The Opera Glasses Podcast
Dan Schlosberg: Reimagining The Handmaid's Tale
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity is presenting a reimagined take on Poul Ruders's The Handmaid's Tale, a work-in-progress based on Margaret Atwood’s sobering novel. Composer Dan Scholsberg was commissioned to arrange the work for chamber ensemble using different technologies to evoke Gilead. The hope is for this arrangement to be used by more arts companies across the globe.
All episodes of The Opera Glasses podcast are hosted by Opera Canada Editor-In-Chief, Elizabeth Bowman. Follow Opera Canada on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Visit OperaCanada.ca for all of your Canadian Opera news and reviews.
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity is presenting a reimagined take on Poul Ruders's The Handmaid's Tale, a work-in-progress based on Margaret Atwood’s sobering novel. Composer Dan Scholsberg was commissioned to arrange the work for chamber ensemble using different technologies to evoke Gilead. The hope is for this arrangement to be used by more arts companies across the globe.
All episodes of The Opera Glasses podcast are hosted by Opera Canada Editor-In-Chief, Elizabeth Bowman. Follow Opera Canada on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Visit OperaCanada.ca for all of your Canadian Opera news and reviews.
Hello, my name is Stephania Romaniuk and I'm thrilled to be guest hosting the Opera Glasses podcast Today. I will be joined by Dan Schlossberg, the wonderful composer who has arranged a new adaptation of Poul Reuter's opera of the Handmaid's Tale, which will be performed at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity this summer. Dan, thank you so much for joining us. It's an absolute honour to be sitting beside you and to be discussing the Handmaid's Tale. Let's start with an obvious question. Since the opera premiered in 2000,. It's been performed across the world. It was even nominated for a couple of Grammys, and yet this upcoming performance is billed as a workshop performance. So could you talk a little bit about what exactly is being workshopped?
Dan Schlosberg:Absolutely so. I am in the process, and actually mostly done with creating a new arrangement of the piece. So originally Paul Ruders, the wonderful composer, wrote it for a huge orchestra, so that would mean like three winds per part, like three flutes, three clarinets, etc. So it's a really huge amount of brass massive string section, just like a full orchestra, and I think it was originally perhaps Joel Ivany and Chris Lorway who kind of hatched a plan to create a new version of it being an iconic piece of Canadian literature and also being a really wonderful opera. I mean, you know Poole set the novel pretty straight on. The story is obviously so compelling and important. So I think they were really interested in sharing this piece under the. You know we're in 2024, we don't have always have access to that type of orchestra anymore for many reasons, and so I think they were just really interested in hearing this piece in a more condensed setting. And so I, you know, spent the last few months working on a new arrangement for 16 players. So that meant and you know I was in touch with Joel throughout the year figuring out what actually the orchestration would be. You know I've done this for many different pieces. I have an opera company in New York which I do, called Heartbeat, and for the past 10 years I spent doing like radical reorchestrations of classic works for very small amount of players. So when approaching this piece, it's a little bigger ensemble than I often worked with and it's also a more contemporary piece. So there's different considerations that I've that have come into play as I've worked on it.
Dan Schlosberg:But when I've picked, when I picked the ensemble, I wanted to try to honor Poole's color, like he really it's an amazing piece. It's like he runs the gamut of styles, sounds, really pulling out as many colors from the orchestras as he can, and so I wanted to honor that, and so I started with PooPoulle chamber orchestra. I knew that you know, we're going to have to have winds of some kind and you know I decided in this piece that we have we're going to need a flute and a piccolo so the flutist will switch off because there's a heat. The high, the high register is really important in this piece, so piccolo is really really important.
Dan Schlosberg:Ovo also is an English horn which provides a really darker color, and then instead of usually you would have clarinet and then bassoon. But instead of bassoon I felt like this piece wasn't really that color, wasn't as important in this piece, and so I actually have two clarinets and so one of them is just playing a normal B flat clarinet. The other one doubles on bass, and so for me the bass clarinet gives a huge. It opens a lot of color option in the low register. So that's for and for. Brass horn trumpet trombone felt it was just kind of the classic setup because I knew that we really needed some of the lower color trombone would give that to us, and then strings. So I in this, what I decided in this case was, like normal string quartet and bass.
