“Yuval was very complimentary about Afterword, which was great for me,” Lewis told me recently of Sharon’s response to Lewis’ 2015 opera. He continued, “So at some point he called and said he was interested in double consciousness. I had just been reading The Comet, which is a short story by W.E.B. Du Bois. a kind of proto-Afrofuturist.”

The end result is The Comet / Poppea which combines parts of Monteverdi’s opera with Lewis’ The Comet. Performances begin at The Warehouse at Geffen Contemporary at MOCA on June 14th and run through June 23rd. The libretto is by Douglas Kearney.

In Du Bois’ story, a comet has struck the world and all that survived is a Black man and a white woman.

Lewis then discusses the plot of this short story. “They find each other and they start to think about what life has been like and what it could be like, perhaps under a new regime. And this is something where Du Bois gets a chance to think about social forces and their role in upholding white supremacy, patriarchy, and so on.”

But it still seems like a stretch to combine a new opera with Poppea. But Lewis tells more.

“They’re both about power and privilege and about patriarchy and time travel, or travel across dimensions or parallel universes. So there’s a double science fiction aspect. That becomes already something where you get maybe more than double consciousness as you get multiple consciousness.”

Perhaps to better understand how this might work together, perhaps defining double consciousness would be helpful.

“I think the original Du Bois formulation, as I recall, was that you were sort of like The Bourne Identity,” Lewis said. “Black Americans used to hear about this consciousness themselves as human beings, that’s how it should be and then as a Negro. How those two inform and deform, their everyday experience.” Though Lewis went on to fully reveal the full story, reading Du Bois’ writing or seeing The Comet / Poppea is a better way to have it unfold for you.

If it sounds confusing, rest assured Lewis is more concerned with where his works lead you as opposed to whether or not you understand them.

“Some people don’t have to understand what I was thinking. They can come to their own ideas about it and then they can enjoy that. I’m more interested in this: I want people to come out of the experience, thinking, wow, that was really different. I’ve never heard anything quite like that before. And then the next step in their thinking is, that was different. So I wonder what else around here could be different? What needs changing. You’ve already changed me.”

Since that is a philosophy at least in some part shared with Yuval Sharon, their partnership on this project makes complete sense.

“I think that this is something that Yuval has managed to do throughout [his] whole time with The Industry – which is to make make things that not only challenge you, but to cope with experiences you’re not going to be able to predict in advance. Even if you’ve heard it several times, you can hear it again and you still don’t quite know how it’s going to be. I think that’s very important to sort of play around with memory and to make sure that memory is something that we have to build, that we just can’t accept nostalgia. I think that’s what’s going to happen in this opera.”

Sharon and has team have carefully blended to the two works into one seamless production. The Comet / Poppea is performed on a rotating stage allowing audience members to see different aspects of the story as the stage rotates – thus creating a physical double consciousness.

“We want to give the audience freedom. That’s why we don’t make fixed relationships between the music and the dance, because we want to give people freedom to create their own relationships. We’ve created one relationship. But it’s not a matter of just decoding what the composer and the creators think. It’s kind of using this as a springboard for your own thinking.”

Lewis is also looking for new ways for himself to think. To create. To evolve. Yuval is doing the same as are other directors working in the opera world. This production allows both of these men to move the needle, yours and the art form’s.

“It’s not like you’re looking for influence. What you’re looking for is the possibility for other people to do things. What’s happening is that ideas are sort of moving back and forth between the historical realms, which are always making new histories. I’m looking at this more as increasing the amount of freedom or the feeling of freedom that we have to make these kinds of interventions. I think that anyone who sees this, it’s going to be wow, that was different. I guess I could do stuff different too, which means I’ll probably have to change a lot of what goes on now.”

If you surmise this deep-thinking composer is concerned about his legacy, you’d be as mistaken as I was when I asked the question.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen there. I mean, I wrote a few books. I wrote a lot of articles. I contributed to various fields trying to write music. Who knows what happens with it, you know? I try to help people in general, whatever it is, writing or music, writing or whatever. Maybe there’s something that takes a spark in them, and then you hope they go out and help other people. I hope I was helpful.”

Main Photo: George Lewis at a rehearsal of The Comet / Poppea (Photo by Erin Baiano/Courtesy The Industry)

The post Composer George Lewis Gets Struck by a Comet appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

To be fair, it is a little limiting to refer to Marc Lowenstein as just as composer. He’s also a music director (with The Industry and others) and conductor. He’s a singer and also an educator. But since we’re staying in the present, today we’ll talk about his work as a composer and also the most recent one to be a part of LACO’s Sound Investment Commission.

On Saturday, May 20th at the Alex Theatre in Glendale and Sunday, May 21st at UCLA’s Royce Hall, LACO will present the world premiere of HaZ’man HaZeh. I’ll allow Lowenstein to share details about the piece in the following excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview please go to our YouTube channel.

LACO’s Sound Investment Commission works a little bit differently than if you had gotten a commission from another performing arts organization in that the people who who donate into this program get to have a number of meetings with you, progress reports, hearing bits and pieces of a work in progress. I assume that’s very different than with any other institution.

It is very different. Although having said that, in my work in The Industry, we did do something similar in that we do workshops and we have our donors come to the workshops and we have meet and greets with them. But that’s not formalized in the way the Sound Investment program is. And it’s really formalized in a good sense: first I met and talked about my initial ideas, then I met and I had a small group of musicians play some excerpts just to check them out and to see if I could coerce one of the violinists into singing, which is a whole other issue. But I’ll tell you about that later. Then there’s one more meeting with donors right after one of the dress rehearsals. So they get to see the evolution from idea to piece and to performance.

One of the benefits of this program is the creation of modern classical works. If we don’t have contemporary works, how many Beethoven cycles can someone sit through? 

