Place was a Pulitzer Prize-finalist in 2018. The committee called it, “A brave and powerful work, marked by effective vocal writing and multiple musical genres, that confronts issues of gentrification and displacement in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.” Hearne wrote the music and part of the libretto. He collaborated with poet Saul Williams who write the rest of the libretto.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group is presenting Place on Tuesday evening at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Hearne will be conducting the performance which is directed by Patricia McGregor. She was recently named the incoming Artistic Director at the New York Theater Workshop.

Last week I spoke via Zoom with Hearne about Place, how he’s reconciled his own ideas about the issues the work raises and how his composing allows him to understand himself better. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

You stated previously that you were confronted with your own feelings after hearing Spike Lee speak at the Pratt Institute about people and the relationship they have to their neighborhood. How did composing and writing Place impact your own perception of how you relate to your neighborhood? Has the time since the work debut altered your perceptions about that relationship, if it has?

One thing that changed is that I started to see the divisions that I created in my own life and my own sense of identity and my own self and how maybe I’ve created a proxy for thinking about those divisions. What I mean by that is that through this process, I started really looking at texts about whiteness and white identity and white supremacy and it got very personal in a way that I think it hadn’t before this process. And that’s a big way that my thinking changed. 

It was as blunt of an interrogation of the tenets of white supremacy and that systemic racism that were embedded in my own upbringing, in my own identity. That was totally not academic because all of my artistic work was right there front and center and that’s a big part of my heart and soul.

I think part of growing up in a place with so much systemic racism as a white person is often, at least in my house, in my generation, it is growing up with the idea that your perspective as a white person is like the neutral one. No one ever like told me, “Oh, that’s a better perspective” or that you’re better than anybody else explicitly. But also no one really told me that to be raised as a white person entailed kind of its own identity. So in a way being raised with this paucity of identity itself. I don’t think anyone should be raised that way. But this process was like a cartography process of mapping all the ways that white supremacy or racism was present just in all of my individual small interactions and the fundamental structures of family.

I’m happy to say that I think the conversation around all these issues has progressed a lot since when I started writing the piece. I’m not saying that any of this stuff was taught to me intentionally. But that’s, of course, the problem. This process really helps me connect all of these concepts which I’ve been wrestling with since basically coming of age in this culture so it makes sense.

Having come through this process how do you reconcile the dichotomy between the shining concert hall on the hill that is Walt Disney Concert Hall and the huge homeless community, mostly non-white, that are mere blocks away. Should that impact the way an audience experiences Place?

I hope it influences the way people see work like this. That dichotomy is all around us in this in this culture, right? In this society and this in this country, in the city. We’re living at a time of a large increase in the number of unhoused people in the city. And there’s a huge increase in aggressive, violent police action to remove unhoused people from the places that they’re dwelling.

Part of the process in writing this piece has been to think about displacement and the connections of displacement and systemic racism. Wrestling with inequalities that have been built into the systemic fabric of these institutions. I know that there are good people within these institutions that are trying to root out these inequalities and trying to create really safe spaces for all sorts of different types of people. But it’s not easy.

Including, I would assume, safe spaces for artists who aren’t just white to be recognized in the performing arts world as well.

Especially American music. There are these incredible innovators who just were never included in institutional music or classical music as we now call it. And I think that the reason that they weren’t included is because they’re not white. Duke Ellington being the most obvious example of a composer who was creating music that is symphonic and who’s pushing boundaries in so many different directions; creating this unique American work. I’m not saying that that necessarily affected Duke Ellington’s reputation, but I do think that when we say classical music we should acknowledge that it’s based on this history of exclusion.

When we think about the language that we use to talk about why certain artists are innovative or important we often romanticize it and leave out all of these very blunt and important sociological contexts: who had access to certain streams of money and who is a white man. These are actually very important parts of it. When we take all this together, we can see how the genre and institution of classical music has been sculpted.

During the pandemic you did an at-home version of Place that was streamed online. Did that prompt any reconsideration of the work that you had already completed or any reflection on what to do next?

I don’t feel like the piece was done until we did the version in March 2020 where we were all sheltering in place. We had already made the album and the album was about to come out. We had all the tracks from all the instrumental performances, from all these brilliant instrumentalists that we recorded across the country to make the piece. But then these singers, who were prepared and all ready to do the whole show, were stuck at home as we all were. So we decided to make this at home version.

The people in the cast, the singers, they all live very differently and they were all affected differently. It was more traumatic to some than others. Something about that, plus the fact that this is a piece about place and displacement. Through people just capturing themselves at their microphone, but capturing the whole environment, we were able to get a really personal picture into the lives of all the singers. I think that was the last key to understanding the piece. It gave us something that we didn’t get when we were doing a large stage version. It made the piece really intimate and we use that in the remount of the piece that we’re doing now in 2022. 

