American Modern Opera Company (AMOC): Hersch, Sciarrino

Program Notes

Salvatore Sciarrino
Stupori (2018)

Juxtaposing heterogeneous texts to compose a series of contrasting, seemingly random pieces, I often pursue this mirage: by imperceptible degrees, encountering the other, each character becoming clearer in itself. Once combined, the different pieces complement each other and light up like windows onto the complex variety of the world. For me, a curious and insatiable observer (caught and torn between art, science, and philosophical speculation), those windows—those transversal perspectives—unlock the pleasure of continuous discovery and are a good curb for melancholy. Indeed, the history of civilization increasingly seems to me like a gigantic mutual massacre that only culture has the power to regenerate into utopia and hope.

Thus arrives a new batch of songs: the baritone plays the starring role, with excesses of restlessness, almost bordering on dramatically acted scenes. The instruments interact with him subtly, punctuating and echoing. I have long developed my own personal singing style, and now it is unmistakable. It is difficult, almost a risky gamble, to evoke the space around the voice and vary it, with three soloists: flute, violin, and a percussion ensemble that also includes exaggeratedly large instruments, relics of a symphony orchestra, left on the chamber-music stage.

In my musical language, the relationship between figures is at least as important as the notes, for an organic whole of wholes to unfold. Therefore to present Stupori, I would need to show some sheets of paper stolen from my laboratory, from which one can follow, in some sense, the planning of the work.

The graphs serve not so much to control physical parameters, but rather to configure a perceptual physiognomy, that is, the recurrence of physiological stimuli (and the resulting psychological involvement). They are diagrams where the seemingly most elusive aspects are intuited, calculated, measured, and then empirically verified; we find ourselves far beyond the problem of the passage of time. For example, the persistence of sound images, virtual counterpoints, suspended atmospheres, even the tension of expectations, all become measurable dimensions: unusual yet expressively powerful perspectives, which should not surprise the lay listener.

Michael Hersch
Carrion-Miles to Purgatory: thirteen pieces after texts of Robert Lowell (2014)

The poetry of Robert Lowell (1917–1977) has drawn me back often. He is a poet whose words I have set in some form with regularity over many years at this point. There is a particular kind of restrained intensity and structural urgency present in his work which always, if not increasingly, feels an apt companion for our time, for most times. In a recent piece which engages his texts, oaks cut for the pyre (2025), written a decade after the completion of Carrion-Miles to Purgatory, one of the fragments—in this case part of adaptation from Eugenio Montale— reads,

Everything near you is smoke. . .
Everything you grab hold of—street, portico, walls and mirrors—glues you to a paralyzed crowd of dead things
. . . it’s a sign that this is the hour for letting go of the life you were always disposed to throttle . . .

There is here the tension present in so much of Lowell’s work, a tension between and within an almost formal darkness and a notable energy directed toward the world around him, energy only possible in many cases if fueled by something resembling optimism. However, his sense of buoyancy is often housed within spaces of dread and a knowledge of inevitable loss:

We must all live by taking a few uncontrolled screams—in our stride

Carrion-Miles to Purgatory is a cycle consisting of thirteen pieces for violin and cello where the music and each poetical fragment engage in something perhaps resembling a conversation between myself and the selected Lowell text. The texts simply live in the score to be seen by the musicians performing the music. I struggled with whether they needed to be, or even should be, presented to listeners of the music. For tonight’s program, I have opted to include them in the program notes.

Carrion-Miles to Purgatory: Texts by Robert Lowell

1. To hang the Furies by their itching ears,
   And the green needles nail us to the wall.
2. . . . and the snow
   Blazes its carrion-miles to Purgatory.
3. . . . Now how the weary waters swell,
   The tree is down in blood!
   All the bats of Babel flap about
   The rising sun of hell.
4. . . . and the oak
   Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph . . .
5. Again and then again . . . the year is born
   To ice and death . . . the snake-tailed sea-winds coughed and howled
   For alms outside the church whose double locks
   Wait for St. Peter
   Time and the grindstone and the knife of God . . .
6. . . . drowned face downward . . .
   Until the thaw he waited, then the flood
   Roared like a wounded dragon over shoal
   And reef . . .
   And rolled his body like a log to Styx;
   Two angels fought with bill-hooks for his soul.
7. . . . my bones are trembling and I hear
   The earth’s reverberations and the trumpet
   Bleating into my shambles . . .
   O Mary . . .
   Our sacred earth in our day is our curse.
8. . . . I saw you wiry, bed-ridden . . . Half inaudible . . .
   It is all
   A moment.
   The trees
   Grow earthward: neither good
   Nor evil, hopes nor fears,
   Repulsion nor desire . . .
   Will serve to stay the fall.
9. Time smiling on this sundial of a world
   Sweltered about the snowman and the worm . . .
   This winter all the snowmen turn to stone . . .
   May the snow recede and red clay furrows set
   In the grim grin of their erosion, in
   The caterpillar tents and roadslides, fat
   With muck and dropsy . . .
   Into this eldest of the seasons.
10. . . . and the laugh of Death is hacked in sandstone . . .
11. Hell is burned out, heaven’s harp-strings are slack.
    Mother, run to the chalice, and bring back
    Blood on your finger-tips . . .
12. . . . Canaries beat their bars and scream . . .
13. . . . and black-windowed blocks
    Recoil against a Gothic church.
    The clocks
    Are tolling . . .
    The shocked stones
    Are falling like a ton of bricks and bones
    That snap and splinter and descend in glass . . .

The excerpts from Lord Weary’s Castle, by Robert Lowell, have been provided by Michael Hersch.