Oh, my goodness, no. I’m slightly older, shall we say. So I don’t I don’t think people realize what a renaissance of modern orchestral music there is going on now today, and such a broad array of composers, different styles. 30 years ago you just couldn’t get your music performed by any orchestra. Their idea of modern music was one piece by an extremely famous person and that would anchor the season. Now it seems like almost every concert by every major orchestra has a really interesting piece. Even if it’s not successful, it’s fabulous to hear. 

So I think we’re really in a tremendous renaissance of hearing a broad array of new voices of all ages and backgrounds and all musical styles. I think that’s crucial.

Of course, if we’re talking 30 years ago by one famous composer, it was either Philip Glass or John Adams.

I remember talking to my peers. All of us essentially made our own groups and our own orchestras to play the works. But there was still a barrier. It wasn’t necessarily a lack of awareness. It was sort of a blinkered mindset on the boards of all those institutions. The boards have changed and they realize that there’s all this great music out there. There’s a lot of great young composers out there.

I’m thrilled because the Sound Investment program isn’t just for young composers. I’m not exactly a young composer. I joke I’m sort of a mid-career despite my age, because of all these three different aspects that I do all the time. So I haven’t written as much as many other composers my age. But at the same time it’s refreshing that Sound Investment will have very young and untried composers with tremendous amount of promise and then somewhat older, more experienced ones. Just whoever they find interesting. 

What can you tell me about HaZ’man HaZeh?

It’s about the battle, the internal struggle, between nostalgia and sort of overt futurism. So I try to reach that through a dialectic between song and dance, and then something that’s neither song nor dance.

What inspired the work and its title?

I’m not that religious, but when I am, I feel marginally drawn to the sort of the Jewish mysticism tradition and where it intersects with Buddhism. It’s not very original of me, but it’s just sort of where I sit.

My roots, in terms of what I heard as a young person, [were] romantic chamber music and classical orchestra. Then I moved into jazz. So the beginning is sort of Schumann meets Sibelius meets Charles Mingus and this sort of wild party. Then I realized that in writing all these nostalgic styles, in some ways nostalgia is a beautiful thing. In another way, nostalgia is the enemy because you can drown in nostalgia unless you make something new out of nostalgia. It can really hold you back. 

Also I think if you worry too much about the future, you’re also holding yourself back. You’re not living in the present in that sense. So it’s this weird search for honesty between nostalgia and this sort of attempt to be new. I wanted to have some title that would evoke the present time, that overused word mindfulness of the present.

Then I realized there is something in the Jewish liturgy. There’s a very common prayer every time you reach a milestone, whether it’s just a happy day, a holiday, there’s a blessing. You thank God for bringing you the moment of this moment. And in Hebrew, the words are HaZ’man HaZeh, which literally means this time or the present time.

Where does a singing violinist fit into this picture?

I think one way to really live in the present is to dance. In all my music there is this binary between song and dance, and they sort of fuse together. There’s actually a song I had been working on at the same time. I didn’t think it was part of this piece. I had been setting this meditation on one of the Dalai Lama’s sayings, which is “My religion is kindness.” I’m working on the song. Can I take this block and just move it right here? 

I called up the orchestra manager and I said, “Is there someone in the violin section who wouldn’t mind just getting up doing this intonation, reciting?” At our last donor salon, one of the violinists, Sarah Thornblade, stood up and she just sang. She’s breathtakingly beautiful.

How important is it for an audience to understand what a composer is trying to get across versus just listening and enjoying it?

At its best there’s no difference. I think a lot of composers would say the same thing. We hope that there’s explanation beneath it, but we certainly hope that explanation is not necessary. Having said that, a certain amount of linguistic fluency helps, or familiarity, let me put it that way. 

Just as composers can get lost in the many styles that are around today, audiences, for their own good, might want to become a little fluent in things that they like. Which is just to say, if you like something, listen to it and try to figure it out. You might not. The first listen might not be as rewarding as the fourth or the fifth. Or maybe it’s not linear or something like that.

How much does working within an organization like The Industry, which has presented operas in a train station (Invisible Cities), in cars moving throughout the city (Hopscotch) and other unique locations, make you feel that we are moving in a direction where traditional expectations of how art is to be presented or consumed and genres are becoming passé? 

I would rephrase it slightly with your permission. I think they’re being expanded beyond that which is passé. Let’s talk about opera, not just symphonic music for a second. I want to look at traditional opera as sort of like those Civil War reenactments. There’s a place for it and people like that. It’s a history and a culture and it’s a deep part of us. It might be a little passé, but it’s deeply important. There’s a real place for the Met and for LA Opera and Chicago Lyric and all those places. At the same time, we can’t live in the past.

Whatever the words: problematize, interrogate, question the relationship between the audience member and the work. It’s very set. If you think about going into an opera house, you know what your relationship to the work is.

Yuval Sharon, Founder and Co-Artistic Director of The Industry told me that “The inner life of the piece of music has to be made manifest on a stage.” He was talking about Invisible Cities. Does that same thought process become part of what you think about when you’re composing something for a concert hall?

I love site specific concert music that doesn’t have voices. So I think there’s always going to be a home for these really beautifully acoustically tuned halls that allow you to immerse yourself in either electronic, acoustic or some kind of sound world so that you can project yourself into the sound. I think that’s fundamentally different than what happens in opera, where it’s a story and you project yourself into the story, the narrative or the scenario. Even with music that’s programmatic, I just think it’s a fundamental difference. So when you try to problematize the symphony hall, it’s going to be different.

I think you can listen to an opera in a recording, and I think you only really get it if you’ve seen it on the stage. But that’s not true of orchestra music. You can listen to wonderful orchestra music in a recording and really get it. And really get it in a way that you just can’t get up.

