The music man

Richard Cumming's orchestral Picnic

by Bill Rodriguez

Richard Cumming and Adrian Hall, back in the day

Richard Cumming knows he's a talented composer, and it's no wonder. There are the admonitions and appreciations of so many great composers within him. "Augmentation, diminution," he says as he points to favorite moments of a passage he has penciled into a musical notebook, that day's transcription from what he calls "the Bible," the 48 Preludes and Fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach. Every morning he gets up at 5 to copy one of the parts for meticulous study.

"The only similarity among the 48 fugues is that they begin with a fugue subject. That's the only similarity," he says, amazed at "the constant inventiveness of that mind."

He says he becomes a better composer by the exercise, from which he is still learning. "For one thing, my counterpoint frees up, and my use of inner voices frees up. My baseline becomes far more mobile -- I've always been a good melodist." One fugue takes him a week, the whole collection a year, and he has gone through the exercise every decade since he was a teenager.

Speaking of which, Cumming -- Dee Dee to friends -- has remained resolutely boyish, joking and enthusing in his CD- and book-packed Benefit Street parlor, packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes on more than one table. He'll be 71 in a few weeks, and he needs an exercise bicycle in the kitchen to keep himself limber after a recent hip replacement. But Cumming hops spryly up to play a three-step modulation to C-major in Beethoven's Eroica symphony that he finds brilliant in its banal directness.

The upcoming world premiere of his first opera, if it's anything like its composer, will be anything but banal. Trinity Repertory Company is staging The Picnic, directed by Oskar Eustis, on February 28 and March 2, with a March 6 matinee. A 15-piece chamber orchestra will be conducted by Edward Markward, of the Rhode Island Civic Chorale and Orchestra. It's been workshopped in Denver and New York, the latter performance earning it the Rubin Opera Award. The cast of singers includes celebrated mezzo-soprano Hillary Nicholson as well as baritones Rene de la Garza and James Kleyla.

Cumming is Shanghai-born, Manila-raised, San Francisco-schooled and has been equally as far-ranging in his career as a composer. His name is recurringly familiar to Trinity audiences as the co-writer, with founding artistic director Adrian Hall, of the perennial A Christmas Carol. He has co-authored 14 other stage, screen, PBS and radio productions with Hall, as well as more than 100 musical scores.

Over the decades, he has taught at several colleges around here, giving that up in recent years because "it's all the same energy that goes into the composing." The last "arts experience" class he taught at Rhode Island College started out with 17 students, but when word went out about the dynamic, smart and funny instructor who thought that all great music is sexually charged, 68 showed up the next day.

"As Auntie Mame said, `Life is a banquet spread before us, but most poor sons of bitches are starving to death,'" he observes, apropos of the musical "enthusiast" he describes himself as being.

Fortunately for Trinity, Hall tapped that enthusiasm, and musical sheet-smarts, from the get-go, from the company's first production, Saint Joan in 1966. Cumming has composed some 60 scores for Trinity and has been at the keyboard for 20 productions. Even more important for local audiences, he was in charge of Project Discovery from its 1966 inception till 1980. The longest-lived of those Federal grant high school theater appreciation programs, its one-millionth student was bussed to Trinity last season. Project Discovery held Hall's creative feet to the fire of teenage disdain for Shakespeare (at one RISD Auditorium performance, students tore plumbing out of a restroom!). Out of sheer survival Hall was forced to develop the dynamic "Trinity style" of audience engagement.

Such as the early production of Macbeth. "Out came a cannon, shot into the audience's faces! Through this smoke of which came a bagpiper. Gnaaa, gnaaa -- told you immediately, Scotland," Cumming says. "That mind of Adrian Hall's! I wouldn't be the composer I am today except for Adrian. Oh, no. That fertile mind."

When Cumming was musical director in the theater's formative years, he and Hall scorned taped music, instead incorporating live musicians into the action. It's a signature Trinity practice that continues today.

His first "real teacher, as a composer" was Roger Sessions, the influential composer of polyphonic symphonies. Sessions instructed him for six years, from Cumming's late teens, and taught by using models such as Bach.

"And then my beloved friend and teacher Ernest Bloch. We went from Mr. Bloch to Ernest to Uncle Ernie to Ernie," he says. The noted Swiss-born composer, Sessions' teacher, is especially known for his chamber music.

From them all, as later from Hall, Cumming knew he must learn how to enthrall, whether with piano pieces or songs.

"I'll tinker with harmonies, constantly. Just one alteration and suddenly a chord comes so to life. Just taking a D up to a D-sharp. Ooh, yeah, that makes it far more uneasy," he says. "One wants constantly, of course, as one wants in the theater or in a novel, to grab that reader, grab that audience, grab that auditor and get them involved."

And opera, with its grand emotional sweep and lyrical majesty, certainly can engage listeners musically. Cumming's The Picnic is a microcosm of such epic emotionalism, involving seven people on a beautiful spring day who go on a picnic. Against the pastoral calm, long-kept secrets emerge, and by the end of two hours several lives have been devastated. The late Henry Butler wrote the libretto, which the composer describes as being "Chekovian" in its storytelling depth.

Cumming began writing the opera in 1964, originally for 32 instruments. But in 1971, a visit to the Austrian chalet of composer Samuel Barber -- who received a Pulitzer in 1958 for the opera Vanessa -- changed that grand design to something more intimate.

"Sam said, `Are you out of your mind? There are seven people, there's no chorus, there's no ballet. Even the picnic is eaten during the intermission. What are you doing with this Strauss orchestration?'" Cumming recalls. "I said, Jesus he's right. So back to square one I went and rewrote it for 15 instruments. That's why it took from 1964 to 1980 to write!"

Simplicity, simplicity, as Thoreau advised.

"At age 70, what I've finally come to do in my composing is to be economical," he says. "That doesn't mean it can't have great flourish."

And if the life and work and personality of Dee Dee Cumming is any indicator, it will be a fine and elegant flourish indeed.