Nadia Hallgren | Death / 2021 [Filmed concert by LAOpera]

sudden a vista peeps

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tyshawn Sorey (composer, based on a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar), Nadia Hallgren (director)

Death / 2021 [Filmed concert by LAOpera]

 

Already this year, with the quarantine having still closed the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and other performance centers, LAOpera presented an on-line digital performance of a new composition by composer Tyshawn Sorey featuring poet Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Death.” The composition was performed by mezzo-soprano Amanda Lynn Bottoms. The work as a whole consisted of three parts in the short film directed by Nadia Hallgren, premiering on February 19th, 2021, the date I watched it.

     The first part, titled Act I consists of a reading of the poem by Ariyon Barbare in the Paul Laurence Dunbar House in Dayton, Ohio. Act II is a short discussion of the work and a brief history of Sorey’s early youth playing the piano in a Newark Catholic Church he attended with his aunt. And Art III consists of the song, with musical accompaniment by pianist Howard Watkins, sung by Bottoms.

     Sorley has for many years been known for his wide swath of influences from classical contemporary composers and musicians as various as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Anthony Braxton (with whom he studied), Cecil Taylor, and younger jazz musicians and ensembles. Alex Ross in The New Yorker has described him as a defiant shape-shifter who straddles both the classical music and jazz worlds.

 

“There is something awesomely confounding about the music of Tyshawn Sorey, the thirty-eight-year-old Newark-born composer, percussionist, pianist, and trombonist. As a critic, I feel obliged to describe what I hear, and description usually begins with categorization. Sorey’s work eludes the pinging radar of genre and style. Is it jazz? New classical music? Composition? Improvisation? Tonal? Atonal? Minimal? Maximal? Each term captures a part of what Sorey does, but far from all of it. At the same time, he is not one of those crossover artists who indiscriminately mash genres together. Even as his music shifts shape, it retains an obdurate purity of voice. T. S. Eliot’s advice seems apt: ‘Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” / Let us go and make our visit.’”

     Known for his highly complex compositions, Death, because of its focus on a poem of a 12 lines, is far simpler in structure and resonance, each stanza beginning in a rather assertive chordal statement before quickly broiling down in minor chords that—as director Hallgren exemplifies in her images of flying and often quarrelling hawks—spin down into darker and jarring dissonants, finding only temporary repose in major chord key respites.

      The poem itself is not only dark, as you might expect from its title, but is odd in its implications.

 

Storm and strife and stress,

Lost in a wilderness,

Groping to find a way,

Forth to the haunts of day

 

Sudden a vista peeps,

Out of the tangled deeps,

Only a point--the ray

But at the end is day.

 

Dark is the dawn and chill,

Daylight is on the hill,

Night is the flitting breath,

Day rides the hills of death.

 

     The poem begins in an almost Dantean manner, the narrator “lost in the wilderness” having suffered the horrors of life, groping to find his way, apparently, to light.

      Yet the rest of the poem does not function in that manner as a “vista peeps,” the narrator spotting “a point, a ray” of possibility. It is not daylight, however, that provides that vision for in the next line we see in the conjunction “But” the alternative, “day,” not evidently what the poet is seeking. The vision of the vista has come in the dark of “dawn and chill,” just before the sun rises. Night provides a “flitting breath,” while death rides the hills of daylight.

      In short, it appears, the narrator prefers the vision he has found in the night as opposed to the daylight when death becomes a far more obvious opponent.

      If, as Sorey seems to argue, this poem has important meaning for our own times, it is not our having been able to move out of the shadows that we have been facing that will help us to go forward and live fully lives, but rather the visions, the beliefs we burnished out of the dark. Visionary revolutions, one might argue, are always spawned in the worst of times rather than in the best. The new vaccines for COVID were created in the very darkest days of world-wide deaths.