Almost anyone who listens to opera, which is probably not a lot of people, have almost always seen the work before. Or have seen a video of it. It’s always marketed with visuals in a way to bring you into that story. This isn’t arguing for one form over the other. I just think we have to recognize the fundamental difference, which, of course, will have blurred lines in between it. But I think they are different. And it was very challenging to me. 

I found a quote by Ray Bradbury where he said, “No sound, once made, is ever truly lost. In electric clouds, all are safely trapped, and with a touch, if we find them, we can recapture those echoes of sad, forgotten wars, long summers and sweet autumns.” How would you like your music, and this work in particular, once safely trapped, to help listeners recapture their own memories and experiences? 

I read Ray Bradbury obsessively when I was 14, and he’s definitely steeped in that same sort of nostalgia that I talked about. I don’t know. I don’t know that the music has a message that it wants to give out. I hope it’s successful on its own terms. I would almost unask that question. You tell me.

I’m much more interested in how other people react to it. I know what the sounds are. I know how it sounds. I cannot predict whether it’s even partially universal in expressing what I’m trying to express or if other people get other things from it. That’s always the case.

There have been many pieces that people interpret as one thing and that the composer meant something else. So I have no good answer. I hope it’s successful. I hope people hear it. I hope it’s successful on its own terms if that means something. I’m still kind of discovering what those own terms are.

Is this work finished in your heart and in your mind? 

Yes. I’m very good at saying, “Okay, let’s do the next best thing after that.” That is living in the present. The message of this piece is, in fact, to let it go and to just to do the next thing and to find your next mantra and to live in the next moment. Because that’s literally all that there is. It’s only by letting go and having a tremendous amount of throughput, I think, that you can really find the meaning in the moments.

To see the full interview with Marc Lowenstein, please go here.

Photo: Marc Lowenstein (Courtesy Marc Lowenstein and LACO)

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At Cultural Attaché we believe firmly in direct, one-on-one conversations before we post any interview. However, when the person you are interviewing is singing the demanding role of Brünnhilde in Die Walküre, we’ll make an exception. After all, soprano Christine Goerke isn’t just taking on a role she’s been performing since 2015, she’s doing so in a wildly unique production of the opera’s third act on Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl. Gustavo Dudamel will be leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the performance.

Yuval Sharon, the innovative director behind Invisible Cities, Sweet Land and productions of The Magic Flute and La bohème that upended long-held traditions, is directing this production. As you’ll see, it’s also not going to be a traditional approach to this second opera in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle and it’s going to require a lot of rehearsal time.

So we agreed to ask Goerke about this production via e-mail so she could rest her voice. Goerke, who has also sung roles in Wagner’s Parsifal and Lohengrin, has appeared throughout the world in Elektra, Turandot, Ariadna auf Naxos, Falstaff and many more. We knew she was a tremendously talented singer. What we didn’t know was how great a sense of humor she has. As you’ll see in this interview.

What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. All emphasis built into her answers are hers.

Very shortly after we posted our BEST BETS for the week on social media, you re-posted and said you were “Very excited about this!” What has you so excited about this particular concert?

There are so many reasons to be excited about this event.  First of all, it’s Die Walküre and any opportunity I get to sing Brünnhilde is reason enough to be excited! It’s also my first opportunity to work with Maestro Dudamel, not to mention that it’s been a minute since I’ve been on stage at the Hollywood Bowl. 

I will say, however, that this isn’t just a concert. This is a fully staged “experience.” It is a way to approach the storytelling that I have never experienced in opera, and I would imagine it’s something that most of the audience will never have experienced either.  It’s *exciting*! (Did I mention – “exciting”?!? LOL!)  

Yuval Sharon has proven himself to be one of our most imaginative directors. What does he have in store for this production and what do you think will make it unique?”

Yuval is absolutely one of our most imaginative and innovative directors. I think that often when people hear that a work that they know and love is being “re-imagined” there is trepidation. I get it. But in working with someone like Yuval, who doesn’t just have an incredibly strong vision for a different presentation of something that you think you know, but also has immense knowledge and love of the work, that has given all of us an incredible glimpse into the new direction in which he is taking our art form. 

His production of Act 3 of Die Walküre takes place in a world that Wotan has created. It is a digital world and we can truly see this when things start to fall apart (I’ll let you all join us at the performance and see exactly what that means!) The singers are all working in costume with a green screen. 

We are essentially offering two performances which are going on at the same time. Different cameras will be picking up different parts of the story/staging and adding the stage elements to the digital offering (which the audience can view at the same time on the screens placed around the Hollywood Bowl). We will all be on the stage interacting with each other in ways that perhaps you won’t see on the screens at all times. It is definitely some hardcore multi-tasking for us, but it is worth it and we’re all loving it.

This is not the first time you have worked with Sharon. What resonates most about your collaborations with him?

Collaborating with Yuval is really quite remarkable. He’s warm and genuine to work with as a director and he comes armed with an immense amount of knowledge. He knows exactly what he wants, but he is willing to listen to the people in front of him and take their thoughts and needs into account. Often his innovative ideas can be a bit jarring (and I mean this as a compliment), but if you allow yourself to step in and go along for the ride it’s a hell of a lot of fun!

How do you think Sharon takes Wagner’s theory of Gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art) into the 21st century and how does it apply to this concert?

It’s interesting…Wagner was so specific as to what he envisioned for his Ring Cycle. He was a great dramaturg. He wrote of fantastical beasts and journeys and epic sagas. I truly believe that we are simply moving through that journey and every day, with every new way to tell stories – here through a digital medium – we continue that storytelling journey. It is ever-evolving with whatever new technology and innovation that we are able to offer to it and we are speaking to people in a way that is perhaps more relatable to what we now know and are able to create. I believe this invites more people in to what has, at times, seemed elitist. 

You began singing Brünnhilde in productions in 2015. Though the pandemic interrupted your schedule, how has your relationship to this character and her music evolved since those first performances with the Canadian Opera company?”

