Blind Injustice, receiving its NYC premiere by MasterVoices in February 2025, tells the stories of six people wrongfully convicted and incarcerated, serving 117 years behind bars before their release and exoneration. In this episode, composer Scott Davenport Richards and librettist David Cote speak with host and fellow composer Randall Eng - whose Remain was premiered by MasterVoices in 2018 - about how the opera developed. Their deep dives into specific scenes and songs will enhance your listening experience - whether live at Rose Theater or on the Fanfare Cincinnati recording!

• What opera can do, beyond “what is should be”.
• Each story could have been an opera of its own… feedback from exonerees helped shape the music and words.
• The Chorus as a character - the jury, the world, the system, the prisoners, the mob.
• Getting the Job Done
• What Makes a Person…
• 5/4, asymmetry, and broken people
• Musical styles that represent all the peoples of the United States. Listen for echoes of Sesame Street, 90s New Jack, PBS, and Go-Go (the official music of Washington DC)
• Deep dives into the richly textured numbers “Blind Spot,” “Wonder of Forensics” and more!

RANDALL ENG is an award-winning composer of opera, music-theatre, and works in between. He is Resident Composer and full-time faculty member at New York University’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program; his operas Florida (libretto by Donna DiNovelli) and Henry’s Wife (libretto by Alexis Bernier) were highly praised in presentations at New York City Opera’s VOX festival, the Public Theater’s New Work Now! Festival, Lyric Opera Cleveland, the Shaw Festival, Galapagos Arts Space, and Metropolis Opera, among others.  http://randalleng.com/

SCOTT DAVENPORT RICHARDS has been commissioned by New York’s Public Theater, Signature Theatre (Virginia), and others. His operas A Star Across the Ocean—Paris 1965 featuring Chuck Cooper, and Charlie Crosses the Nation, An Opera in Jazz Idiom, were featured in New York City Opera’s Vox Festival.  He has written several play-scores and children’s works; as an actor he originated the role of Sylvester in the original Broadway Production of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and assisted his father, Lloyd Richards, in the origination of three other Wilson works. scottdavenportrichards.com

DAVID COTE is a playwright, opera librettist, and arts journalist. Previous operas include Three Way (Nashville Opera and BAM); The Scarlet Ibis (Prototype); and 600 Square Feet (Cleveland Opera Theater). Plays include The Müch, Saint Joe and Aristotle Punches Down (O’Neill National Playwrights Conference semi-finalist). The longest-serving theater editor and chief drama critic of Time Out New York, he is the author of popular companion books about Broadway hits including Moulin Rouge!, Spring Awakening, and Wicked. davidcote.com/

The MasterVoices Podcast is a project of the New York City nonprofit MasterVoices (previously The Collegiate Chorale), whose mission is using the human voice to connect, inspire, and unite. Founded in 1941 by Robert Shaw, the Chorale was one of the first integrated choruses in the United States.

Learn more at www.mastervoices.org.

In the 1920s, operetta remained supreme and American audiences were in love with Gilbert and Sullivan – the Gershwins included. Their score for Strike Up the Band paid homage while creating songs that were sui generis and utterly American. Listen as McWhorter and Maestro John Mauceri – who, at the behest of Mrs. Ira Gershwin, conducted complete recordings of the show’s 1927 and 1930 scores – go deep on orchestration, figuration, and the miracle of the Gershwin brothers’ collaboration. 

Also discussed:

• the story of the Gershwin brothers is a great love story. They were a true union and always had each others' back.

• differences between orchestrations for operetta, jazz, and musical theater

• more strings means less seats!• a brief primer on figurations

• songwriters v composers

JOHN MCWHORTER teaches linguistics at Columbia University, as well as Western Civilization and music history. He has written extensively on issues related to linguistics, race, and other topics for Time, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and elsewhere, and has been a Contributing Editor at The
Atlantic. He is the author of The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, and other books, including Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He hosts the Lexicon Valley language podcast, and has written a weekly newsletter for the New York Times since August 2021.

JOHN MAUCERI has a distinguished and extraordinary career that has brought him to the world’s greatest opera companies and symphony orchestras, the most prestigious halls of academia, and the musical stages of Broadway and Hollywood. He has taken the lead in the restoration and performance of many kinds of music and is an internationally published author. With over 70 albums to his name, he has
been entrusted with editing and restoring works controlled by the families and estates of Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Harold Arlen, Leonard Bernstein, and others. For sixteen seasons, Maestro Mauceri led the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. johnmauceri.com

SHOW NOTES/REFERENCES

• Buy tickets to MasterVoices' Strike Up the Band at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday October 29, 2024 

Music

• Hanging Around With You
• Strike Up the Band
• If I Became the President
• Homeward Bound

The MasterVoices Podcast is a project of the New York City nonprofit MasterVoices (previously The Collegiate Chorale), whose mission is using the human voice to connect, inspire, and unite. Founded in 1941 by Robert Shaw, the Chorale was one of the first integrated choruses in the United States.

