The MasterVoices Podcast
Part oral history, part entertainment, and part education, the show will invite a diverse range of masterful voices to explore subjects ranging from music and language to history and culture.
The MasterVoices Podcast is a project of the New York City nonprofit MasterVoices (originally The Collegiate Chorale), whose mission is using the human voice to connect, inspire, and unite. Founded in 1941 by Robert Shaw, the Chorale was one of the first integrated choruses in the United States.
Learn more at www.mastervoices.org.
The MasterVoices Podcast
Blind Injustice - Ep 1: In Their Own Words (and Music)
Blind Injustice, receiving its NYC premiere by MasterVoices in February 2025, tells the stories of six people wrongfully convicted and incarcerated, serving 117 years behind bars before their release and exoneration. In this episode, composer Scott Davenport Richards and librettist David Cote speak with host and fellow composer Randall Eng - whose Remain was premiered by MasterVoices in 2018 - about how the opera developed. Their deep dives into specific scenes and songs will enhance your listening experience - whether live at Rose Theater or on the Fanfare Cincinnati recording!
- What opera can do, beyond “what is should be”.
- Each story could have been an opera of its own… feedback from exonerees helped shape the music and words.
- The Chorus as a character - the jury, the world, the system, the prisoners, the mob.
- Getting the Job Done
- What Makes a Person…
- 5/4, asymmetry, and broken people
- Musical styles that represent all the peoples of the United States. Listen for echoes of Sesame Street, 90s New Jack, PBS, and Go-Go (the official music of Washington DC)
- Deep dives into the richly textured numbers “Blind Spot,” “Wonder of Forensics” and more!
RANDALL ENG is an award-winning composer of opera, music-theatre, and works in between. He is Resident Composer and full-time faculty member at New York University’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program; his operas Florida (libretto by Donna DiNovelli) and Henry’s Wife (libretto by Alexis Bernier) were highly praised in presentations at New York City Opera’s VOX festival, the Public Theater’s New Work Now! Festival, Lyric Opera Cleveland, the Shaw Festival, Galapagos Arts Space, and Metropolis Opera, among others. http://randalleng.com/
SCOTT DAVENPORT RICHARDS has been commissioned by New York’s Public Theater, Signature Theatre (Virginia), and others. His operas A Star Across the Ocean—Paris 1965 featuring Chuck Cooper, and Charlie Crosses the Nation, An Opera in Jazz Idiom, were featured in New York City Opera’s Vox Festival. He has written several play-scores and children’s works; as an actor he originated the role of Sylvester in the original Broadway Production of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and assisted his father, Lloyd Richards, in the origination of three other Wilson works. scottdavenportrichards.com
DAVID COTE is a playwright, opera librettist, and arts journalist. Previous operas include Three Way (Nashville Opera and BAM); The Scarlet Ibis (Prototype); and 600 Square Feet (Cleveland Opera Theater). Plays include The Müch, Saint Joe and Aristotle Punches Down (O’Neill National Playwrights Conference semi-finalist). The longest-serving theater editor and chief drama critic of Time Out New York, he is the author of popular companion books about Broadway hits including Moulin Rouge!, Spring Awakening, and Wicked. davidcote.com/
The MasterVoices Podcast is a project of the New York City nonprofit MasterVoices (previously The Collegiate Chorale), whose mission is using the human voice to connect, inspire, and unite. Founded in 1941 by Robert Shaw, the Chorale was one of the first integrated choruses in the United States.
Learn more at www.mastervoices.org.
Hello and welcome to the Master Voices podcast, where we invite a diverse range of masterful voices to explore subjects ranging from music and language to history and culture.
Speaker 2:This pod is a project of the New York City non-profit Master Voices, formerly known as the Collegiate Chorale, which, then as now, is dedicated to the unique power of the human voice to connect, unite and inspire.
Speaker 2:Over the next few episodes, we're exploring the extraordinary opera Blind Injustice, which tells the stories of six men, women and teens who were wrongfully incarcerated, spent decades in prison and were finally exonerated thanks to the hard work of the Ohio Innocence Project. In our first episode, guest host Randall Ng, a composer and Master Voices collaborator, sits down with the composer and librettist of Blind Injustice, scott Davenport Richards and David Cody. Together, they dive into the process of writing Blind Injustice, what it means to tell the real and often harrowing stories of living, breathing people who were very much a part of the show's creation, and what to expect from the new Master Voices production. We hope that this series on blind injustice will allow you to share our love for this truly exceptional work. Music excerpts heard in this episode are from the 2019 Cincinnati Opera live recording, used with permission from the composers. And now, without further ado, sit back and enjoy the Master Voices podcast.
