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On
June 22, 2025, the
Alliance for New
Music-Theatre held a
recital for the 15
participants of a
two-week workshop
entitled
Composer-Librettist
Studio that involved
writing words and music
for one or more singers
to perform. At the
invitation of poet
Nathalie Anderson, one
of the five librettists
of this project, the
Steiny Road Poet, along
with her opera partner
Janet Peachey, attended
the recital held at the
University of the
District of Columbia in
Washington, DC. The
group of 15 included
five composers, five
librettists, and five
singers. With each
assignment, a new
pairing of composer and
librettist occurred.
Anderson, who is an
accomplished librettist
having premiered
several operas with
composer Thomas
Whitman, agreed to a
July 9th, 2025,
interview to provide
insight into this
demanding workshop.
Written in
Anderson’s
words, the
detailed descriptions
of the five projects
clearly reveal that
each participant needed
a certain level of
experience. This was
not a workshop for
beginners.
The New Music-Theatre Assignments
1. Regular
Rhythms and Operative
Words. This
assignment asked us to
create formally regular
rhythmic lines, aiming
at iambic
pentameter. We
were asked to make note
of the stresses,
noticing especially
when they departed from
the iambic norm; and we
were asked to provide
and identify an
"operative"
word -- crucially
significant -- in each
line. The
composer's task was
then to work with and
around the formal
rhythm to convey
natural speech
patterns, and to
emphasize the
operatives to convey
emotion. We were
given NO guidelines on
topics or
situations. Each
team worked with one
singer.
According to Anderson,
no one did this
assignment exactly as
stated. She herself
usually avoids writing
in traditional forms
and instead aims at
producing words and
phrases that create
rhythmic patterns. What
she learned from this
exercise was that
complicated vocabulary
can be hard for singers
to pronounce. This was
particularly so for
their assigned singer
Ruslan Bondar, a
Ukrainian baritone new
to singing solos in
English. One
interesting aspect of
working with this
singer was he had an
ability to sing
falsetto. This added
extra texture and
emotional load to
Anderson’s story
of “Petty
Professor
Curenton.”
2. Plot
Beats. This
assignment drew on
exercises using
story-boarding to
visualize the
"plot" of
"Jack and
Jill." We
were asked to imagine a
situation involving two
people. One
person is in a
particular place.
A second person comes
in. Things
progress. We were
encouraged to create a
plot with perhaps five
"beats,"
marking stages in the
story. The
composer's task was
to mark those plot
developments with
appropriate musical
changes. Each team worked with two singers.
Anderson’s story
for this assignment
entitled “Blood
Tells” dealt with
two vampires who did
not immediately
recognize that the
other was also a
vampire. The musical
elements included blues
and Eastern European
waltz. The singers were
Bondar, whose Slavic
accent was perfect for
a role as vampire, and
Roz White, a graduate
of the Duke Ellington
School of the Arts and
a former student there
of Janet Peachey's.
The Dresser was
particularly impressed
with White's blues
performance. Anderson
expects that the
playful vampire subject
matter will make it
more likely that this
piece will go on to
other performances.
3. "Piano
Bench"
assignment: The
composers were asked to
come prepared with two
contrasting musical
phrases. For an
extended time -- maybe
15 minutes, though I
remember it as longer
-- the composer was to
play and replay those
pieces for the
librettist, not just
serenading, but
"noodling"
around -- taking the
chords apart,
reconfiguring the
phrases in various
ways. The
librettist was to
listen but not
comment. Later
that day, the pair met
again, heard the
phrases again, and
talked through various
possibilities suggested
by the music. So,
although the librettist
wasn't setting
words for the
particular melodies,
the trajectory for the
project came from the
music to the words, and
then back to the music
again. Each team
worked with one singer.
This assignment required the composer to come prepared with
two contrasting musical phrases. Most song/aria writing starts
with the words first which are then set to music. To the Steiny
Road Poet’s ear, this assignment didn’t produce very memorable
results, though she liked Anderson’s lyrics for “Blighted.”
Anderson found the overall pieces more satisfying, particularly a
song by another composer and librettist team which posed a
lyrical pastoral theme with the driving rhythms of a contemporary
subway ride. Greg Watkins, bass, the singer assigned to Anderson
and her composer was another accomplished graduate of the
Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
4. Political assignment: For this assignment, each team
worked with an ensemble -- either two singers or three. One
of the singers in each group was assigned as the singers'
representative. That singer and the librettist and composer were
each asked to bring to the group a photograph representing
something crucially important to them personally -- implicitly
something political, though of course EVERYTHING is political.
The group's first task was to find a way of bringing all three
photographs into some sort of synthesis. We were asked (I'm
half-quoting, half-summarizing here) to hone a one-sentence
theme statement to serve as a spine for the narrative
structure—all characters, events, and beats should be connected
to and driven by this theme.
This assignment seemed complicated by the number of people
involved and the requirement that a photo of personal importance
from three different people be amalgamated into one overarching
theme. However, in the opinions of Anderson and Steiny, the
results produced satisfying performances of all five works.
Possibly that was because, by the fourth assignment, the overall
group of 15 had momentum from their previous experiences.
Anderson found that this assignment lent itself to compelling
anthem-like pieces, particularly as writing for ensembles added
voice to voice.
5. Commissioning the Theater Song": For this assignment, each
team was asked to create a version of the "32-bar AABA theater
song" -- that is, following a formula telling a dramatic story in
four quatrains. We were asked to follow a regular structure --
perhaps some version of an Emily Dickinson hymn-based
quatrain -- where the rhythm and rhyme patterns of the first two
stanzas and the final stanza are identical, and the third stanza
creates a structural contrast. Examples included "Anything Goes
," "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," and "Send in the Clowns" --
none of which follow the required pattern exactly! Composers
were warned that scores "must be no more than three pages in
length."
But this assignment had a further component: each singer
"commissioned" a song that they'd like to perform. They were
asked to identify a character, a setting, a situation, a mood, and
a decision or event that changes things. The teams interviewed
or consulted with their singer for about a half an hour, and then
each team also met with the organizers to report and reflect on
their assignment.
The results from the final assignment were a tour de force. Was it
because of the formula, the accumulated experience bolstered by
the two weeks in which composers, librettists, and singers had
struggled together and deeply learned how to collaborate with
each other, or some combination of these factors? The assignment
encouraged the writing teams towards lyricism and wit, and the
singers’ investment in the project made for particularly moving
performances.
This program capped the third annual Composer-Librettist
Studio. Refer to the Alliance for New Music-Theatre website https://www.newmusictheatre.org in early January for
information on how to apply for the next Composer-Librettist
Studio. Hats off to the co-facilitators Susan Galbraith, who kept
the three-hour program moving forward, and music director
Sonja Thompson. Thompson was amazing in her ability to
instantly adapt her piano accompaniment to each set of
performances and appear not only ready but enthusiastic without
a trace of fatigue.
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Writings