Learn more at www.mastervoices.org.

When the first version of Strike Up the Band closed in Philadelphia in less than a week, its author George S. Kaufman famously quipped, “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.”  But what is satire, anyway? Join host John McWhorter and celebrated New Yorker cartoonist and editor Bob Mankoff as they trace the arc of satire from Aristophanes to Jon Stewart, and ponder its eternal attempt to rid us of our (equally eternal) human foibles. 

Also discussed:

• vaudeville, and other important stops on the comic development train.

• are the Marx Brothers still funny?

• humor is its own reason for existence, like music.

• when did “sense of humor” become a thing?

• John does a mean Mrs. Draper!

ARTIST BIOS

JOHN MCWHORTER teaches linguistics at Columbia University, as well as Western Civilization and music history. He has written extensively on issues related to linguistics, race, and other topics for Time, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and elsewhere, and has been a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, and other books, including Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He hosts the Lexicon Valley language podcast, and has written a weekly newsletter for the New York Times since August 2021.

 BOB MANKOFF has been the driving force of comedy and satire at some of the most honored publications in America, including Esquire and The New Yorker, where he was Cartoon Editor for 20 years. He has devoted his life to discovering just what makes us laugh. He founded Cartoon Collections, parent company to CartoonStock.com, a new spin on the Cartoon Bank, the world’s most successful cartoon licensing platform that he founded in 1992. His life at the magazine was the focus of the 2015 HBO documentary Very Semi-Serious. Mankoff is currently the cartoon editor at the weekly online newsletter Air Mail.  bobmankoff.com

SHOW NOTES/REFERENCES

• Buy tickets to MasterVoices' Strike Up the Band at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday October 29, 2024 
• What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic by Henry Jenkins
• Video footage of George Gershwin in rehearsal for Strike Up the Band, bantering with vaudeville comedians Clark and McCullough.
• Library of America’s Kaufman & Co.
• By George: A Kaufman Collection

The MasterVoices Podcast is a project of the New York City nonprofit MasterVoices (previously The Collegiate Chorale), whose mission is using the human voice to connect, inspire, and unite. Founded in 1941 by Robert Shaw, the Chorale was one of the first integrated choruses in the United States.

Learn more at www.mastervoices.org.

 What was life like in the 1927? What changed by 1930? And how was it all reflected on stage? 

For over half a century, Strike Up the Band has been one of the great mysteries of the American musical theater - lovingly reconstructed and reworked by teams of theater makers, historians, and archivists. For the past year, Maestro Ted Sperling and theater historian Laurence Maslon have been crafting a new version that brings out the best of the original 1927 and 1930 scripts and scores. Listen as they discuss their process with John McWhorter- and share some great anecdotes. 

• no broccoli, no pizza, no talkies 
• slackers and hacks and chaff, oh my! 
• business with cigar… continued business with cigar…
• everyone pays attention to the way a note begins, not so much to how it ends.
• Larry Hart had a brother, Teddy
• ...and who is George Spelvin? 

ARTIST BIOS
JOHN MCWHORTER teaches linguistics at Columbia University, as well as Western Civilization and music history. He has written extensively on issues related to linguistics, race, and other topics for Time, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and elsewhere, and has been a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, and other books, including Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He hosts the Lexicon Valley language podcast, and has written a weekly newsletter for the New York Times since August 2021.

LAURENCE MASLON is a professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and associate chair of the Graduate Acting Program. He is the host and producer of the radio series, Broadway to Main Street, on the local NPR-affiliate station WPPB-FM, which won the 2019 ASCAP Foundation/Deems Taylor Award for Radio Broadcast. Books include a companion volume to the PBS series Broadway: The American Musical, and Broadway to Main Street (Oxford University Press, 2018).  Editing work includes the two-volume set American Musicals (1927-1969) and Kaufman & Co., an anthology of Broadway comedies by George S. Kaufman, both published by the Library of America.

TED SPERLING is a music director, conductor, orchestrator, singer, pianist, violinist and violist. He is the Artistic Director of MasterVoices and was Music Director of the recent Broadway productions of My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, and The King and I. He has led the NY Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Boston Pops, and BBC Concert Orchestra, among many others, as well as the orchestras of New York City Opera and Houston Grand Opera. A graduate of Yale University and The Juilliard School, he appeared as Steve Allen in the Season Two finale of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” tedsperling.net
 
SHOW LINKS 

• Buy tickets to MasterVoices' Strike Up the Band at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday October 29, 2024 
• Laurence Maslon's PBS article on political satire in musicals 
• Word usage and history via Online Etymology Dictionary

The MasterVoices Podcast is a project of the New York City nonprofit MasterVoices (previously The Collegiate Chorale), whose mission is using the human voice to connect, inspire, and unite. Founded in 1941 by Robert Shaw, the Chorale was one of the first integrated choruses in the United States.

Learn more at www.mastervoices.org.