Speaker 3:Scott and David. Welcome, hi, randall. I'm so excited to be talking to both of you about this piece, which I've been knowing about for a long time, and I've known both of you individually for a very long time. I saw this piece at Montclair Skate State and was blown away by it. It's an incredibly powerful piece with a very lush and varied score, and I'm thrilled that it's happening in New York now. So let's start by just I'll ask you how are you feeling?
Speaker 2:about this.
Speaker 3:What does it mean to you to be doing this now?
Speaker 4:I mean I'll start since David didn't jump in. I mean, basically, I'm terribly excited. I mean the idea that Master Voices is doing this and doing this on the scale that I imagined in my years might be possible but thought would be difficult to actually achieve with 120 voices, and I'm really looking to hearing that happen in and in the Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center, which is an amazing room. It's acoustically wonderful and we're going to have this wall of chorus at the back of the stage and I'm really excited to hear that it's going to be something.
Speaker 5:Eugene is free. He's walking through the gates. Eugene is free.
Speaker 6:I can breathe, eugene is free, I can see.
Speaker 7:God, all the colors dancing in my sun. Eugene is free Dancing in my song. I'm also the idea of being able to share this with New York audiences, and the piece in such good shape as it is, because Ted knows the score so well now and can embrace the theatricality of it, the momentum of it. It's a piece that I think moves very fast. I think it's going to be great because the audience will see that it's not just a traditional opera, whatever that is. It's a mixture of theater and opera and documentary. There's about 40% of the libretto is taken from interviews with the exonerees, and so I think that it's going to be exciting to show what opera can do when it exists on a continuum of music theater, and that it's not just trying to replicate some European idea of what an opera should be. So again, I think New York audiences will really appreciate that.
Speaker 3:How do you feel like the piece reads today? It premiered when 2019. So 2019 in Cincinnati, and then Montclair was last year.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 3:Okay, so this is the third time it's being put up.
Speaker 4:Yes, there was a version in Colorado as well.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay, and the size of the chorus was smaller to begin.
Speaker 4:Yes, smaller to begin, yes, we began. Well, the whole piece was began as a commission by a Cincinnati Opera and the Young Professionals Chorus of Cincinnati, and so they were part of the original commissioners. So it was conceived of as in a choral way to begin with, and after meeting the chorus and meeting I as a composer realized, oh, we really need to write some music for the chorus as a character, because one it's there, it's big, it's important and the character of the society in which this injustice exists is a huge character and it needs to be present in the piece in a big way.
Speaker 7:Yeah, even though it's about the criminal justice system and these horrible miscarriages of justice, we don't have any. We have no courtroom scenes. In the opera there's a prosecutor and a defense, sort of archetypal figures who go back and forth and argue. But you know, in a sense the audience is the jury, but also we have this mega jury, I guess, of the chorus members. In a sense so it's going to be. Is it like 24 member chorus in Cincinnati?
Speaker 4:In Cincinnati it was about 30, and around 24 in Montclair.
Speaker 3:I think one of the most powerful things about this piece is the way that the well, the choral writing in general, but also the way that the chorus is sometimes used as kind of to represent the system and sometimes used to represent kind of a broader sense of who these individuals are. I mean, the end of the piece is just a knockout. So and you said that it was a Cincinnati youth course, scott, is that what you said?
Speaker 4:The Young Professionals Choral Collective that's it in Cincinnati, which is an organization sort of like Master Voices in Cincinnati, in that it's people from the community who want to sing choral music and choral rap and want to stretch what they do.
Speaker 3:I'll say, from my own experience of working with Master Voices, the most powerful thing about that experience was getting to work with a chorus that was made up of people from a wide range of backgrounds who had a wide range of views on what the topic was. So, moving now to this very much larger group of people, with this range of ages as well, what are you thinking about in terms of the differences of how you did this before and and what this larger version means to you?
Speaker 4:well, to uh, to me it means uh, larger, because the um, what we really get the sound, uh, when, when you have the chorus shouting guilty, guilty, uh, then it will be. It will be the mob that's actually coming for these characters and we will have that effect in the room. This is going to shake. I haven't heard it in the room yet, but this should be shaking the room.
Speaker 8:Two counts of rape by force. What threat of force? Saloni is a cult.
Speaker 1:Two terms of life imprisonment. Salome, salome.
Speaker 4:Salome. The nice thing about the orchestration is one thing I've noticed in orchestrating as soon as you add a drum set to the band, you have to amplify the voices, and so we will have a sound system and we will have the ability. And it's a 12 person band and it was orchestrated in a way so that the chorus can fill up the middle. So there are three violins and a cello. Ordinarily you might think, oh, I have a string quartet so I can cover the middle, but this way we can actually have the violins playing high notes up top and it doesn't sound too squeaky. The chorus fills out the middle like the bass, trombone, bass, clarinet and bass fill out the bottom and between that and the chorus it manages to sound really huge. And that's just a little technical orchestration choice for the whole piece.
