The Original New Music Community
Rhiannon Giddens, along with guitarist Bill Frisell and percussionist Francesco Turrisi, perform “Julie’s Aria” from Giddens’ first opera, Omar. Premiering at Spoleto, the opera is receiving productions at a number of prominent houses. Here is an audio stream via YouTube. Giddens is busy with myriad projects, but her singing is so compelling here: dare Spoleto offices hope for a cameo?
Chaya Czernowin
Heart Chamber
Naxos DVD
Patrizia Ciofi, soprano; Dietrich Henschel, baritone; Noa Frenkel, contralto; Terry Wey, countertenor; Frauke Aulbert, vocal artist
Deutsche Oper Berlin, Johannes Kalitzke, conductor
Chaya Czernowin’s opera Heart Chamber deals with the emotional journey involved in navigating a relationship. It does so with large-scale forces; in addition to vocal soloists, a substantial orchestra, a chorus and chamber ensemble placed on the sides of the stage, and surround electronics. Because this is a love story that is not without its travails, and the interior lives and subconscious feelings and fears of the characters are so potent, the use of all of these resources seems fitting.
The involved couple, played by soprano Patrizia Ciofi and baritone Dietrich Henschel, are paired with two additional singers, Ciofo with alto Noa Frenkel and Henchel with countertenor Terry Wey. They serve as reflections of the deep unconscious of the protagonists, sometimes revealing hidden truths that contradict what is overtly stated. Czernowin crafted the libretto, which is non-linear in its narrative but touches on many essential themes: courtship, commitment, conflict, and parenting among them. The viewer is often invited to see the distortions of memory playing a formative dramatic role. The meeting scene, which takes place on a staircase where Ciofi drops a jar of honey and Henschel retrieves it for her, is replayed a number of times with variations, suggesting that memories are pliable and renewable dependent on a person’s current mindset.
All four of the soloists display superb control, detailed musicality, and considerable acting abilities. Vocalization moves from hushed whispers to full-throated cries, with glissandos prominent in the declamation. When the vocalists are enacting the plot, Czernowin likens the sections to close-ups in a film. The electronics incorporate vocal samples, which allows for elaborations of the singing that at times take on a prismatic cast, particularly when coupled with additional layers of singing from the chorus. Some of these can be quite delicate breath and mouth noises. The opera’s dream sequences all feature interactions between the singers and chorus, some of the best music in Heart Chamber.
The relationship between the chamber group – the Ensemble Nikel – and the Deutsche Oper Berlin is similarly multifaceted, sometimes cooperative and at others acting independently. Bassist Uli Fussenegger joins Ensemble Nikel and serves a featured role; the weight of the double bass is used in what Czernowin calls “sound floods/surges,” and it often announces and depicts pivotal dramatic sequences. Different fractals of the ensemble play “Forest” segments. Conductor Johannes Kalitzke has been set a formidable task, and he rises to the occasion, eliciting a detailed and vivid rendering from the performers. The production values of the DVD are strong, capturing arresting visuals and many vantage points of the performers that allow for the viewer to get a sense of the enveloping live experience. Heart Chamber is a potent work ripe for additional productions.
-Christian Carey
Unlike those big-media favorites lists that appear in mid-December to grease the skids of the Great Shopping Season, my year-end reckonings dawdle until the last moment and don’t claim to define the best of anything. But with audio streaming, social media and other factors pushing the contemporary music landscape into an increasingly variegated but fragmented state, some measure of thoughtful inventorying seems both prudent and practical. In that spirit, here’s a biased and opinionated survey of albums and other media released in 2018 that made an impact on me.
New music theater was a recurring theme during the year. Tops in prominence was the premiere of Kurtág’s Fin de Partie at La Scala, but we’re still waiting for that to be recorded. Another notable 2018 event was the US premiere of Saariajo’s chamber opera Only the Sound Remains (its European video release was one of my picks in 2017). Over in the UK, a string of high-profile operatic premieres—including Muhly’s Marnie, Dean’s Hamlet and Adès’s The Exterminating Angel—reached an apex with the captivating Lessons in Love and Violence by George Benjamin. Its libretto, which Martin Crimp adapted from Marlowe’s play Edward II, divides the palace intrigue into seven scenes, and shoehorned into a tight 90 minute span, the result invites comparisons with Wozzeck (though Berg, when faced with the insane King’s insistence that “I can hear drumming”, would surely have used the orchestra to depict his deluded reality, whereas Benjamin depicts things as they really are). Lessons is similar in style to Hamlet and Angel, but Benjamin’s textures are thinner and clearer, and thus seem more varied and communicative by comparison.
