From the PhD supervision

The one here is the one which breaks with the convention of stresses in the original text.

After discovering a few weeks ago that in 2013 an opera was made of “The Masque of the Read Death” I looked for any online interviews about the work. Cecilia Livingston, on being asked “Please talk about the challenges in creating your adaptation of the story” answered: “The principal challenge in adapting Poe’s Masque to the requirements of drama, and opera specifically, is that Poe’s work typically has very little dialogue or ready-made mise en scene.”
(taken from https://barczablog.com/2013/10/14/10for_cecilialivingston/ accessed on 15/05/23)

She is also asked “What do you love about Poe and especially his story The Masque of the Red Death?” to which she answers: “I have mixed feelings about Poe as a writer, but as a provider of dramatic material with operatic potential, he has left a great legacy.”

These two quotes from this interview have been the difficulty I have found in the process of adapting Poe. It is dramatic and therefore suited to being staged, but finding text you can extract from the source material into something suitable for a libretto I have found very difficult. Since Poe returns often to the same themes it was quite easy finding poems of his which were suitable for adapting into the libretto.

Below is a video clip of Livingston's opera where The Red Death appears. The libretto seems more narrative and there seems to be space in the sung material for mime and choreography.

In the Edgar Allan Poe poem "Alone" Poe writes in iambic tetrameter meaning there is an even pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables which I always find a problem since the style of the music for the rest of the opera is striving to changing meters in the music. I'm looking to break up the evenness of the stresses in the poem with changing time signatures, while still making sure to keep the stresses of the original poem in the "correct" place. Here are the first few lines of text set to music and focusing only on the role of the singer.

In my original proposal for PhD I had mentioned trying to use "non-lexical vocables" which are inspired by the band The Cocteau Twins use of an "invented language" to use which services the music (rather than text being set to music). In order to generate vocables in the style of The Cocteau Twins I asked chat GPT to generate some, It took a while to give the right prompts to the Artificial Intelligence but, eventually, it came up with something close to what I was looking for. Below is a link to the conversation which led there. Below that is how I set (as a hocket) the text the AI gave me.

A pdf of the chat i with the AI can be found HERE

Here is a setting of the extracted text where I have tried to connect all the words I've chosen from Poe to make into a drinking song for the chorus which has phrases of equal length. Below is a picture of an extract from the piece and below that is a link to the pdf of the full score.

Click HERE for the pdf copy.

I'm attempting to find poetic couplings in the original text and freely adapting them to create some kind of meter. Below I have colour coded which lines might similar in poetic character and, anything in red, are lines I have decided I don't need and I'm cutting.

following on from the task in the last blog post where I was trying to extract enough from the original story to make a libretto. I, this week, am trying to extract enough from the original text to make something lyrical enough to be an aria. Again you will see me trying to reduce the amount of words by cutting out the parallelism.