Ohhhh Brünnhilde…This character has been and always will be so close to my heart. She is an incredibly fully-formed character like no other that I’ve been able to portray. When I first took her on at the Canadian Opera Company in 2015, I was a little terrified. I would have been insane not to have been! I think it’s fair to say that the first time we do any role we don’t get to the root of it. In fact, I feel like the ones that are really and truly worthwhile are the ones that are constantly teaching us something new every time we come back to them.   

Brünnhilde begins her journey in Die Walküre as a naive and somewhat “know-it-all” teen; righteous and indignant.  She then finds fear and disappointment as the person she loves most, her father, falls from his pedestal. She goes on in Siegfried to find love again, but then finds betrayal in Götterdammerung, as well as her own internal strength, integrity and power.   

It all sounds incredibly grand, but when you take it down to bare bones we have all been that know-it-all teen who has no idea what the world has in store for them. We have all seen a parent that we have on a pedestal of perfection become fallible in our eyes. We have all fallen in love, been betrayed and hopefully, found our inner strength and worth, allowing us to accomplish great things.

Those things in all of our lives are ever-evolving. That is what I hope I can bring to this character and it changes every single time I have the honor of portraying her.  

At what point can you tell if the production of the Ring Cycle in which you’ve agreed to appear will be a good one or not?

As far as I am concerned, every production of a Ring can be great … though we all admittedly might prefer one over another.   

As someone who has seen only one Ring Cycle and was frankly scarred by it, what would you say is the reason to give the entire work another try? It should be noted that hearing you sing the Immolation Scene with the LA Philharmonic in concert went a long way towards doing so.

First, I’m heartbroken to hear that you were scarred by a Ring Cycle! I think it’s the coolest story in all of opera. Look, at times it is difficult to divorce yourself from say… a costume… or a set… or the lighting… or even the premise for the storytelling in which the director is asking you to immerse yourself.   

In the end the text, the music, the interpersonal relationships on stage, they don’t change. There is an incredible intimacy in a grand saga here. It offers an insanely wide span of emotional depth and, let’s face it, visceral volume*. (See This Is Spinal Tap “the numbers go up to 11”)  

In its simplest form? It’s a story of a wildly dysfunctional family. I have a funny feeling that we can all relate to that on some level!

In an interview with Alex Ross for Pitchfork, writer Cat Zhang says, “The anarchist Emma Goldman allegedly remarked that Wagner’s music helped women release ‘the pent-up, stifled and hidden emotions of their souls.'” Assuming she made that remark, was Emma Goldman right? What does his music help you do?”

Oh Emma. These days very few women have those soulful emotions pent-up, stifled OR hidden. This just gives us a fabulous soundtrack with which to let them fly. 

I hope that the next time I have a conversation with Christine Goerke, it will be in person. And I can’t wait to see Sunday’s concert!

All photos by Arielle Doneson/Courtesy Opus 3 Artists

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We spoke by phone last week as he was driving with Yuval Sharon. The two men had just spent time at Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan. We had a terrific conversation. Tragically the app I was using only recorded the first ten minutes of that call. Thankfully those first ten minutes were rich – as you will see.

Tines is a Juilliard graduate and a fierce advocate of works by new composers. He originated the lead role in the world premiere of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones in 2019 at Opera Theatre of St. Louis. He’s also performed compositions by Kaija Saariaho, David Lang, Matthew Aucoin, John Adams and more.

His work to confront racism is best represented by The Black Clown, a music-theater piece he created with Michael Schachter that was adapted from Langston Hughes’ poem of the same name. Tines has also become a leading proponent of the work of composer Julius Eastman whose works have been gaining in prominence over the last decade. 

Eastman was a minimalist. He didn’t adhere to the style of contemporaries like Phillip Glass. Eastman’s music was aggressive. It was political. It was, at times, confrontational. And it was rarely written down. Much of what he did write down was sadly scattered to the winds as he battled homelessness and drug addiction. 

One of his most significant pieces is The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc which is being presented in a film starring Tines that is part of this year’s The Tune in Festival from CAP UCLA. The film closes out the on-line festival on Sunday, November 7^th. 

There’s a prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc which finds the soloist performing a series of repeated phrases over the course of 13 minutes.

Tines has performed the pieces several times, including a performance in 2017 at Zipper Hall in Los Angeles.

Early in our conversation I asked him how his relationship to the work has evolved since that time.

“When I was first doing it, it was more about the visceral aspects of surviving through those 13 minutes. Trying to give those short, important words, as much support and clarity as I could. To have the interpretation of the piece come from the actual doing of it. Meaning, he organically outlined things to break down over time or lower in register and stretch out in time. And now that I’ve had that visceral experience a number of times, it’s like I have a body or emotional memory of where those places are. 

“Doing the piece, it’s not exactly exhausting, but I definitely do feel the kind of tension that I think Eastman is trying to invite the performer into. So I can grow into the piece and in other ways. One way has been to focus very intently on what I think the raison d’etre of the piece is where he says, ‘When they question, you speak boldly.’ That sentence is, I think what the entire preceding eight and a half minutes is building toward.”

Tines went on to illuminate what Eastman was doing with The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc.

“Eastman is inviting everyone into the role of Joan of Arc and then giving the same instruction that’s poured fourth through her own spiritual ancestry into our current time.  So realizing and sitting with, more deeply, what it might mean to try to inform people in the larger trajectory in history to speak boldy and to understand how my own personal values align with that. I see the piece as a conduit for delivering a message that resonates within myself, but was also set forth by an ancestor.”

In notes before the premiere of The Holy Presence… Eastman wrote, “Dear Joan: When meditating on your name, I am given strength and dedication. I shall emancipate myself from the materialistic dreams of my parents. I shall emancipate myself from the bind of the past and the present. I shall emancipate myself from myself.”

