Peter Boyer’s Melodrama of Ellis Island

Photograph of Ellis Island projected behind the Pacific Symphony (from the preview for the video being discussed)

This afternoon I finally got around to watching the Great Performances program Ellis Island: The Dream of America with Pacific Symphony. The program was first broadcast on June 29, 2018; and I had recorded a rebroadcast on one of the KQED channels at the beginning of October. “Ellis Island: The Dream of America” was composed by Peter Boyer for orchestra and a group of actors, who recite accounts of entering the United States through Ellis Island by seven immigrants.

Great Performances presented a video of a performance by the Pacific Symphony that took place at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Orange County in 2017 conducted by Music Director Carl St. Clair. The program has been available for viewing on its PBS Web page, but it can only be viewed by KEQD members. However CSP, which calls itself, “the industry leader in publishing and media innovation,” uploaded to YouTube their own version of the Pacific Symphony performance, framed with a discussion of the event by the composer, in time for this year’s Independence Day weekend.

In the nineteenth century a melodrama involved the presentation of a narrative, staged or recited, supplemented by the performance of songs and/or instrumental music. By the twentieth century the term had assumed pejorative connotations; but, in many ways, “Ellis Island” is a melodrama in the earlier sense of the term. As a result, one should probably not try to discuss the music in terms of its own virtues but rather to address the “overall package” of words and music. Most important is the immediacy of the words themselves, which Boyer personally selected from the documents of the Ellis Island Oral History Project. The seven texts he assembled provided an excellent account of just how diverse the immigration experience could be.

As the PBS Web page put it, these texts were “dramatically interpreted by guest stars Barry Bostwick, Camryn Manheim, Michael Nouri, Lesley Fera, Lucas Near-Verbrugghe, Samantha Sloyan and Kira Sternbach.” The performance of these actors left the impression that each of them had his/her own approach to framing the words themselves in a “personality-based” delivery. However, how each personality was established seemed to have been left to the actor with little input from either Boyer or St. Clair. As a result, there was considerable variation in the sincerity of each delivery.

The music, in turn, tended to serve primarily as background for these narratives. There was an “overture” of sorts that seemed to suggest folk origins; but the overall impression was one of blandness for the sake of not upstaging the texts. Thus, after the first few narrations, I found myself wondering if the entire offering would have conveyed more compelling impact had the composer been more directly acquainted with the “immigrant experience,” whether or not that experience involved Ellis Island.

As a result I found myself musing on my favorite chapter from Agnes de Mille’s first memoir, Dance to the Piper. This was the chapter about the creation of what was probably her most successful ballet, “Rodeo.” She recalled her first meeting with Aaron Copland, who provided the music for that ballet. As she put it, she told Copland that she wanted to create a ballet about “the real American experience.” Copland replied that, if she truly wanted an account of the real American experience, she should set her ballet on Ellis Island. According to de Mille, she told Copland to go to Hell!

I offer this anecdote because I realized how difficult it was to avoid thinking about Copland while viewing the performance of “Ellis Island.” There was always a side to Copland’s composition technique that was not afraid to expose sharp edges; and there was no shortage of sharp edges in the texts collected for the Ellis Island Oral History Project. Copland himself was born in Brooklyn in 1900; but his father, Harris Morris Copland, came to the United States from Russia by way of Ellis Island.

Copland had, of course, composed a “melodrama” of his own based on the recitation of the words of Abraham Lincoln, “Lincoln Portrait.” There is an intensity to his setting of Lincoln’s works that is unmistakable. I suspect that, had he been asked to create a similar “melodrama” based on those that entered the United States through Ellis Island, his music would have been more intense, simply by virtue of his proximity to that experience.

That said, I suspect that many listening to Boyer’s “melodrama” today may well know next to nothing about Ellis Island and will come away from the concert at least somewhat better informed about its role in American history.