notes on Strange Birds

 

Strange Birds is a chamber opera set thousands of years into the future. Four singers on microphone are stripped of conventional dramatic character and communicate using a vocabulary of wordless melodic gestures inspired by birdsong. The singers, sound system, and imagery surround the audience allowing the experience of many different auditory and visual perspectives of this peculiar community of future bird-humans. Both singers and audience are subject to a volatile sonic weather, an immersive soundscape constructed by manipulating and combining small samples of 19th century orchestral music to create a wide range of textures which are mixed live during the performance. The premiere of Strange Birds was presented at GAle GAtes et al, in Brooklyn, NY in October/November 2001 with an abstract and textured visual environment (also mixed live) by Jeff Sugg, that merged mechanical and illusion concepts with contemporary visual technologies. Costumes were by Wandjina. The singers were Galienne Eriksen (soprano), Vielka Kelly (mezzo-soprano), Daniel Neer (tenor), and John Rose (baritone).

Some people who have heard Strange Birds question whether in fact it is an opera, citing such omissions as lack of words, lack of plot, lack of characters, lack of proscenium, lack of orchestra or conductor. And it’s true, the work does seem to be missing much of what one would find in productions at the Met or City Opera. But these are only vestigial organs which were replaced with new machinery: the verbal libretto with pure melody, plot with conceptual situation, characters with figures in space, proscenium with environment, orchestra with sonic weather, conductor with each singer’s breath. I chose opera for my concerns because in my mind the form is only defined by the word itself, which means simply work, and by a tradition of rendering archetypal figures on a stage using evolved musical forms. In other words, it allows non-musical ideas and formal musical structures to resonate together, deepening the fields of both art and music.

the primordial future

In Strange Birds I didn’t want to reference the present, and certainly not a re-enacted mythological past, as is the convention in operas that seek non-contemporary subjects. Instead I went the other direction—the mythological future. Our present culture’s originary age lies in science fiction—the technological utopia—far more than classical Greece or Biblical times. But why stop one hundred or two hundred years from now? In fact I wasn’t thinking of a particular chronological date, but imagined a world in which current tendencies had played themselves out. The passing of western civilization into its primordial state. The last two thousand (or even one hundred thousand) years being a blip—a fold—a slight ripple in the coursing of the universe.

And in this primordial future I doubt that humans will be watching other humans on a stage. So we have four singers/figures in space. But the title suggests that these are birds. Specifically, I view them as future-primordial bird-human deities. Future humans that have evolved to take on attributes very similar to those of birds. Why birds? They posess quickness, lightness, and mobility without hardened boundaries. Three dimensional mobility without that limiting axis where ground and gravity meet to keep humans on a merely two-dimensional plane. They are emptied of a lot of human garbage—overwrought psychologies, petty word games, sentimental manipulation tactics. What they do have, which has perhaps been lost in the evolution into human forms, is a sixth sense—a specifically bird sense—that allows for more sophisticated communication that does not rely on the rotting supports of logic and sequence. Birds maintain a clear sense of their relationships to each other in space and time using other means than our Cartesian navigational strategies. Flock sensibility. And I think flocks are quite different than herds—i.e. herds of cows or humans. It’s almost as if they are individuated along the lines of their activities rather than their physical separation in space.

And they have no need for words. There are all sorts of reasons to let them go. Words are too sequential and set up too many blockages. Words are so often getting in the way of what we are trying to say. The very structure of human languages forms our expressions in such a way as to misfire them, misdirect them. Words also imply some kind of linear response logic that I wasn’t interested in. I did not want to create dialogues or conversations that went back and forth. In fact it will be seen later that I am specifically ambivalent to this. This future primordial species has lost the whip of chronological time. I am more interested in simultaneity—or the overlapping and endless interplay of different durations—the four times of the singers at least. Words are invested with a rhetorical—or a one-at-a-time sequential—logic that wasn’t going to work.

This is not to say that Strange Birds has no language. In fact there is a very clear vocabulary of melodic gestures which are repeated and constantly recontextualized throughout the opera. I was interested in the forces at work in the gestures that make up communication patterns, and to get at this I needed to lose the indicating quality that words have. I want the audience to hear the act of communicating rather than interpreting exactly what is being communicated. What does it mean when individuals speak to each other. What are they exchanging? Not facts—at least not on an essential level. I wanted the clean lines of the basic forces that get transferred when one person communicates with another. The pure gesture that is often submerged in human words. The gestures that humans have in common with any other species.