Tines agrees that those thoughts seem particularly timely as we try to extricate ourselves from the trauma of the last nearly two years.

“It seems like even listing a lot of things that are, perhaps, secondary to one’s existence and, I think, maybe people articulate their lives or find their identity through many things that he’s listed. But maybe he’s getting at the idea that it’s important to allow those things to fall away and see what actually remains there. One’s self from one’s self, I guess, is one of the most nuanced ones. Maybe releasing the picture of what one feels one is and trying to actually allow some reality or some sheer engagement with reality.

“Given the reality of the pandemic, as you say, I think we’ve all had at least some encouragement, if not space or impetus, through violent and intensive means to do that sort of work.”

There was so much more of our conversation that, like many of Eastman’s compositions, remains but a memory. But I began my interview with Tines by asking him about something else Eastman had said and it seems the most appropriate way to conclude this story.

Eastman said in a 1976 interview “What am I trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest. Black to the fullest. A musician to the fullest. A homosexual to the fullest.” How does performing his work allow Tines to do the same?

“It allows me to do the same because our identities are deeply aligned in that way. All of the aspects of identity that he outlined, I also embody. So by being able to realize his words, I’m able to be very closely in conversation or community or connection with his aspirations.

“I’m meaning there are a lot of times where, you know, reference for a work is somewhat removed from you and it’s your job to figure out how to embody that. With Eastman’s work, it’s really a beautiful opportunity for me to do something that kind of pulls a certain specific identity along or finds something that I’m more closely connected with.”

To hear a rare interview with Julius Eastman, we suggest you listen to this 1984 interview he did with David Garland.

CAP UCLA’s The Tune In Festival runs November 4th – November 7th. You can find the full schedule here.

Photo of Davóne Tines by Bowie Verschuuren/Courtesy CAP UCLA

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Soper used the stories of eight women from fiction, written by men, to explore how they were treated by their creators in her work which is a song cycle for voice and ensemble. Amongst the sources and characters to be found are Lady MacDuff from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Emma Bovary from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Daisy Buchanan from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Jenny Wong will be leading Wild Up! in these performances.

Last week I spoke by phone with Soper about Voices from the Killing Jar and how timely the work feels now nearly ten years after she composed it. What follows are excerpts from that conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

A decade after completing Voices from the Killing Jar, what are your thoughts about the work and your relationship to it?

I guess I do sort of think of it as a piece from an earlier time, but in terms of my relationship, it has changed. I think it was the start of me becoming more interested in works that had explicit theatrical elements and a legible kind of quasi-narrative element. And it was really a chance for me to really see how versatile I could be as a performer. I think those are all the things that I kind of tried out for the first time with that piece that have become just part of my regular practice. I think like all pieces of music – probably for most composers – it’s also a record of a time in my life that had its interesting things. A time when I was really connected to the ensemble I was working with and I was finding my compositional voice as they say.

Do you think the #MeToo movement in some way now makes this work more prescient and more topical?

That’s not for me to say. That’s probably just for people receiving the work now to say. Of course, I have thoughts and sadnesses about how things have changed even since I wrote that piece. And in a way I think things haven’t gotten better necessarily with regard to gender equality.

Here we are on the call and you ask me about #MeToo. Of course, I get it. I’m not upset or even surprised that you would bring that up. But I don’t know. If people who are not in the majority point of view, everyone who’s not the straight white man, it’s like I did write this piece about these female characters. So I can’t really say that it doesn’t involve gender or my feelings about it or that it would be inappropriate for you or anyone else to want to talk about that in context of the piece.

To be clear, the reason I asked is that there are certain pieces of art that get created and then become more resonant because of what has happened, not as a result of that work necessarily, but just what has happened with time after their debut.

That makes sense.

I recently spoke with conductor Ruth Reinhardt and we talked about when it was going to be that a woman is a composer or a conductor and not a woman composer or a woman conductor. Do you see that shift in perspective happening in your lifetime?

I guess I’m not super optimistic about great strides for equality in my lifetime at the moment. This is such specific moment where it’s difficult to be optimistic about cultural shifts.

What was your reaction when Yuval Sharon suggested pairing your work with the Schoenberg?

I think we had talked about a couple different things of mine. I didn’t really realize that they premiered exactly one hundred years apart. That seemed very cool to me; a nice synchrony. I think it makes a lot of sense. They’re both minor dramas. They both have kind of like a weird instrumentation. They both are for unconventional singers. So I’m pleased and honored to be half of that double bill.

How challenging is it for you as a composer to get additional performances of a work beyond a premiere? Many composers with whom I’ve spoken said getting the first performance is easy, but getting the subsequent performances is much more challenging.

I’m very grateful that people are doing my work. Sirens has been done a couple of times and Voices from the Killing Jar, too. I was writing things that I thought would be really fun and challenging for me to do as singer that I wasn’t getting the opportunity to do. I want to be theatrical. I want to play an instrument while I’m up there or whatever. So I think what’s been really gratifying to me is to see other singers say, “that looks really fun and I want to try that” or “I’ve got some friends I want to do this piece with.” I hope that one of the reasons my stuff is sticking around is because it’s just really challenging and interesting and a fun experience for the performers.

As somebody who doesn’t sing, it’s doesn’t look like it’s easy at all.

It’s not easy. As someone who didn’t get a vocal degree and didn’t really start studying voice in any serious way until basically after I wrote for voice, I know it’s possible to do without achieving a higher level of vocality. The singers who tend to do my work tend to have more thorough training than I do. Maybe it’s an opportunity for them to do some of these others thing you don’t encounter in vocal pedagogy.

Composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger said “A great work is made out of a combination of obedience and liberty.” Do you agree with her or is there another way to describe what a great work or a great composition is today?