Saul Williams wrote in Said the Shotgun to the Head, “I have offered myself to the inkwell of the wordsmith that I might be shaped in terms of being.” Ted, what is offering yourself to the inkwell of composing allowing you to be?

I’m pretty impulsive. I make like really large works sometimes that take years to make. I feel like often it’s driven by things that I feel in a moment or things that I feel [in] a cumulative succession of moments that feel powerful. I tend to use that as an engine. And then look later at the thing I made.

It’s the learning that comes from the rigorous process of composing. It’s through the rigor of holding yourself to really high standards and making sure that the piece understands and respects itself. Setting those strictures up as clearly and as well-constructed as possible. I think that through that discipline I can come to a much clearer understanding of who I am and who I am in the world. Without composing I don’t know if I would have any motivation to do that. If I didn’t have that process, I think that I would be drawn to living in a way that had no impact. Through composing I can continually examine my impact. 

I am really interested in living in a way that helps other people be better. But I have to help myself be better. I know it’s very presumptuous to think you can help other people be better without really putting yourself through the paces continuously. So I think composing is just the whole apparatus for that. 

Place is produced by Beth Morrison Projects. To see when Place might be performed in your area, I suggest you go to BMP’s website here.

Main photo: Ted Hearne conducting Place (Photo courtesy Unison Media)

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The show begins with an empty stage. Very quickly a home gets built and the lives of the many people who come and go and experience all of life’s major (and not-so-major) events occupy that home over the course of the show.

It is a conceptual piece that earned rave reviews when it was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2017. And each and every review said the less you know the better. So here ends any further details about Home except for one: the audience plays a character in the show with some members being brought on stage.

In addition to the narrative as structured by Sobelle, there are also original songs written and performed by Elvis Perkins. (You have to figure his parents must have loved Sun Records.)

In addition to Sobelle and Perkins, the cast includes Ching Valdes-Aran, Sophie Bortolussi, Jennifer Kidwell, Arlo Petty and Justin Rose. Home is directed by Lee Sunday Evans.

One of the lead producers on this project is, to no surprise to anyone who knows her work, Beth Morrison. For those familiar with her aesthetic, that should give you some idea of what to expect.

Home has a running time of 1 hour and 45 minutes with no intermission. The show will be performed at The Broad Stage through March 8th.

For tickets go here.

Photo of the company of Home by Jacques-Jean Tiziou (Courtesy of The Broad Stage)

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What I do know is that 17 Border Crossings is making its California premiere this week at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica. I also know that the show has appeared at the New York Theatre Workshop, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), in Moscow, Hong Kong and more.

17 Border Crossings follows Phillips as he travels the world over the course of those 28 years. He uses a spare set with just a desk, a chair and a light bar. Lighting by David Todaro and sound by Robert Kaplowitz help us understand where in the world Thaddeus Phillips is. That Phillips can also speak multiple languages helps place each of these stories as well. Some of his adventures are wild, some are downright frightening.

Phillips is not just a performer, but also a director and designer. Amongst his other shows are Capsule 33, El Conquistador and Henry Five Live From Times Square.

Tatiana Mallarino directs the show. She is not just the director, she is also married to Phillips.

For tickets on Friday go here.

For tickets on Saturday go here.

Photo of Thaddeus Phillips in 17 Border Crossings (Photo by Johanna Austin)

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Sharon is best known to local audiences for his unique opera productions of Christopher Cerrone’s Invisible Cities at Union Station and Hopscotch, an opera experienced while driving in cars around Los Angeles. There was also War of the Worlds, a collaboration with the LA Philharmonic in 2017. With Atlas he concludes, in a very major way, his three-year residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Monk was commissioned by the Houston Opera to write Atlas. The work had its world premiere there in 1991. The following year it toured the world and played New York at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

This is not traditional opera. Nor is Monk is traditionalist. The opera is mostly wordless and is minimalist in design. With this production Monk is giving the reins over to another director to interpret her work; though she is on board as an artistic advisor to the production. Having seen much of Sharon’s work in Los Angeles, it is safe to say that this will be theatrical in the extreme – and that is meant as a compliment.

Atlas is not a work that has been embraced whole-heartedly. There are those who love it and those who hate it. Given Sharon’s aesthetic, it’s safe to say you won’t see a production of Monk’s opera anywhere else that looks like this one. Visual artist Es Devlin is collaborating with Sharon on these concerts.

