Composer Revels in Blurring Boundaries

For Bob Massey, a grandfather's gift turned out to be a seed of inspiration that has so far produced a multimedia opera, an album and, this week, a concert performance. All go by the name "The Nitrate Hymnal" and explore the fragile nature of memory, the unreliability of technology in shaping memories and the inexorable erosion of love.

As Massey explains it, after his grandmother died in 1999, his grandfather gave him all the 8mm home movies he had shot during their marriage. "I made him project them on the wall and videotape himself explaining what was going on in all these films," says Massey, who had seen some of the footage over and over as he was growing up "but none of my grandparents as young people."

The home movies covered four decades of marriage, starting with his grandparents' honeymoon in 1941 just before Pearl Harbor, and the changes startled Massey, a key figure in Washington's DIY post-punk music scene since the '80s. He hosted the local composers salon Punk Not Rock, played in the post-punk-chamber ensemble Telegraph Melts and still leads the late-night-music-leaning Gena Rowlands Band. Massey also writes for several music journals and worked as a news aide at The Washington Post for a number of years.

Massey says that what moved him was the fact that "there's your mortality in front of you. You're looking at two different grandfathers -- the one who is a young guy who doesn't have kids yet and has no idea what's coming down the pike, and then you're looking at the old guy who's been through a war and a train wreck of a family. That dissonance between them is so intense that you almost couldn't miss it."

What to do with that impression was another matter, and Massey spent a couple of years trying to figure it out, eventually leaning toward creating a song cycle and simply projecting the films. Massey says he thought that would be it. "When I started talking to [filmmaker] David Wilson, whom I knew from other projects, we found a grant for 'experimental opera.' We thought, 'Well, we technically fit the bill,' and it sort of became a self-fulfilling prophecy."

The key word would be experimental: "The Nitrate Hymnal: A Dying Dream in Four Acts" is not a rock opera. It involves rock musicians, but they were drawn from Washington's underground community and teamed with the New York avant-chamber ensemble Anti-Social Music for the opera. For its world premier at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial Auditorium in Alexandria in January 2003, the work was scored for two electric guitars and electronic keyboards, a string section of three violins, viola, two cellos and bass, acoustic percussion, pre-recorded sounds and four singers.

The team gathered to record the album last year and will unite again for Saturday's rare concert performance at the Warehouse Theater. Hai-Ting Chinn, who sang in the original production, will join Daisy Press (Bang on a Can All-Stars) and Massey on vocals, supported by a 12-piece orchestra.

The opera imagines an aspiring filmmaker visiting his grandmother on her deathbed and ends up exploring truths and consequences captured in the family's home movies juxtaposed against imagined interludes. Massey has always made it clear that the opera's story -- involving geriatric decline, a son's suicide and a troubled marriage -- has no real connection to his grandparents' actual lives; he used their images only as counterpoint to invented scenarios. Massey's grandfather, now 90, has not seen or heard "The Nitrate Hymnal," but he gave Massey free rein to use the films, which won't be included in the Warehouse concert.

"This is a punk rock production and has been from the very beginning," Massey says of the adjustments, adding, "I'd love to say we have the resources to do everything, but we don't."

The initial organizational grant came from the Creative Capital Foundation; by the time "The Nitrate Hymnal" had its world premiere in Alexandria, it was as a commission of the Washington Performing Arts Society. The performance was produced by Anti-Social Music, with Massey writing the music and libretto and Wilson handling film and video; they collaborated on the story.

Massey recalls a number of starts and stops on the way to Alexandria. An initial score, he says, "needed to be tightened up in form because I was not playing to my strength. I was doing something a little more ambitious than I had chops for, and I had to go back and actually write hooks, which is actually what I can do. Hooks in pop songs and arias in operas are kind of the same thing, but I hadn't written any arias, and it was flat sounding, slow and not that dramatic. I had a month of all-nighters to start from scratch."

One benefit: "I know a lot more about Mozart, Verdi and all these dudes than I would ever have had reason to," says Massey, who once described "The Nitrate Hymnal" as "opera for people who hate opera."