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Streamed Live 1/31/2009 Watch it here for free |
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 A New Jazz Opera by Dan Plonsey & Harvey Pekar |
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Artists Statements
Harvey Pekar
When Dan Plonsey approached me about this project, I found the idea of writing an opera libretto immediately
intriguing. As long as it's not conventional, I could do it. What, I thought, can I put into this? Let's make
it about music and the arts. Let's make it about the problems faced by turn of the 21st century artists in
general. I talked about it at length with Dan, who spent a weekend working with me in Cleveland. It would be
an unusual opera in that it would educate and polemicize: if you cut off the avant garde, you commit it to
death. The challenges presented by symphony orchestras to their audience are at present minimal. There ought
to be a place for cutting edge work. I thought there wasn't much out there being said about this, and wanted
to open up some discussion. I felt I could illustrate my points through Dan's music, show how that departs
from convention and why that's good. In my comic book work I am always concerned with quotidian life and the
populist aspect of art, both of which have deep roots in Dan's musical philosophy. The making and consumption
of art shouldn't be restricted only to those with an academic background. The more people you get involved
this way, the more you foster an artistic community, the better chance you have of getting great music.
LEAVE ME ALONE! will I hope exemplify these claims.
Dan Plonsey
LEAVE ME ALONE! is an opera with libretto by Harvey Pekar and music by myself. The opera, simply put, is the
non-fictional account of its own creation. The main characters are Harvey Pekar, Dan Plonsey, and their
wives, Joyce and Mantra, respectively. Pekar and Plonsey discuss their own working processes, beginning with
an examination of Plonsey's "Music Manifesto." The wives break in at times, bringing with them aspects of
real world drama, which becomes, in effect, a second manifesto: these insistent intrusions being both the
materials for and constraints upon the pair's artistic work. Likewise, the course of the opera's music is both
inspired and limited by the interplay between the real and the imaginary. It is a penetration of the
"Cleveland Sound" into "The Music of El Cerrito." (Quotation marks used here indicate that while I am indeed
a Clevelander residing in El Cerrito, the music I make relates to each as imaginary.) As usual, my music
comes about as an accretion of bits of mis-remembered music from around the world, organized according to:
the modernist principle of the organic; the post-modern recognition that everything goes with everything
else; and the post-post-modern rejection of things clever, overworked and cynical, opting instead for simple
presentation of beauties both mysterious and obvious. In concrete terms, this means working with a small
ensemble of multi-instrumentalists, chosen more for their personal qualities as for instrumental abilities.
The music features meandering melodies, accompaniments, and bass lines which each pull in different and
unexpected directions, reasonably and unreasonably.
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