In their conversation over the phone on February 14th, Glenn McClure and fivebyfive intern Cori Trenczer discussed McClure’s “Promised Land: An Adirondack Folk Opera”, McClure’s collaboration with fivebyfive, his general thoughts about choosing who to work with, and his advice for fellow artists.

“Promised Land: An Adirondack Folk Opera” is an opera aimed at showing the history of the Adirondacks that people don’t normally notice, and bringing the community together to see the historical importance of that region. Going forward, audience members have made it clear that they would like to see more of the two female lead characters in the libretto so he is currently working on emphasizing those two characters even more than they already had been. McClure is grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts grant for paying for a portion of the opera, and is excited to have mentioned the Mountain Lake PBS coverage of the opera.

They also discussed the recent collaboration between fivebyfive and Dr. McClure. He said that he enjoyed working with fivebyfive because of their “marvelous imagination” and how they are of course at a “high level technically”, but are still “willing to do off the wall things”. He is “thankful for their friendship” and thankful for their “giddy enthusiasm to do wacky things”, and these are the aspects that made the collaboration most successful and enjoyable.

When asked how he chooses which people to work with, McClure said that projects are usually formed from interesting conversations he has had with people about things they want to communicate. He’s drawn to folks that want to do something interesting. A good example of the beginnings of a project coming from conversation is the Caribbean Mass for Choir and Steel Drum, which was the piece that really launched his career as a composer. So many connections are made at performances of the Mass, musical and professional. When McClure visited Frankfurt for the performance of the mass, the pianist was chatting with him and said he has another choir, and asked McClure to write something for their anniversary…this ended up being for the Choir of the European Space Agency, and he wrote a piece for choir and string quartet specifically representing the Rosetta Mission (the 9 year mission where an orbiter was flown through space and then a lander was dropped on a comet). That entire collaboration came through a conversation that was had at a performance of a different project.

A music student herself, Cori wanted to ask Dr. McClure if he has any advice for fellow musicians. He listed a few important things:

Become a sophisticated listener, listen to the nuances of the person next to you
Listen to those who are not in our field
An artist’s job is to give voice to what we learn from others, and in order to do that we have to be able to listen to them first
Treat people around them well, respect their time and their effort
Follow those folks that you admire
Follow people you trust
Follow the adventure of the relationships that ended up there
Value of always doing good work, always treating people well, and really really looking to those people that you trust and admire and to follow their recommendations
There is no one career path for us creatives

Dr. McClure wanted to mention that he is launching a new website soon, so stay tuned!