Local composer, tenor, and pianist Jesse Preis (Oregon via Wyoming) had wanted to write a small-scale opera ever since 2018, when they sang a staged version of Schubert’s Winterreise. That experience led to a series of private musical sketches on Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven.” Preis then used their pandemic downtime to turn those sketches into a three-voice setting (two narrators, one raven).

The work will be premiered by Renegade Opera on November 9 and 10. That premiere is part of Renegade’s upcoming Artists in Conversation Stage(s) at The Center for Native Arts and Cultures in Southeast Portland, a two-day event that also features a workshop reading of Little Ones by Renegade co-founder Danielle Jagelski and Rhiana Yazzie.

Here’s how the Renegade folks describe the distinction between the two:

2024 Artists in Conversation Stage(s) presents live performances of two works in different stages of their development. The presentation of Little Ones is the first libretto reading, the first time anyone is hearing the words that will be set to music by the composer.

The presentation of The Raven is the first concert performance, the first time the music and libretto will be performed for an audience, with no costumes and minimal staging.

All of this is in itself a novel way of doing opera production, which is exactly what you’d expect from “Portland’s Unconventional Opera Company.” In the few years of their existence they’ve amply demonstrated what they can do for (and to) Oregon audiences, as you can see and hear in Oregon ArtsWatch’s recent coverage of Adam’s Run (here and here), Birdsongs of Opera (here), American Patriots and She Loves You Back (here), Orlofsky’s Party (here), and so on. Much of this is now on Renegade’s YouTube channel, and you can get started with that right here:

What interested us about Preis’ setting – besides its subject matter (“The Raven” is longer than you remember, and a difficult poem to set under any circumstances) — is that they set it with open vocal scoring. Open scoring is not too unusual in instrumental music, from the earliest days of Baroque trio sonatas to today’s graphic scores, jazz charts, and so on. But it’s less common in vocal composition, and especially in opera, because composers and singers alike tend to prefer having everything dialed in – not just by voice type (soprano, bass, etc.) but by fach (coloratura, lyric, comic, etc.) This dialing in has always been an aspect of operatic writing, but in recent decades it’s also become wrapped up with the tedious overspecialization that so characterizes contemporary classical music and modern life in general.

Preis decided they wanted no part of that, and composed their opera in such a way that any singer could sing any of its three roles, regardless of gender expression and other traditionally limiting factors (ask any mezzo about the old “witches, bitches, and britches” problem). In this production, all three singers happen to be women: Abigail Krawson as the Young Narrator, Claire Robertson-Preis as the Old Narrator, and Renegade co-founder Madeline Ross as The Raven. But, thanks to a clever bit of compositional ingenuity, any combination of singers can perform this setting.

We had to know more about all this, and also had the usual questions about a-ha moments and The Future and whatnot, the stuff we ask every composer we can get ahold of. So we got Preis on the phone and picked their brain about it all. 

Renegade Opera’s Artists in Conversation Stage(s) happens at The Center for Native Arts and Cultures on November 9 and 10; tickets and more information available here. Our conversation with Preis has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.

Oregon ArtsWatch: Tell us about your a-ha moment.

Jesse Preis: I think I’ve had a series of those throughout my life, but maybe the most pivotal was that when I was young I had a great-grandmother who was a self-taught pianist, and she was fabulous. I remember her listening to recordings of famous pianists like Vladimir Horowitz playing Rachmaninoff and Chopin and Mozart, and she would get out her scores – she had a whole closet of piano music – and she would go over every detail, and then she would learn how to play the piece. I remember as a six-year-old sitting on the floor of her house, listening to her play Rachmaninoff, and being like, “Wow, I really want to do that.” And so one day I told her, “I really want to learn how to play piano,” and she said, “Oh, I’d love to teach you.”

From the very beginning I was interested in writing my own music, and trying to learn as much as I could. I grew up in Wyoming, out in the middle of nowhere, but I was surrounded by music because she just lived down the street from me. So I would go down and hang out with her, and we’d talk about music together and listen to Gershwin, and I even remember getting out film scores I was excited about and showing them to her and getting her take on those.

She was an incredibly important inspiration for me. So it’s not as much of a moment, but it’s a person who really really helped me and fostered my love for it.

OAW: When did you start singing? And what made you decide to pursue music academically and/or professionally?

JP: I got into singing when I was in high school. I sang a lot growing up, because my family were very religious people, so we sang in church, you know, those kind of things. But I really got into musicals in high school. I was cast as Curly McLain in Oklahoma, and I remember practicing my butt off on that. It was so exciting. It was a really cool, nerve-wracking, exciting time for me. When I graduated from high school, I had at that point decided that I was going to do music – but when I went to college I didn’t know what instrument to do, because I was doing piano, I had also been doing saxophone for seven years at that point, and I was singing. So I started for the first year of my college career doing all three, and then narrowed it down after that.

