When I was approached by my good friend Michael Mills about writing an operatic piece for a new collective project (Telltale Opera Theatre) being embarked on by himself, Meg Huskin and Ben Ross, amongst other Peabody friends, I did not have a single clue what this piece was going to be. For some time now I have been wanting to write a lot more for the voice and figuring what vocal writing and genres like “opera”, “song cycle” and “art song” mean and sound like in my musical language.
What conventions feel honest and true in the medium I feel comfortable expressing myself in?
How can I open up my sound palette to include or stretch beyond my levels of comfort to encompass all the feelings, meanings and expressions that the texts carry?
In that same vein, I have also been particularly interested in working with a libretto spun by verses or prose from different, seemingly disparate sources. Not only poetry or texts by others but also those written by myself in the past or for a particular project, a mixture of both being the case for This. Is. You. Are.
In previous pieces I had worked around texts of mine, be it through the title being a line out of something I’d written or in the case of my cello solo Enredado en mi propio eje, where the performer has to recite progressively more intense and convoluted texts, while playing incredibly jagged, visceral and bizarre gestures up and down their instrument; however, I hadn’t embarked on a project of a larger scale where beyond that barrier of contrast between music and text, both things would become one or rather an entangled mess that spelled out a kind of “story” or “narrative” or “poetic journey”.
When the turn came to focus on this new piece, I had just finished the second movement (and only movement written thus far) of my in-process song cycle reflejo cristalino, onírico, pétreo for baritone and string quartet for which I put together a libretto with a couple of verses from Federico García Lorca, Julia de Burgos (a Puerto Rican poet whose work has long inspired both my music and my poetic work) and a couple of verses written by myself. At around this time I was researching and looking more closely at works that did similar approaches to texts and two pieces guided my process in maybe an indirect way: Michael Hersch’s “I hope we get a chance to visit soon” and Gabriel Bouche Caro’s “Que tus dos ojos no dejen de brillar“. I should say I had conversations with both composers and gathered their thoughts about the composition process for both pieces, however both conversations probably deserve separate blog entries of their own.
Regardless, both perspectives helped me start to assess what all of this meant for me, and how I could approach this sense of collating, or rather curating texts could look like for me, particularly because in my case it didn’t just have to be limited to the poetic output of others but also my own and how my voice could be present in the artistic center of a piece, not just in the music but also in conversation with the other poets. The possibility of layers upon layers of meaning being set seem staggering, overwhelming. And for a time they were. They really were.
At the beginning of the project, even though I had recently finished a piece for baritone, I didn’t want the language or the sound world of that piece to have too much influence on this one, so I positioned myself to start from a different angle. Because of the scope of this piece being more immediate and large, though not as large as the proposed one from my other cycle, I decided that I needed to have an actual firm libretto. A roadmap that outlined a kind of story, even if not immediately perceived, but that showed a kind of three-act structure (though not truly “acts” in the traditional sense) of mood spaces “The Character” (whoever they may be) found themselves in and what they were feeling or working through. In this regard, the conversations I had with Meg Huskin (composer, soprano and one of the founders/organizers of Telltale Opera), as well as with Ben Ross (baritone singer who will be premiering the work, and also a founder/organizer of Telltale) really helped me establish the central ideas of the text, as well as focal points of the story being put together.
Even though the aforementioned cycle will deal with similar themes of love, loss, and identity, I wanted this piece to manage them and speak about them in a much more dedicated, direct and visceral way, but through the perspective of someone that is dealing with these issues in media res. I wanted the piece to be a person’s journey of discovering deep truths about themselves, these bubbling through the surface until they couldn’t be hold off anymore, and after the deluge of being surrounded by them, having dealt with them and the aftermaths of these and other new emotions and situations. An exploration of a latent queerness, of ways of looking and thinking about ourselves, our bodies, and our place in the world through the eyes of others and how this changes us.
The task of crafting a libretto around all of these ideas was a complicated one, initially. I delved into a lot of queer media, shows and books, the most influential of these being James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, which aside from having reverberations with any queer person’s experiences, its ways of not only presenting a story, but also its extemporaneous layering of themes, and its poetic use of language. I think most of us have a Giovanny or are have a been a David to someone. Because of the novel’s incredibly rich and indelible narrative devices, as well as complex characters and setting, I felt like any kind of adaptation of the novel for this project would overflow the constraints of this project and would prove to be a cartoonish representation, rather than an honest exercise. Nonetheless, the themes of self exploration, moving from denial or rejection of a version of yourself towards another, among several others, which reverberate deeply throughout Baldwin’s novel is incredibly present and commented on.
Society’s expectations and its pressures also feature in the poetic text, through the presentation of contextualized and re-contextualized religious verses. “The Character” struggles with the conceptions and dogmas they grew up listening and learning from their family and how that process of coming into their own space and person comes into conflict with their burgeoning feelings, ideas of themselves and the reworking and remaking of their worldview.
Suffice it to say that every time one endeavors to experiment and delve into new areas of creative practices (at least to myself), it can prove to be a very intimidating effort. Especially when as a composer, I exclusively deal with sounds produced by instruments that are in turn being manipulated by sounds suggested to living, breathing people. In principle, poetry and poetic writing because of its medium and origins, is very much a literary art removed from music (especially in a more post-modern sense that mostly eschews any of the ancient 19th century notions of poetry needing to have an innate musical sense to it were the norm). This distance to music (even if its just a perceived one) I think is what allows me to engage with poetry, somewhat contradictorily, with contemporary musical elements as reference that later may or may not form part of a piece or that just allow the verses to stand as their own creative unit. Whenever I find myself sitting down to compose poetry, I think of a feeling, a notion, a focus around which I can start entwining string of words, like a threading a web of associations through the mere act of weighing how words sound together (both literally and figuratively). This monodrama is most likely the first out of many times I will find myself engaging in this kind of compounded approach to composition (poetical and musical), though I might sometimes feel like:
“I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole–and yet–and yet–it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life!” – Lewis Carrol, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
For those of you interested the libretto is available here.
This. Is. You. Are., a monodrama for baritone and chamber ensemble was commissioned by Telltale Opera Theatre for Ben Ross, and will be premiered on February 2nd, 2025, at 2640 Space, Baltimore, MD.
Julio Elvin Quiñones | Composer 