On a trip to New York to hold auditions, I ran into Steve covered in white dust. Turns out he was doing under-the-table contracting work for big bucks in between singing jobs. I tucked this information away and when Opera Memphis was starting to get serious about creating a new rehearsal-office facility, I approached him about becoming the General Manager and General Director. As the facility was being built, he was instrumental in keeping the architects and contractors on task and on time, something I never would have been able to do. Steve's warmth was great with our donors, and he was a particular favorite with one, Barbara Marshall, who was exceedingly generous and also demanding.
Steve went on to Nashville Opera and has just finished up seventeen years at Shreveport Opera, which was rechristened "Steveport" by the entire opera field. Keeping a small opera company afloat is one of the hardest jobs in opera. You have hardly any staff and very little money. Steve did it in style, staying in the black, and even doing an occasional adventurous show like DEAD MAN WALKING.
Steve produced SPEED DATING TONIGHT! several times. I always knew about his witty and silly lyric writing--he wrote several school shows that have played at Shreveport and other companies--and he eventually wrote lyrics to several numbers in SpDT!, including "My Priest," "I live in a singlewide," "Wildlife Rehabilitator," and "Kleptomaniac." For the 2025 version of SPEED DATING TONIGHT!, his last production, he wrote lyrics to "Blood Donors," and "My Darling Pet Snake."
Here's "Blood Donors"--Steve is a multigallon donor himself and even put together several blood drives at Opera Memphis.
Although it's not til 2028, I've started sketching a new opera for Taos Opera Institute's 20th anniversary. We did one excerpt from it on the showcase last week at TOI. This is Camryn Belle Creech as a singing magpie. The opera's working title is OVERHEARD. Thanks to Mark Craig, and TOI's predecessor/founders, Mary Jane Johnson and Linda Poetschke.
I am working on an online catalog. It's part catalog. Part autobiography. It's a work in progress that I can update very easily.
It's to help folks learn about my less well known pieces. It's to serve as a primary source for research. It's to keep keep things straight for my family.
This wiki is done with great program called Obsidian. It's not working perfectly, but it will someday.
Composers and songwriters end up with a variety of publishing relationships during the course of their careers. Increasingly self licensing is a practical and profitable option too. But all of these different ways of getting music to the public can make tracking things down difficult. I have seen this with the estates of composers--once the composer is gone, the writer's family sometimes has a hard time tracking down where things are. And publishers lose track of things too.
The graph illustrates that my work is mostly self published, with a several publisher relationships, the most important being with E C Schirmer Classical. I've also decided that there are works that I'd like to make available through IMSLP. These are things that are in genres--brass fanfares, string quartets--that I'm not known for, so there's no reason not to make them available for free. Eventually, I'll upload more works to IMSLP. What is less robust at this point is the archiving. I'm throwing out boxes of old manuscripts after scanning them, but haven't quite worked out where these electronic files (along with a few boxes of paper) will end up.
Eventually each of the nodes on the graph will be clickable for more information--collaborators, commissioner, performance history, and how to get hold of it.
