Peter Sellers wanted to know more.
He was in San Francisco a few years ago at a performance of “The No One's Rose,” a fascinating and singular piece of musical theater starring some of the American Modern Opera Company's favorite artists and featuring music by young composers. I went to see it. Matthew Aucoin.
One of the standout sections of the work is “Trolling Deep Waters,” a setting for a poem by Jorie Graham that is both human and inhuman, natural and spiritual at the same time. I felt that there was. Most importantly, it seems to have brought something new and special to Aucoin's writing.
After the show, Sellers, 66 and a longtime opera director, asked Aucoin, “What was that?''
They decided to draw further on the inspiration of Graham's poetry and began without a specific commission. Their project, now taking shape as the evening-length “Music for New Bodies,” will premiere in Houston on Saturday in concert, sponsored by DaCamera and Rice University's School of Music, where they will be performed.
Spanning 70 minutes and in five movements, “New Bodies” tells Graham's poems about the earth and humanity in shifting voices and ranges, conveying the power of nature and evoking the sometimes anesthetized mind. Its breadth and form are reminiscent of Mahler's Lieder, but it is neither a song cycle nor a symphony. It's probably the closest thing to opera, but it's mostly opera itself.
“I don't know where that information came from,” Aucoin, 34, said this week. “I feel that I have had a long and intense apprenticeship writing orchestral works and operas, and now I am spreading my wings, but this is something else. There is no ground under my feet here. It’s terrifying and thrilling.”
As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Aucoin studied under Graham, 73, a prominent figure in American poetry and a recipient of many awards. In her interview, she recalled him as a “genius”. (Three of the authors of “New Bodies” happened to be MacArthur's “genius” associates.) She watched the birth of his first major opera, “The Crossing,” about Walt Whitman during the Civil War. , I once asked him how music is born. Composition. As a poet, she said, her words are heard. He tells her that her sound is like heat that turns into sound. This metaphor struck a chord with her.
She gave her blessing to “Music for New Bodies,” but left most of its creation to Aucoin and Sellars. “Honestly, when you have Peter Sellers and Matt, your best bet is to avoid it,” Graham said. They are excerpts from her collections Fast, Runaway, and To 2040, published since 2017 and dealing with her cancer treatment, Earth, and immortality.
Like countless composers before him, Aucoin is no stranger to creating poetry. “The words that appear in the mind and the notes that appear in the mind, for him, he has to go through two different channels and there's a way they talk to each other,” Graham said. “He knows how to explore the depths of music on the page.”
But her poetry unlocked something unknown to Aucoin, he said. Part of the reason, she thinks, is that here he's trying to find a language to understand what it means to be human. Sellers said it may also be an admiration and love for her writing.
“This is not just standard operating procedure,” Sellers said. “This work has depth and inner calm, as well as warmth and intensity. Jolie's poetry invites many entrances, and in Matt's music meaning multiplies. He captures this enveloping texture, memory. , and created a zone of hope.”
For Aucoin, Sellers was a “spiritual guide.” They had frequent conversations about “New Bodies'' unrelated to the production, with the director encouraging the composer to make important decisions about form. At one point, Sellers told Aucoin that the fourth movement's solo line, “Prying/Dis-“, should be given to multiple singers to reflect a “deep interconnectedness”.
The score for “New Bodies” translates the polyphony of Graham’s poetry into instruments, electronics, and, most unusually, a chamber group of five vocalists. Aucoin said the singers created an “unstable balance” in the mass and four-part chorale. They pass line fragments to each other as if they share a consciousness, or they come together to function as a unified force, greater or less than human.
“What I want to do here is house a consciousness that is eroded by many voices, both internal and external,” Aucoin said. “The Earth says, 'Remember me,' but it's heard by consciousness. Or we're in the mind of a person sitting at an operating room table, and we're listening to her veins.” We hear the voices of chemicals flowing through our bodies.Humans and non-humans are connected, but only through music can we feel that connection.”
“New Bodies” ends with a brief setting of preliminary poems called “Poems.” The poem is about the earth saying, “Don't forget me.” Mahler ended “Ode to the Earth” with the repetition of the word “eternity”, which slowly evaporates. But Aucoin's earth crescendos in the final bar, playing a tremolo chord of immense power.
“We have finally reached a point where the voice of the earth can be heard,” Aucoin said. “It's a gentle voice that says, 'Remember me,' but also, 'I'm going to be okay.' It had to end with that roar. It's harsh, but… It is fun.”
Graham said that when listeners heard “New Bodies,” they got a sense of “having to go into the field to rebuild” and “realign your soul, change your direction, cleanse yourself.” ” hoping to hear something.
Part of that will be Sellers' work in conceptualizing the stage version after the concert premiere in Houston. The score “takes all the elements of opera and creates something different. There's no Cherubino, there's no Count, there's no Countess, but they're all there.”
Sellers doesn't yet know what exact form “New Bodies” will take on stage, but he has used his time in Houston to truly study the piece, learning to appreciate the ferocity of the music and the layered depth of the text. I am learning and pursuing that open part. The result it leads to. “I think it will happen gently,” he said. “But it would be really beautiful.”
A directing workshop will be held at Brown University this fall, and the American Modern Opera Company will perform the work in New York next year. But Sellers approaches the next step with the same patience this work has enjoyed since its inception.
“There's no need to rush,” Sellers said. “Whatever this piece ends up being, it's going to be around for a long time. And like any child, it'll eventually tell you what it wants.”