This is Not About Natalie

Last night was opening night of SOLOperas – a double feature of new operas produced by Experiments in Opera for solo performers at The Tank in New York. Last week I shared some information about my new work for Aaron Wolff, The INcomplete Cosmicomics. I'm so grateful to be splitting a double bill with "mod-synth mastermind" (Pitchfork) composer-librettist Jason Cady, who has written a new opera starring Sarah Daniels for solo singer with a ventriloquist doll and guitar. Sarah portrays a songwriter who uploads a new, original song everyday to Youtube and introduces each song in dialogue with her puppet. She was formerly one half of the underground duo, “Kris and Natalie.” Her former partner, Natalie, went on to become a famous popstar. But this is not about her.

All three nights of SOLOperas are sold-out, but stay tuned for videos and future performances.

Anna Heflin: We both wrote the music and libretto for our pieces and made big revisions throughout and after the workshopping process. Your biggest edits were in the libretto – could you talk about what you learned about the opera through the workshopping process? How would the creative license change if you were working with a separate librettist?

Jason Cady: My original libretto had the character telling a story about how she became obsessed with ventriloquism after her older sister died during adolescence. She talked with her dummy as if it was her sister, even imitating her sister’s voice, until her mother overheard her and came to believe the doll was possessed. The mother ended up taking her and the doll to a psychic healer for an exorcism. The story was a dark comedy, but it was a little more dark than comic. Also, it was strictly telling a story from the character’s past. Reading a novel or short story in the past tense is one thing, but in a live performance it felt unsatisfying, so I wrote an entirely new story. I could not have asked a librettist to do that.

AH: Our costume designer, Krista Intranuovo Pineman, said something very astute in a production meeting about our two works. She noted that both feature characters experiencing loneliness and in response to their isolation, your protagonist Kris reaches out and my leading entity Qfwfq turns inward. When did Kris as a character, or her situation, first occur to you?

JC: It sounds shallow to talk about it, but I find it fascinating how the careers of some of my friends and acquaintances have developed over the past 24 years that I’ve lived in NYC. Some of them became internationally known, while others, who are just as talented, continue to struggle. Why some find success is complicated, and hard to predict or understand. I created the character Kris so I could delve into the jealousy she feels when her former partner becomes famous. We all want to be creative on our own terms. We want to have integrity. But being successful opens up opportunities.

I’m also curious about artists that accrue followers online but don’t seem to have made a mark in the old world of print media and music venues. I wonder what their stories are. If I could start over I would learn how to edit video. No one thought about that when I was starting out. There has been a pretty radical change in what it means to be an artist.


AH: The one-person show is having a moment on Broadway with Dorian Gray and Vanya. You’ve told me how influential this one-woman / one-man show model in theater was for you, it was for me as well. During the creative process Aaron Wolff and I both watched the recorded Vanya performance featuring Andrew Scott, for example. Are there any specific one-person shows that inspired you or is it more about the genre as a whole?

JC: When I first described the concept for this show to people they always used the term, “monodrama.” I hate that term. First of all, my opera is not a drama, it’s a comedy. And, I don’t think I would call Cosmicomics a drama either. I think the Calvino is Sci-Fi told in the style of folktale, and then your libretto is an iteration on that. Plus, monodramas feature solo singers accompanied by orchestras whereas Sarah Daniels plays electric guitar, and in your piece, Aaron Wolff accompanies himself on cello and looper pedal. These pieces are fundamentally different from monodramas.

AH: How did the idea of the ventriloquist doll come to you? Intuitively I feel a connection between the doll and electronics, which play a big role in This Is Not About Natalie and I’m curious how the sonic and visual ventriloquy interact.

JC: I hate to admit it, but I don’t know where the ventriloquism idea came from. It just popped into my head; I thought “wouldn’t it be funny?” But I liked the idea because it got two distinct characters from one performer. I was trying to make a simple, easy-to-produce piece. Initially, I thought I would perform it in music venues, but the more I worked on it, I realized it really belonged in a theater. But, who knows, maybe we will do some future performances of it in clubs?

AH: When I think of your music, I think of groove and movement. Do you compose on instruments, into a DAW, directly into sheet music or some combination of the above?

