Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Unfinished Poetry

2022; The MIT Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00610

1537-9477

Matthew Aucoin, Geoffrey Lokke,

Diversity and Impact of Dance

Born in 1990, Matthew Aucoin studied poetry at Harvard before training in composition at Juilliard. While working as an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, he received a surprise commission to compose a new work for the company. Eurydice (2020), Aucoin's adaptation of Sarah Ruhl's play from 2003, received its Met Opera debut this past November, following its first production at LA Opera (with Aucoin conducting). December saw the publication of his book The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera, which situates his work within the long history of Orphic music-theatre and alongside pieces by living composers he admires, including Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, and Chaya Czernowin. Before turning to Eurydice, Aucoin adapted a series of works by Walt Whitman, culminating in his two-act opera Crossing, which premiered at the American Repertory Theater in 2015. Two years later, Aucoin co-founded American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) with director and choreographer Zack Winokur. The company, which consists of composers, musicians, designers, and choreographers, includes star singers Julia Bullock and Anthony Roth Costanzo. AMOC has produced The No One's Rose (2021), a dance-theatre piece by Aucoin, Winokur, and choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith; CAGE, Winokur's acclaimed 2018 production of John Cage's music for prepared piano; and a new arrangement of John Adams's opera-oratorio El Niño (2000) that debuted at The Met Cloisters as part of Bullock's residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018. This conversation took place in early January 2022.◼Thomas Adès has talked about only writing operas where people are physically trapped in some location, like the island in The Tempest or the manor in The Exterminating Angel. He says this confinement mirrors how theatre audiences feel trapped in the dark. How do you think about operatic or theatrical space?I think of theatrical space less as shared confinement and more as shared liberation. Sure, in a sense we’re all trapped in the room for the duration of the performance. And I imagine we’ve all had the experience of desperately wanting to press “eject” and escape from a particular theatrical universe before the curtain comes down! But more important, for me, is the reality that everyone—audience and performers alike—willingly chose to enter that room (at least, one hopes so). Why do we keep making that choice? Why do we keep entering these magical rooms? Surely, it's because we know that the illuminated “playing space” of the operatic stage (or the concert hall) is a portal into a sharable alternate reality. That's the key thing—that it can be shared. My collaborator Sarah Ruhl recently described live performance, or maybe it was all shared experiences of art, as a dream that we dream together. Not a dream that you have by yourself, where you wake up and ask, “what the hell was that?” and wonder if you’re crazy, but a dream that you have together with others. I think that's why performance spaces are a refuge—and sometimes an addiction—for many people.In your book, you say that opera is an impossible art. This reminded me a lot of Daniel Sack's Imagined Theatres. Is this just useful hyperbole, or do you think some specter of impossibility is a constituent element of the form?I love that phrase—“specter of impossibility”! That specter does loom over your head whenever you’re rehearsing an opera; the risk that things may not come together by opening night is almost always palpable, and it's a source of much agita. I think that was my starting point: the all-too-familiar feeling, both as a composer and a conductor, of worrying, “Is this even possible?” And then I zoomed the camera out a bit and thought, well, is it ever possible? Does it ever all come together? And I think the answer is no: you never create exactly the piece you set out to create. A lot gets lost in translation, but a lot gets found, too. This is true of every art form, I think, but it's most obvious in opera, because opera has the most moving parts and thus the most potential for embarrassment when things crashingly, hilariously fail to cohere.Any examples come to mind?Well, I don't want to single out particular pieces that I think fail especially egregiously! But the question applies equally to individual performances. Sometimes, it's a clash between the piece itself and the aesthetic of the production; sometimes, it's a singer who has the wrong voice for a role, or who's just got a bit of phlegm in their throat that night; sometimes, it's a conductor who for whatever reason seems to be in a hurry to get home, and so all the tempi are too fast. The point is that the littlest thing, in opera, can shatter the illusion, the—I don't even want to call it suspension of disbelief... really it's an immersion in disbelief. If one element refuses to play nicely with others, the good kind of disbelief can curdle into skepticism or apathy. The listener can feel that they’re merely outside the piece, being held at arm's length, rather than being immersed in it.You studied poetry in college. What did you write about? What were you composing during those years?I have no idea to this day what my poetry