Well, how do you interpret what she means by that?

That that are certain rules you start following as a composer, but there’s this liberty to go off and do you want to do as well. That it’s this combination of the structure you’re taught and then what you choose to do with it.

Now there’s less of a sense of you’re taught about a certain structure because we’re even much further from any kind of common practice than she was. For me I’m trying to figure out what’s effective and it helps to have some rules. And you can do anything you want. I don’t know that I would say anything in particular is the characteristic of a good work.

I like a really good quote by Iris Murdoch, the novelist. What is it? It’s like the moment from after something is a space where the work hasn’t totally committed itself. Like it’s too late to go back, but it’s too early to say what it is, is like a really important moment. And that genius is when that moment is spread over the whole working process. I think it’s sort of this balance of trying to hone in on it, but also being open to changing your mind and breaking all of your rules at any given moment.

For tickets for Saturday’s performance, please go here. For tickets for Sunday’s performance, please go here.

Photo: Kate Soper (Photo by Liz Linder/Courtesy KateSoper.com)

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Angel’s Bone tells the story of a married couple who find two fallen angels. The angels have not fared well in their journey to earth. Once they have recovered their strength and are feeling better, the husband and wife use them for their own personal gain.

The libretto is by Royce Vavrek (Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves – which LA Opera will perform in February and March of 2021.)

In awarding the Pulitzer to Angel’s Bone, the committee called it “a bold work that integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world.”

In April of 2017, Du Yun told NPR about the work’s theme, “When we look at human trafficking, we always think that it’s far away from us. We all have our own narrative of what human trafficking is supposed to be, but if you do a little research, human trafficking happens, in many different forms and shapes, right in our backyard.”

Du Yun was one of the composers of Sweet Land which was recently produced and performed by Yuval Sharon’s The Industry.

While we won’t have opening night on May 1st to experience Angel’s Bone in person, at least we do get to see and hear the work that inspired Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim of the New York Times to write, “It’s an appallingly good work when you consider that it takes on the subject of child trafficking and mixes in elements of magic realism and a musical cocktail of Renaissance polyphony, electronica, Modernism, punk rock and cabaret.”

Photo of Angel’s Bone performed at the New Visions Arts Festival in Hong Kong in 2018. (Credit: Hong Kong Leisure and Cultural Services Department)

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“Necessity is the mother of invention” for Yuval Sharon, Artistic Director of The Industry and co-director (with Cannupa Hanska Luger) of Sweet Land. He and the entire company came up with a plan to make sure the opera didn’t just fold up without further opportunities for audiences to experience this opera which garnered rave reviews from Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times and Alex Ross in The New Yorker.

Sharon assembled the entire team to film both parts (Feast and Train) of the opera. Now Sweet Land, which was composed by Raven Chacon and Du Yun, can be streamed for less than fifteen dollars. The cost of purchasing this film will help offset losses incurred due to the early closure.

With the release of Sweet Land in this format, it felt like the right time to conclude my conversation with Duncan and Kearney. Remember, the answers below have been edited for clarity and length.

I read multiple takes on Sweet Land from both critics and audience members. One person said that the opera, “disrupts the dominant narrative of American identity.” If disrupting that identity was indeed a goal, what would you, as one of the creators, like that narrative of American identity to be replaced with?

ACD: I find great resonance in that description. One of the things Douglas and I talked about early on was the idea of American exceptionalism. That was something we were really interested in breaking up. In part, by just noticing that the reason so many “great things” happen in America is because land is stolen and labor is replaced. You don’t get to see they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but by the skin and hair of others.

DK: That domination is not abstract. That means at some level that you are a part of something in which people are often seen as resources to be exploited. You don’t have to go to slavery to think about that. You can walk down the street and see people who have jobs that have had to fight for minimum wage.

ACD: What do we want to replace that with? For me I’m most interested in the dis-ease, it’s about being disinterested in the past and the vast wasteland that is that. I want people to reconnect to land and plants and animals. The climate is accelerating at such a fast rate, it just says how much we aren’t in touch with what the earth needs. Actually reconcile with how we got here and what that means.

DK: Some of the work is going to be hard. What we have to ask is is that what we want to keep doing. If that isn’t, it’s going to take work to stop, to create a different possibility. I would like us to have an identity of reckoning with what it is that has gotten us to this moment and actually dealing with it.

There is the idea of privilege that runs through Sweet Land. For those who define privilege in strictly economic terms, what does this opera say to them?

DK: One of the things that Sweet Land talks about in terms of privilege for people whose view of privilege is more strictly speaking routed through economics, we do see a kind of extractive colonialism happening in some of the different scenes. It’s not just the settler. One of the things that’s important about Train 2, is there is a scene that Aja wrote about a kind of distance between sort of the ideal around expansion and possession and a hollowness around what that acquisition actually provides. There’s a kind of soullessness about that. Sweet Land braids and entangles so many different strands of what we might think of as categories for privilege and what we might call underprivilege.

Aja, in your poem, Fictive, you write, “There is a story we tell. A story about suffering. Not because we are suffering, but because that is the story we have been taught to tell.” How does Sweet Land fall into the category of a story you have been taught to tell?

ACD: There is a level of intergenerational trauma that I both hold and continue to re-thread into my present experience and my experience of others – because of the depth of erasure of indigenous lives in particular. That was the project. I also feel as an artist my writing is a way of evoking an alternative future. It’s not just the traumas of the past, it is weaving backwards in order to weave forwards.

Sweet Land is self-described as an “opera that erases itself.” Is that how you looked at it creatively?

ACD: I didn’t have to erase my own story. I don’t think it is in fact an erasure, but I think it gets engaged with erasure in Douglas’s sections. [He wrote Train 1 and Feast 2] I was interested in different kinds of erasures. In the libretto there were a lot of things being disrupted simultaneously.