Speaker 7:I think for any chorus member too, it's an incredible range of modes that they get to sing in in terms of what their function is in the opera. I mean, the very opening is this weave of place names, because I wanted to start the piece with the names of the towns where the people were accused of committing crimes they didn't, or where the crimes took place and the wrong person was accused, and also the places where there are penitentiaries and prisons. So to weave all these Ohio place names into a kind of choral, I don't know kind of incantatory choral opening, because of course all these cases took place in the state of Ohio. So somehow I wanted the land, the towns to be invoked at the beginning and that's just one kind of lyrical section. And then of course you have male members of the chorus, mostly playing prisoners, who threaten and sort of verbally harass Claren in the piece.
Speaker 4:I would say there's a very harrowing David's talking about a very harrowing scene when Clarence is in prison and the other prisoners are threatening to set him on fire and Mark had to really warn Clarence who the actual Clarence was going to attend. And Mark had to actually send him the demo as a trigger warning first so that he wouldn't be confronting this initially and to come into a room and suddenly be faced with this, so that he could prepare Wow. And he really did need that because the real event was so, so, completely harrowing for him.
Speaker 3:Well, let's talk about that a little bit now. So the genesis of the project is that you had these stories, you had a lot of stories right to choose from and you were in touch with some of the people that this was with all the people that you chose, right Right, we did interviews with all six people involved in the four cases, as well as Mark.
Speaker 1:Godsey, of course.
Speaker 7:How did you? Those are new interviews that we just sort of yeah that we drew a lot of material out of.
Speaker 7:I'm curious about the structure of the piece and how you came up about the choices of which stories you're going to tell and what order you were going to tell it, and how you could relate the different individual stories to each other.
Speaker 7:Well, mark, you know, kind of brought the four cases you know, nancy, nancy Smith, clarence Elkins, the East Cleveland Three and Ricky Jackson and he brought those to us as cases that he thought would be the most dramatic, and they were. You know, as I always say, each one of these stories could have been a full length opera on its own, and so, but so there was a wealth of wealth of information to go with. So how do I it's a it's the structure of the opera is telling, telling all four cases in a very it's obviously a very abbreviated fashion because it's a 90 minute opera. We're trying to talk about the flaws in the, in the system, with forensics, with, with eyewitness testimony, as well as talking about their cases and how they eventually were exonerated. It's a lot of material. So it's necessarily kind of like this each individual has their own story, but they go on a group journey from beginning to end in the opera, from their lives being taken away from them to being exonerated at the end. So it's episodic, I guess.
Speaker 4:Just to answer your question, it's a very episodic piece that goes between first person narrative from the exonerees to sections that are more, that are invention, but they're informative and Robin, as they were putting this all together was the way they found we have these six individual people, four cases, but with all of them there were commonalities between their experience with the justice system, and so we could. So this is just one example of the way this works, at the end of Clarence being, when Clarence says they put me in the hole. And then we transition from Clarence's being thrown into the hole and then we experience Larissa's experience of the hole when he sings the hole, experience of the whole when he sings the whole. So because of the common narrative of a prisoner's move through the justice system, it allows us to almost tell one story with all the same characters, and I think that is something that David found really brilliantly.
Speaker 3:Robin Guarino, your director and colleague in this work. So was the structure set before Scott started writing music? It seems like the kind of piece that is modular enough that some music could be written and then affect what the structure ends up being.
Speaker 7:Yeah, I mean the interview. They sort of they wanted to fast track, just doing the interviews and getting the material first. So, you know, robin and I interviewed the exonerees that really pop and can be dramatized. What are the pieces of information from Mark's book, also called Blinded Justice, can we extrapolate and feed to the audience? Yeah, so we had a structure and we had a draft of the libretto that we brought to Scott because we needed to find the exact right composer who could do this, who could be, I don't know, versatile enough and have dramatic chops and also write music that was appealing and varied and would drive the story forward. And so, you know, I was very scared when I sent him the draft of the you know libretto because I was like, okay, he might be like, no, it doesn't appeal to me, or you know.
Speaker 4:And I said, no, no, this is my thing, this is. I felt like I knew exactly how to do this, and one of the nice things that I really liked is that David and Robin wanted a range of styles that represented the United States and represented all the peoples of the United States. So that, which is something that's very, very close to my heart, and I don't like being limited in that way the and I mean from my point of view I look at, look at music as there's an element of design. You design based on a place, you design based on a character. You design based on a character. You design based on a place you design based on a character, you design based on a character's wants.
