As a writer, my job is to communicate an idea or story in a way that appears effortless. With ‘Star of Love’ I wanted to explore two themes; the power of love and the power of music. From the response I have received through phone calls, letters, and emails, I think Lou and I have accomplished our goal. Even without the visual humor that is so necessary to the opera, every one so far has laughed at all the jokes and understood the storyline to a tee. As Elvis said, “I said all that to say all this.” Your positive comments are what brightens our day. Please be a ‘Star of Lover’ and blog us to death with happy thoughts. Steve ..oh yeah to you know who. I purposely did not use the word ‘chow’ in the opera as a way of saying goodbye in Italian.  I’m not that corny.

As a mother of 3 young boys, I’m always trying to find ways to incorporate culture into our not so cultural life. A children’s opera is great idea. It’s just the thing to reel them in and have them learning before they even realize they are being exposed to something cultural! Keep it coming.

Steve and I started composing Star of Love in 1997. I was a graduate student at Washington University. Soon after we started, I moved back east to Boston. From then on, our collaboration was by mail and phone.

One of the most successful methods we used was mailing cassette tapes. In Star of Love, Steve is not only the word guy, but also the melody guy. For every word written, Steve would have a melody to go with it. My job was to take these melodies and add an orchestra part to them, as well as retro-fitting them into a large whole.

Since Steve does not write music notation very well, he would send me tapes in the mail of him singing the melodies and then explaining to me what he wanted the orchestra to do. These descriptions would sometime be specific, but more often than not, he would say things like, “can you make the orchestra sound like fireflys?” . i enjoyed the challenge and enjoyed very much trying to figure out what Steve wanted.
This process went to on from 1999 until about 2004.

Hey kids, did you ever wonder how to write and opera? In this section I will write about all the steps steve and I have gone through to compose Star of Love. If you have any questions, you can ask them in a comment, or write your own entry and we will all junmp in and discuss yuor question.

Hey Folks, who heard our radio show? Tell us what you thought?