You can view streaming video of the Royal Opera’s premiere production at medici.tv (subscription required) or purchase it on Blu-ray. Highlights include the powerful second scene where three peasants describe their impoverished agony to the callous Queen Isabel (played by Barbara Hannigan). One peasant asks why both the poor and the rich sleep three-to-a-bed (the latter alluding to Edward’s same-sex consort Gaveston). Another fine moment is the brief threnody for Edward that features cimbalom and Iranian tombak drums (one of the opera’s few nods to beat-driven vernacular music). Benjamin’s use of cimbalom and two harps is effective throughout: they seldom play simultaneously, but working in tandem they create a soundscape rich in struck/plucked string sonorities.
Speaking of British royalty, there’s Thea Musgrave’s Mary Queen of Scots, wherein Scotland’s most famous female composer weighs in on its most famous female politician. The long-unavailable 1978 recording of this most admired of Musgrave operas has finally reappeared in celebration of her 90th birthday (Amazon, Spotify, YouTube). While Lessons in Love and Violence belongs to the Tippett tradition of English-language opera, Mary is squarely within the more conservative Britten lineage, but its style is still contemporary and unsentimental. My favorite moment comes in the ballroom scene where one courtier starts up a bawdy reel to disrupt Mary’s dance with a rival, the musics clashing like the men’s ambitions. Won’t someone revive this work onstage in lieu of yet another production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda?
In November 2018, while various world leaders were in France commemorating the end of WW1 (or in Trump’s case, hiding indoors from the rain), Parisian audiences took in a concert staging of Nicholas Lens’s 2014 opera Shell Shock. The libretto, a collection of anguished reflections from war veterans and widows, ostensibly set during the Great War, was penned by Nick Cave, thus explaining how a traditional opera might open with a lyric like “Some asshole…some asshole…some asshole shouts at me in words I do not properly understand”. The eclecticism of Lens’s score is reminiscent of Henze, though specific passages conjure up other composers. The prelude, for instance, is practically a clone of the Kyrie from Ligeti’s Requiem, while the Canto of the Nurse resembles the serial music heard throughout Eisler’s German Symphony.
That Shell Shock has been successful enough to warrant revival is due largely to its weaving of cultivated and vernacular styles into a fabric that is postmodern but not hackneyed. ENO and the Met should take note of how much better this works for “accessible highbrow” than Marnie, whose application of bel canto opera accoutrements in service of fancified Broadway-style music comes off as pretentious and overproduced.
Video of Shell Shock can be streamed here for a limited time.
Fixed media music has often been marginalized within the broader classical music world because it doesn’t align with traditional performer-centric institutions and publicity machines. That its prominence is increasing today is testament to the shakeups engendered by inexpensive digital instruments and new distribution channels. One of the few regrets I have over this development is the amount of high-quality studio work that I’ve had to set aside to shrink this part of the list to a manageable size:
Steve Layton: Virtual Composition (Bandcamp)
Sarah Davachi: For harpsichord, For pipe organ and string trio (Bandcamp)
Okkyung Lee: Speckled Stones and Dissonant Green Dots (Bandcamp)
Éliane Radigue: Œuvres Électroniques (14 CDs, from GRM, available at Metamkine, excerpts on SoundCloud)
The epic electroacoustic works of the mother of dark ambient, gathered into an attractive 14-CD box. My contribution to Second Inversion’s Top 10 Albums of 2018
Gloria Coates: Piano Quintet, Symphony No. 10 (Drone of Druids on Celtic Ruins) (Spotify, YouTube)
Coates is like a kinder, gentler Ustvolskaya with her single-minded emphasis on colliding sound masses and abstract forms. This new Naxos recording starts with her un-Brahms-like Piano Quintet (2013), in which half of the string instruments are tuned a quarter tone sharp (a technique borrowed from Ligeti’s Ramifications). Next comes her Symphony No. 10 (1992–3), which is like a Phill Niblock piece arranged for brass choir with a battery of snare drums added in. A new octogenarian and longtime Munich resident, Coates is finally receiving some well-deserved recognition in her native United States
Berio: Sinfonia, Boulez: Notations I–IV, Ravel: La Valse (Amazon, Spotify, YouTube)
Ichiyanagi: Sapporo (audio excerpt)
Richter, Schnittke et al: Through the Lens of Time (Spotify)Next come three albums that seem to be on everyone’s list, and understandably so.