Speaker 4:They were eager to hear a bunch of different styles, but then the difficulty is how do you not make it pastiche and how does the change in style not take you out of the moment and take you out of the character? So I think the trick to that is by being consistent in motive through all the different styles, make sure that the motives are all based in a character and in a character's need. So when we first meet the prosecutor, he's introduced by a bass figure in 5-4. Like bum, bum ba-dum, boo-doo-doo-dum bum ba-dum.
Speaker 5:What makes a person a criminal? What makes a person An expert's? Got a hundred soft answers, but not one good, hard one. How's this? They're bad guys Sick, broken, suspected, diseased, human garbage.
Speaker 4:And me. I'm your garbage man. So from my point of view he's a broken person. He's a person who walks asymmetrically and he's a person who and that asymmetry is there in the 5-4. Then that's shared by Ricky when he is in prison later and he's broken and that same motive is taken and moves the other way and instead of a downward motion of the figure, it goes upward.
Speaker 8:The following morning we were taken to the obligatory lineup. We were never actually pointed out as the perpetrators by this kid that was supposed to have seen us commit crime Edward Vernon, 13 at the time. He was thrown to fantasies. He banished a lot of stuff or just made enough. He's got the goods.
Speaker 4:That's how you do it. Come back, we have there's the number Getting the Job Done, which is all the prosecutors singing. How they look at their point of view is I need to get this job done. And they sing justice, getting the job done. And the rhythm of that then becomes the bass is the rhythm for pieces all the way through, as they're all being thrown in jail. The basses are playing do-do-do-dum-bum, and so that in our minds we think we remember, or we subconsciously remember, that lyric getting the job done, getting the job done. So that even though the styles might be changing, the actual musical material is consistent all the way through.
Speaker 7:And we remember those lyrics as we're hearing it. Thank you, it's not done, it's not done, it's not done, it's not done, it's not done, it's not done, it's not done. Scott referred to the scene called Guilty, which is where the exonerees are. They recite the crimes that they were, you know, falsely convicted with and, yeah, getting the job done, sort of like grinding under it as the chorus comes in with saying guilty in a hair-raising accusation. And I remember I don't know if we talked about this, but it's like a meat grinder, it's like this machinery is grinding, getting the job. I can't say it. It's like this kind of machine that's eating people up and it's just terrifying, it's terrible.
Speaker 8:Murder, 15 to life, and it's just terrifying.
Speaker 7:It's terrible, and I will say in terms of the pattern. Obviously you strive for patterns as well or motives. In terms of words, the first line of the opera is you know what makes a person, and it's the prosecutor. So it's basically what makes a person rape, what makes a person kill. You know what makes a person. I mean it's the prosecutor, so it's basically what makes a person rape, what makes what makes a person kill.
Speaker 5:You know what makes a person a criminal what makes a person rape a grandmother and flood in her to death and blooding her to death, then rape and beat the six year old girl in the next room? What makes a person throw acid in a stranger's face, kick him four times with a pipe, shoot him in the head? What makes a person molest little kids? What? Makes a person kill a stranger in the street like a dog.
Speaker 7:And then the end of the last thing, of course, is Alicia, a law student who works with the Ohio Innocence Project, who's asking you know, what makes a person strong enough to endure injustice, strong enough to endure injustice? So it's like this arc of questioning people but also very flawed.
Speaker 1:What makes a person, what makes a person strong enough? What makes a person strong enough? And I'll sing it out to you.
Speaker 3:It's a kind of closed question at the top and then an open-ended question at the end. For me and it's similar to what they're talking about, scott, which there's so much kind of connecting material that really makes this thing feel like not, I mean, I spoke about it as like something that could be modular but feels like something that is very unified because of how the score, both textually and musically, is kind of always reminding us of how things are kind of like, you know, interrelating with each other, us of how things are kind of like, you know, interrelating with each other. And for me, that opening figure for the prosecutor is tracking as like confidence. You know there's a real kind of assuredness for the way he kind of owns that. That then when you kind of like change the contour of it for Ricky, it feels very different, but while maintaining that kind of sense of of brokenness that you're talking about. So it's.
Speaker 3:It's really how some things are kind of similar connect characters are are similar on one level and then like very different on another level. I feel it's done really powerfully. Let's. Let's talk a little bit about the question of verbatim Like. So you said, david, that 40% of this is verbatim text. And how, like how, do you make the decisions on what is going to stay the way it was and what you want to kind of reshape?
