- Thank you, Michael.

Joining us in the studio tonight is Dr.

Augusta Cecconi-Bates, director of, as she puts it, serious music.

Dr.

Cecconi-Bates, thank you for joining us in the studio this evening.

It's a pleasure to have you here.

- Well, it's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you.

- And you have an extensive background in operatic production, musical production.

All, and all of your works are really influenced around anti-war and anti-discrimination.

I'm really curious, where did that journey begin for you?

- I think that began when I was commissioned in the early eighties by Oswego, SUNY Oswego, to write a piece for band.

And they, I picked the war is kind poem by Stephen Crane.

And I realized this is very important.

This is very important.

We were not at war then, but it was very important.

And that was commissioned, it was performed.

It was performed in Chicago several times by the Chicago Symphonic Wind Ensemble 'cause they thought it was important.

And in the eighties, Christopher Keen, who was then a conductor for the Syracuse Symphony, got wind of the cantata.

And he came up to me at a meeting one night and he said, if you orchestrate this, I'll perform it.

So I orchestrated it 'cause it was for band and I had to make it for orchestra.

So I orchestrated it, sent a copy to him, and it came directly back to me unopened because Christopher Keen had died.

- Oh.

So he was not able to do it.

And now I'm trying to find orchestras to touch it again.

And you're working on a bunch of works as we speak.

You have recently worked on pieces such as picking Elderberries with Craig Thornton.

You are working on, you did a opera, Molly of the Mohawks as we have here.

And you even referenced, I wanna go back a little bit 'cause you referenced Stephen Crane when you were talking about one of your cantatas, War is Kind.

Yeah.

What's the background behind that cantata?

- Well, the background behind that, Stephen Crane was a war correspondent during the Boar War in the 1899.

He died shortly thereafter, but he was the anti-war person.

He firmly believed that war was not good.

And he writes this poem and in them poem, it's, it's a description of how horrible war can be.

And obviously war is not kind.

- So when you make these, when you make these pieces of music, these cantatas, these operas, how do you get your message across of anti-war, anti-discrimination?

- Well, you have to have texts.

If you don't have words, you can't get the message across.

I mean, you can write all the beautiful music you want, it's just music.

All right.

It's sound.

But sound without the sense of the words isn't gonna tell you that it's anti-war.

You have to really make your point.

- And it sounds like you've definitely made that point.

'cause there was another, there was another cantata you mentioned that you are trying to get back played.

We have a dream.

And am I correct in assuming that that has relation to Martin Luther King's I have a dream speech?

- Oh yes it does.

- Ooh.

- Oh, in 1968 when he was assassinated, I was teaching in schools in Syracuse, New York.

And a lot of my kids were black students, eighth grades, and they were devastated.

And they came up to me and they said, wow, this is so terrible that this happened.

I said, why don't you write a bunch of essays and poems about Dr.

King?

So they did.

And we got it.

We put it all in a little booklet for them.

And then they came up to me and they said, Ms.

Bates, we know that you write music, can you make these words so that we can sing about Dr.

King?

And I said, sure.

So I put the little cantata together, we performed it with the kids maybe five, six times in Syracuse that in 1969, 1970.

And then the city asked me to orchestrate it.

And they said, if you get, if you orchestrate it, we'll get all city choir, all city orchestra.

'cause at that time they had orchestra in Syracuse schools.

They don't anymore, but they did.

And we'll get two good singers who are from the black community to sing the solos.

So we did, and it was performed in 1972.

It uses the, the text that the kids wrote, a lot of theirs.

But it also used, I have a dream that one day my four children, this is the speech by Dr.

King.

And we performed it and it was very, very successful.

And then it sat on the shelf for years.

And then suddenly orchestras were asking me about it.

So I submitted it and the first thing they hit was, you just broke a copyright law.

- Oh.

- You can't do it without permission from the king family because the 1963 speech I Have a Dream is copyrighted.

- Oh.

- So what I did was I changed the words and I essentially paraphrased what he said.

Still the same cantata, still seeking 27 different orchestras are looking at this.

Nobody has said yes, they're gonna do it.

But you never know.

You know, they just might.

