Introduction
        The words “pocket opera” suggest, to most people, “smaller than the Met”. Indeed there are several companies in the United States and Europe with Pocket Opera in their names, and they have many characteristics in common: small houses, affordable prices, traditional repertory and modest productions. Examples include Donald Pippin’s Pocket Opera in San Francisco and New York City’s Amato Opera, while Europe boasts companies with the name “Pocket Opera” in Nuremberg, Germany, Zürich, Switzerland and Venice, Italy.

John Eaton’s Pocket Operas – The Background
        The Pocket Operas that John Eaton has written for the New York New Music Ensemble and his own Pocket Opera Players bear some similarities with the traditional movement, especially in the reduced size and portability.
        It’s the differences that matter, though. The “pocket” flavor of the Eaton’s works is suggested by this quote from producer Ed Greer:  “It also allows for juxtaposition of ideas - taking the miscellaneous things that somehow you end up with in your pocket and arranging them in a way that makes sense.”
        The sense of the unexpected, as if a pocket opera could come out of Huck Finn’s pocket, along with the frog and the marbles, keeps them light. While still treated seriously, pocket operas, (particularly the "Romps for Instrumentalists") are created with humor and playfulness.

Pocket Operas demystify opera.
        The concrete differences between Eaton’s Pocket Operas and the productions by traditional Pocket Opera companies are notable. First, these are new, original works created for contemporary musicians and their audiences. Eaton’s first “Pocket Opera” was commissioned by the NYNME, which asked for “a piece in which they could do more than just play their instruments”.
        That leads to the second difference, which is that the Pocket Operas ask much non-musical activity of the musicians. As it has developed, the genre has divided into two closely related categories: “Romps for Instrumentalists” with typically no singers other than the instrumentalists, and “Pocket Operas” in which, although the main characters are played by singers, the instrumentalists have considerable participation. In both forms the musicians take on characters in the plays, may sing, whisper, speak, dance or even turn somersaults, while still playing their instruments.
        Joan Kopperud, the acclaimed clarinetist who has performed in many Pocket Operas, described her attraction to the work:
“It brings range and fun to my life and work and has expanded my studies (I have taken dance, acting, and mime classes.) For example, I just returned from playing a bad, mad queen and had a blast being mean and cartoonlike on stage, right down to a major temper tantrum.”
        The third difference relates directly to the music. Eaton has written that he thinks his most important contributions to music are:
        a) The exploration and development of multiphonics and other new techniques for woodwinds — indeed the exploration of new musical materials for all Western instruments.
        b) An immersion in microtonal music. Eaton approaches this not as a theorist, but pragmatically. In his opera Danton and Robespierre the music of the title characters radically differentiate their personalities and visions; the humanist Danton uses the approach of dividing the traditional half steps into quarter tones, with every pitch having many different tendencies, while unbending idealist Robespierre’s music is in just intonation with every pitch closely related to the tonal center of the moment. Eaton writes: “In short, I approach microtonal music rather like a whore; I will use whatever gets the job done, in the case the “job” being whatever I want to express.”
        c) The live performance of electronic music on instruments especially constructed or modified for that purpose. (Eaton’s longtime collaborators on electronic music and instruments include the legendary Robert Moog. Eaton also pioneered in the electronic modification of instruments and especially voices in opera.)
        These elements are present in nearly all of the pocket operas, in varying quantities.

June 20, 2007
Pumped Fiction (World Premiere) at Symphony Space's
Leonard Nimoy Thalia at 8PM.

Previous Pocket Operas
        Pinocchio (2004)
        Peer Gynt (1993)
        Let’s Get This Show on the Road (1993)
        Don Quixote (1996)
        Golk (1996)
        Travelling with Gulliver (1997)
        Antigone (1999)
        Youth (2000)
        "...inasmuch" (2002)
        Salome's Flea Circus (2003)
       

Check out our web feature in the archives of
http://www.NewMusicBox.org under Eaton. 

REVIEWS (text files)!
Sequenza21
The New York Times

INTERVIEWS (sound-file)
WNYC Radio, Carmen Helena Téllez and John Eaton