Scott Johnson: Mind Out of Matter (Amazon)
Alarm Will Sound performs this new “atheist oratorio” from the master of speech melody, based on speeches by Daniel Dennett. I review it here
Another neo-Tibetan passage starts in the 30th minute of Pillars II with trombonist Ben Gerstein doing his best dungchen impression. Sorey soon enters on a real dungchen, though the result is more evocative of a didgeridoo. Several minutes ensue with drone plus bells/cymbals and later a bass drum. In the 37th minute, bowed double basses again launch a deep industrial growl which builds for four minutes until it completely usurps the drone from the dungchen. This slow and deep music continues until the 45th minute. Hopefully you’ve gotten an idea of the album’s sound world and slow pacing, but remarkably, the music never seems to drag
Malin Bång: Structures of Light and Spruce (Spotify, YouTube)
Saariaho x Koh (Spotify)
David Schiff: Carter (Oxford University Press) (Amazon)The quantity of thought-provoking work that came along in 2018 makes this list quite a bit longer than last year’s, and testifies to the ongoing resilience and sophistication of Western art music even as some voices prophesize its imminent demise or assimilation. But perhaps a bit of perspective should be offered by two final albums whose scope lies well outside that usually associated with Western-influenced cultivated arts:
Music of Northern Laos and Music of Southern Laos
Cherishingly recorded between 2006 and 2013, and released this year on Bandcamp by the irrepressible Laurent Jeanneau (AKA Kink Gong), these two albums showcase the remarkable heterophony and sound world of traditional Laotian folk music. On display are the spicy timbres of bamboo tube instruments, the vertical mouth organ called a khene (basically the same instrument as the Japanese shō and the Chinese sheng) and singing in a variety of throaty and nasal styles. Per Jeanneau, “most recordings available in the Western world focus on the dominant culture in Laos. I focus on marginalized ethnic minorities”. It’s a monument to the tenacity of threatened cultures clinging to life amid the pressures of global artistic commodification.
[Ed. note: Former S21 contributor, member, and friend David Salvage has in the last couple years pulled up his U.S. tent pegs and landed in Italy. He’s offered up his review of the latest György Kurtág premiere last month at La Scala.]
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After decades of prodding, false starts, intense study, delays, and, finally, seven years of composing, György Kurtág, at age ninety-two, has written his first opera. For its subject matter, he has chosen Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, a play he saw during its initial run in Paris in 1957 and has loved ever since. World premieres don’t get any more hotly anticipated than this, and it was a privilege to be in attendance for the opera’s final performance at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.
Endgame takes place on one of the last days of an imperious invalid named Hamm. As he sits in his wheelchair, he gives his servant, Clov, half-pointless tasks to do, like reporting on what’s outside the windows or pushing him around the room. Stuck in the same space are Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell, who live in two trashcans, having lost their legs years earlier in a biking accident. There is little food left for the four of them, and outside lies a bleak landscape of post-apocalyptic desolation.
While Kurtág’s work will inevitably be referred to simply as Fin de partie, its complete title is worth keeping in mind. The opera is actually called Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie and bears the subtitle “scenes and monologues, opera in one act.” By including Beckett’s name in the title, Kurtág connects the work with his earlier Beckett setting, Samuel Beckett: What is the Word; with the subtitle, he suggests that the present is something formally more open than a traditional opera.
The result bears out both title and subtitle. The original version of What is the Word is for singer and piano, and the piano doubles the singer note for note without contributing additional harmony or counterpoint. A similar closeness marks Kurtág’s approach to the singers and orchestra in Fin de partie: while the orchestration is vast and colorful and adds harmony to the vocal lines, emphasis to the stage action, and commentary on the text, principally, the instruments serve to double the vocal lines, making for an almost monadic work that is intensely expressive. Indeed, this is the miracle of Fin de partie: Beckett’s play is quirky, intimate, and subtle—in other words, not material readily suitable for operatic adaptation. And yet Kurtág’s music captures the text’s many mercurial shifts in tone while remaining nothing if not coherent and compelling. As much as any opera in history, Fin de partie finds that magical ground where song, speech, and tone are united. Rather than an end of anything, I found it to be a beginning, an opera rich in new possibilities for composers to come.