DK: That question is something Aja and I still talk about. I gave a Sunday talk last week and I wrote a little bit about erasure and and how can you call it erasure when the bones are still there. Is that still erasure if you see bones? What we really wanted to do was show a myth being made.

To purchase Sweet Land for streaming, please go here.

All photos from Sweet Land by Casey Kringlen for The Industry/Courtesy of The Industry

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While the tagline for Sweet Land is “an opera that erases itself,” Kearney and Duncan had more than that on their mind as they structured the two-parts: Feast and Train. (For full details of the opera please go here.) Not only are there two parts to the opera, there are two parts to Feast and Train.

Kearney wrote the second part of Feast and the first part of Train. Duncan wrote the first part of Feast and the second part of Train. But the librettists had more than just the idea of an opera erasing itself on their minds as I learned when I spoke by phone last week with each of them.

Here is part one of my conversations with the two writers. These excerpts from those conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

The timing of Sweet Land seems perfect given the present administration’s treatment of immigrants. How much did Trump’s policies influence the creation of this work and the writing you did?

ACD: My understanding is the 2016 election had a really profound impact on Yuval personally and that was a large piece of his impetus of wanting to do the original version and then the struggle to fund it through to what we have.

One of the things that in response to his draconian immigration practices is a refrain that people say all the time which is wrong which is “We are all immigrants.” We are not all immigrants. The complexity and nexus of those things was of particular interest for Douglas and I.

DK: One of the things that’s interesting about that line is how it has been imagined as a unifying rallying call. But in that usage there is an erasure that is maybe well-meaning, but is persistent erasure because the indigenous people are not immigrants. That exclusion is central to the American myth.

There is a way in which immigration is imagined as a kind of intentional seeking of a better life. From an Afro-dysphoric perspective, at least some populations of it, I don’t know you can call it immigration.

When creating art that has a strong political component, are you preaching to the converted or do you think that concept itself reflects a naivete that would suggest there’s not racism to be found amongst the arts crowd?

DK: That’s such a great question. I think there was definitely a time period in which I was really worried about preaching to the converted. During the process I had to think about what I was arguing for in terms of representation and space myself as one of the creators. Even in delivering political commentary there is a way people can come expecting a particular kind of response or treatment. So trying to destabilize that and make things less streamlined is one of the ways I try to approach political content.

ACD: There was an operating assumption that the largest percentage of the audience would be white and older based on the demographics of The Industry’s opera audience. However, because all of the creative folks with the exception of Yuval were people of color and we were focused on bringing in people of color, we were not writing in opposition to white imagination or something. I think we were hoping we would affirm things that resonate with people’s experience; jar folks who aren’t as experienced with the experiences of the audience.

It seems to me that Sweet Land reaches two segments of the audience: those who are determined to break the cycle of bigotry and those who repeat it. What would you like each group to get from their experience of seeing Sweet Land?

ACD: One of the things that we were doing in sort of an explanation for the second act for Train and Feast was to evidence ways in which erasures of history are present. Speaking for myself as a mixed race, cisgender queer woman, there’s all kinds of way I don’t write things that I’m tacitly implicit in or just don’t literally see because I don’t see the breadth of them because of my skin, or mixed race or higher education. All of us, regardless of what we are trying to do, can always increase the volume of our awareness.

DK: For people who would like to break the cycle, I would like people to come away from it not feeling as though they have been necessarily given an answer as much as they have been given a method for destabilizing and working through the questions and the problem.

ACD: For folks that don’t care, if they don’t care you can’t speak to them. They need some cataclysmic life event and even that might not change their world view. I’m not sure that people who don’t care were ever our audience. People who are more comfortable not having to care, it’s probably those folks we are hoping we can be in a dialogue with. It’s a presenting of an experience so that hopefully they no longer feel they can’t care.

DK: It’s a difficult game to presume that what a person who is dead-set against recognizing the humanity of other people that what they need is just the right argument. That strikes me that it is the job, often times, of the victims to not be victimized. I don’t know that in the great history of political speech or artistic effort that the goal should be “maybe if I write this one line, that person will go ‘Oh.'” That’s giving them the right to abdicate responsibility. I don’t know that’s the rubric we should be using.

For someone in the 21st century to say they haven’t encountered humanity from other people that are not like them, if they come to Sweet Land, I hope what they see is opera in which you have a group of artists who have created a work of art using an approach while, on the outside it might look like it is consistent with other kinds of productions, but that it was created with an approach of consensus that is more consistent with a sense of community. That it took discipline and that took effort, but was what was central to creating this work that is Sweet Land.

Check back soon for part two of my interview with Aja Couchois Duncan and Douglas Kearney.

Main photo: An image from Feast 2 in Sweet Land (Photo by Casey Kringlen for The Industry) All photos courtesy of The Industry

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Even if you never experienced Invisible Cities at Union Station or Hopscotch in cars around Los Angeles or War of the Worlds in a former parking lot across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall, you probably heard about them. I can assure you word has already spread about the new project from The Industry called Sweet Land which is now being performed at Los Angeles State Historic Park.

Yuval Sharon, the Artistic Director of The Industry, has assembled an amazing team to tell, in opera form, the story of indigenous people (or The Hosts as they are called here) who encounter settlers (or The Arrivals.)

The team includes composers Du Yun (Pulitzer Prize winner for her opera Angel’s Bone) and Raven Chacon; librettists Douglas Kearney and Aja Couchois Duncan and joining Sharon as director is Cannupa Hanska Luger.

The creators refer to Sweet Land as an opera that erases itself. Let them explain.

There are two distinctly different tracks you can experience when you see Sweet Land. One is entitled Feast and the other is Train. (Note that they are separate and require separate tickets.)