I’m less interested in psychology and more interested in behavior. Or, I don’t want to know why people do what they do, I am just immensely fascinated by what they do, not so much individually but as a composite phenomenon. Psychologies—the basis of most drama—are drenched in words. A me-against-the-world situation which is necessitated by the idea of person. But this idea itself is not necessary. Once words and psychologies are removed there will still be gesturing between physically individuated organisms, as there are with any species. There will still be communities. And in these, vital forces that vector their way through and between people when they communicate. There will be engagements in which individuals join, disperse, co-operate, antagonize. But ideas of character, personality, trials and tribulations will have no meaning in this context. There will be absolutely no possibility of psychological drama.

And so I am offering a small community—four individuations of a given species which the audience will observe for a little more than an hour. In the course of the work there will be no development of character. No individual’s dreams will be broken or realized. However, there will be the dynamic play of communication patterns—of vocalizations and gesturing. There will be many spatial configurations of vocalists. Complex surges and swells, and placid moments. Abrupt explosions of activity and gradual bindings and dissolvings. In short, the ebb and flow of a species in motion. This opera is not a story as much it is a system that the audience experiences for a prescribed duration. And in this system are forces at work that could apply equally to humans, birds, singers, perhaps even planets, atomic particles. . .

breath cycles

Most of my technical developments amount to a coming to terms with time. With the movement of music in time. The movement of the audience as it relates to the music in time. I have avoided most of the time-keeping apparatus that has been fundamental to western classical music since early polyphony. The limit structure of meter. The role of the conductor. Functional (narrative) harmony. I feel that these conventions are problematic, being principally a residue of old states and religions (European ones at that) and as such are by no means a legacy to simply absorb without reflection.

In Strange Birds there is no conductor because there is no meter. In all of my previous works, as in Strange Birds, I have used as the fundamental rhythmic unit not the metrically allocated beat, but the breath cycle of the singer or instrumentalist. This was evident in my earliest vocal composition Siren Song (1996), then later with MOWATMB (1998), and then with Purgatorio (2001). In each case I gave the singer a series of unmetered short melodic gestures to be sung in sequence. The direction was that each singer was to sing a gesture as they exhaled, and then take an unrushed natural inhalation, after which they would sing the next gesture. Rather than conform their breath to the melody the idea was to allow the breath in its natural rhythm to carry the melody. Through the rehearsal process I work with the singers to find the appropriate pacing, though ultimately it is up to their breathing in the context of performance to determine the timing of the gestures. I don’t use meter because I find in the singer’s breath a more basic grounding for the delivery of melody and for the division of phrases. Much more so than by propping them up with artificially equidistant measures and beats to be temporally aligned with the other singers by a conductor. With a soloist, or in the case of Strange Birds, during an aria, I hope that this technique allows the audience to enter the melodic gesture and experience its duration in an immediate way—almost out of chronological time.

This technique becomes particularly interesting when two or more singers are on separate breath cycles. This is a community that manages to coexist without need for the ordering constraints of being in-step with each other. And so the singers are in no way asked to align themselves with each other and so their short phrases combine to create a fluctuating and complex texture. Each of the singers, while maintaining their individual line, participates in a composite whole as their phrases variously interact with the phrases of others: overlapping, merging, sometimes continuing and completing each other, sometimes pre-empting or intersecting contrapuntally. That the gestures of the singers originate from an individual impulse, rather than a collectively aligning agent (a conductor) is emphasized by having the voices approach the audience from different directions in the space. My challenge is to compose these phrases in a way that will provide a dynamic range of textures for different sections and (now that the harmonic relationship of several lines is involved) the desired balance of consonance and dissonance. The textures are always unpredictable in the particulars, though the composite sound or feeling can be largely premeditated. I am using an intuitive sense of probability to control not specifics but tendencies—frameworks within which the audience can experience very particular, though fluid, states of non-completion.

The phrases themselves were inspired by birdsong, which works well in this context, as the calls and song phrases are one to several notes in length—comfortably sung in a single breath. Bird vocalizations themselves are beautiful in their simplicity—at once alien and immediate—and have been the basis of many of my compositions over the last ten years. Though because birds have an acuity of hearing, as well as a metabolism that operates about ten times faster than humans, I usually slow down bird sounds to about one-tenth of their natural speed to reveal the nuances of the expressive gesture. This also avoids the abhorrent effect of the singer sounding like a bird. I wanted to evoke the elliptical and primeval simplicity of birdsong through a peculiar bird-human hybrid vocal style without losing the lyrical potential of the classical voices. The arias in the opera, as well as some of the duets, consist of several phrases sung on breath cycles which in essence are not so different from that of a song sparrow, whose first phrase introduces the melodic figure, followed by several more phrases that are variations or repetitions on that figure. As for the ensemble sections I was more interested in birdcalls, which are distinguished from birdsong in that they are usually shorter (sometimes only a single note) and are not developed over a series of phrases. And though the individual lines remain discernable, the birdcall’s fragmentary quality facilitates combining and recombining well with other calls to reveal the muliplicitous interactions within this bird-human community.