Dan Schlosberg:Very important to have the bass there, obviously, because when a small ensemble but, because again, he really pulled, really loves the high violins together in really close, close proximity, and so generally we violin, two violins, feel a cello. But for me I was like, okay, I really need a lot of high sound at certain moments, and so I actually asked the violist to double violin as well, and so the string quintet either is three violins cello, bass, or two violins viola, cello, bass. And then the other challenge was percussion and keyboards. Percussion originally was, I think, four or five, even percussion, and so I did not have the personnel for that in this, and so I was like, what is the minimum that I really can use? And so I decided two. I would have two percussionists and they're really going crazy, and one of the things that you'll see in this is that they're just jumping around from instrument to instrument all the time and I really ask a lot of them um, they're like often playing two instruments at once, with one hand playing one, one hand playing the other. For example, chimes are an important sound in this piece, and so I ask, I think, percussion two to both play chimes and timpani. So she's like playing timpani with one hand and chimes with the other and then has to like switch quickly to play bass drum. So it's all kinds of craziness, but percussion is such, especially in a small ensemble like this, percussion is like crucial to round out the sound and make it sound like big and everything.
Dan Schlosberg:And so then the remaining challenge was the keyboards. Originally there were three. There's an organ, there's a piano and then there's a sampler that plays not only like electric piano sounds and um and vibraphone, but also sampled bowed cymbals and sampled all kinds of crazy didgeridoo. There's a didgeridoo sample at the keyboard place, so I had to kind of figure. And then there's a harp. So there are basically four keyboard instruments in Poole's original orchestration that I had to figure out how to deal with, and so the way that I that for me is the easiest is to just put all of that into two different keyboard parts.
Dan Schlosberg:The harp gets put in the keyboard. It's all like samples and synthesizers, um, and I I felt like that was appropriate, given the fact that pool had originally written a sampler part into his orchestration. So I was just like you know what, we're just going to use his sounds that he already used. Plus, just like we won't have a harpist, unfortunately, we'll just put the harp in the keyboard, but it just makes it a lot more versatile so that the keyboard can be doing any number of things. Sometimes they play like they augment the bass part, like there's supposed to be four or five basses playing solo at some point and we only have one. So the keyboard goes down and kind of augments that sound. But that was that's how I ended up on this ensemble. So in this workshop, to like circle back to your original question, which I now spent like 10 minutes talking about in this workshop- you're going to hear basically all of act one of this new instrumentation, as well as one scene from act two.
Dan Schlosberg:And you know, the other challenge that we face in creating a small version of this piece is dealing with the cast, which is huge, on the chorus, which you know is non-existent in our version. And so this workshop, you know, in a more, if we had a little more time we would have dealt with the chorus for this workshop, but that will have to be for the premiere. Like the chorus, we're kind of figuring out a few different solutions for whether it's pre-recorded or off stage, or using the people we have in our ensemble to fill out the sound which in this workshop you're going to hear. That, like, you'll hear the full cast who are all soloists, kind of act as the chorus in this workshop, which is a really it's a really important part of this piece. Anyone who knows the story knows that, like seeing the kind of mass of handmaids is is a major like element of this, and so that's part of creating this whole new version.
Stephania Romaniuk:So, in addition to those challenges, obviously you have the challenge of time. There's been two weeks and I believe that you weren't even here for the first several days moonlighting is my other opera.
Stephania Romaniuk:I'm the head of an opera company in fact, to put together even just a single act and a little bit of the second act, to squish that into two weeks, that's a huge, especially with even if it is reduced forces. What were some of the things that have been unexpected in this rehearsal process or even in general, in the creative process that you didn't anticipate before it actually started?
Dan Schlosberg:It all comes down to how to achieve the music that Poole wrote. With the amount of people we have, and I think, as we started to look at what actually would be involved with, okay, if we were gonna, if we're gonna have to substitute the chorus with a recording of a chorus, that means that you have to have a full recording session where everyone is there singing, and when there's a chorus you know they can't always they need to figure out, they need to get their pitches somehow and they also need to be like so there's a chorus, they need to get their pitches somehow. So there's also a challenge of well, there's a full chorus, and so each of them is going to need an in-ear monitor so that, if a keyboard is playing something, that they can hear their pitches better, but that we don't want to end up in the actual recording, and so that was a major challenge, and so we ultimately were like, okay, that's not for this year.
Dan Schlosberg:That's going to have to happen in advance of the premiere, whenever that occurs. So that was one thing. And then in this workshop you'll hear, we did make some recordings. There are some moments where the chorus has like little solos, when they're at the market and they're ordering eggs and whatever, and so you hear that, and we actually recorded our individual soloists singing those lines, and then our amazing keyboard programmer, henry Ng, put that into the keyboard parts.