Paolo Bartolameolli leads the LA Phil in these performances. Atlas calls for a small chamber ensemble and there are 19 vocalists.

The LA Philharmonic closes out its centennial season this weekend. Rest assured, love it or hate it, people will be talking about Atlas well into next season. It’s a bold and spectacular way to conclude this anniversary season.

For tickets for Tuesday’s performance go here.

For tickets for Wednesday’s performance go here.

For tickets for Friday’s performance go here.

Main artwork and video courtesy of the LA Philharmonic Association.

Photo of Yuval Sharon by Sam Comen/Courtesy of the LA Philharmonic Association.

Collage of images of Meredith Monk courtesy of MeredithMonk.org

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The show will be 90 minutes and will feature 100 solos choreographed by Cunningham. The performance will feature live music and a unique set. Similar programs will take place at London’s The Barbican and New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). The time difference will allow audiences around the world to live stream each performance on Facebook and Vimeo.

The London performance can be viewed online at 11:45 AM PDT. The New York performance can be viewed live online at 4:30 PM PDT.

The following dancers are scheduled to participate in the program at Royce Hall:  Paige Amicon, Cemiyon Barber (understudy), Barry Brannum, Lorrin Brubaker, Rena Butler, Tamsin Carlson, Erin Dowd, Katherine Helen Fisher, Joshua Guillemot-Rodgerson, Casey Hess, Thomas House, Laurel Jenkins, Burr Johnson, Vanessa Knouse, Cori Kresge, Brian Lawson, Jessica Liu, Victor Lozano, Una Ludviksen (understudy), Daniel McCusker, Polly Motley, Jermaine Maurice Spivey, Savannah Spratt, Pam Tanowitz, Ros Warby, Riley Watts, and Sam Wentz

For tickets in Los Angeles go here. (At press time there were only 38 tickets remaining.)

The performance in New York is sold out.

Photo by Gerda Peterich. Courtesy of CapUCLA

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The book was Didion’s examination of socio/political and cultural events of the late 60s while at the same time taking a look inward at her own issues with depression.

Los Angeles-based director/writer/artist Lars Jan presents his realization of Didion’s work starting tonight at the Freud Playhouse for four performances. The production utilizes the first essay in the book. That essay uses the same title as the book.

Mia Barron, who happens to be Jan’s partner, recites Didion’s text while a group of people, housed in a glass box, seem to be having a party of their own. The other group of people is you, the audience.

If it sounds a little confusing, Jan is much better at explaining it since it is, after all, his creation.

Let’s start with the concept for the show. Can you put into words what exactly you are doing with The White Album?

In our show there are two different audiences. Traditional theatre seating, akin to the demographics of usual theatre, tends to skew older and more white than the population. Our inner audience is mostly in their 20s. We are pulling mostly from students, artists and activists. They start two hours before the show. They talk, they see information about the Berkeley police, student protests, Joan Didion, The Doors, Charles Manson and essential topics and figures covered in the essay. They can’t get distracted by the name dropping which is no longer relevant. But they can understand the movement and what it represented more and follow Didion’s thought process and have a more informed opinion of why she does so. The piece culminates in a conversation with the inner and outer audience and the creative team which is not a talkback, but part of the show.

When did you first become aware of The White Album and when did the idea of doing a theatrical production inspired by it first come to you?

I read the essay in high school when I was 16 or 17 – which is about 20 years ago. It’s the piece of writing I’ve returned to most in my life. I’ve always found Joan Didion herself to be a compelling character. I found the essay to be a very compelling and theatrical monologue. Maybe a decade or a little more ago, I first had the image of a Joan Didion-type in a house party and I was seeing through the glass window of a house in Malibu. A Didion figure steps out onto the veranda and starts talking and the party continues behind her. She has a drink in hand. That’s how I saw the essay performed – as the background of one of her house parties.

How challenging was it to get Didion to approve of you concept and grant the rights to use the essay?

Maybe 4-5 years ago I did my first inquiry into the rights. I didn’t get responses. We wrote Joan letters and eventually the Brooklyn Academy of Music [BAM] asked what I wanted to do. They said, “Maybe we can help.” We started triangulating and we worked on a bunch of pressure points.

Eventually Mia got to her nephew, Griffin Dunne, through a mutual friend. Griffin was aware of Mia’s work and tangentially mine. We had a green light within 24 hours.

Were there any restrictions on what you could do with the essay?

The one commitment we made, that they didn’t ask for, but figured into the approval, was I don’t want to deconstruct it. I want to perform every word from beginning to end. Once I said that there were no other restrictions.

Thematically there is a lot that was documented by Didion that still resonates today. What did you want to say, as an artist, about the times we live in?

