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Michael Gordon

premiere performance: City Symphonies trilogy

On May 26, Spoleto Festival USA presented three powerful City Symphonies by Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison, performed for the first time as a trilogy by the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra.

Gotham (2004) for New York, Dystopia (2008) for Los Angeles, and El Sol Caliente (2015) for Miami Beach celebrate the character of place and how it evolves, pairing image and music to share the energy, chaos and beauty of urban life.

Gordon describes the trilogy:

The City Symphonies are part of an ongoing series of orchestra/film collaborations I have created with filmmaker Bill Morrison. How to capture the aura of a city? The sound and images converge as a biography of both time and place. In Morrison’s signature style, film is both newly shot and drawn from archival black-and-white footage. Decaying celluloid allows for an ongoing commentary of hidden and revealed imagery. The orchestra sings the city’s song in fractured tunes, rhythmic pulses, and harmonic echoes.

At the start of our creative process Bill shows me one of his rare finds — a snippet of decayed footage — and we go from there. In Gotham, the subject is New York City, where we both live. In Morrison's film, images of old New York begin with a surprising scene of a man tending sheep. As the camera pulls back, the surrounding urban landscape is revealed, and we see that he is tending sheep in what is now the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. The opening music is spare, a solo violin and piano. As the visuals expand the sound extends to the all strings, winds, and brass.

Gotham begins with the Sheep Meadow, but moves on to capture the intense city that we love. Hyper pulses and blaring glissandos in the trumpets contribute to the industrial howl. Gotham is not a tourist’s view of New York – gritty sidewalks, manhole covers, and construction activity fill the screen. It’s noisy. It’s dirty. It’s exciting. Why do we live here? We took a fresh look.

Dystopia is Los Angeles. We start on the highway at high speed and don’t slow down. I explore the lines between clear harmony and dissonance, pleasure and trouble. There is a sense of a phonograph record speeding up and slowing down — you hear the beauty, but in an altered state. Disparate sounds and musics poured into a great blender. Bill's visual material combines new footage shot in modern Los Angeles and well as historic footage of the city. Included is the first film ever shot in LA ,’'South Spring Street, Los Angeles,'' by Thomas Edison. We are in 1898. There are horse drawn carriages. As we enter current LA, Morrison offers a rare glimpse into the under-belly of the city as he traces the vast machinery of waste processing, a by-product of our hyper-consumerism.

The third City Symphony, El Sol Caliente, celebrates the 100th anniversary of Miami Beach. The players are arranged on the stage in an architectural pattern to allow for sound to move spatially through the orchestra. These sound waves ebb and flow, connecting to the natural forces that envelope this tiny vibrant strip of land. Newsreels, tourism clips, home movies, as well as Bill’s newly shot footage, fill the screen. Bathing beauties, hurricanes, families vacationing, and art deco hotels are there to capture our imagination of this iconic destination. We see men wrestling alligators and manatees, symbolically wresting South Florida from the swamp and into the world's imagination as a tourist destination. Yet this fragile barrier island lying off a continental peninsula at sea level will probably not survive this century without a drastic intervention on its behalf. How will we wrest Miami Beach from nature in the 21st century?

David Lang

'the little match girl passion': Best of 21st Century

The Guardian UK has listed David Lang's the little match girl passion as one of the top 25 works of classical music written in the 21st Century. The composition received a Pulitzer Prize, the recording won a Grammy Award, and the score has since become one of the most performed new works in the world.

the little match girl passion has been staged by Glimmerglass Opera and Portland Opera, choreographed by the Paris Opera Ballet and the Royal Swedish Ballet, with theatrical productions in Moscow, London, Edinburgh, and Sydney. Since its premiere by the Theatre of Voices at New York City's Carnegie Hall in 2007 the work has been performed over 450 times across 36 countries.

This season alone there are more than 25 global performances — concerts in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, Netherlands, New Zealand and across the United States.

Over the past 12 years, the little match girl passion has joined the repertoire as a chamber work, a staged production, a work for full chorus, and a featured event on Christmas and Easter concerts around the world. Indeed, it has become a contemporary choral classic.

On December 21, the little match girl passion's 8th annual performance at the MET Museum features The Crossing (Donald Nally, conductor) at The Cloisters, the MET's museum of mediaeval art.

After the Museum's 2012 concert, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times hoped that having the little match girl passion would "become a Met Museum holiday tradition" — and it has. This is the eighth holiday performance at The Met: “I cannot imagine a more appropriate occasion and setting to hear this poignant and, by the end, consoling piece,” Tommasini added.

In 2016, the Los Angeles Master Chorale and conductor Grant Gershon released the premiere recording of the choral version of the little match girl passion along with Lang's new work the national anthems.

With a text that Lang himself wrote — based on Hans Christian Andersen's tale, the Gospel According to St. Matthew, and passages from Bach's St. Matthew Passion — the little match girl passion tells the story of a young girl who is forced to sell matches on the street and freezes to death. The recording of the little match girl passion by Paul Hillier's group Theatre of Voices on Harmonium Mundi received the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance.

Lang describes the work:

I wanted to tell a story. A particular story — in fact, the story of The Little Match Girl by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. The original is ostensibly for children, and it has that shocking combination of danger and morality that many famous children's stories do. A poor young girl, whose father beats her, tries unsuccessfully to sell matches on the street, is ignored, and freezes to death. Through it all she somehow retains her Christian purity of spirit, but it is not a pretty story.