OAW: What were some of the early compositions of your own that made you really feel like a composer?

JP: I wrote a few piano pieces at different points in my middle school and high school years, and I’d have people just be like, “Wow, that’s really good!” And I remember one person hearing something and coming back to me later, like, “I’ve had your piece just going on in my head all day!” I was like, “Oh, my goodness! That feels so good!” It was something that I had wanted to do for a long time.

And that connects to something I do now. I teach with a school called Hoffman Academy, based out of Cedar Mill. The thing that we always teach is that anybody can be a composer. There’s no rule for writing something that people will like and connect to. There are things that you can go through: these things seem to really be hooks for people, people like these things when they hear music. But when you get into classical music, especially in the 20th century, you have composers writing stuff that’s just totally out there and still making it work. Trying to say, “there is only one way to do this” — it just doesn’t work anymore. So I’m saying to kids, “if you like it, that’s the most important thing.”

I run into compositional block; I’ll be like, “this isn’t good enough, this isn’t something that people will like.” But then I have to get out of that mindset and think, “well, if I like it, somebody out there will like it.” So I have to bring it back to being more personal and not trying to please everybody else.

OAW: How would you characterize your teaching method at Hoffman? What’s a typical lesson like?

JP: I normally like to start off with technical things, warm-ups, you know, like any normal teacher. But I think that one thing that sets us apart is that we try to not just teach music that’s on the page. There’s a traditional way that piano teachers have taught, and it’s mostly just note-reading based. But that misses the whole point of music, which is to listen and to enjoy. So we try to connect the ear first – very much based on Suzuki and Kodály methods, which are much more ear-based than sight-reading.

So we do that first and then we bring in the sight-reading. Every lesson is about making music, whether that be something that is written down or something that’s never been played before. So we do improvisation sessions in our lessons, and we’ll set parameters. For beginner students we’ll give them a finger scale like a penta scale. C major: CDEF, and G. Those are the only notes you can play during this time, but you can play them in any order at any time. And then teachers will play some kind of chord progression, or some kind of groove, for them to improvise over the top of. And that gets them not just thinking about “is it good, or is it bad, but can I create something I enjoy?” And that’s really helped me with my writer’s block as well. It’s just being in that moment, creating something that you connect to that you enjoy.

And some of the best musicians are that way. Like Keith Jarrett, his famous Köln Concert where he just went up there and played stuff he had never played before, and it became like one of the most famous jazz recordings in history. As classical musicians we often think so much about, “it’s got to be perfect. It’s got to be exactly what the composer intended.” And, you know, if it’s written down it should be. But at the same time, music should be a personal thing. It should be an expressive thing. It’s not just a set of rules that you have to follow. It should be something that is current, too. Getting out of that classical mindset of being perfectionists, and being a little bit more of a jazzer, and being willing to bring some life to music. That’s important to me. Not that my music is really that jazzy!

OAW: So let’s talk about The Raven. What led you to set this particular Poe piece, and how did you approach the composition process? And tell us more about the open voice-type scoring.

JP: I’ve always loved that poem; Edgar Allan Poe has been a poet that I’ve been interested in since I was young. And I really wanted to write an opera, but I didn’t know what about – and this is my first opera, my first finished one. I really enjoy stories that are a little bit longer, that take you through a journey, and you have to think about them and what they are saying. Stories like Winterreise or Die schöne Müllerin by Schubert. Both of those are fantastic song cycles that really are operas for one person, because they follow a long storyline. When I was in college I did Winterreise from beginning to end, with staging and everything, because I was very interested in that concept. And I was like, “I want to write something like that.”

So I had a couple of sketches: “if I ever wrote The Raven into an opera these are ideas that I think would fit with that.” Then, in the last few years – especially during the pandemic – I really started bringing them together. Because, you know, we were not doing so much for so long. And I was like, “I have these ideas sitting around, let’s start doing something.” So I started putting them together and doing edits and deciding what worked and what didn’t.

I am a team member at Renegade Opera, and Renegade has a history of doing immersive opera. I mean, our statement is that we “create thought-provoking, intimate musical performances that engage audiences and multifaceted artists, reclaiming narrative power for the traditionally underrepresented and championing institutional reform in opera.” So, as an opera student, I always thought that the institution was kind of stuffy – we were always doing older works, in the more traditional way. But there’s so many new works, and so many people who want to write new works. We need to start thinking, “how can this be different? How can this support people who normally didn’t get a role, or would like to sing a role that they can’t sing for traditional reasons, or because the composer decided to do stuff that their voice just can’t do?”

So as I wrote it, I gave options for the different roles, so that if there’s a note that’s written that’s too high they can sing a lower option, or if it’s written too low they can sing a higher option. Those kinds of things. And I tried to make it more central to what all voices can do with their vocal range. It doesn’t matter what fach they are, they can choose a part that they really connect to.