I’ve always been incredibly inspired by the many movements that coalesce in the late 60s, particularly student movements, the Black Panthers, women’s and civil rights before that. The forming of coalitions to raise fundamental questions about the direction of our history. That was the first time we really did that as a country. You have this dialectic between the observer and the observed.

Didion’s beautiful mind forms a particular perspective of history and time and is gorgeously expressed. On the other hand, the essay is 50 years old. I wanted to embrace the timeliness of her capacity to make sense of her time, but also explore the distance of those she’s covering from the outside. The questions they were asking are still incredibly current. 

On Joan Didion’s website she has a selection of quotes. One of them comes from A Book of Common Prayer: “We all remember what we need to remember.” Do you agree with her?

That’s a pretty short sentence. It sounds like an epitaph. It sounds like what you write on a civilization’s gravestone. I think we have to work very hard to remember things that the most predominant power structures would like us to forget.

Need is a complicated word. It makes me think of King Lear, “O, Reason Not the Need.” Need is profoundly skewed by privilege. We’re finding that out every day. But need is a funny word that is often used to liberally. It’s used like the word “hate.” They are very strong words and as a society we’re far too prone to hyperbole.

For tickets go here.

Profile photo by Kawai Matthews. Other photos by Lars Jan. All courtesy of CapUCLA.

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When something becomes taboo, it’s like the forbidden fruit. You know you aren’t supposed to try it, but inevitably you will. The realization of that cause and effect seems to be lost on politicians. As it was on Jesse Helms and others when an exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe in Cincinnati became the front line in the culture wars in 1990. Not only did it capture the media’s attention, it became a pivotal moment for a then fourteen-year-old Bryce Dessner.

Dessner is known as one of the members of the rock band The National. He’s also known as a composer who has collaborated with the likes of Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, Philip Glass, Sufjan Stevens and Paul Simon.

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic will offer the world premiere of Triptych (Eyes of One on Another). The work is part of the Green Umbrella Series and was inspired by Dessner’s recollections of the controversy surrounding this exhibit and Mapplethorpe’s work. This premiere is the concert version of Triptych. A larger presentation, with full staging, sets and costume design, will have its premiere on March 15th at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Dessner wrote Triptych in collaboration with librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle (featuring words by Essex Hemphill and Patti Smith) and with the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth in mind.

I recently spoke with Dessner about Triptych, Mapplethorpe and the new recording of his Piano Concerto for 2 Pianos featuring Katia & Marielle Labéque.

What do you remember most about the controversy and shutting down of the Mapplethorpe exhibit?

As a teenager born and raised in Cincinnati, those events really marked the city in a way that stuck with me. It was later on when I got into college and studied art more seriously that I got to know better his work. 

What is it about defining art, particularly the way these photographs were, that provokes greater interest?

I think it absolutely backfired. There is a beautiful essay, The Invisible Dragon [by Dave Hickey] where he talks about on some level Mapplethorpe needed Jessie Helms in terms of how it amplified his work and it became so much more scrutinized and into the bloodstream. It had the opposite effect.

How has Triptych evolved as you near the premiere and do you anticipate making changes before the subsequent performances?

I think the score has evolved dramatically. The process and timing was a bit later than I would normally be comfortable with. It’s a tricky subject matter in terms of getting a solid structure to what we wanted to say. It took a lot of revisions. The music has been shifting up to the last week. It will keep evolving. There’s a bit of pressure with a premiere like this. Ideally we could keep workshopping it and make it better. In June it comes to New York. Before then I would imagine I will revise the score quite a bit.

You’ve chosen to use a lot of vocals accompanied by a chamber orchestra. How did that decision come about?

My challenge on this piece, which is text driven, the libretto is substantial and important and a lot is said with unbelievable poetry. I hope my music measured up. The piece does have a wide range of sounds. I wanted the music to be heard. But here I was very focused on the text to the extent the piece is clear and can be sung. 

There’s a statement about Triptych that says the work “examines how we look and are looked at, bringing us face-to-face with our innermost desires, fears and humanity.” How did writing Triptych bring you face-to-face with those same things?

I try to let the piece guide me and to listen to my collaborators and the great musicians who are singing it and performing it and come to it with an open heart. And to be aware that these conflicts are in me, too.  Just because I’m making this piece, I’m not exempt from confronting these pieces the way others do.

You have a new recording coming out in April featuring your Concerto for Two Pianos and El Chan (also the name of the CD). The Labéque Sisters seem to be a muse for you. What is unique about them and your collaboration with them?