Speaker 7:Yeah, I mean we had, like we had about 20 hours of interviews give or take and tons of pages of transcripts. So you know, robin and I had to pick what episodes we thought were really popped that really told the story. You know some novelistic details. You know of what happened the day that they were arrested, how they survived. The ten polls were. Know of what happened the day that they were arrested, how they survived. The 10 polls were that.
Speaker 7:Tell us about the day that you were arrested or accused or detained by the police. Tell us about your time in prison and what was your. What was hitting rock bottom for you in prison? What was that? How did you survive in prison and what was the process of getting exonerated. So that was sort of like you know how. Those were the main things that we asked for. One example I would say the the scene of the crime, with the east cleveland three describing the crime that they witnessed. Uh, that was eventually, you know, pinned on them. Uh, they all described driving in the car down the road and seeing this murder. And for the libretto I had to sort of like pick each of their reminiscences from that and sort of weave it together into a group, put them all in the same room, even though they were all interviewed separately.
Speaker 6:Yeah, we was driving around Just hanging out. It was a beautiful day Like any other day. Here's the street. We was driving down the street. The street is set up so crazy because they got these railroad tracks.
Speaker 7:And then I don't know, scott, somehow you made that so cohesive.
Speaker 4:Well, thank you. So we have a trio of young men. They are a trio and they are also individuals and want to step out, either in front of each other, behind each other, and they are really tight as friends, but they also want to be individuals, so somehow managing to. There are times when they all sing together and times where they have their own lines, choosing, a musical palette and a rhythmic palette that comes out of the time in which they are arrested. I wanted a new jack swing of a sort of a triplet, a triplet hip hop swing, that's if I'm going to beatbox it like that which I was familiar with from Washington DC and from Go-Go, which was very much of the time that they were arrested. At the same time, it also gave us the same feel of the Sesame Street thing, so that we understand at the same time that they're also just kids and they really are children who are going out to try and just have fun on a beautiful day, and so, hopefully, all of that comes through.
Speaker 7:Yeah, and they describe the streets and the weird arrangement of a bridge that goes across the street and a stop sign that they nearly hit on coming traffic when they drive away, and it's just sort of like. It's just like it's testimony, but it's testimony that reveals so much character, um, and so much, yeah, as scott said, their bond as friends and was so how much of that was uh verbatim well, I mean it was all verbatim, but you know verbatim.
Speaker 7:Well, I mean it was all verbatim, but you know verbatims. You know every, every line in the in the libretto has been tweaked or massaged in some way. So but I mean I did, I did weave it together or repeat things. Um, yeah, it's, you know it's it's, it's, it's taken. It wouldn't exist without their, without their, their responses in the interviews. Yeah, um yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean it's astonishingly fluid and I think that's kind of one of the well, something that you're, scott, is just very good at is making kind of long bits of text feel like they're kind of totally natural, even when they are coming from more of a prose kind of background.
Speaker 3:Let's talk a little bit more about this sequence because I find it one of the most exciting kind of transformations of music functioning as one thing to functioning as another thing in the score. So, scott, you've kind of described the opening of this where they're cruising around and there's a real kind of precision, the opening of this where they're cruising around and there's a real kind of precision to the way that the orchestra is working. Here it feels like everything is like in sync and and all these like offbeat piano hits, which for me maybe it's because the word street is happening so many times in this sequence made me kind of think about the scene in X with the character Street. And then they get to this moment of singing about the blind spot, and it almost feels like a fun thing the way that the three voices come together on that and I'm thinking about this. You know them reaching this, this place where they can't see anything and it almost feels like okay you know, this is part of our kind of like chilling out thing.
Speaker 3:And then everything turns um and you're kind of moved from writing from the point of view of being inside these characters and they're kind of like uh, they don't have that many cares into something terrible is happening in front of them and we're kind of witnessing, uh, along with with them, this tumult. So tell me a little bit about this next sequence then.
Speaker 4:Well, they witness someone, they witness a shooting, and so they're blind by a spot and they come upon these two characters and the three are describing what the characters are doing In the stage version. We see what they're doing and it's described, and one character is, and they're distinguished because one character is swing eighth notes and the other character is straight eighth notes. So those two rhythmic ideas are in conflict in that moment. And then everything goes crazy and we have a big fast jazz ride, cymbal, somewhat not atonal but modal move, as they are all chasing and everything, and they're in the middle of a gunfight and all of the hits of the gunfight are in the orchestration.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, that's what you're looking for, yeah yeah, um, I mean, it's very kind of I I feel like now I'm observing with them, right, um, and instead of kind of like being in the place of feeling you know their kind of ease, now I'm kind of like in. It's like maybe I'm going from being in their heart into being in their eyes or something like that. Um and uh, the kind of aggressiveness of which that drum sets, uh, takes over, is really powerful and he just shot him.
