Julia Bullock, Carolyn Yarnell, Allison Loggins-Hull, Pamela Z, and conductor Christian Reif taking bows (courtesy of SFS)
Last night vocalist Julia Bullock brought her History’s Persistent Voice project to Davies Symphony Hall in her role as San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Collaborative Partner. She performed with a reduced ensemble (strings and percussion) of SFS musicians conducted by her husband, Christian Reif. The performance took place in a setting of immersive video installations designed by visual artist Hana S. Kim and projected across multiple screens.
History’s Persistent Voice began as the product of a season-long residency that Bullock spent at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018. It was inspired by an anthology of 136 lyrics and melodies sung by communities of people who had been enslaved prior to the Civil War. The “main event” in Bullock’s New York performance was the premiere of Freedom Songs, composed by Jessie Montgomery with texts taken from that anthology. The music was co-commissioned by SFS, and last night it received its SFS premiere. The songs were interleaved with spoken texts, which included an extended recitation of a text by Craig Anthony Ross, who was executed at San Quentin Prison on December 13, 2005.
Other songs that had first been performed in New York included Pamela Z’s “Quilt,” commissioned by SFS, “Mama’s Little Precious Things” by Allison Loggins-Hull and “Green Pastures” by Tania León. The program also included world premiere performances of two songs by Carolyn Yarnell, “I Come Up the Hard Way” and “ain’t my home.” Except for León, all of the composers were presented in Davies for last night’s performance.
This was a program built on a solid foundation of the rich lode of semantics involving the experiences of people of color in the United States. The texts selected for performance approached those experiences through both denotation and connotation, and the expressiveness of those words could easily have been lost were it not for the clarity of Bullock’s vocal deliveries. Nevertheless, the experience was definitely one of a highly compelling performance, rather than the pedantry of a graduate seminar. Bullock clearly had a message to communicate; and, unlike the old (and now outmoded) joke, she needed more that Western Union to deliver that message.
That message built up its impact through each selection of words, sung or spoken, that provided the spinal cord for the entire program. In that context the inclusion of all of the texts in the program book was not just a convenience; it was a necessity, as much a part of the performance as the music being presented. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the printed content was so valuable that the the audience suffered a major injustice with lights turned down too low to read that content. The dimming of the lights, of course, was due to the projection of Kim’s images, a small slice of which was set aside for supertitles.
This physical layout was clearly a product of people unfamiliar with reading poetry. Anyone that has attended a more “traditional” vocal recital that provides a text sheet knows that the eye does not follow the vocalist word by word. Rather, while the words are being sung, the eye tends to explore “regions” of words, allowing the listener to appreciate how context informs both the composer and the vocalist. Presumably, all of the composers (not to mention Bullock herself) were sensitive to that role of context; but those sitting in the darkened Davies space were deprived that contribution to the listening experience. (I say “deprived” because any awareness of context on the part of Kim’s visuals never seemed to be anything more than coincidental.)
As a result I left Davies last night hoping that an audio recording of the performance would eventually become available. I felt that being deprived of my usual poetry reading skills put the contributing composers at more than a bit of disadvantage. I would give anything to revisit the entire program, this time with the benefit of the poetry-reading skills that I have acquired over so many decades.
No comments:
Post a Comment