Words by Baynard Woods
Photos courtesy of Rhymes With Opera

Early in the spring, we walked up to Dionysus to have drinks for a friend’s birthday. At the bar, waiting for a beer, I started talking to Ruby Fulton, a short easy going woman with a button nose and a carefree attitude that often, unexpectedly, makes her seem like the smartest person in the room. We’d met before, when I was writing something about her band We Used to Be Family.  She was telling me about a blog called “How to Steal Like an Artist,” when suddenly she said “Do you want to write a libretto for an opera that’ll be performed as part of a small festival in New York in October?”

In his recent book “Triumph of the City,” Edward Glaeser argues that, as the subtitle puts it “Our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier.”  He shows how the density of people in cities allows for random encounters which in turn lead to collaborations and  these give birth to “Golden Ages” and Renaissances” in places like ancient Athens and Florence in the 1500s and Paris in the 1920a. And it’s happening all over Baltimore.

Reading Glaeser made me even more interested in this process and so I decided to examine the collaboration that I recently stumbled into.

Ruby had two ideas. One was based on the Nero Wolfe detective series “I like how he and his sidekick don’t ever really age but this infinite number of things happen to them,” she explained. The other idea came from a story she read about the drug ketamine. “They had some ketamine for a party. But hey never took it. The house burned down and the guy got out. But he couldn’t find the girl, so he went back in and almost died.” She went on to explain that he’d had this near death experience but came back. His girlfriend did not. A while later, he took the drug and relived his near death experience.

I teach Greek and Latin as a side gig and I immediately liked this. It was the Orpheus story. I wasn’t so keen on the Nero Wolfe idea because, as I told Ruby “I’d have to use someone else’s words.” But I did try to pitch a lost in time idea where Nero Wolfe and his sidekick are really the Emperor Nero and the philosopher Seneca. Seneca had been the insane emperor’s teacher and adviser and took part in a plot against him. Nero sentenced him to death but allowed him to kill himself. Seneca lay in a tub with all his friends around and slit his wrists. My idea was that within that moment, these two players kept getting sucked out of their own time and dropped into the middle of these mysteries. She didn’t dig it, but we both liked the ketamine idea.

Problem was, neither of us had ever done ketamine, a psychoactive drug synthesized to replace PCP. We’re both very much law-abiding citizens these days, but we’re also committed to our crafts and felt we should have some idea what we were talking about. In my younger days– far back beyond all statutes of limitations– I experimented with nearly anything I could get my hands on but was a little too old to have the ketamine experience. But alas, we couldn’t get ahold of any and neither of us were willing to go down to Lexington Market and whisper “special k,” so we decided to wing it.

The other problem was that the opera had been accepted to Artscape. That meant we had very little time.

And though my objection to Wolfe had been an aversion to using someone else’s words, I used only about five words of my own. As I understood it, opera was invented as an attempt to revive the “total art” of Greek tragedy. I’d recently been teaching a lot of tragedy and I saw the themes everywhere in classical literature. For parts that I deemed choral, I used fragments from classical literature to create the transcendent experience of near death and drugs: the underworld. For the other parts, I took a mixture of early modernist literature– Elliot, Joyce, Rimbaud, Proust, and Hemingway– and cut them up to tell the story of the drunken party, the fire, the realization upon “coming back” that his girlfriend was dead, and the depression that followed.  It is a work of acoustic sampling.

I gave this big unwieldy text to Ruby who cut it up and layered it and composed music for it. “Having all of the different writers was interesting musically. They were from different places and times and I gave each one a note that comes back every time the text comes back to the writer. But the other cool thing that really happened by chance was that when I came over to have you record the Greek and the Latin it sounded great. I never would have thought to use them like that.” She cut up the recordings and layered them and used them as the rhythm.

When I saw Ruby’s score, I was astounded by what she was able to do with what I gave her. Neither of us could have completed the project– this project at least– without the chance encounter at Dionysus– rather appropriate for an art trying to revive tragedy.

In the meantime, my neighbor, Chris Schaeffer finished a large partially abstract painting of Pandora’s jar that fit the themes perfectly. I showed it to Ruby and she decided it would be the backdrop, adding another layer to the accidental purposefulness of collaboration. And I’ve left out all of Ruby’s regular Rhymes with Opera collaborators, with whom she’s practicing right now.

I’ve still not heard the music. I will be watching KETAMYTH with whatever crowd Artscape brings into the Corpus Christi church Saturday, July 16th, at 6:00 p.m. But you can see a video of it here at http://www.rhymeswithopera.org/.

Words by Baynard Woods
Photos courtesy of Rhymes With Opera