July 2nd

Today I decided to get a start on researching for my Personal Project.  At the Bootcamp, I decided I wanted to produce and write an operetta in the sense that I would write the overture and at least one aria of an operetta and plan the production of the operetta, but not actually put it onstage.  I looked up ‘how to put on an opera production’ on Google, and scrolled through a few websites, but ultimately only three (2 Blogspot posts and an article from the Atlanta Opera) ended up containing really useful information. I cited those and wrote a few notes using the Notecards function on Noodletools so that I don’t forget what I saved them for.  The two Blogspot posts are really interesting because they talk about putting on an opera production as an opera company, which made me think that maybe I should just change my whole idea to planning an operatic season as an opera company and to have the operetta I’m writing as my new production for the year. Since I still have time before the school year starts I’ll just ruminate on it for now.  What I want to do next is:

- Find more articles about the writing of an opera, and a few more on producing

- Email my contacts at The Met and the modern composer Nico Muhly and ask them a few questions

- Read through and analyze Puccini’s La Bohéme which I have the score for to get a feel for the writing style and orchestration techniques

- Read Grimm’s Fairy Tales and pick a short story to base my operetta off of