SHEPHERD SCHOL COMPOSER CELEBRATES 'THE BIRTH OF SOMETHING'

Office of News and Media Relations
Jennifer Evans
Media Relations Specialist
Email: jevans@rice.edu

For months, Anthony Brandt has been like an expectant father, preparing, anticipating and worrying as the big day approaches. Finally, it’s time.

Tomorrow night, the Rice University associate professor of composition will welcome to the world his new “baby,” the chamber opera “The Birth of Something.”

After a yearlong gestation, the work will make its world premiere at 8 p.m. Feb. 24 in a concert presented by Da Camera of Houston at Zilkha Hall, Hobby Center for the Performing Arts.

Da Camera, a local organization known for its imaginative programming connecting chamber music and arts, approached Brandt to compose a work, and he saw the opportunity to pursue a dream: exploring chamber opera, an underdeveloped form that is smaller and more intimate than its larger operatic brother.

He set off researching the genre and searching for a librettist, the wordsmith who would craft a story Brandt could set to music. He was seeking a writer who could create a story specifically for this project, but who also understood the challenges of writing a libretto.

Music draws the spoken word out threefold, Brandt said, so the writer would be on a tight rhetorical budget.

He contacted famed playwright Edward Albee for advice. His recommendation was the up-and-coming playwright Will Eno.

Albee has described Eno’s work as “inventive, disciplined and, at the same time, wild and evocative,” and the New York Times called him “a Samuel Becket for the Jon Stewart generation.”

A finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, nominated for his critically acclaimed off-Broadway play “Thom Paine (based on nothing),” Eno was exactly what Brandt was looking for.

Working almost entirely by e-mail — they met only once — the Brooklyn playwright and the Rice composer kicked ideas back and forth. Finally, Eno said he had come up with something new but predicted that Brandt would hate it.

Eno was wrong; Brandt loved it.

“It was Eno’s voice perfectly,” Brandt said.

Two characters, a man and a woman, find themselves in an opera and proceed bravely through love scenes, death scenes and domestic scenes on their way toward self-recognition. The characters struggle with the nature of reality, each wishing to be grander than they actually are — noble, for example, or heroic — and each bringing the other back to a “the dog needs to be walked” reality.

Brandt scored the piece for two voices, string quartet and percussion and described the finished work as a 35-minute, five-act “kind of experimental” chamber opera.

“All the acts are very episodic and very short, about five minutes for most of them,” he said. “In fact, the first act is only four lines long:

‘It’s a boy!’

‘And so it is!’

‘Wait, I’m wrong. It’s a girl.’

‘Well, whichever; it’s a start.’”

The 17-minute third act is where most of the music is and where the opera is really fleshed out, Brandt said, adding that part of this exploration was figuring out what it takes for a work to be an opera.

“Any time you write, you want to feel that the words come to life only if they have music with them,” he said. “When it becomes musical, when the words are sung, it comes alive.”

Breathing life into “The Birth of Something” will be Shepherd School alumna Andrea Moore, percussionist; the Enso String Quartet, Rice’s quartet-in-residence; Michael Chioldi, baritone; and Karol Bennett, soprano — and Brandt’s wife.

“That’s always been part of the dream too,” Brandt said. “To write something really theatrical for her.”

The months of work were challenging — particularly since he was teaching at the same time — but also a wonderful growth experience.

“One thing that I love about collaboration is that it forces you outside of yourself,” he said. “It forces you to stretch, and you discover new capacities and new ways to express yourself.”

Brandt has been a faculty member at the Shepherd School since 1998, racking up honors that include a commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation of the Library of Congress in 2000; composing the score for the nationally aired PBS documentary “Crucible of the Millennium”; serving as composer-in-residence for OrchestraX of Houston; and receiving fellowships from the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Tanglewood Music Festival and two from the MacDowell Colony.

Most recently, Brandt received a $7,500 grant from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston/Harris County to compose a piece for the Houston Chamber Choir.

“The Birth of Something” is sponsored in part by the Humphreys Foundation. For tickets, call 713-524-5050 or visit DaCamera Houston.