It is with the opera’s subtitle, however, where Kurtág seems less surefooted. In creating a libretto of an appropriate length, he has very significantly reduced the role of Clov. By doing so, Kurtág has weakened the play’s dramatic heart: the complex interdependence of a master and his servant. These cuts make some important moments in the opera’s second half come out awkwardly. When Hamm laments that a stuffed dog is not in fact real, the statement is a bit baffling because Kurtág has the cut the play’s sad and comical stuffed-dog scene (which involves Clov). When Hamm thanks Clov for all he has done for him, we might be similarly puzzled, since in the opera he does little for his master (crucial scenes mentioned above involving the windows and the wheelchair ride are also cut). Strangely, Kurtág also omits the parts where Hamm asks Clov whether it’s time for his painkiller; in the play, Clov always says that it’s not time; at the end, he finally reveals to Hamm that there is no more painkiller left. In the opera, we only get this final exchange: the result is a sudden outburst that lacks catharsis. And in the opera, Clov’s long concluding monologue (prompted by Hamm to say something “from the heart”) seems more like a set-piece than the expression of things long unspoken.
By attenuating the play’s central conflict, Kurtág’s Fin de partie becomes less unified—more “open”—than Beckett’s original. As a result, it prioritizes the expression of inwardness over the realization of drama. As the opera goes on, the monologues take over, and the drama becomes more and more suspended. Of course, monologues can heighten drama; but this depends on the characters’ being insightful about themselves, others, or their situations. Beckett’s aren’t, and he wisely never lets their stories, musings, or ramblings dominate for too long in the play.
While I loved every note of Fin de partie and found the music’s force such that I’ve had trouble composing ever since seeing it, I remain puzzled as to what was gained by the approach Kurtág took: reducing Clov cuts into the play’s very core, and giving the monologues free reign is the wrong approach for this material. (I have some speculations about this, but I’ll save them for the comments section.)
Meanwhile, what remains is a grand achievement—a new opera at an extraordinarily high level. Those who stuck their necks out to make Fin de partie happen—Alexander Pereira, sovrintendente of La Scala, perhaps foremost among them—deserve our respect and gratitude. However problematic it might be, this is a work that bestows honor on any institution who decides to mount it or any musician who participates in its performance.
As part of their continuing new music series, the Boston Court Performing Arts Center in Pasadena presented Descent Into Madness, A Concert of Cautionary Music on February 9, 2018. The centerpiece of the evening was a performance of Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot by Peter Maxwell Davies, featuring Canadian soprano Stacey Fraser and Brightwork newmusic. Anthony Parnther, conductor, Jack Van Zandt, who studied with Peter Maxwell Davies, and Terry Smith, stage director for this production, were also on hand for a pre-concert discussion of this spellbinding work of mid-20th century British experimental opera.
The first half of the concert was given over to three contemporary works, including two by Southern California composers. Un-intermezzi, by Veronika Krausas, opened the proceedings with Aron Kallay as piano soloist. The titles of the individual movements are taken from the novel Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville.
The first intermezzo, “each dreams the other” began with a quiet repeating phrase, and conveyed a lightly mysterious feel. Darker chords followed, adding tension, and these alternated with the softer passages. The program notes state that this movement : “… is the composer’s version of the floating quality of Brahms’ Intermezzo in B minor, OP. 119, no.1.” This provided a gently evocative prelude to the next section, “a bowl for shadows.” Written in the “whimsical style of Erik Satie”, there is more mystery here, with a solitary line of notes that are nicely offset by counterpoint and stronger passages that occasionally build to a mild anxiety. Good contrast in the dynamics and a sensitive touch by Kallay sustained this delicate balance. The last movement, “a chorus of night-things”, opens with a wonderfully active splatter of notes – a summer shower of optimism. This movement bubbles cheerfully along like a running brook in a spring pasture. A solemnly dark passage intrudes from the lower registers and as the movement proceeds, alternating with the sunny confidence heard in the opening. These contrasting passages continue throughout, increasingly varied and building to the finish. Un-intermezzi is a pleasing homage by the composer to literary and musical influences, brought forward to a contemporary sensibility.
