Local Composer Monica Houghton

Okay. So you’re at about the right age for a mid-life change. Crisis is too strong a word for what’s going to happen here. But you’re close to 40, been married, have two kids in their teens, and then you go off to New York for a mini-vacation. Gee, this could make for a good novel, except that it’s real life we’re talking about here.

You see, the person in question is Monica Houghton of Shaker Heights. That momentous trip to New York happened in 1998, during which she went to the Metropolitan Opera House. The Kirov Opera was visiting, led by Valery Gergiev, acclaimed artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. It was there that Monica saw Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa – a very Russian opera about a slice of life in that country. “It really struck me,” she says now with a smile. “It was so Russian, had such a sense of place. I wanted nothing more in the world than to write an opera with that ‘sense of place’ about my country. The American West.”

Actually, this may not be all that far-fetched. Monica was already a better-than-average pianist, and had even been composing a bit for a few years. But still, generally speaking, one does not just sit down and write an opera. Oh, no!

It helped that, although she was born in Vermont, she grew up in Reno. It was there she acquired her love of the West. So, even though Monica was now living in Cleveland, she still had friends there, and one of them, Jon Christensen, a writer and sometime actor, steered her toward the legendary William Wright. Never heard of him, you say. Well, maybe you’ve heard of Dan DeQuille? No? Then, how about Mark Twain? Yes, that Mark Twain!

When William Wright went west in the 1850s from Iowa, leaving behind a wife and family, he set out to become a writer. Using the pen name of Dan DeQuille he became a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens in disguise) was a reporter for the same paper at the same time. This seemed the perfect setting for an opera. Thus The Big Bonanza - set in the wild west when silver mines (Comstock Lode) were the source of all wealth and power. Passion and murder appear as well. Twain writes about the murder, which really happened.

Meanwhile, back in Ohio, Monica applied for admission to the graduate composition program at the Cleveland Institute of Music. She already had degrees from Harvard. A Bachelors in Chinese and Master’s in East Asian Studies, because she’d always been interested in languages and various cultures. “Art, philosophy, poetry. It’s useful to know these things,” she says. It came in really handy when she went to China in 2004.

Monica had been teaching piano students in Kent since 1990, and then, in 1993, at an Ohio Music Teacher’s Association meeting, she met Akron composer Mary Ann Griebling. She decided that composition was a good thing to know more about, and started taking lessons from Ms. Griebling. She joined the Cleveland Composers Guild, and after being accepted at CIM in 2000, moved to Shaker Hts. Of course, she succeeded in her goal at CIM, earning her Master’s in orchestral composition in 2003. She now teaches in the preparatory department there, and also has three undergrad students at CASE. Plus she composes. A lot.

Anyway, there were two trips to China in reasonably rapid succession – a three-week stay at the Shanghai Conservatory as Composer in Residence in March was followed in May, when she was the only American composer (along with those of Australia, Germany, France, Korea and China) at the Shanghai Spring International Music Festival. Her String Quartet No. 1 was performed there on May 14, 2004.

The trip had a dual purpose, actually. She was looking for an authentic Chinese ‘homesickness’ song, “because authenticity is important when writing an historical piece.” One of the characters is a Chinese laborer named Zhang, who was homesick for his native country, and Monica needed at least a fragment of Chinese melody to accompany the words. She had successfully found such snippets of American songs to include for other episodes and this one was proving elusive. But while she was there, Conservatory students conducted a reading of the newly composed scene from the opera, in which Zhang sings of how he came to Nevada to seek his fortune—the song in Chinese folk style with erhu accompaniment. Not too many American composers write for erhu. Or for concertina, for that matter. But our Monica does!

And now, nine years after having first heard Mazeppa, Monica’s opera is complete. It may need revisions at some point (almost worse than writing it from scratch!) but first it has to be heard. Of course a staged performance would be really dandy, but that might be a trifle optimistic at this stage. Even a reader’s (singer’s?) theatre type production with piano would be great. “If you write for live people, you need to hear it,” states the composer. “I can play it on my computer, but it’s like making clothing to fit a dressmaker’s dummy. It’s just nothing like the real thing.”

With pencil at hand, Monica composes at the grand piano that sits proudly in her living room. First, she thinks it through, then taking up the pencil notates the music she hears in her head on special music paper. The computer is for printing readable copies, once the notes are all on the paper. “Writing the last scene—a musical summary, if you will—was hard. Endings are hard,” she adds. “All the way through, I’d had to keep going forward in an intelligible way. You can’t re-write history, after all.” After each reading “I’ve tightened, rearranged—even cut things ‘dear to my heart’.”

The first libretto from Christensen was ‘really good’ but it was too long. The two creative artists discussed back and forth about the iconic aspects of the real-life characters— “who would be in it and who wouldn’t,” she adds. She smiles then continues. “But still, it’s an opera about wealth and family. It’s a very American story.”

In May, Oberlin College’s Conservatory of Music, directed by Jonathon Field, did a reading of the final scene of The Big Bonanza. This resulted in a few minor tweaks here and there, but nothing serious. Other scenes have been read, also. Last summer, scenes 5 and 8 were performed at the Virginia Arts Festival John Duffy Composers Institute in Norfolk. Actually, during the last six years, all but scenes 6 and 9 have been read. Of course, most of them have since been altered at least somewhat. The composer is pleased. ''Really, though, there weren’t too many changes I wanted to make after the reading at Oberlin.”

This year has been a promising one for Monica (Niki to her friends). Her children are now 20-somethings, out on their own. James lives in Kent and Maya just graduated from college and is living in San Francisco. So far she’s won two prestigious awards: the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2007 and she was named "Composer of the Year for 2007" by the Ohio Music Teachers Association. This prize included a commission to write a new work for premiere at the OMTA Annual Convention which will be held this coming November in Columbus, Ohio. The resulting work for solo piano will be premiered by Cleveland pianist Halida Dinova.

As a younger woman, she never dreamed that one day she’d compose an opera. “It’s been such a learning experience. Just continually putting one foot in front of the other.” She has, however, learned one thing for certain, and states with confidence, “My next opera will be on commission!” A big grin accompanies those words.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Kelly Ferjutz artswriterATadelphia.net
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