Speaker 8:And he just shot him. That's my ring. And when I seen that I'll be like, oh no, oh no. Everybody kind of dug down, oh no.
Speaker 3:And when we raced up to see what was going on, oh no, oh no, behind the truck To the other side of the street and the guy's shooting at him A few more times and then they are safe and this alternating, this oscillating harmony thing starts to happen as they're describing, kind of like they're saying they're witnesses and it's almost a moment of repose for a sec.
Speaker 5:We committed no crime.
Speaker 6:But we was witness to a crime.
Speaker 8:We couldn't believe what they were saying. We told them what we saw.
Speaker 7:Yeah, I mean yeah it also. It feels also kind of like to me. It feels like there's a menacing air that comes in because the music is something like the walls are closing in on these guys.
Speaker 3:It feels like yeah, I mean, is that kind of me? It's it. That is what happens as the kind of music gets louder, um, and we go from kind of being inside these characters to now being, you know, kind of being these characters being swallowed up by the music. It's a really fascinating moment for me to see how the music shifts from depicting, kind of emanating from inside them, to kind of enveloping them. The system is kind of now this sonic wall and yeah. So tell me a little bit about the conception of that, scott.
Speaker 4:Well, the image I had in my mind for it was the planet-eating cornucopia from the original Star Trek. There's only more. There was a star. That's what came to my mind. There's this big, big giant, you know, 50 million mile-wide cornucopia that goes from galaxy to galaxy, eating planets. That's what I had in my mind for the image of there being literally swallowed up by this, so it allows the scale to become greater. Are you going to think about a giant planet eating cornucopia, or are you going to just think of a meat grinder?
Speaker 3:Which would you?
Speaker 4:set for an orchestra.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm kind of surprised that the orchestra is as small as it is, because you're able to convey such a sense of scale in it, and sometimes it's a lot of big band sounding stuff and then sometimes it sounds like a chamber ensemble, but when it's large it really feels large. I'm, I'm, I feel like hearing this um, uh, at the lincoln center, at jesu, lincoln center is with these forces, it's gonna.
Speaker 3:The scale of this thing is gonna be very powerful can't wait yeah, um, so then we get into this, uh, spoken section, um and um, then after that we get into this spoken section and then after that we get into the wonder of forensics. So that's. You started talking at the beginning about some of the kind of opera plus aspects of this. That it's opera but it's also kind of has elements of other kinds of things, and the spoken kind of textures are part of that. So I'd love to hear a little bit more from both of you about the way that you're using spoken text.
Speaker 5:Hold on, hold on. It wasn't just Tamika's testimony. The East Cleveland three were found with gunshot residue on their shoulders and jackets.
Speaker 6:Gunshot residue tests can produce false positives. Chemicals you can pick up anywhere.
Speaker 1:Like the back of a police car or being handled by the police, who routinely have residue on them from target practice.
Speaker 7:Well, I mean, I was always impressed that Scott didn't mind leaving sections to be spoken, you know, to. I mean, did you ever? I mean, was that a? I guess we never talked about it? Did you ever wrestle with that, scott, in terms of like?
Speaker 4:Not really. It's usually the information without emotional content, or information with very little emotional content, or when it's just information, we don't, we, uh, without them we don't really doesn't need to be sung, it's we? I think it's just much it. It gets us to the music quicker if we just use words to convey it. And although sometimes it's often words in front of music or underscored words. So I mean when the prosecutor is asking a little girl, like what happened, I mean in two lines, like what did you see, honey? I don't know, it just seemed more effective spoken. And that also gives contrast between. It gives me, by having a contrast between music not music or sung not sung, it gives the choice of sung more meaning and it gives the choice of spoken more meaning, sort of the digital musical dramaturgy.
Speaker 7:Yeah, I mean in the scene of the crime, because we're just meeting these characters. We have a little bit of spoken words to introduce the idea of forensics in the piece, which of course I learned about how a lot of forensic evidence has today been discounted through Mark's book. And so the East Cleveland police were found supposedly with gunshot residue on their shoulders and coats. And so that's where we the prosecutor's eager to convince the audience that all these cases were totally airtight and don't listen to these bleeding heart OIP people. And that's how we get. We bring the idea of forensics into the room where it's like. Well, the prosecutor of course believes that forensics are infallible. So we go from a verbatim section to a section where I had to write something, some text that sort of explored, that sort of explored or what am I trying to say that sort of exposed forensics in a way as shaky. And so I wrote this very rhyming, very sort of, I guess, anthemic type of text. That's got that.
