New School New Books 2025

Seeking the Philosopher's Stone is a personal, philosophical, and ultimately spiritual exploration of music's ability to alter our perception of time, allowing us to believe, at least for a moment, that we can cheat death. I refer to this phenomenon as “the alchemy of time” and argue that it is an essential part of the opera composer's toolkit within a practice I refer to as “creative dramaturgy.” To explore these ideas, I look not only at my own operas (Dog Days, JFK, Black Lodge, and Soldier Songs) but also at the work of Louis Andriessen, Luciano Berio, John Zorn, Gustav Mahler, Italo Calvino, Werner Herzog, Edward Bond, William S. Burroughs, Michel de Montaigne, and others. I argue that the ability to make us believe we have cheated death is what makes great opera feel so powerful and what consequently makes creative dramaturgy so important.