Dan Schlosberg:At one point, one of the keyboardists plays notes that I've assigned, but instead of hearing pitches, you hear the recordings of these soloists, and so that's an element that we wanted to try in this new version of the piece that will then translate to other moments as well, but you'll hear that here. You'll also hear some sound effects that we've put into the keyboards, and when you have keyboards at your disposal, especially two one is difficult because one you are only limited to two hands. When you have four hands at work and you're able to, like assign different sounds to different registers at the same time, like at any one point, I could have a vibraphone playing with the right hand and have samples of people saying something with the left hand, and so it really and when you have four of that, that really opens up any you can really do as many things as you want. I love using it, because our options just become so, so much bigger in terms of pre-recording sounds, vocals, recordings of choruses and sound effects. All of that can just happen within the confines of the keyboards, and so that's something that we've started to explore in this workshop, and I guess we're probably hoping to do a bit more.
Dan Schlosberg:But again, the confines of time. It's like we only have so much time to record and to rehearse and our keyboard programmer only has so much time to do all of this. So that's one thing, and I think the other thing is sound. So in this particular workshop that you will see the particularities of the space that we're in, which is really beautiful theater, we don't have access to the pit this year, so that means that the orchestra is on stage and because of the sound setup, there's no room in front of the orchestra to have the singers, so we have to put the singers up in back, and so that presents a whole variety of sound challenges.
Dan Schlosberg:We have an amazing sound team working on it. But what that means is have to deal with amplification in a way that we did not anticipate, although this piece also has these really extended flashback scenes, which was another thing that we were kind of. In the next version we would pre-record all of those as well and have that have projections work, but for this we just didn't have time. So for this version we have microphones there for the singers and for the flashback scenes we're actually putting a bit of reverb on to kind of denote that they are separate and that they're in the past. But because of the size of the I mean the band is 16, but you know it's full, it's brass instruments, it's instruments and they're playing right in front of the singers, and so we are figuring out how best to balance that and kind of using some sleight of hand, sound tricks to achieve that.
Stephania Romaniuk:There's so many things. So many things so many things to keep track of.
Dan Schlosberg:It's making an opera you know, making an opera involves every department, so you always need to like think about five zillion things at once.
Stephania Romaniuk:And on top of that, this is a work by a living composer. So, because you're arranging someone else's work, how much creative freedom have you had in your own arrangements?
Dan Schlosberg:Great question when I've done arrangements of classic operas in the past, like I really take a lot of liberties and I change the music, sometimes completely, I change it to be almost unrecognizable in terms of the orchestration. But in this case, like I really am sticking to what Poole has given us on the page in terms of color, because he's a brilliant orchestrator, he's a brilliant composer and I would think that my goal here is to kind of enhance and essentialize what he's done, rather than kind of add. You know people who look at this. You could maybe find my own personal stamp on it if you tried, and it's something I consciously put in. I have proclivities, like when I choose what to assign to what like I think that I would have. I tend to have certain choices, like even in not taking out a
Dan Schlosberg:bassoon, for example, or like having the violas, double violin. That's more of my own like way that I like to orchestrate, but in general, like I think I hope that we'll hear like a really beautiful version of what he wrote. That like is a little more, you know it's having a chamber ensemble is different. It's like it's vivacious and maybe more, and it has a lot of clarity in a way that a full orchestra is just there for a different reason, and so I really enjoy that. Having solo strings is really interesting in this piece. It's like a group of soloists rather than an orchestra, and so that affects the way that I write it, but I would say that I'm really trying to bring his music to life mostly.
Stephania Romaniuk:And I've had a chance to sit in on a few of the rehearsals, and the texture is, I personally find it, very evocative of the world of. The Handmaid's Tale, and so I think, for readers who are familiar with the novel or people who have seen the TV show, they might be familiar with the fact that this is like a futuristic, dystopian sort of society. Democracy has deteriorated into really religious authoritarianism.
Stephania Romaniuk:I don't really know where I'm from down south of the border there's I mean, that's a different podcast, but it's we kind of see this alternate universe and you really do feel the sense of that unease through the music. What was part of your preparation process for understanding the world of the Handmaid's Tale and how you wanted to bring it to life through the orchestration?
Dan Schlosberg:I am very familiar with the book. I actually read it for the first time just a few years ago and I can't stop thinking about it. I mean, I think in the context of what's happening today it's just there. It's always resonating. The TV series I'm not as familiar with I've seen a few episodes but I think once I started on this project I consciously like did not watch all of that because I'm sure it's amazing. It's slightly different, I think. The book it kind of goes off in certain directions.