Organism, by Jason Barabba was next, scored for clarinet and flute. The music stands at center stage were arranged so that the two players faced each other. A high pitch from the flute floated upward to begin, and this was nearly matched by clarinet so that their dissonance resembled the whistling of a strong wind. Skittering passages followed, and these soon morphed into a series of intertwined and independent phrases woven together into a dazzling matrix of brightly organic sounds. The composer writes in the program notes: “One of the great features of both the clarinet and the flute are their ability for great subtlety, control and intricate dynamic shading. In this case the undulating opening section was designed to highlight the instruments’ dynamic control in their higher ranges.”
There were no common harmonies or pulse – each line was independently played with the rapid runs and trills nearly colliding but for the precise playing of flutist Sara Andon and clarinetist Brian Walsh. Even with all of the notes flying out into the audience, there was enough of an arc to the phrases so that the listener could naturally follow the flow. While every bit as complex, active and animated as a Jackson Pollock painting, Organism engages and dazzles, but never overwhelms.
Louis Andriessen
Theatre of the World
Leigh Melrose, Lindsey Kesselman, Marcel Beekman, Steven van Watermeulen, Mattijs van de Woerd, Cristina Zavalloni, vocal soloists
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Reinbert de Leeuw, conductor
Nonesuch 2xCD
Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s 2016 opera, Theatre of the World, subtitled “A Grotesque in Nine Scenes,” is a fantastical portrait of Seventeenth century polymath Athanasius Kircher. Commissioned and premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a recording of the live performance of this production was released in 2017 on Nonesuch.
In a nonlinear narrative propelled by effusively polystylistic music, played with assuredness and flexibility by LA Phil under the direction of Reinbert de Leeuw, Kircher’s thwarted late life ambition to find a theory for essentially everything is vividly but quixotically depicted. Among the variety of formal and stylistic devices are Renaissance style counterpoint and dances, post-minimal figurations, neoclassicism in the mold of Stravinsky, and oodles of pop ranging from Latin dances to doo wop to Krautrock. Amplified voices alongside acoustic instruments (apart from an electric guitar and synthesizer) allowing for even the most muscular sections of the orchestration never to overwhelm the singing. The vocalists are uniformly up for the significant demands placed upon them by the score. Particularly fine performances are given by Leigh Melrose in the title role, Lindsey Kesselman playing the boy/Devil, and Cristina Zavalloni as a nun who corresponds with Kircher, serving as intellectual foil, inspiration, and even at times confessor.
On a quest for knowledge, Kircher and his companions are misled by the Devil and periodically waylaid by witches and an ominous executioner: hence the grotesqueries. The production’s visuals apparently evoke nightmarish vistas, like an entropic funhouse full of circus mirrors. While a video recording of the opera would be a fascinating document, particularly if the production team were able to further enhance already significant onstage use of multimedia, one still gets a strong sense of the its atmosphere from the audio recording alone. That said, even with libretto and booklet notes in hand, the quick shifts between characters and of plot, demeanor, sung language (I counted seven), and musical tropes makes Theatre of the World a formidable piece to ascertain. Those willing to provide an attentive ear will find themselves richly rewarded by Andriessen’s compelling use of the aforementioned plethora of material to stymy stale operatic conventions and, in their place, embrace a richly hued, multimedia theatrical environment. Theatre of the World is the most imaginative and ambitious piece that LA Philharmonic has commissioned and presented to date. Nonesuch’s excellent CD of it is my pick for Best Contemporary Opera Recording 2017.
-Christian Carey
To open with a broad stroke, opera is generally seen as a medium that embraces tradition. For example, while the repertoire certainly has a myriad more terrifying works to offer, the Royal Opera House offers Don Giovanni and Macbeth as selections from their Top 5 Scariest Operas article. Bearing this in mind, I couldn’t help but appreciate the particularly rich novelty of fitting my smartphone into a specialized cardboard case to watch the first ten-minute episode of The Parkside Murders, the virtual reality horror opera.