Speaker 3:I mean. So my reaction to that, the Wonder of Forensics section, was that I kind of was buying their point of view for the beginning of it until they got to the chorus of the Wonder of Forensics, because I mean this is the most kind of, I think the most kind of minimalistic kind of section of the score.
Speaker 5:Here's the report of the bite marks dental records. We know this guy did it. We need you to deliver.
Speaker 1:We need you to deliver.
Speaker 5:The scene of the crime is stuffed with clues.
Speaker 3:Who can blame us if we pick and choose? Starts off with this really kind of cool, you know, marimba, steve Reich, kind of world repeating note, kind of crescendoing repeated notes kind of thing, and like there's a neutrality and objectivity and clinicalness to it that feels like, ok, this is something I can. That feels like it's some sort of real truth. But then when they come in with that chorus on the wonder of forensics, it feels like suddenly it's revealed that this is kind of like an ad and it's you know, it's we're in the carousel of progress. And it related to me to the way the chorus is used in Trouble in Tahiti to kind of sell this notion of suburbia. That it's like there it's something that clinical kind of minimalist language is something that's a tool that's being used, that's being, that's a tool that's being used.
Speaker 3:And um, the um, the phrase that they sing later on who can blame us as we pick and choose? Is so revealing to me about um, the way that this um you know forensic evidence is something that later on in the piece um will be very important with clarence's story and the way he's kind of like obtaining this dna that eventually is going to get him exonerated is so? It's not. It's not entirely coming from the point of view, I think, of that. You know, the science itself is the problem. It's the way that it's being used and the way that it's kind of like purposely being, um, you know, shown here to be a thing that is above question, without us kind of thinking about who's doing what with it. So I don't know if you have some thoughts on that.
Speaker 4:Well, musically it was. I was going to the world of using the language of PBS documentaries and ads for their funders, who are often scientific or pharmaceutical corporations who very much want to convince you of these things. And the chorus it's the wonder of forensics could be like the National Geographic theme on PBS. And then, and so you've said it, it's the intersection of quasi-scientific minimalist music that is then used to sell science, or sell an impression of science in one way or another, or a sound impression of science in one way or another. So that's the way in which musical language choice really is a design element within the piece and I would say what you said earlier about DNA.
Speaker 7:Of course you know that DNA is the most reliable form of forensic evidence to link people to the scene of the crime.
Speaker 7:But other types over the decades, like blood spatter, uh analysis, dental, even dental record analysis, or, I'm sorry, bite, bite mark analysis, boot prints, um, fiber clumps, that kind of thing, all this stuff that wove its way into the lyrics, um, yeah, those have been subjected to rigorous kind of like investigation.
Speaker 7:You know, and it's shown that some, some forensic experts that made a decision one one time in one case, like a few years later with a blind in a blind test, would choose the other, you know evidence, so that there was some, there was an element of interpretation that went into this, as well as pressure from prosecutors to maybe link a certain piece of evidence to a certain, uh, alleged person.
Speaker 7:So I I don't want to go on, but it's like it's another case of concision, like all these cases that we, that we that we dramatize in the piece, to actually go and explain why blood spatter patterns or bite marks have been discounted would take up, you know, another half hour of the opera. So it had to be very concise and I would say that all the rhyming, I think I think I let myself really just go crazy with the rhyming and that because to me, like the pbs music style, if it rhymes you know it must be right, it must, it must be, it must all sort of fit together and and have a sort of logic, because those logic, because it has a sort of euthany, that must be true in a sense.
Speaker 3:There's a certain kind of like formality to things, kind of locking into place with the use of rhyme here. That, you know, makes it feel like it's over and done right, that these are not questions that need to be consistently, continually kind of investigated, but rather this is like an answer rather than a question. So let's talk about one more piece down that you brought up rhyming, which is the Choreo-Hoga section, which has a lot of rhyme in it and Scott goes to a different place musically than a lot of the rest of the score as well. Tell me a little bit about, like, how you decided to go to that kind of specific place.
Speaker 7:Well, I just I realized, as I was, you know, working on sections, I realized that there wasn't actually a bonafide protest song in the piece, you know. I mean, obviously all the exonerees were horrified and outraged at what happened to them and they expressed it in various ways. I just thought the East Cleveland Three would be good characters to sort of actually sing about to a number which is like this is horrible, look at what's happening to us. This is monstrous, this is, you know, I'm angry about this. And so I went and wrote, you know, verses for them that were like, in a spoken word, hip-hop, sort of uh, realm, which I don't normally do. But I, I just, it's just sort of flowed and I, I wrote it down and I thought, no, you know, I'll try, I I'll see what Scott and Robin say to this.