was about. It was quite abstract—I must have been thinking musically when I was writing it. My friends on my college's literary magazine were pretty obsessed with the Language poets—Michael Palmer's Notes for Echo Lake was an important book in that circle—but my mind wasn't wired that way; I couldn't quite get excited about the notion of exposing or emphasizing language's materiality, as the Language poets did. I wasn't a born avant-gardist. But that doesn't mean my poetry made sense! My teacher Jorie Graham was convinced that when I wrote poems, what I was really doing was composing music; that is, what the language really wanted was to dissolve into music. That was perhaps a gentle way of saying my poems didn't quite work as poems.On the musical side, I didn't have a rigorous daily composing practice in college, as I do now (and as I have ever since graduating). I would write music in these frenetic little bursts. I had ideas, but my technique—that is, the way that the notes manifested on the page—wasn't yet up to snuff. I remember the frustrating sensation of a musical idea floating into my head but then outrunning my capacity to write it down; I watched certain ideas disappear into the sunset, never to return. In my senior year, I realized I needed to whip myself into shape, which is why I went to Juilliard, to work with Robert Beaser. Another important thing, late in college, was my friendship with the violinist Keir GoGwilt. I wrote a lot of music for Keir, and that one-on-one connection—the ability to experiment, and to have a great performer tell me what did and didn't work on his instrument—was essential.In discussing L’Orfeo, you claim that the banality of the libretto was generative for Monteverdi. Does opera need poetry? Does your opera?Opera thrives on a particular kind of stripped-down poetry—poetry that is in some way unfinished or open-ended. In the chapter on L’Orfeo, I also talk about the librettist for Jacopo Peri's Euridice, a wonderful poet named Ottavio Rinuccini. The trouble with Rinuccini is that the poetry is so elaborate, so superabundant, that there's almost no room for the music. A similar issue arises—though the music is many worlds away from the Italian Baroque—in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's libretti for Richard Strauss.Ideally you want your librettist to be someone who really loves music, who—even as they’re writing—is eagerly imagining what the composer will do with their words. You don't want someone who believes that the work begins and ends with them.What did your collaboration with Sarah Ruhl involve? You adapted an existing work of hers.Composer-librettist partnerships are often full of tension, misunderstandings, hurt feelings, shouting matches, etc., but mine with Sarah was notably happy. One thing that helped was that I felt, when I first read the play, was that it was already pretty close to the scale of a libretto, and that our task would be a fairly humane kind of distillation and reduction. And so it was! Sometimes she would do a “reduction” of a given scene; sometimes I would do so myself, and then run it by her for edits; and then I’d set to work writing the music. It was very far from adapting, say, a Shakespeare play, where you have to throw out 80% of the text if you don't want your opera to be ten hours long.In your book, the discussion of The Rake's Progress includes a number of W. H. Auden's wonderful strictures and dicta for opera. For instance, a libretto should not have a single sensible remark or moment. Do you abide by this?I agree with Auden that operatic characters, as a rule, shouldn't speak (as he puts it) “sensibly.” In opera, whenever someone makes a banal, quotidian statement—“could you pass the potatoes,” or whatever—the audience starts to lose interest. Oh god, you can feel the air go out of the room when a libretto is full of small-talk-y lines like that! It's the kiss of death for an opera.The way I frame it in the book is that since opera automatically exists in a kind of dream world, one law of the art form is that the absurd is normal and the “normal” is absurd. It's a foundational reversal. It makes perfect sense, in opera, to say—for example—“Is that the sofa on which your father bled to death?” But a casual water-cooler conversation about politics or baseball? There's usually no reason to sing that kind of statement. Movies and sitcoms and straight plays do a much better job with that register of communication.Sarah Ruhl uses quotidian language. What sets hers apart? You’ve said that Ruhl's texts “might seem to be written in prose, but their true fabric, secretly, is poetry.”I think that Sarah is up to something very subtle in this regard. Yes, the language she uses is often fairly quotidian. But look at the way it's used; look at what is and isn't sayable in her work. For instance, in the scene when Eurydice first encounters her father in the underworld, he insists over and over that he's her father, but she can't understand a word he's saying: her memory, and her faculties of language, have been wiped clean. And then he says, “When you were alive, I was your tree.” And this non-literal statement triggers an association for Eurydice that provides the first flicker of her memory returning. Elsewhere in Sarah's work, a world of apparent “realism” will suddenly dissolve into the fantastical—just think of the moment in Melancholy Play when a character becomes so depressed that they transform into an almond. My point is that