Tyler Cowen: preference

Transcript context

…Oh, writing an opera is hard no matter what. I once said to the great architect Frank Gehry, “You’re lucky you can farm out the electrical and the plumbing and the concrete to someone else, but we composers, we have to do everything.” In this case, I did the libretto, the vocal writing, the sketching, and the instrumentation, and I even did the computer setting of the full score. I was at this for pretty much four years. If I think about Verdi’s Shakespeare operas, it feels to me they require near-perfect performances. I love James Levine doing Otello, but a lot of other recordings don’t quite work for me, or I love von Karajan doing Falstaff, but everything has to be perfect. Are you worried that with your opera, the combination of Shakespeare, the complex musical, all the roles, that it will be nearly impossible for other people to do it as well as, in essence, you’re doing it now? For lack of a better word, I write classical music. And the term classical music, of course, has an odor for younger people because they associate it with older music or older people. But it’s actually a very thrilling thing to do because, when you write a score, you are essentially making a recipe for something, and it changes with every performance. It’s not like a recording by a pop group that’s always going to be the same. Hence, every different iteration of a work of mine is different. Different singers and different conductors and different violinists — they give a completely new point of view on something. The pieces are constantly being reborn.…

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