JC: I start with notation rather than from synth patches or electronic sounds. I play everything on piano, or guitar, or bass guitar, or drum-set when I’m composing. I sing the vocal parts. I recently bought a mandolin to help me with my string writing. Sometimes I take my clarinet out of the closet when I write for winds. When I record synths I only use modular synthesizer or keyboard synths—no software synths.

Genre is a way to convey meaning, and genre usually is the rhythm section. If I wanted to reference Verdi I would write some “oom-pah” accompaniment. 

I don’t write leitmotifs. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect an audience to understand and remember leitmotifs when encountering a work for the first time. Yes, it worked in Jaws. But, honestly, I don’t even think it works very well in the Ring Cycle. Rather than creating a strictly internal logic, I try to create meaning by connecting with other music.

In my opera, the character mentions Billie Eilish and Fugazi, so I quote a couple bars from their songs, while also expanding on their harmony. But, it’s not just quotation—actually, I rarely include direct quotation. When the ventriloquist dummy talks about opera I use melismatic runs to signify opera. In one passage she talks about experimental music and I wrote clusters and quintuplets with wide leaps. But through the revision process it ended up pretty diatonic, so it sound as thorny as I had wanted. Experimental music is the one genre that we can’t pin down. (But I don’t only do this when a character mentions music, those were just some good, clear examples.)

AH: I love your Y2K video opera I Screwed Up The Future, I just return to it from time to time to rewatch it. It seems to me that there’s a certain technological doom that recurs in your work, but usually it’s set in the past. Does that feel accurate? If so, what made you shift the timeline to the present for This Is Not About Natalie?

JC: In the introduction to The Naked Sun, Isaac Asimov wrote that he believed humans had an inherent fear of robots because all the Sci-Fi stories that featured robots (prior to Asimov’s I, Robot) involved fights between humans and their machine overlords. But, while humans may or may not have an innate repulsion to robots, I argue the issue really had to do with the nature of fiction. Conflict drives plot. Of course, robot stories will be about battles with humanity. I would love to time travel, but when I write a story about time travel it will be about something going wrong.

So, do I hate technology? Yes, I do. But, I’m not writing polemical diatribes, I’m writing about characters facing problems. I’m not nostalgic, or against innovation. I’m opposed to billionaires laying off workers. I’m opposed to the gig economy. I’m opposed to Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai attending Trump’s inauguration and supporting the rise of fascism. I’m opposed to Musk cutting foreign aid and the social safety net.

The protagonist in my opera posts a new song online everyday. It’s great that those platforms make that possible. But the tech oligarchs don’t care about art. It’s all just “content” for them. If hate speech gets as much “engagement” as art that’s just fine for their bottom line. The tech bros are billionaires while artists struggle to pay rent.

AH: How would you describe Experiments in Opera to someone who hasn’t heard about the company?

JC: EiO is an opera company in New York City. We only produce work by living composers. Most of it is on a scale that is sustainable: chamber ensembles and shorter durations. SOLOperas is a good example of what we do. Your piece is an hour long and my piece is 30 minutes, so the whole show is an hour and a half with only two performers—although with the design team there are quite a lot of people involved. 

EiO is led by Aaron Siegel, Kamala Sankaram, Shannon Sindelar, and myself. We’re all artists. I’m always looking for fun projects and compelling stories. I find that seriousness plagues too much contemporary opera.

About Jason Cady

Jason Cady is a composer and librettist. He performs on pedal steel and modular synthesizer. Pitchfork called him a “mod-synth mastermind…funny and engaging.” Anthony Tommasini, in the New York Times, described his video opera, I Screwed Up the Future, as ”charming fantasy...drably comic and spacey.” Opera News described his opera I Need Space as “delightfully weird...hilarious, dry and detached performances made this futuristic, retro story of love and rejection endearingly poignant.”

Cady is the Artistic Director of Experiments in Opera. His CDs have been released on Aerocade Music, Lockstep Records and Peacock Recordings, and his podcast opera, Buick City, 1:00 AM is available on Apple Podcasts. The Brooklyn Arts Council, New Music USA, free103point9, The Casement Fund, Lighton International Artists Exchange and the American Music Center have funded his projects.

Cady has an M.A. in composition from Wesleyan University, where he studied with Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton. He was born in Flint, Michigan and now lives in New York City with his wife, Ann Heppermann, and their two cats. He is an enrolled member of the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.