Mason Bates / Masonic

OVERTURE TO CALIFORNIA FICTIONS orchestra & electronica

Overture to California Fictions raises the curtain on an opera about a writer slowly overcome by his inner demons. The opening three scenes of California Fictions, which will ultimately comprise nine scenes and a full evening, were featured on the New York City Opera VOX Showcase this past spring, and the singers and orchestra performed beautifully. But for a good portion of the rehearsal process, I was admittedly fantasizing about beginning the lyrical yet turbulent overture that would precede the first action-packed scene. Here you have it.

Faced with the interesting challenge of creating a short orchestral work featuring the percussion section of the Mobile Symphony, I found a ripe dramatic situation in the opera's first scene. Dean Pearsall, a once-bright light in the world of fiction, has watched his writing and his marriage to Victoria gradually unravel over the ten years since the publication of his hugely successful first novel. The action begins in the midst of an explosive argument between them. The opera opens, in fact, at the moment that Dean leaves her, jumping in his car to make the drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco, where he will attempt to finish his novel in the empty mansion of a friend. It is there, while attempting to write, that he is haunted by apparitions of his wife.

After a mysterious opening to foreshadow the apparitions, the overture lifts off with a soaring theme expressing the once-strong love of Dean and Victoria. But, like the gradual unraveling of their marriage, this love theme undergoes a tremendous transformation. The harmony and meter become unstable, the theme is stretched in all directions Ñ and, by the climax of the piece, it has become the explosive argument that opens the opera. Throughout the overture, the percussion section acts as an acoustic version of the ghostly, shimmering electronica that appears at special moments in the opera, and as a colorful ratcheting-up of the dramatic tension. Unwilling to allow the piece to end lyrically, the percussionists cling to persistent groove in the work's final moments Ñ and, overwhelmed, the orchestra's ephemeral note of lyricism vanishes.