Stephania Romaniuk:I agree.
Dan Schlosberg:I think that, like the sound world that Poole has created is really strong and it really reflects the action on stage and it's just like it kind of pulls you in all these directions and the way that he stacks tonalities tonality is there and that's what makes me personally interested in it, particularly in the score.
Dan Schlosberg:I think if it were completely atonal and opaque I wouldn't feel a strong connection to it.
Dan Schlosberg:But it's there and I think that's reflecting what you said in terms of the like we're in this world, but slightly off, we're in a somewhat recognizable world.
Dan Schlosberg:But it's also just bizarre and the sounds that are created from this band and the keyboards and the synthesizers are just like a little strange and a little off and a little intense and and it's like it has this element of ritual and there are these. You know it's again, it's this religious authoritarian state and they've co-opted the Bible for purposes of of, like you know, ceremonial rape to say, I mean, that's what's happening in this and like taking children away from women and all this stuff. So I think the the score captures that kind of screw, like mangled version of religion in a really interesting way the percussion and the way that the Latin there's a lot of Latin in this and the way that that's set in this, like the choral, the quasi-religious choral music, I tried to retain that as much as I could and, like the gongs and the drum, the bass drum is a really important element of this and the tam-tam, which is like this big, resonant dong, and so I try to preserve all of that and keep that in mind as I orchestrate it.
Stephania Romaniuk:I guess this is going to be our last question and, as workshop performances typically go, it's not fully staged. This particular one, as you mentioned, it's missing most of Act 2 and some other sections. What role does the audience play in this kind of a performance, perhaps through independent learning or their engagement as listeners or the use of the imagination, and how would you encourage listeners to make the most of their experience?
Dan Schlosberg:The audience, for me, is so important, so important. In any piece of music. I always say that there's the composer, slash, arranger, in this case the performers who make any audience who listens to it, and that those three elements without one of those, impossible. So for me, the audience. I'm very curious, very, very curious, what an audience will think of this. It's not fully staged. It's not like we have Amanda Tessini doing a gorgeous job of shading, like the actors are all. The singers are all standing up.
Dan Schlosberg:You know in the back there's going to be, you know people turn one way or the other. They kind of simulate certain scenes and there's some projections and there's obviously super titles as well. But I think the piece is very powerful even without that and I think even in this kind of bare form, just listening to the music of it and watching and seeing the plot unfold, I think people will be affected by it. I'm just very curious as to how, and I'm curious how it comes across in this setting. I would encourage people to take it in, just let it wash over. I'm not sure how many people in the audience will have heard this piece before. It hasn't been performed too much, I think. Now it's getting more performances, and I think this is a really wonderful time to try out a new version of it Again, the story is just beneath the surface for everyone.
Dan Schlosberg:At the moment I'm speaking for myself, listening to the music, taking the story and seeing how the we have a beautiful opportunity to see the full orchestra on stage and I think it's virtuosic. And all of these instrumentalists are playing parts that were meant for either multiple versions of themselves or like a whole section. And so seeing soloists play this music really demanding music and seeing the singers they've prepared it so incredibly well. They sound really amazing and I think seeing people do this piece without the kind of like you know you're just distracted by not distracted, but you're like enamored with a certain staging or like whatever just seeing the piece as is, I think, will be very interesting.
Dan Schlosberg:I think it will be effective.
Stephania Romaniuk:And so good news, bad news the performance is sold out at the bounce center, so if you don't have your tickets, unfortunately you will have missed it this year.
Dan Schlosberg:I heard that the hockey game watching a certain team win or lose that day may have there might be some more tickets, so possible that's what I heard yesterday, but if it unfortunately still sells on the website, there will be more opportunities to catch this piece in the future for sure.
Stephania Romaniuk:Do you have any hints on when that might come up?
Dan Schlosberg:BAM is hoping, as far as I know, is hoping to produce it either next season or the following, and I know there's a lot of interest in this from outside people that might partner with Banff, but no date has been set. But I think everyone's keen to do the full Now that the orchestra pit in the theater actually is functional. I think everyone's very keen to do the full Now that the orchestra pit in the theatre actually is functional. I think everyone's very keen to do it quickly. So I'm excited about that.
Stephania Romaniuk:Well, I absolutely cannot wait to see this performance and just wish you all the very best and a huge toi, toi, toi on Saturday. Thank you so much you.