Speaker 6:Come on, let's do this. Talking about the East Cleveland, three Derek, eugene and Maurice that's me Three brothers stole off the street like a UFO, shot down a beam when they at Gee I don't know 20 long years. They put us away All cause a girl of 14 had her, say, 20 long years in the pen To survive inside you gotta learn how I present I mean the place in your brain where you can take the strain of being so heinously framed and restrained every day. It's insane, a shame, a goddamn stain on he's insane, a shame, a goddamn stain on humanity's name.
Speaker 7:And, um, yeah, and I just, and I didn't, of course I wasn't trying to write a cliche of a hip-hop song right here, because I can't do that and I shouldn't, and I don't want to do that, anyway. So, scott, but Scott said it in a way that I think was just fantastic.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean, I think the trick is to sort of set it without, to avoid cliche, to use a style with if we're able to really use a style with irony, and then we can avoid cliche. But again, the musical underpinning is from Cuyahoga, which we've heard all the way through. So again, it's a transformation of the motives that we've heard in other contexts and in other styles before. So it's not. Oh, now the characters remain consistent with themselves and don't adopt a different character or a different style of speaking in order to, in order to do the number. So it's some see how it, I mean, it's working, I think it's, it's, it's working and it's working for people.
Speaker 3:So I mean, I think that's the moment where, like, the score is so far ranging, but it's the moment that feels the the most contemporary and pulls us so much into the present moment. I think the having a scene that's not just about the injustice of putting these people into prison, but then what happens to them when they're there, is really important to the takeaway of the piece. But to do it in this kind of structured way that has some fierceness to it and reads as both who these characters have been all along, but also some things about what's happened to them, it struck me really, really powerfully.
Speaker 7:It's also a chance. I mean, the Cuyahoga follows a real suicide attempt that Eugene Johnson tried when he was being rebooked into prison. Come see the opera, you'll see the whole story. But he was released briefly by the court, sort of in the middle of his sentence, but then, out of technicality, they dragged him back into prison and so when he was being rebooked he grabbed a pen and tried to stab himself. He did stab himself with it. So we follow that up with Cuyahoga, which, besides being like a protest, an expression of anger and rage, it also is a chance for the three of them to sort of in fiction at least, to be in the same room with each other, because they all didn't really, they weren't really able to hang out with each other in those 20 years they were in prison. So it was a chance to bring them back together to I don't know help each other through, I suppose Wow.
Speaker 3:Can you tell me a little bit about what the reaction to the piece has been from the people that you've interviewed for this, to have these stories written about them?
Speaker 4:to have these stories written about them. I hesitate to put words in their mouth, but we made sure that they were involved through the workshop process. So, and they were, we had people, exonerees, attending the workshops. There was a specific moment when, well, there was an original lyric for Nancy's oh Lord aria, where David quoted for I was born a sinner. But Nancy was very concerned that this would look like an admission of guilt and she wanted nothing that that gave any impression that she might feel guilty of anything. So so we changed that lyric, we changed that lyric for Nancy when she when she made, when she made that objection.
Speaker 4:So that's an example of, of the input that we took Cause I mean, I think I mean, given what they're, I feel a real sense of, given what they're, I feel a real sense of responsibility, given what they're through they in general, I have a sense that they are very excited to see their lives presented on this scale. It's sort of the musical big screen on some level, just in scope, there's a level of. It appears to be somewhat gratifying. So that appears to have been the reaction up to this point.
Speaker 1:Oh Lord, oh Lord, protect me.
Speaker 6:Nancy was in constant agony. She had four children out there. Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh God, did it be?
Speaker 1:Because I can't die in prison. I can't die in prison. I can't die in prison. Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord protect me.
Speaker 7:Yeah, I mean, they attended rehearsals. We did follow-up interviews with them. That led to extra scenes later in the process. You know, there's a scene between Derek Wheat and his mother on a visiting day when she comes to visit him, and he's very low and they're separated by glass and it's a very emotional mother-son scene and the inspiration for it came out of the entry with Derek, and I remember in Cincinnati sitting behind him at one of the performances, and of course you're like, oh my god, what is he, you know? And so the worst, of course, would have been if any of them had said whatever in any way disappointed or disapproved. And so I'm watching the back of derrick's head as the show's going on and, you know, and he's dabbing. He's dabbing at his eyes during the scene, and so I'm like, okay, I'll assume that's a good sign, you know, and very emotional scene.
Speaker 3:And and yeah, so it was. It was really, yeah, gratifying. Well, it'll be even bigger when we see it at Lincoln center jazz Lincoln center and I think the the impact this is going to have on the audience is going to be enormous. It's been a pleasure talking to both of you about this piece and I can't wait to see it again.
Speaker 4:It's been great talking to you, randall. Thank you, randall, I'm a little person.
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