Matthew Zapruder and Missy Mazzoli in Correspondence

What follows is a conversation conducted over several weeks by email between composer and musician Missy Mazzoli and poet Matthew Zapruder, friends and fellow travelers, concerning their work together on Mazzoli’s recently released and highly acclaimed album Vespers for a New Dark Age, some differences and similarities between the effects of music and poetry, compositional processes and childhood loneliness formations, good and bad gigs, rocking out, teaching, creativity, and the 1990s. See Korea, the poem that inspired the vespers here.

MATTHEW ZAPRUDER: Hi Missy. What are you working on? And what are you up to right this very minute?

MISSY MAZZOLI: Believe it or not, this very minute I am sitting in my boring ole Brooklyn apartment, listening to a loopy playlist I made of Henry Purcell, Brian Wilson, and Beck, taking a break from packing. I’m about to go to Philadelphia for a few days to work with the opera company, and then down to Houston for a performance of Song from the Uproar, an opera I wrote in 2012. It’s strange for me to look up and notice how so completely opera and theater have taken over my life.

I’m working daily on an adaptation of Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves for Opera Philadelphia, and doing research for a few other theatrical projects. What’s occupying you creatively these days?

MZ: Sorry I haven’t written you. There is this little baby in our house now who has achieved a level of adorableness utterly inimical to adult scheduling. Right now I am staring at said four and a half month old baby, actually, his image in one of those little blue plastic monitors. In a minute I will go upstairs and kick it with him.

Right when my son was born I felt a burst of creative energy, which was quickly drowned in a wave of sleeplessness (I wrote a poem for you, in fact, with him on my lap!). My wife has been great about making sure that I have some regular times to work, but I have not been so good over the past several weeks at preserving that time: I usually end up catching up on “crucial” emails (I feel like crucial emails is an oxymoron) that I have not answered, or doing school or editing work, and then feeling despair, because I didn’t actually make anything except some lost pixels.

I’ve also started work on another musical/theater project, something our friend Gabe Kahane is working on, an adaptation of a story for an opera. It’s all still very nascent, and I am mostly doing a lot of “research”...