- Now, I wanna mention another piece you're working on right now.

As a matter of fact, skaters, it's in production as we speak over in Toronto.

What can audiences expect for this upcoming opera?

- Well, they're gonna see a lot because number one, it is an opera.

Number two, it's gonna be a multimedia production because we're gonna show film from the 1940s during the war.

And we're also gonna show the film of when the two skaters, the sister and brother won a championship in 1962 in Prague.

That was on Wide World of Sports.

So we have that film of them, their skating champ, their championship skating of that.

So that'll be shown.

- How did you get access to that sort of media?

- It's in public.

That's public domain.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

That's public domain.

So we have a right to it.

- Okay.

I know Toronto has important significance as to why it's being put on there as opposed to anywhere else in the world.

What is that important significance?

- Well, specifically that family that left Czechoslovakia in 1948 and escaped, came to Canada and settled in just outside of Toronto at Oakville.

And they have a family business and they, they still maintain that business.

They're purveyors of cork products and they've been doing the seven generations of that.

But in any case, the two skaters were very happy in Canada.

They won the championship that they won in 1962 as Canadian citizens.

And Otto became the ambassador from Canada to the Czech Republic under Queen Elizabeth.

Wow.

So it's, it's very, very much connected to Toronto.

- So people are going to love this opera when they see it.

Oh, I think so.

It sounds like there was a lot of hard work and you referenced somebody who you worked with very closely.

Oh yeah.

Who passed away in the middle of this production.

Yeah, actually even my Molly of the Mohawks a lot, the conductor for that was Charles Schneider from the Utica Symphony.

And he and I had worked on something earlier together.

And when I did Molly of the Mohawks, he was the one that put it all together.

Got it.

You know, got it.

actually staged, et cetera, et cetera, and got the production done.

He is the one who worked with me then.

on Skaters and the two of us worked for 10 years creating the music, finding the performers, and talking about words, et cetera, et cetera.

And he did a lot to make sure that the orchestration actually was orchestration.

'cause he was an orchestra conductor.

We were all set to, for the two of us to be in Toronto to, you know, share the accolades.

But he passed away in, in 2022.

So as a result, when we do perform this, it'll always be done in Memoria for Chuck Schneider.

- I imagine he would absolutely love that.

- Yep.

- And you are carrying on his legacy through that, through that opera.

- So - When can audiences expect to see Skaters hit the Toronto theaters?

- Well, originally it was scheduled for October of 2025, but we just couldn't get enough people together for it.

Couldn't get enough money, is what it is.

This is a big production, so it's postponed now the possibility is May, 2026 and that's it probably will happen.

She's gonna use a student orchestra rather than a professional orchestra.

It'll cut the cost down a little bit.

But when you're talking opera, I don't know why I decided to write operas.

You know, I could write piano sonatatas and I can get 'em performed for five bucks.

But when you're talking opera, you're talking a hundred thousand dollars.

- Well, folks are certainly gonna look forward to this opera.

I can guarantee it.

As we start to wrap up, I'm getting the wrap up signal.

Now, as a matter of fact, there's one question I really need to ask you for.

Aspiring composers, aspiring artists who wanna do work similar to what you've done, what sort of advice do you have for them to get started?

- You just have to keep doing what you're doing and you have to believe in yourself and you have to do something musically every day.

And if you wanna write music, then you write something every day, even if it's only three or four notes.

But you do it every day because it's gotta be, it has to be the most important part of your life.

It's your whole mindset and okay, it's your mindset.

The last thing you're thinking about is money.

Well, that's the last thing I thought about.

And unfortunately I never got any money for any of the stuff I did.

So, but we were, we were lucky for Molly of the Mohawks.

We had a film producer from California called Honest Engines Films.

Imagine that.

And she came to NY and they filmed the, the production up there.

And she paid for all of that.

And this, it's online.

You can look it up online that the, the recording of it still available.

- Well, folks, you certainly need to check this out.

All of the, all the operas from Molly of the Mohawks to Skaters, Dr.

Augusta Cecconi-Bates, thank you so much for your time in stopping by our studio today.

We appreciate having you.

- Well thank you.

It's kind of nice for me to reminisce.