Peter Sellars wanted to know more.
He was in San Francisco a few years ago and attended a performance of “The No One's Rose.” This is a fascinating and unique piece of music theater featuring some of his favorite artists from the American Modern Opera Company and a score by a young composer. Matthew Aucoin.
One part of the piece stood out. Set against Jorie Graham's poetry, “Deep Water Trawling” expresses both human and unnatural, natural and spiritual feelings. Most importantly, I feel like I've brought out something new and special in Aucoin's writing.
Sellars, 66 and a longtime opera director, asked Aucoin after the show: was that?”
They decided to develop the inspiration of Graham's poem further without any special commission. Their project, now fleshed out as the evening-length “Music for New Bodies,” premieres Saturday at a Houston concert presented by Dacamera and performed at Rice University.
In five movements spanning 70 minutes, “New Bodies” sets Graham’s poetry about the Earth and humanity shifting between voices and registers, channeling the power of nature and, at times, evoking the narcotic mind. Although its expansiveness and form are reminiscent of Mahler's 'Continental Song', it is neither a lieder nor a symphony. It's probably closest to opera, but it's mostly opera.
“I don’t know where it came from,” Aucoin, 34, said this week. “After a long and intense apprenticeship composing orchestral pieces and operas, I am now spreading my wings and this is something else. There is no ground here beneath my feet. It’s scary and thrilling.”
As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Aucoin studied with Graham, 73, a renowned and widely admired pillar of American poetry. In her interview, she recalled him as “a genius.” (The three creators of “New Bodies” are all MacArthur's “genius” colleagues.) She watched the birth of his first major opera, “The Crossing,” about Walt Whitman during the Civil War, and then taught him how music was born. I have asked. composer. As a poet, she listens. He said it felt like heat transforming sound into notes. The metaphor stuck with her.
She gave her blessing to “Music for New Bodies” but left its creation largely to Aucoin and Sellars. “Honestly, if you have Peter Sellars and you have Matt, the best idea is to avoid it,” Graham said. They draw from her collections “Fast,” “Runaway” and “To 2040,” published since 2017, all dealing with her cancer treatment, the planet and immortality.
Like so many composers before him, Aucoin is no stranger to setting poetry. “The way words appear in the mind and the way notes appear in the mind have to go through two different channels for him and talk to each other,” Graham said. “He knows how to dive into the depth of music on the page.”
But her poetry opened up something unfamiliar to Aucoin, he said. She thinks one of the reasons is that he is trying to find a language to understand what it means to be human. Sellars said it could also be about admiration and love for the text.
“This is not just standard operating procedure,” Sellars said. “This work contains depth, inner calm, warmth and intensity. Jorie's poetry evokes many entry points, and in Matt's music meaning spreads. He created a realm that embraces not only texture and memory, but also hope.”
For Aucoin, Sellars was a “spirit guide.” They often chatted about “New Bodies” regardless of its staging, with the director urging the composer to make important decisions about form. At one point, Sellars told Aucoin that the solo line in the fourth movement, “Prying / Dis-“, should be given to multiple singers to reflect its “deep interconnectedness.”
The score for “New Bodies” transforms the polyphony of Graham’s poetry into a chamber group comprised of instruments, electronics, and, most unusually, five vocalists. Aucoin called these singers “unstable” singers who balanced the mass or four-part chorus. They sometimes pass over pieces of line as if they share consciousness, or come together to function as a force that is greater than or not human.
“What I’m interested in here is inhabiting a consciousness that is invaded by many voices, internal and external,” Aucoin said. “The Earth says, ‘Remember me,’ but what does it mean? overhear With consciousness. Or we are inside the mind of a person on an operating room table, listening to the chemicals coursing through her veins. “Both humans and non-humans are connected, but it is only through music that we can feel their connection.”
“New Bodies” ends with a poem, “Poetry,” in which the earth tells the earth to “remember me.” Mahler ended “Das Lied von der Erde,” or “Song of the Earth,” with the words “forever” slowly evaporating and repeating. But Aucoin's dirt crescendos in the final bars with tremendously powerful tremolo chords.
“We’ve finally reached a point where we can hear what the Earth is saying,” Aucoin said. “A soft voice that says, ‘Remember me,’ but also, ‘I’m going to be okay.’ We had to end it with a bang. “It was intense yet fun.”
Graham hopes that when audiences hear “New Bodies,” they will hear a sense that “we have to go to the land to rebuild,” to “rebalance, redirect and purify the soul.”
Part of that will be Sellars' work on envisioning a stage version following its Houston concert premiere. He said, “The score takes all the elements of the opera and creates something different.” “There is no Cherubino, no Countess, but they are all there.”
Sellars doesn't yet know what exact form “New Bodies” will take on stage, but he's using his time in Houston to truly learn and follow an open approach to this work: the intensity of the music, the multi-layered depth of the text. The ending it could lead to. “It’s going to be soft, but I think it’s going to be really beautiful,” he said.
A stage workshop will be held at Brown University this fall, and the American Modern Opera Company plans to present the work in New York next year. But Sellars is approaching the next phase with the same patience the piece has enjoyed from its inception.
“There’s no need to rush,” Sellars said. “What this work will ultimately become will be around for a long time. And like any other child, he will eventually tell you what he wants.”