sudden a vista peeps
by
Douglas Messerli
Tyshawn Sorey (composer, based on a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar), Nadia Hallgren (director) Death / 2021
Already this year, with the quarantine having still closed the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and other performance centers, LAOpera presented an on-line digital performance of a new composition by composer Tyshawn Sorey featuring poet Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Death.” The composition was performed by mezzo-soprano Amanda Lynn Bottoms. The work as a whole consisted of three parts in the short film directed by Nadia Hallgren, premiering on February 19th, 2021, the date I watched it.
The first part, titled Act I consists of a
reading of the poem by Ariyon Barbare in the Paul Laurence Dunbar House in
Dayton, Ohio. Act II is a short discussion of the work and a brief history of Sorey’s
early youth playing the piano in a Newark Catholic Church he attended with his
aunt. And Art III consists of the song, with musical accompaniment by pianist
Howard Watkins, sung by Bottoms.
Sorley has for many years been known for
his wide swath of influences from classical contemporary composers and
musicians as various as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Morton
Feldman, Anthony Braxton (with whom he studied), Cecil Taylor, and younger jazz
musicians and ensembles. Alex Ross in The New Yorker has described him
as a defiant shape-shifter who straddles both the classical music and jazz
worlds.
“There is something awesomely confounding about the music of Tyshawn Sorey, the thirty-eight-year-old Newark-born composer, percussionist, pianist, and trombonist. As a critic, I feel obliged to describe what I hear, and description usually begins with categorization. Sorey’s work eludes the pinging radar of genre and style. Is it jazz? New classical music? Composition? Improvisation? Tonal? Atonal? Minimal? Maximal? Each term captures a part of what Sorey does, but far from all of it. At the same time, he is not one of those crossover artists who indiscriminately mash genres together. Even as his music shifts shape, it retains an obdurate purity of voice. T. S. Eliot’s advice seems apt: ‘Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” / Let us go and make our visit.’”
Known for his highly complex compositions,
Death, because of its focus on a poem of a 12 lines, is far simpler in
structure and resonance, each stanza beginning in a rather assertive chordal
statement before quickly broiling down in minor chords that—as director
Hallgren exemplifies in her images of flying and often quarrelling hawks—spin
down into darker and jarring dissonants, finding only temporary repose in major
chord key respites.
The poem itself is not only dark, as you
might expect from its title, but is odd in its implications.
Storm and strife and stress,
Lost
in a wilderness,
Groping
to find a way,
Forth
to the haunts of day
Sudden
a vista peeps,
Out
of the tangled deeps,
Only
a point--the ray
But
at the end is day.
Dark
is the dawn and chill,
Daylight
is on the hill,
Night
is the flitting breath,
Day rides the hills of death.
The poem begins in an almost Dantean
manner, the narrator “lost in the wilderness” having suffered the horrors of
life, groping to find his way, apparently, to light.
Yet the rest of the poem does not
function in that manner as a “vista peeps,” the narrator spotting “a point, a
ray” of possibility. It is not daylight, however, that provides that vision for
in the next line we see in the conjunction “But” the alternative, “day,” not
evidently what the poet is seeking. The vision of the vista has come in the
dark of “dawn and chill,” just before the sun rises. Night provides a “flitting
breath,” while death rides the hills of daylight.
In short, it appears, the narrator
prefers the vision he has found in the night as opposed to the daylight when
death becomes a far more obvious opponent.
If, as Sorey seems to argue, this poem
has important meaning for our own times, it is not our having been able to move
out of the shadows that we have been facing that will help us to go forward and
live fully lives, but rather the visions, the beliefs we burnished out of the
dark. Visionary revolutions, one might argue, are always spawned in the worst
of times rather than in the best. The new vaccines for COVID were created in
the very darkest days of world-wide deaths.
By 1903 Dunbar, with the loss of wife and
his impending death from TB, accordingly, had plenty of reason to fear the
reminders the daylight might show him, an empty house and the daily strife and
stress of his illness. In 1904 he moved back to Dayton where his mother lived
remaining in her house until his death in 1906.
We are now so fortunate to be able to have
this work, the third musical setting of this poem, on film. Although,
obviously, it would be far better to hear this lied sung by Bottoms in person,
I do hope that after the present health crisis the LAOpera company and others
who have made similar attempts to reach new audiences will continue to tape and
film symphonic and operatic works. I was grateful to be able to share this
LAOpera Now production with friends throughout the US.
Los Angeles, February 20, 2021
Reprinted from USTheater,
Opera, and Performance and World Cinema Review (February 2021).