Sarah is careful to create conditions in which magic can happen. Her characters might seem to be speaking normally, but inevitably there are little clues, little anomalies in their language that suggest we might be in a kind of Lewis Carroll-esque wonderland.What inspired the music at Eurydice's wedding? I assume (actual) dance music?It's original music. But if it feels weirdly familiar, that's good! That's what I was going for. I wanted to create an atmosphere that I remember from college parties: a dark, crowded, sweaty room with unbearably cheerful, cloying dance music from the early 2010s (á la Katy Perry, or The Black Eyed Peas) playing at an earsplitting volume.One thing that I intended in that scene—and I’m not sure this came through clearly in the Met staging—is that Eurydice really isn't enthusiastic about the dancing at all. She finds it claustrophobia-inducing; that's why she makes the fateful decision to leave her own party.You claim that contemporary opera composers exhibit an “unprecedented methodological polyphony,” that they almost exist out of time. I sometimes wonder if this produces its own sort of sameness? Or even a received idea of sameness in the minds of, say, the Met audience?No, I wouldn't say that the diversity of musical approaches out there amounts to its own kind of sameness. The sheer volume of pieces is overwhelming, for sure—and it can be hard for listeners to feel like they have a coherent standard of judgment, of saying “this was good” or “this was bad.” But I’m not sure that's a bad thing. I think it's humbling, in a fruitful way. There are, of course, listeners out there who still think that “new music” is one single thing (they usually think it all sounds either like Schoenberg or like Philip Glass). But those people just haven't done enough listening!An entire chapter of The Impossible Art is devoted to Chaya Czernowin's Heart Chamber (2019). You end up describing the libretto: “[T]he singers’ lines are stacked vertically, their words scattered across the page like text magnets on a refrigerator. Czernowin instructs us to ‘read the text as you read a score’; that is, we should read left to right, but we should read all text down the vertical axis simultaneously.” What interests you about how Czernowin uses the page?In a masterful and very spare way, Czernowin's libretto for Heart Chamber does something that opera librettists have been doing for centuries: she writes text for multiple characters with the intention of their being layered in an ensemble. But since Czernowin is also the piece's composer—and a composer with an unusually vivid visual imagination, as evidenced by the many forms of graphic notation in her music—she's able to layer and spatialize the text in quite a precise way. The libretto almost looks like a proto-score. I found that fascinating, the way that she seemed to treat the libretto as a first stage of composition, a blueprint.In Eurydice, Orpheus is depicted by two singers: a countertenor and baritone. You note that Czernowin concurrently wrote a similar character in Heart Chamber. I wonder what the microhistories of opera have to say about this. It's such an interesting coincidence.Yes, although I’m not sure it's pure coincidence; I do think there's a physical connection between the baritone voice and the countertenor voice. Many countertenors are also baritones, and vice versa—that is, when they sing in chest voice, they’re baritones, but they also have a strong falsetto register. In my experience, it's much less likely for tenors or basses to have this capacity to moonlight as countertenors; most often it's baritones or bass-baritones. My friend Anthony Roth Costanzo, countertenor par excellence, has a party trick that displays this duality: he sings both parts in a famous Mozart duet for baritone and soprano, flipping back and forth between his falsetto and his (baritonal) chest voice.It's almost as if the baritone and the countertenor are two sides of the same coin. I was certainly looking to make use of that quality in Eurydice, since the countertenor Double is an emanation from the baritone Orpheus. And in a very different way, I think Czernowin was making use of this property too.You’ve been living with this opera for some time. Do you feel the need to purge yourself of it? Or is it now a part of you?Happily I don't feel the need to “purge” anything! Eurydice is a part of me now, but I have a strong instinct that I’ll never write anything quite like it again. There's a certain innocence to the piece that I feel it would be unwise to attempt to recapture.What is next?It's too soon to say in any detail. But I’ll drop one breadcrumb: last year I finally set to music a poem by Jorie Graham, a terrifying poem called “Deep Water Trawling” that's spoken by the voice of the bottom of the ocean. The experience just set me on fire creatively. My friend Julia Bullock was spectacularly scary as that oceanic voice when we premiered the piece with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in San Francisco.So I find myself wanting to engage with Graham's work much more deeply, especially the poems in her recent books that reckon with the different ways that the earth is changing as a result of what we’ve done to the environment, as well as the ways that the human is changing—the frightening algorithmic voices that we’ve created almost against our own will. It's very exciting, to me, to imagine giving voice to some of these natural and post-natural forces in music.