What drew me to The Little Match Girl is that the strength of the story lies not in its plot but in the fact that all its parts—the horror and the beauty—are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl's bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories; her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There is a kind of naive equilibrium between suffering and hope.

There are many ways to tell this story. One could convincingly tell it as a story about faith or as an allegory about poverty. What has always interested me, however, is that Andersen tells this story as a kind of parable, drawing a religious and moral equivalency between the suffering of the poor girl and the suffering of Jesus. The girl suffers, is scorned by the crowd, dies, and is transfigured. I started wondering what secrets could be unlocked from this story if one took its Christian nature to its conclusion and unfolded it, as Christian composers have traditionally done in musical settings of the Passion of Jesus.

The most interesting thing about how the Passion story is told is that it can include texts other than the story itself. These texts are the reactions of the crowd, penitential thoughts, statements of general sorrow, shock, or remorse. These are devotional guideposts, the markers for our own responses to the story, and they have the effect of making the audience more than spectators to the sorrowful events onstage. These responses can have a huge range—in Bach's "Saint Matthew Passion," these extra texts range from famous chorales that his congregation was expected to sing along with to completely invented characters, such as the "Daughter of Zion" and the "Chorus of Believers." The Passion format—the telling of a story while simultaneously commenting upon it—has the effect of placing us in the middle of the action, and it gives the narrative a powerful inevitability.

My piece is called the little match girl passion and it sets Hans Christian Andersen's story The Little Match Girl in the format of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion, interspersing Andersen's narrative with my versions of the crowd and character responses from Bach's Passion. The text is by me, after texts by Han Christian Andersen, H. P. Paulli (the first translator of the story into English, in 1872), Picander (the nom de plume of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the librettist of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion), and the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. The word "passion" comes from the Latin word for suffering. There is no Bach in my piece and there is no Jesus—rather the suffering of the Little Match Girl has been substituted for Jesus's, elevating (I hope) her sorrow to a higher plane.

For more information about the little match girl passion, please don't hesitate to write us at info [at] redpoppymusic [dot] com or visit us at www.redpoppymusic.com

Julia Wolfe

Fire in my mouth album recorded by NY Philharmonic

Julia Wolfe's large-scale work for choir and orchestra Fire in my mouth is released digitally today (August 30) on Decca Gold. It was recorded live at the world premiere in January 2019 by the New York Philharmonic, The Crossing and The Young People's Chorus of New York City. The physical album will be available October 4.

Fire in my mouth is based on the garment industry in New York City at the turn of the century, with a focus on the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and its aftermath. Drawing upon contemporary accounts of immigration, labor, and activism amongst the garment workers of the Lower East Side, Fire in my mouth brings the world and words of the garment workers to the forefront.

The recording features 36 women from The Crossing, directed by Donald Nally, and 110 young women from the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, directed by Francisco J. Núñez, for a total of 146 vocalists — a number commemorating the total who perished in the fire.

For Wolfe, Fire in my mouth was an opportunity to recast the women not as voiceless victims, but as protagonists whose actions and sacrifices had a profound effect on United States history. Wolfe writes:

I had been thinking about immigrant women in the workforce at the turn of the century. They fled their homelands to escape poverty and persecution. The garment workers arrived to these shores with sewing skills. Many of the women wound up working on these huge factory floors — hundreds of women sitting at sewing machines. Fire in my mouth tells the story of the women who persevered and endured challenging conditions, women who led the fight for reform in the workplace.

The piece also incorporates elements derived from protest chants, courtroom testimonials, Yiddish and Italian folk songs, and an elegiac recitation of all 146 victims' names.

Upon its premiere, critics noted Fire in my mouth for its sensitivity to the subject matter, as well as its emotional impact and inventiveness. David Hajdu of The Nation called Fire in my mouth "a monumental achievement in high musical drama, among the most commandingly imaginative and emotively potent works of any kind that I've ever experienced." Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times noted that Wolfe's "choice of choral texts, mostly drawn from oral histories and speeches, shows great sensitivity.” In reference to Wolfe’s incorporation of folk song into the sonic factory sound of the orchestra Tommasini writes, "The way these songs are embedded in Ms. Wolfe’s agitated, heaving orchestra, they seem like alternative coping mechanisms for the oppressed.”

Fire in my mouth is the third in a series of compositions about the American worker. Wolfe’s first, 2009’s Steel Hammer, examined the folk-hero John Henry, reveling in the contradictions of over 200 different versions of his life to tell a story that transcends time and space. Her 2015 oratorio Anthracite Fields honored the workers of the Pennsylvania Anthracite coal region at a time when the industry fueled the nation. The piece consists of five movements, each based on a source text describing a way the coal industry affected life in America on a local and national scale. The Los Angeles Times wrote that the work "captures not only the sadness of hard lives lost...but also of the sweetness and passion of a way of daily life now also lost. The music compels without overstatement. This is a major, profound work." Steel Hammer was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music; Anthracite Fields won the award in 2015. A 2016 recording of Anthracite Fields was also nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

For more information about Fire in my mouth or any of Wolfe's other works, info [at] redpoppymusic [dot] com (please don't hesitate to write us)!