      The date for this poem appears to be 1903, four years after Dunbar—who after marrying Alice Ruth Moore in 1898, lived with his wife in the happy whirl of the Washington, D.C. social scene accorded him for his position at the Library of Congress—was diagnosed with tuberculosis. His doctor suggested a move to the better air of Colorado and regular ingestion of whiskey to alleviate the disease’s symptom, which we now know only leads to a further decline in health. For a few years, so Alice noted in her diary, she served joyfully as his nurse, remaining in love. But her husband soon began showing signs of alcoholism and in 1902 he arrived home in a disturbed state of mind, later beating her so severely that she was ill for months after with peritonitis, an infection in connection with the rupture of the abdomen where he had brutally kicked her. She nearly lost in her life in the incident and never returned to their home, without divorcing.*

      By 1903 Dunbar, with the loss of wife and his impending death from TB, accordingly, had plenty of reason to fear the reminders the daylight might show him, an empty house and the daily strife and stress of his illness. In 1904 he moved back to Dayton where his mother lived remaining in her house until his death in 1906. 

     We are now so fortunate to be able to have this work, the third musical setting of this poem, on film. Although, obviously, it would be far better to hear this lied sung by Bottoms in person, I do hope that after the present health crisis the LAOpera company and others who have made similar attempts to reach new audiences will continue to tape and film symphonic and operatic works. I was grateful to be able to share this LAOpera Now production with friends throughout the US.

 

*What isn’t generally discussed in the autobiographies of Paul Laurence Dunbar or even, for that matter, in many of the commentaries of Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar herself is that she was far more than a suffering wife. Having graduated from the teaching program at Straight University (which later became part of Dillard University), Alice first taught school in New Orleans and studied art and music, learning to play the cello before meeting Paul.

     She also was an accomplished poet and short story writer, publishing several collections of work, including Violets and Other Tales. At about the same time, she moved to Boston and soon after New York City where she co-founded at taught at the White Rose Mission, a “home for girls” located in Manhattan’s San Juan Hill neighborhood. During this period, she began a correspondence with Paul Laurence Dunbar.

     As the rather well written Wikipedia entry reports “Their correspondence revealed tensions about the sexual freedoms of men and women. Before their marriage, Paul told Alice that she kept him from "yielding to temptations," a reference to sexual liaisons. In a letter from March 6, 1896, Paul may have attempted to instigate jealousy in Alice by talking about a woman he had met in Paris. However, Alice failed to respond to these attempts and continued to maintain an emotional distance from Paul. In 1898, after corresponding for a few years, Alice moved to Washington, D.C. to join Paul Laurence Dunbar and they secretly eloped in 1898.”

 

     As noted above, their relationship was a difficult one due to Dunbar’s alcoholism and depression. What didn’t get expressed above is that before their marriage, Paul had raped Alice while drunk. She confirmed this to Dunbar’s early biographer: “He came home night in a beastly condition. I went to help him to bed—and he behaved as your informant said, disgracefully.”

     His 1902 beating of her also may have been the result of Alice’s several lesbian affairs. After their divorce, Alice moved to Wilmington, Delaware, teaching at Howard High School for more than decade as well as at the State College for Colored Students (later Delaware State University) and at Hampton Institute during the summers.

     In 1916 she married poet and civil rights activist Robert J. Nelson, working with him to publish the play Masterpieces of Negro Experience (1914). Despite her marriage, Alice continued to have sexual relationships with several women, including the principal of Howard High School, Edwina Krusel and the black activist Fay Jackson Robinson.

     During the 1920s and 1930s, Alice, while continuing the write stories and poetry, became an even more fervent activist for African American and women’s rights. As the Wikipedia entry recounts:

 

“In 1914, she co-founded the Equal Suffrage Study Club, and in 1915, she was a field organizer for the Middle Atlantic states for the women's suffrage movement. In 1918, she was field representative for the Woman's Committee of the Council of Defense. In 1924, Dunbar-Nelson campaigned for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, but the Southern Democratic block in Congress defeated it. During this time, Dunbar-Nelson worked in various ways to foster political change.”

 

     Apparently, she was also active the NAACP, cofounding a reform school in Delaware for African American girls, working with the American Friends Inter-Racial Peace Committee, and speaking at rallies against the sentencing of the Scottsboro defendants.

      If this is all ancillary to the concert I describe above, I propose that Alice may ultimately be a far richer subject than her first husband.

      The portrait of Alice above is by Laura Wheeler Waring.

 

Los Angeles, February 20, 2021

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance and World Cinema Review (February 2021).