to speed and such. I have all sorts of ideas, but am generally bored with blogging about my day to day comings and goings. So I'll get topical, or something.

Meanwhile I've also updated the performance section, and hope to be posting some new audio very soon. Thanks for stopping by.