
Category: Composers




We’re very much looking forward to hosting an online dialogue on February 20 between two people we admire greatly: David Landis and Jake Heggie. David is the president of Landis Communications Inc. in San Francisco and a member of AMN’s advisory board. Jake is one of the premier vocal and opera composers of our era; his compositions include the operas Dead Man Walking (2000) and Moby-Dick (2010). Over email, we asked them to give us a foretaste of their conversation.

David: We met when I was the public-relations director for the San Francisco Symphony and Jake was doing in-house public relations for the San Francisco Opera.
Jake: I started there as a writer in April 1994. I don’t remember exactly when we met, but it was very shortly after that.
David: The San Francisco Opera’s PR department has brought us some great talent! Besides Jake, there’s Armistead Maupin, author of Tales of the City.
Not many serious composers have a background in public relations like yours, Jake! What did you learn about music, and musical institutions, from working in PR?
Jake: It actually started for me in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. I had suffered a hand injury, focal dystonia. That forced me to stop playing piano, which was pretty traumatic. While I was reeducating my hand with an entirely new technique—starting with scales!—I had to find a way to make a living. I discovered I could write well about music and the arts. I got a job at the UCLA Center for the Arts as the PR and marketing writer, and then moved to Cal Performances [at UC Berkeley] and finally the San Francisco Opera. It was a great education. I met people from every corner of the arts: administration, donors, artists, stagehands, props, costumes, wigs and makeup, front of house, box office, art managers, writers, press, publicists. That education has served me well through the years because I learned early about the totality of the business—not just one perspective. Also, my job at the San Francisco Opera was to write about every corner of the opera house and what was going on in it, and relate that to the world somehow. It was heaven! I attended everything, met the most amazing people, took them to interviews, spent time with them … and then started writing songs for the great singers coming through. It was the best apprenticeship ever for an aspiring opera composer … except I didn’t even know I was an aspiring opera composer at the time!
David, you used to sing in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. Have you ever sung any of Jake’s works? Any insights from the singer’s point of view?
David: You give me a lot of credit! I think I only got into the Symphony Chorus because they knew I did PR for the symphony and thought I could help promote the chorus! Sad to say, but I have never sung any of Jake’s works. Let’s put that on my bucket list, please! What I will say as an observer and an audience member is that I’m always impressed with the lyricism of Jake’s music. I think that would be so gratifying as a performer.
Jake, can you tell us a little about what it’s like to receive a commission for a new work?
Jake: A commission is a gift of possibility and a vote of confidence to an artist. It’s the opportunity to find and create something meaningful: to collaborate with great colleagues and go on a wonderful adventure together. I don’t think I’ve ever been told what to write; I’m usually asked what inspires me in the moment. Because if I’m not inspired, it’s not going to be good! It has to be something that gives me musical shivers—where I don’t necessarily know what the music is, but I know the music is there. So I’m asked to create something for a specific occasion, singer, ensemble, company—whatever—and we explore what inspires me that also inspires the company. From there, I suggest the writer, director, conductor, and singers that I want to work with—again, people who inspire me and the team. It’s all about having the right people on the team. One weak link can bring the whole thing down.
Singers like Nick Phan, who has also led an AMN workshop, are huge fans of your work, Jake. Do you write for particular singers’ vocal ranges or abilities?
Jake: I always write for specific singers. Their personalities, idiosyncrasies, and voices are what help me write something specific, clear, and strong. Imagine you’re a screenwriter and you’re asked to write a script for a movie about [former US Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright. You think, hmm, OK, Madeleine Albright. And then they say, “Oh, and we have Meryl Streep as Madeleine Albright.” Well, HELLO! Now, just about anything is possible, right?
David, you’ll be moderating the online conversation on February 20. Want to give us any hints about what you’re planning to ask Jake?
David: I’m always curious not just about the past but about the future. So maybe we can persuade Jake to look into his crystal ball and give us some juicy tidbits that point to the future.

Our February 13 online workshop, “At Home with Lisa Mezzacappa: A Jazz Listening Session,” is a guided tour of jazz history conducted by one of the Bay Area’s most inventive and versatile musicians. An acclaimed composer, bassist, bandleader, and producer, Lisa Mezzacappa has collaborated with filmmakers, dancers, visual artists, and neuroscientists, and has worked with groups from duos to large ensembles.
But there’s a lot more to Lisa Mezzacappa than that brief introduction. Here are six more things you should know about her.

She grew up in a working-class family in Staten Island, New York.
Lisa started playing the clarinet in fourth grade and became a youth symphony star. In junior high school she took up the electric bass, dyed her hair blue, and “jammed with dudes in garages,” as she puts it.
She planned to become a biologist.
She majored in biology at the University of Virginia before adding a second major in music. Eventually, though, science took a back seat to music: Lisa came to the Bay Area and received an MA in ethnomusicology in 2003. Science still informs many of her compositions, most notably “Organelle,” which Mezzacappa calls “a ‘set’ of pieces inspired by diverse scientific processes – some enormous and unfathomable, others impossibly microscopic – that form a whole through the insights and explorations of master improvisers.” In 2019, “Organelle” was awarded the Pauline Oliveros New Genres award from the International Alliance for Women in Music.

In 2005, she toured with 1960s folk-rock star Donovan.
Writing in the San Jose Mercury News in 2014, Richard Sheinin called the tour “a rare above-ground gig” for this prolific underground musician.
She based an album on themes from film noir and detective fiction.
Written for her sextet, avantNOIR (2017)—an homage to the crime stories of Dashiell Hammet and Paul Auster—uses clues, imagery, and quotations from the novels as well as acoustic and electric sounds, field recordings, and composed and improvised material. From the liner notes: “The musicians find themselves in a room at the Alexandria Hotel on Kearney Street, where they are encouraged to sit and have a drink with the wily Caspar Gutman, explore various objects and personages in the room, ride the elevator, make a phone call, holler to someone in the street below for help, or get the heck out of there.” (Listen to “The Ballad of Big Flora” from avantNOIR.)
She won a 2020 Bay Area Jazz Award.
San Jose Mercury News jazz writer Andrew Gilbert bestowed the puckishly titled “In Case NASA Needs a Resident Composer Award” on Lisafor her “antic, playful, and often poignant settings for the album Cosmicomics,” a project inspired by “the whimsical celestial fables of the Italian writer Italo Calvino.”(Listen to the Lisa Mezzacappa Six play “Solar Storms” from CosmiComics.)
Her latest project is a radio opera.
“The Electronic Lover” was released as a podcast in nine episodes. Listen to the first episode here.