The first episode of The Parkside Murders fully embraces its medium as a VR experience, and uses the unique strengths of VR to tell this story. While appreciating opera and cinema are traditionally group experiences, virtual reality (for now anyway) is solitary by nature. Furthermore, the fixed perspective of traditional mediums allows for a layer of separation as an audience member that this VR experience sheds. Rather than treating this experience as a 360-degree film, The Parksville Murders forces you into drama immediately, establishing the viewer as a named character in the opening supertitles. Before learning the names of our protagonists, you learn that you (yes, you) are The Watcher. As this episode unfolds, The Watcher, unable to move anything below the neck, begins to wonder what their role is in this story. The lack of autonomous mobility in this visceral, 3D environment is frustrating, but a constant reminder that The Watcher is not here to help, harm, or change. The Watcher exists to bear witness. After being directly addressed by the supertitles, and later by one of the main characters, Watcher is left wondering about the nature of their role in this narrative. This isn’t a question one generally runs into in cinema, or opera. Director Cari Ann Shim Sham* transforms several formalist techniques prevalent in horror films such as frenetic editing, use of visual and aural white noise, and frame-rate manipulation in their adaptation for a VR experience. The line between the story and its telling is blurred, and opens up a floodgate of possibilities for storytelling in this medium.
Virtual reality aside (or about as far aside as it can be moved from the main focus) The Parksville Murders is, afterall, an opera. Scored for soprano (Corinne, played by Kacey Cardin), mezzo (Sarah, played by Mikki Sodergren), a small chorus, and electronics, composer Kamala Sankaram incorporates music in a way that is always in service of the drama, and mounting sense of dread. In this episode, the electronics are a clear backdrop for more interesting musical material: Sankaram’s vocal writing and extended use and manipulation of diegetic sound. Sounds of white noise from a nearby television set, sharpening knives, and nearby knocking are deeply embedded into the work, and had this Watcher constantly inspecting their surroundings in horrified anticipation. Sankaram’s vocal writing is, aptly, the cornerstone of this score, and well supported by Cardin and Sodergren’s excellent performances. Captivating in its own right, one begins to notice that Sankaram’s approach to vocal writing itself is being used to tell a story. Cardin’s initial plea of “Help me, help me…” (a plea made directly to The Watcher) is eerie, angular, and immediately stands in stark contrast to the electronic droning that comes before it. Later, the surreal nature of Sodergren’s entrance “on screen” is mirrored in Sankaram’s writing for her character. While Cardin sings at a slower, measured pace, often repeating words and small phrases, Sodergren sings parlando, often speaking in full sentences. The contrast between our two leads leaves so much room for uncertainty about what exactly The Watcher is bearing witness to. Again, it is hard to know where the story ends and its telling begins. The differences in the text setting between these characters and Sankaram’s blending of diegetic and nondiegetic sounds certainly leaves room for this story to dive deep into the realm of the supernatural, but it is too soon to tell.
The first episode of The Parksville Murders is available now exclusively on Samsung VR, and it is well crafted, immersive, and genuinely scary. Recommended. During the daytime. With the lights on.
At National Sawdust on Friday April 7th at 7 PM, Opera Cabal presents the premiere of Ken Ueno’s new opera Aeolus. Joined by vocalist Majel Connery and Flux Quartet, Ueno performs throughout the opera. His fascinating blend of vocal techniques includes microtonal inflections, megaphone-amplified directives, and throat-singing. Electronics, video projections, and an architecturally conceived set design converge to make Aeolus a potent multimedia concoction. I recently caught up with Ken as he was in the thick of preparations for the opera.
Hi Ken. Thanks for taking the time to talk with Sequenza 21.
Why are you calling this an opera instead of some other genre? As you well know, multimedia theater pieces are called all sorts of things…
Following the examples of Monteverdi, Mozart, and especially Nono, “opera” seems to be an open enough label, if we need a label, so I hope it’s appropriate for this piece. But you’re right – I don’t really know what to call it. It doesn’t have a regular narrative. It features two voices that are in distinct contrast to bel canto singing. But I am attached to the possibilities Prometeo opens up, so if Nono’s is an opera, then, Aeolus, can be an opera too, right? Aeolus does feature a suoni mobili (Nono calls the movement of sound the main drama in Prometeo) characteristic in that, in the guise of Aeolus (the ruler of the winds), I move around the hall, directing my non-semantic vocalizations with a megaphone to articulate the architecture, the space, as an instrument.