sonic weather

To create the orchestra for Strange Birds I recorded a large array of samples from 19th century orchestral music on vinyl records. I wasn’t looking for famous quotes—in fact most of the pieces I sampled were obscure. I was generally looking for vertical sonorities that could be stretched out infinitely, and the samples were always short, often less than a second or two. I specifically avoided any harmonic motion or melodic phrases. What I was looking for was a wide range of orchestral colors which I would later elongate, transpose, filter, loop, and layer with other samples to create a rich orchestral atmosphere that referenced the 19th century in tactile sound, though at the same time entirely neutralized its linear motion and harmonic progression. I also avoided any samples which fell into any recognizable meter, since this would suggest a container for the singers. If there were any pulses, they were layered with pulses of other tempos, mirroring the multiple durations of the singers breaths. There are times when perhaps as many as seven or eight full orchestras are sounding at the same time.

The orchestra behaves as sonic weather. Rather than highlight and emphasize a storyline or the emotions of the characters, it serves as the environment in which these humans/birds find themselves and has a completely non-psychological function. The last thing I want is to lay out the emotional life of a represented character by making music that exists solely to manipulate the moment to moment experience of the audience—to goad their emotions into very specific pre-packaged containers at carefully contrived moments. This is not to say that these various textures are not evocative. Many of the textures have an unequivocal feeling to them, whether a sense of foreboding, or blissful ascension, or casual nonchalance, but because they are unattached vertically to the vocal lines, and clearly exist independently, the effect is not an enhanced emotion on stage or the revealing of a character’s emotional state. Rather what I hope comes across is the relationship between the self-sufficient entities of the vocal and instrumental musics, which clearly have their own courses though are not mutually exclusive. They are atmospheres in the meteorological sense. The singers are informed by the orchestra the way that human activity is informed by the weather.

Each section is in a sense inert, frozen in time, propelled neither by functional harmony nor chord progression, but existing as a harmonic field which is actualized for an arbitrary duration. These textures are unstable as the result of many elements in fluctuation (the four separate voices, the many elements that are mixed into the orchestra), their relationships finely morphing at each moment. And though the atmosphere, pacing, and energy level of the music can change at any moment—sometimes slowly dissolving into a placid ethereal zone, sometimes interrupted by torrents of relentless waves, or bursts with no apparent antecedent—there is space to move around aurally while one is within a given section. The last thing I want is for the audience to feel they have to follow along, feeling a certain way at each moment. There is enough following in every media in our culture.

opera environment

When the audience arrives at the performance space to experience Strange Birds they find no proscenium. Instead the audience enters into an active environment in which the singers perform within the same area as the audience. The speakers and visual design elements, often simultaneously active, are in many locations emitting different sounds and visuals from all directions. This configuration helps to eliminate the expectation of a linear narrative and suggests a logic that has more to do with space than with time. The physical separation of the singers highlight that these are communicative gestures which have to traverse real space to arrive at their recipients. Each location offers a new auditory perspective which allows the audience to find different balances between the voices during the ensemble sections: if one is centrally located among the sound sources one gains a feeling for the whole texture of a species communicating in general. Though when one approaches one singer, his or her vocalizations become the foreground to the voices of the others, emphasizing the individual’s relationship to that whole social texture.

I hope that this spatial layout, in conjunction with the loosening of the constraints of temporal alignment and sequence will allow each member of the audience to explore the piece on their own terms. Rather than follow a musical/dramatic narrative I would rather the audience experience these strange birds and explore their behavior, though in a more immediate way than a scientist observes a specimen. A real relationship is formed by virtue of co-habitating the same space—they are all part of the same reduced biosphere. In fact what may be interesting at a certain point is experiencing the behavior of other members of the audience within the context of the environment as a whole. What interests me is to put a contemporary audience side by side with its spectral future incarnation and provoke feelings of the arbitrariness of many of the existing containment structures we find about us culturally and the potential which exists beyond them. To provoke feelings for what is essential about human communication, language, and behavior and to separtate this from what is superfluous.

Joe Diebes, 2003