There’s three different parts. There’s the narrator, looking at this tale at two different parts of their life. So there’s the narrator experiencing the tale, and then there’s the narrator in the future looking back and retelling it, experiencing the emotions in different ways. The narrator has traditionally been viewed as a man, but that’s not written into this opera. It doesn’t matter what gender you are, it doesn’t matter what gender expression you are, it doesn’t matter what fach or voice type you are. As long as you can sing the notes or sing the options, you can sing the part. That was my intention with it.

And then there’s, of course, the raven. In our case it’s a her, but it doesn’t have to be. The raven has their own aria that uses the word “nevermore.”

Overall I was trying to write something that people could connect to, and could be excited about performing. My intention was for it to not be super-challenging, for it to be something that was melodic that people could listen to and get in their heads, and be able to learn quickly – whether that be learning from the piano or learning from a listening track or whatever. It’s not intended for singers that are, like, incredible pianists or have perfect pitch, or anything like that. I feel like a lot of new works get into that: “you have to be incredible to sing this.” But one thing that made opera so exciting back in the day was that it was like the film of that day. It was something that people went to for fun. It wasn’t just heady stuff. So that’s what I wanted to recreate with this, too.

The intention is that even if a group of young singers who are still figuring things out, amateur singers, people who maybe struggle with playing the piano and learning parts that way, that they can learn this opera, because hopefully they connect to a part of it. Anybody can sing it, and can learn it quickly, and sing any part they want.

I identify as a nonbinary trans composer, and one of the reasons I wrote the score the way it is because I think it’s important for people to be able to sing parts that they want to sing. And sometimes that means gender-switching, or singing something that feels more aligned to oneself. One thing that Renegade is doing is reaching out and contacting people who are of the LGBTQ community – specifically nonbinary and trans people who are interested in this work – to be able to come for no cost and enjoy the work, and also be able to have a discussion afterwards. We have a question-and-answer period afterwards, and that’s for me as a composer as well – it’s basically a workshop for me to think about going forward with the work itself, and also with my compositions in the future, when approaching this style of composition that is fachless and not gender-specific. That’s important to me.

OAW: What do you listen to for pleasure? Actually let’s be more specific – what did you listen to yesterday?

JP: Yesterday I listened to some Oingo Boingo. “Heard Somebody Cry,” “Running on a Treadmill,” “It Only Makes Me Laugh,” “Private Life.” I love Oingo Boingo, just to put on while I’m washing dishes or cooking or driving. I love Danny Elfman, I love film scores. And it’s Halloween, so it fits so well.

One of my big favorites is Hans Zimmer, has been since I was a kid. He was a big influence on me, and I got to see him live last week in Seattle. That was amazing. One of my big inspirations is minimalism, so Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt. I love Pärt’s Berliner Messe, and his Passio. Those are pieces I listen to a lot for inspiration, and they’re so calming, too.

Also Romantic music, Rachmaninoff. But I’ll listen to hard metal sometimes. I love Rammstein. I’ll listen to musicals, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Andrew Lippa, Hamilton. I used to dislike atonal music, but over the pandemic I’ve been getting into more of it. Lately I’ve listened to a lot of Varèse. And Stockhausen’s Licht cycle has been very interesting. I would love to see it someday. I’m just curious how it works, because his operas are so different than what you would traditionally think of as operas.

I really enjoy Irish traditional music. I’ve been listening to composers from the Ottoman era. One of them that I’ve been listening to a lot is Tanburi Cemil Bey. His “Nikrîz Sirto” is really catchy. It gets stuck in your head. It’s fantastic music, traditionally played on the tanbur and the oud, but more modern instrumentalists have put it on the cello. You can find all sorts of recordings of that specific piece online.

It could take me forever talking about all the people that I’m inspired by. But that’s the thing I love about music, because I feel like so many people get stuck in a rut, and only listen to a couple groups, and only listen to what they put out. But there’s just so much music out there that all has things that make it great.

OAW: What would you ask Jesse Preis?

JP: Oh, that’s a hard one. I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about that. Like, right now? Or in a different time, like in the future?

OAW: Oooh, yeah, what would you ask your older self from the future?

JP: Well, right now things in the world are scary, especially for performers and musicians, and I guess I would want to ask my future self, “How did you navigate through all this? And how did you still keep your love for music throughout that? And how did that change your music or your approach?”

I feel like the way I write music now isn’t the same as how I wrote it years ago, or the reasons that I write now aren’t the reasons I wrote years ago. And the things that inspire me have maybe not changed, but widened. How does that change for the future?

OAW: And what does Future Jesse say?

JP: Well, hopefully I would say that things weren’t as scary as they might have seemed, that things were going to work out, and that the music and my approach would be an expression of joy and appreciation for the life that I’ve been living. And also a getaway when things have been tough, a warm blanket, something to make me feel at home. Because that’s how it is now, and I want it to continue that way.