You’ve mentioned that there are autobiographical elements in the libretto. Since it is fairly nonlinear in terms of narrativity, would you like to share how some of your own history fits in?
Memory is non-linear. Spaces between texts and texts in memory become islands in search of a place in time, an ostensible home, which the idea of a Penelope represents. My biographical circumstance is that my family moved around so much during my formative years that I don’t have a normative sensation of a home. So, the idea of a home is a mythic space for me, one I’ve also begun to associate with not only a place, but also specific people with whom I shared lived in those spaces that felt like places to which I belonged. That’s also, I think, why James Joyce resonates so powerfully in me. If there is a main narrative in Aeolus, it’s the counterpoint between the semantic and non-semantic in search of a home.
If I may, here’s an excerpt of a draft I’m writing for something else, which elaborates on this:
My own language acquisition parallels Dedalus’ in that the trajectory from babbling to fluency did filter out a palette of sounds that were extraneous to language. As a baby, I remember understanding language before I could actually speak. I remember both the frustration of not being able to communicate, as well as the tiny victories when I somehow managed to reach out and get through – sometimes purely through the inflections of non-semantic vocalizations, maybe combined with clear physical gestures like pointing or shaking my head.
When I was four, my family moved to Switzerland, and apart from speaking Japanese with my family I was a mute child again, unable to speak the local French. The burgeoning richness of my internal life was frustrated by this communication setback. Around that time, I was given a portable Aiwa tape recorder and started to make non-linear musique concrète, playing with snippets of sounds of my little world in exile. Listening to those recordings now, through auto-archaeology, I discover not only that I was vocalizing non-semantically, but that I was singing multiphonics. I was babbling, testing the limits of my vocal repertoire, expanding the repertoire of sounds my body could make. Unhinged from semantic obligation, I was freely playing at making sounds for the pure sake of making sounds, developing a series of dexterous moves ancillary to spoken language – to logos. I remember how it felt. The complex vibrations of the multiphonics reverberated in my body, shaking my bones. It was soothing. I learned to make a variety of sounds that registered different feelings. They felt like different weights of the world. Not being able to speak the local language, not having any friends, I was performing, rehearsing for my future self. The future will rationalize the past. When I read James Joyce as a teenager, the tropes of alienation and exile, and the distance between language as sound and language as semantic medium, all resonated with me.
Tell us about your collaborators.
Majel Connery is my singer. Though classically trained, she has a beautiful lyrical voice, that reminds me of Elena Tonra from Daughter or Beth Gibbons of Portishead. But that’s really unfair. I should not be naming names or comparing her to anyone else – she has a great voice, she is a primary referent in her own right. When I heard her voice and imagined what it was capable of, I knew I wanted to write songs for her. Songs that would carry the semantic exposition in Aeolus. She’s been very generous with me in trying out sketches of my songs in different keys, etc., so that we can get to the right voice/word combination to get to the pathos that I want to express. Majel is also a brilliant project leader. She is Opera Cabal. She is our fearless leader and most responsible for all of this happening. A visionary!
Thomas Tsang is a brilliant architect with whom I have been collaborating for ten years. We met as fellows at the American Academy in Rome, and we’ve collaborated on installations ever since. As an artist, he brings a fully-fledged multidisciplinary edge to architecture. He questions traditional outputs and bravely creates installations, events, workshops that challenge us to rethink the history of specialization in our related fields. The full vision for the opera is to have a space that he designs that is something more than a set or venue, something more integral to the expression of the piece. We are working towards that.
Erin Johnson is a video artist with whom I have been collaborating over the last few years. She’s an all-round creative force. Many of her works thread the line between video art, installation, performance art, curation, and community engagement. She naturally problematizes categories in her artistic output. She curated a work of mine last summer – Fortress Brass, a site-specific piece that took place on boats and then at Fort Gorges in Portland Harbor, in Maine. Erin made videos for four of the scenes in Aeolus, for scenes with voice-overs. Voice-overs take the place of dialogue in Aeolus (a move that I first began to experiment with in my first opera, Gallo). Being pre-recorded, the voice-overs inhabit a different time/place: it serves a distancing function.
I am also lucky to be working with the renown Flux Quartet. Specialists in the extreme demands of new music, breathtaking in their courage and inspiring. I am blessed to have this team.
