Our Own Lives - an Opera in One Act

As I predicted in Writer's Block, I knew I would enjoy this piece... but MY GOD!!! You did this in HOW long??? I never cease to be amazed. I cannot wait for the live recording (?)!

We opened the opera this past Thursday, to fantastic reception. A live recording was made tonight, and we close tomorrow. I will post up the live recording on my Soundclick once it's all mixed and mastered.

Thank you very much! Hope you enjoyed the performance!

THE LIVE RECORDING IS HERE!!!

It's not the greatest - we only had a month to write the thing as well as rehearse and perform it. That said - it's pretty damn good, despite the weird acoustics of the space. Please listen - it's all one track, and it won't take more than a half-hour of your time - and comment!

THE LINK:
Our Own Lives - March 15th, 2008 - Oberlin College

Just listened through the first half of the live recording - great!!
I'm really psyched that this has worked out for you - it's a very respectable recording.
The style itself is very 'musicals', but whatever - it works.
Some good jokes - one or two awkward ones, but the timing and writing of the "oh, only the hottest guy in school" was brilliant!
Molly Tits Magee .
Great - well done. I will listen to the rest later. (Btw, was it you introducing this?)

It is me introducing it. Our opening night performances had about 7 people each, but then both Friday performances (the ones recorded) and Saturday afternoon were sold out.

That's a fine job you did there! Kudos!

This is a great piece, it's just such a shame the singers (who had beautiful voices, by the way) had such insecure intonation.

I think I see a number of spots where you get a sense that there wasn't quite enough time given for the "acting" to happen... the singers seem to rush to catch up to the music. With a tiny rewrite the bumps could easily be fixed.

This sort of thing happens mostly where the singers had spoken interjections. They rush to catch up and start singing again.

There are a few spots where I don't particularly like the prosody... a bit too "pop song"-ish. I prefer a more natural spoken rhythm.

I love the harmony, it works beautifully. I think the instrumentation could use a tiny bit more subtlety. The whole "chordal" piano part gets a tiny bit stale as the piece advances.


This is a great beginning, I hope you get the chance to rework it and get a performance with singers who are more up to the task.

This is wonderful. Unfortunately the live recording's too quiet on my crappy speakers but I'd listened to the whole thing with Notepad before I noticed you'd performed it live lol.

I can't really comment technically except to say that I absolutely love your sense of humour: the comic timing in the music is great at many of the funny parts, and it's not overstated so much that we feel we're being force-fed the humour. I love it, and I love the Waltzing Matilda idea. I think in many ways I prefer this colloquial, slightly more populist style of word-setting to lots of contemporary opera (and Britten, for example) - it just feels so homely and real, fitting the feel of the text immensely well and creating two very real characters. A couple of places I thought the lines could have been improved, and made slightly less samey, by some modulation, keeping the shape of the melody, but varying it a little for the ear (I'll post some bar numbers another time if you like). But overall, I was very impressed and would love to hear more. And it really is a monumental piece of work to produce in 30-whatever days. Well done!

Thank you very much! I'll pass along your compliments on the text to my librettist - I'm sure she'll love to hear it.

I too enjoy a more populist style of text setting when the drama seems to call for it, and this one certainly does.