Katia and Marielle have been playing music together since they were kids. They also work 8-10 hours a day together. It’s a joy to make music with them. They’ve been through enough and seen enough and they are open-minded and supportive. It’s been a beautiful experience.

Mapplethorpe said, “My whole point is to transcend the subject…to go beyond the subject somehow so that the composition, the lighting, all around, reaches a certain point of perfection.” As a composer, do you aspire to do the same thing?

I get great joy when the notes on the page, through the interpretive experience and collaborative experience of mounting the performance with performers, almost lift off and I no longer own them. That’s definitely the case with the singers in this project. I hear them sing ideas I had in the studio, but it’s almost a new piece through their interpretation. That feeling is what keeps me going and why I keep doing this.

Main Photo by Shervin Lainez

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This Friday and Saturday, Gilfry plays the Narrator in The Loser at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel. This is part of LA Opera’s Off-Grand program. The production, directed by Lang, originated at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2016. It’s one act and it finds Gilfry on a platform above the orchestra section and playing to the upper levels of the theatre.

Lang based The Loser on the novel of the same nam by Thomas Bernhard. As the Narrator, Gilfry assumes the role of the person revealing the story of the time when the Narrator, his friend Wertheimer and pianist Glenn Gould were part of a master class taught by Vladimir Horowitz. Seeing how brilliant Gould was, the other men realized they would never measure up. As the story begins, Wertheimer has committed suicide.

“I would say this definitely takes the place of therapy,” Gilfry says about the libretto. “He can figure out Wertheimer, he thinks he’s got Glenn Gould figured out. If you look back at anther couple steps, all of them are Thomas Bernhard. He took the character of Gould to be similar to himself and another to be the offshoot of his personality. You have Bernhard represented in three branches – the three faces of Thomas. It’s very much a self-taught therapy.”

The opera employs a shadowy figure on the piano (Conrad Tao) who may be Gould or the spirit of the musician. Gilfry said just the concept alone intrigued him and particularly how Lang wanted to stage The Loser.

“I thought the ideas were so audacious. The first idea was that I would be suspended. But I don’t think I could do that for an hour. But the concept of it – being that the performer is directly in front of the mezzanine, the orchestra is empty and the main stage is dark – this all sounded really intriguing and something I’d like to try.”

Though Gilfry has performed other modern work (by composers Matthew Aucoin and Jake Heggie as examples), he says Lang’s post-minimalist work is a whole different challenge.

“In the first movement the time signature is always changing and the orchestra is fragmented. There’s only a four-piece orchestra with sparse orchestration. One instrument is pizzicato and plays rarely. And the vocal line is really fragmented. It’s very challenging to memorize. The thing that’s so wonderful about David’s music is the story and words are in bold relief.”

Gilfry has to be very still initially, the opposite of what is normally expected of opera stars.

“As we were working on it, David had this idea – be absolutely still for the first scene. You have a lot of silence where you have 4-6 beats of absolutely nothing and the last word you say fills the air. And you have the tendency to try and fill it in. But I realized that was completely the wrong approach for David’s music. It’s anathema to the way he composes and the life of his music. ”

What is ultimately revealed is not so much material information about Gould or Wertheimer, but more clearly a sense of the Narrator and his own feelings about being an artist. The Narrator’s struggle, Gilfry says, is not one that he has faced.

“I’ve never really tried to be an artist. I’ve just sort of done my own thing. I have felt competition with colleagues to be as much as an artist as I have seen some of my colleagues – the famous singers throughout the ages. Most of my competition has been my own mental feeling. I’ve never felt like I’m not an artist, but I’ve never felt like I am.”

Precisely as he finishes the last sentence he realizes that he’s wearing a t-shirt that says “LA – Los Artists.” A big laugh comes forward from that baritone voice that Gilfry thinks may wrongly have been placed where it was.

“Something I discovered, but I had from the very beginning, is a very good low range. I have great range for someone who sings as lyric baritone. I feel misplaced. I have this whole other part that rarely gets explored. When [David and I] first started working, we just started singing through stuff. He wanted to learn my voice. I guess I came in singing a few low notes, so he wrote the whole thing around that.”

So challenging is this part that Gilfry has counted how many words there are. But it very clear that the degree of difficulty and the unique qualities of Lang’s writing compel Gilfry to continue to perform The Loser.

“I’m right up there in the face of the audience. It’s almost like doing a cabaret show only it’s highly-scripted and it’s much harder music. As much as I have complained about the difficulty, it’s not like anything you’ll hear from any other composer. The vocal line starts out extremely fragmented, but by the end the words get extremely compressed. There are 3,894 words in this little piece. That’s a big task.”

All production photos courtesy of BAM/ Photos by Richard Termine

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