What are some of the electronic elements in the piece?
Mostly, the electronics are backing tracks for the pop songs. In one scene, I perform with a Max patch that the brilliant designer/composer Ilya Rostovtsev made for me. The patch lets me use my iPhone as a controller for algorithmic drums.
What does lateral bowing sound like? You’ve become a big fan of it … how did you first discover it as a technique?
I like lateral bowing because it sounds like breath – the link between my vocal practice, my body, and the embodied choreography of sounds that I notate for instrumentalists to perform. I first came up with lateral bowing, when I was experimenting on a viola during the composition of my viola concerto, Talus.
What’s next for you?
I’m lucky to have pieces upcoming for talented friends: a piece for five-string baroque cello for Elinor Frey; a solo trumpet + electronics work for Andy Kozar; a solo cello piece for Jason Calloway; a saxophone piece for Vincent Daoud; a trio for Kim Kashkashian; and a long overdue piece for piano for Kathy Supove (and some other things too).
Virgil Thomson – Gertrude Stein
Four Saints in Three Acts; Capital Capitals
Charles Blandy, tenor; Simon Dyer, bass; Aaron Engebreth, baritone; Andrew Garland, baritone; Tom McNichols, bass; Gigi Mitchell-Velasco, mezzo-soprano; Sarah Pelletier, soprano; Deborah Selig, soprano; Sumner Thompson, baritone; Lynn Torgove, mezzo-soprano; Stanley Wilson, tenor;
Boston Modern Orchestra, Gil Rose, conductor
BMOP/Sound 1049 2xCD
Virgil Thomson’s 1934 collaboration with the eminent author Gertrude Stein resulted in their first of two operas, Four Saints in Three Acts. Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose, has made successful forays into recorded opera before, bringing scores such as Lukas Foss’s Griffelkin and Charles Fussell’s Wilde to life. Their recording of Thomson/Stein’s opera is a very successful addition to the orchestra’s burgeoning catalog of works.
Taking Stein’s use of non-linear narrative in her writing as a cue, Thomson created a score that, for its time, was exceedingly adventurous. At first blush, one might well think of Thomson’s harmonic language – relentlessly tonal – and his borrowing of material from the American vernacular – ranging from hymns and folksongs to popular songs and dances – to be far more conservative than Ives or other contemporaries who mined similar material but with a more dissonant palette. There is also a component of repetition and scalar melismas, even counting that sounds like a cousin of passages in Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, that suggests a proto-minimal approach to Thomson’s design. However, near-constant shifts of texture and demeanor, which mirror Stein’s approach to text, provide their own set of challenges for both musicians and listeners: in essence, how to follow the thread?
Four Saints in Three Acts is a work with a large cast, yet all of the roles in BMOP’s production are populated by fine singers, many of whom are associated with the Boston area’s various operatic ventures. The orchestra’s playing under Rose is also exemplary: this is a score in which frequent changes of instrumentation create a balancing act that could undo a lesser ensemble.
The liner notes are well curated. Given his totemic role as a writer on music, including Thomson’s essay about Four Saints is a particularly nice touch. Thomson scholar Steven Watson contributes his own enlightening essay, underscoring the durability of the opera through many production incarnations, from its original — an all African-American cast (most unusual for its day) — to Robert Wilson’s staging for huge animal costumes.
Capital Capitals is another Thomson/Stein collaboration, this one from 1927, for four male voices and piano. The text discusses the various virtues of “capital cities” — Aix, Arles, Avignon, and Les Baux — in Provence (Stein became acquainted with the region during her tenure as an ambulance driver in the First World War). It is breezier than Four Saints and proves an eminently charming counterpart.
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At 8 PM on Friday, March 31st at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, BMOP presents a concert featuring works by John Harbison, Eric Sawyer, Ronald Perera, and the world premiere of BMOP commission Black Noise by David Sanford. Soloists include violinist Miranda Cuckson, cellist Julia Bruskin, and pianist Andrea Lam. At 7 PM, a pre-concert lecture with the composers will be lead by Boston Symphony’s Robert Kirzinger. A repeat performance, this one with the Claremont Trio as soloists, will be at 3 PM on Sunday, April 2nd at Amherst College’s Buckley Recital Hall.