“So much to say” is the message I get when I speak to the New York-based Varispeed Collective about Robert Ashley’s final opera, Crash. The group gives the work its European premiere in a concert performance at Louth Contemporary Music Society’s upcoming Lovely Music festival, 10 years after Ashley died, in March 2014, just short of his 84th birthday.
Varispeed describes itself as “a collective of composer-performers that creates site-specific, sometimes-participatory, oftentimes-durational, forevermore-experimental events”. And Crash is no ordinary opera. It’s a work of words and talk rather than arias and singing. Just voices, no instruments.
“The first thing,” says the collective member Gelsey Bell, “is that Crash is a very autobiographical piece. We start with year one of Robert Ashley’s life, and then go all the way to the end. There’s actually a section for year 84, which he never made it to, because he died in the process of us putting this piece on its feet. So it really walks through the entire life of someone.”
Amirtha Kidambi adds, “He passed in the process of our rehearsals, and we rehearsed in his studio space in his building. He was in hospice care, and we didn’t actually end up being able to interact with him face-to-face while he was ill. But he was giving feedback and notes through listening to rehearsal recordings and conveying them through the director Alex Waterman, and through his wife, Mimi Johnson.
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“Something that I still find really astonishing when I pick up the score is that the characters’ names” – she makes quotation-mark gestures in the air – “are just our names, our first names.” Bell adds, “The first performances of this, 10 years ago, really right after he had died, they all felt like memorial services.”
Brian McCorkle recalls that “when we were rehearsing, often it was on, I believe, the sixth floor of 10 Beach Street, where him and Mimi Johnson had lived for many decades. And two floors down was their apartment. During rehearsals, often they would open the door to the stairwell so that he could hear the music as we were rehearsing it. I just think about that all the time. What a magical, bizarre and also very touching and tragic way to learn a piece of music. We’ve only done it three times. So in rehearsing this material again, all these really intense emotions come back.”
McCorkle, who’s part Irish, waves a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the air, talks about talk in Irish culture, and is thrilled at the prospect of being in Ireland on Bloomsday. Kidambi points out that Crash is nothing more or less than a portrait of an artist. “Maybe there’s some resonance there, you know. I think it really speaks to a lot of universals ... ageing, the process of dying. It’s very powerful. There is just something to relate to for everyone, in that it’s a life lived in really microscopic detail.”
One of the things Bob always said about music was that every language has its own music that comes out of it
— Gelsey Bell
Bell is the one the others point to for an explanation of how Crash relates to opera as most people think of it. “Opera at its most fundamental is at the nexus of language and theatre and music and art forms. This piece, just like your traditional Puccini opera, is living at the nexus of sound and visuals and theatre and embodiment. It’s just doing it with different methodology.
“So the virtuosity of the voice is still present. It’s a virtuosity of subtlety and of small gestures. And the drama is still present, but it is present in the way that you have with storytelling as opposed to there being hand-to-hand combat on stage or something like that. One of the things Bob always said about music was that every language has its own music that comes out of it.”
She says the way he wrote for the voice fitted with his idea of “what the English language was asking for with its consonants and the way vowels are handled. Hearing the big wobbly voices felt very Italian to him.” His interest was the musicality of language, and he wanted “to make a space for the language and the stories he wanted to tell”.
Kidambi likens the effect of Ashley’s music to “rhythmic chanting voices, which reminds me of Buddhist or Hindu or Latin chants”. But she also points out that Ashley compared his lineage to American art forms and says, “He was looking a lot at Duke Ellington and Count Basie. He talks about Duke Ellington’s band as being an American opera. They’re all characters and they’re storytellers. Tricky Sam Nanton on the trombone, he’s a character. And at the same time he would reference Monteverdi.” Later, in relation to Ashley’s series of television operas, she says, “Americans don’t go to La Scala. We watch TV.”
Neue Vocalsolisten sing Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung was a big departure for the avant-garde German composer in 1968, who was 40 at the time. He wrote it in a snow-covered house on Long Island Sound, after a long lecture and concert tour in Hawaii and Mexico. And, as he told the American music writer Jonathan Cott, the work was influenced by “a month walking through the ruins, visiting Oaxaca, Merida and Chichenitza, and becoming a Maya, a Toltec, a Zatopec, an Aztec or a Spaniard – I became the people.”
The music is quiet and inward, focused on the resonance of six singers with microphones, seated in a circle between six loudspeakers, so that the audience can catch even the softest of sounds they make while intoning a single chord for more than an hour.
The Neue Vocalsolisten of Stuttgart describe themselves as “explorers and discoverers: in exchange with composers, they are constantly searching for new forms of vocal expression”.
Their German bass Andreas Fischer, who worked on “about 10 or 11 premieres” with Stockhausen, recalls performing Stimmung with him in the late 1990s. “It was really very beautiful. But in the beginning I had the feeling he didn’t trust our abilities a lot. He was sceptical and worried. We had some ideas which were not congruent with his ideas.
“For example, even though it’s written in the score, at least two of us were not able to sit on the floor for 60 or 70 minutes. Another thing was that he expected us for two or three weeks to take only macrobiotic nourishment. So in the beginning, let’s say, we had to find each other.” But “after a really beautiful performance, he was looking like a happy little child. He came to us to the dressingroom and was lying on the floor, like this” – Fischer waves his two arms enthusiastically in the air.
Stockhausen came to a lot of their performances, and if anything went wrong they felt his ire. Fischer and the other singers I speak to, the Dutch mezzo-soprano Truike Van Der Poel and the Argentinian baritone Guillermo Anzorena, all agree that he was particularly strict with and sometimes horrible to the women singers.
About Stimmung itself, Van Der Poel says, “I like very much that the performers and the audience are merged in the same space. I like the precision of how he writes the overtones, the harmonic melodies.” She’s talking about the way Stockhausen highlights components of musical sounds that are not normally perceived as separate entities. “You can see him thinking, okay, if you have a big mouth, it works like this. If you have a small mouth, it works like that. So he writes out both, and offers a choice between two versions of one line. I like the spirit.”
The score calls for the intonation of “magic names”, and there is also erotic poetry that Van Der Poel says she doesn’t like at all. Fischer and Anzorena laugh in sympathy. All three agree that it’s very macho, very chauvinistic. Words to be kept in a museum, says Van Der Poel.
Anzorena was new to contemporary music when he first encountered the piece, and a bit in awe of Stockhausen as an intellectual giant who had written a work that looked in some ways so simple. “But after a while,” he says, “I discovered the difficulties and all the beautiful things that are in it. It’s very, very challenging, because we are very different people and have very different energies. And we have to become one in this Stimmung.”
The German word Stimmung has a range of meanings, from tuning and voicing to mood and disposition. The composer even suggested “the soul’s harmony”, and drew attention to the fact that the word is derived from Stimme, or voice.
Fischer says that “being always for a long, long, long time in the same scale and the same key is really beautiful for me. It’s a little bit like a cathedral. You walk through, and in different parts the sound is different. But it’s always the same harmony. And this is really for sure what Stockhausen wanted, that people come to this special meditative state of mind.”
Louth Contemporary Music Society’s Lovely Music festival, which also includes works by Linda Catlin Smith and Hamza El Din, and an excerpt from Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives, takes place in Dundalk on Friday, June 14th, and Saturday, June 15th
