Sixth meeting: Sorry, it's not going to be a musical

Musiikkitalo and its "terde" as we call it in Finnish.

Our sixth meeting took place in Musiikkitalo. Or rather outside of it, for the weather was glorious and meeting inside would've been a crime against sunshine. We were all there drinking (bad) coffee, and for the first time our new singer, Anna-Maija, joined us to talk schedules, politics and art.

Also Start-up Opera's new honorary member, three-month-old Helmi, was present for the first time. She participated mainly by eating and sleeping, and blinked approvingly at our grand plans.

There were scheduling issues to be fixed, again, and an approximate performance date was decided on. Taking into consideration our director escaping to Lapland, a marriage, and the fastest possible pace of composition, we set our minds to February or beginning of March. I will now take this to the authorities who will probably tell us that everything's booked and we'll have to perform this in a toilet. But hope lives on.

After scheduling issues came the reality: composing will start right now. It is happening. For real. So Milla, Anna-Maija and Itzam agreed on some rules - the fine line between comfortable and possible for human voice. Itzam has been strictly forbidden to compose difficult things, even though nobody actually believes he'll restrain himself from doing so. Composers are mysterious creatures, but they certainly have never been famous for making things too easy for performers. Well, seriously writing, one of our goals is to produce an opera that would be achievable to other performers too. This shouldn't be a work that's performed once and then forgotten, but rather something that would be easy enough - yet interesting enough - to be taken up again by somebody else. Usable music, one might call it. (I'm not saying we're doing a musical, sorry. It'll probably not be on any karaoke playlist anytime soon.)

And what next? We wait for Itzam to work his magic. In the meantime I write more grant applications and the others go hunting for helpers such as set and costume designers - all those people who know a lot about a specific something that we know little about. And then it's November and we all meet again, a few steps closer to an opera.