The opera begins with Contact where The Hosts and The Arrivals first meet. Then you begin on either Train or Feast. In each track you experience the story first as a natural progression from Contact. There is an interstitial section (called The Crossroads) that immediately follows either Train 1 or Feast 1. The Crossroads allows for both tracks to reset and tell a different story about life once The Arrivals have made their presence known and have completely appropriated the land, the life and the people we were first introduced to as The Hosts. (These are called Train 2 and Feast 2).

Sweet Land comes to a conclusion in the same space where it started in a section called Echoes and Expulsions. (By the way, the higher you sit in the bleachers for this last segment, the more you will experience.)

Having seen both tracks I can tell you that you are in for a moving and thoroughly thought-provoking experience. It is recommended that you do NOT see both tracks in the same day. I can attest to the wisdom behind that because I did see both tracks on the same day. My mind was filled with so much that I regret not having the proper time to digest and think about what I had experienced. This is truly powerful and inventive work.

One other thing to be aware of before going: this all takes place outdoors at night. You will spend time walking, standing and sitting in the elements. Even though we are in Los Angeles, it does gets cold during the performances. I strongly recommend you bundle up before attending even more than you might otherwise normally do. (Makes me even more amazed that the 31-person cast and the 24 musicians and 2 conductors can sing and play as beautifully as they do.)

There are two full performances each night and each track runs 85 minutes.

For tickets go here.

Main Photo is an image from The Crossroads in Sweet Land (Photo by Casey Kringlen for The Industry/Courtesy of The Industry)

Update: This post incorrectly listed Yuval Sharon as Shuval. That correction has been made. We regret the error.

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To mark both anniversaries, Camerata Pacifica began a Why Beethoven? project last year. The two-year celebration concludes at the end of their just-started 2019-2020 season with a performance of the Beethoven String Quartet in B Flat Major, Op. 130 with its original ending. Last season concluded with the same quartet, but with its revised ending.

I recently spoke by phone with Spence about his original goals for Camerata Pacifica, where he sees the ensemble today and through it all I got insight into his views on classical music today and the role Los Angeles plays in its future.

How was Camerata Pacific carved a place for itself in the classical music world in Southern California?

What we’ve done much more generally is bring a mainstream audience into the 21st century with us. Our mission talks about affecting positively how people experience classical music. At the end of every season my goal is to make the audience more capable listeners than I had at the start of the season. I think we’ve done that. Over three decades this has become a well-honed audience. If you don’t want to come and lean in and listen, because I expect you to do that, don’t come. There are a whole bunch of other groups I can recommend to you.

What was your vision in 1989 and how does Camerata Pacifica today reflect what you envisioned?

I’m glad to say that we’re living the dream. You are a writer in the classical music business, you understand and this is no indictment of you personally, but no other industry writes so poorly about itself like the classical music industry. Tobacco does a better job and they kill people. I don’t think it is as bad as it was. This is the golden age. This is the second renaissance for classical music. 

We’re immersed in this whole Beethoven notion, but we’re still presenting concerts by rules established in 1800 and the wheels are coming off that machine. The large paradigm institutions have to make massive corrections. Filling a 3,000 person concert hall is a problem, particularly for regional symphony orchestras or operas. Filling smaller halls is being lead by chamber music and it offers a broader range of repertoire. That’s what I’ve always wanted to be a part of. If you can’t listen to Toru Takemitsu, then you’re not hearing Beethoven. That’s been an assertion of ours for 30 years.

How important is the pairing of well-known composers with lesser-known composers in order to grow appreciation of classical music?

I think it is critical for the audience. In the latter half of the 20th century you had a small number of white males deciding who was going to be listened to and what was recorded and broadcast and that’s all collapsed. And that’s fabulous. The arrival of the iPod shuffle is brilliant. Young people are not defined by genre. They listen to what they listen to with an open mind. Classical music is always going to be a minority participation sport because it requires greater participation. We’re never going to get a market share of 95% – it will always be 1 or 2 percent. But that share will always be there. There are always smart people who want to think for themselves. Whether Millennials or Gen X or what you want to call it, you are going to have smart curious people. If you have smart, curious people they can be brought to our product. We are stewards of this art form and we, too, as audience members, should be handing it off to the next generation better than we received it. This is what I think about every day.

You have a unique way of looking at what an audience is and/or should be.

I’m not interested in the music lover. A music lover has fairly rigid ideas of with they think is good or bad music. They are usually thinking of 18th or 19th century work written in a linear manner. What I’m interested in are the intellectually curious and it’s going to be Beethoven and George Crumb and Huang Ruo and they will ask “Why?” I want to reach those people. I believe there is a massive audience of intellectually curious who don’t come because they think of it as dusty or boring. Why the hell you’d drop 50 or 100 bucks on that I don’t know.

How would you describe the state of the arts in Los Angeles as we move into the 2020s?

Nobody has asked me that question before. I think Los Angeles is where it is at. I think the LA Philharmonic is doing a superb leadership job. The growing work done, particularly by Esa-Pekka Salonen, that was superb work that has helped create an audience whether happily or unhappily, they expect to be presented with new music on a regular basis.

I think the future of classical music is looking west into the Pacific. And I think Los Angeles and Southern California is poised to do that. Even in the time that we’ve been performing here there’s been an explosion of chamber music groups. You look at Yuval Sharon’s The Industry, some of the off-stage stuff LA Opera is doing – which is critical, Green Umbrella, Jacaradana, we’re trying to work together and show audiences what’s out there and present it collaboratively.

When you see so much going on – good ideas and bad ideas – whether  all these things survive, that’s the sign of a healthy artistic musical environment. Because that’s what you want – constant new ideas and most of them, by the nature of being, aren’t going to work. The more you have, the more that will work. That’s just simple. I think in Southern California we’re seeing that, which is exciting.

All photos courtesy of Camerata Pacifica

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