A Rumination on Writing an Opera by Jason Thorpe Buchanan

This week, we feature a piece by composer Jason Thorpe Buchanan, whose multimedia opera, Hunger, will be featured in our 2015 FIRST TAKE showcase of new ideas in American opera.

In deciding to write a Multimedia Opera, I wanted to explore the idea of psychological fragility and deterioration in a way that would tie each element together.  Searching for a story that would lend itself to fragmentation I came across Knut Hamsun’s Sult (Hunger), one of the first examples of modern psychologically driven literature and a precursor to stream of consciousness writing.  I sought a librettist whose work spoke on a highly visceral level, able to strike a balance between rich imagery, flow, and the type of fragmentation I was imagining.  I eventually came across Darcie Dennigan’s poetry through a friend of a friend, and immediately wrote to her to discuss my ideas for the opera.  Rather than a faithful adaptation, we decided to create a new work that would retain the essence of Sult but allow us to explore our own ideas more freely.

One of the challenges became capturing the intimate, claustrophobic quality of Hamsun’s writing on the operatic stage.  Henning Carlsen’s 1966 film adaptation captures actor Per Oscarsson’s incredible subtlety of expression and intensity of behavior so beautifully, something that can too easily be lost on stage with a physical distance separating the performers from the audience members, and a traditional focus on ‘beautiful’ singing rather than the psychological state of its characters.  Hamsun himself felt that the “intricacies of the mind” should serve as the main object of modern literature, and so my goal became finding a way to capture this ‘internal’, claustrophobic quality with a subtlety of expression comparable to film.  Darcie and I set out to develop an opera that would not be driven by dialogue or actions, but rather these psychological and emotional states, exploring the edges of comprehensibility.

I’ve been contemplating what might be referred to as “operatic time”, a construction that has become the norm through an enduring tradition of arias that are used to suspend or draw out dramatic events, illustrating a character’s emotions or psychology in a neat and tidy 2-4 minute presentation of one idea before moving to the next.  This is a convenient strategy if the intention is to communicate a linear story clearly and succinctly, working under the assumption that the audience “needs time to understand” what is happening, using simple means to gently guide them from point A to point B.

I’m not interested in that.  I’m interested in disorientation – in what happens between being exposed to an idea, a fragment of a story, one word, one phoneme, a cell – and realizing what has taken place; “how do these two things fit together?” With each piece of information presented, the context of the original cell again changes, perpetually suggesting a number of equally viable scenarios or interpretations.  This process causes you to continually re-evaluate your understanding of what is unfolding, a situation where the relationship between these cells of information can be explored; a puzzle without all the pieces, and you are left to imagine the implications of each and every possible outcome.

Multimedia opens the door to what I might call “cinematic time”: an opportunity for simultaneous or rapidly shifting streams of information – for new ways of dealing with time such as compression or acceleration, jump cuts between seemingly unrelated ideas, or juxtaposition of contradictory materials.  The protagonist in Hunger is split in two; a composite between soprano and baritone depicting aspects of his inner/outer selves, intellectual deterioration, and volatility of the psyche.  This fragmentation became an underlying theme in all elements of the opera.  Rather than clear, coherent representation of the events that unfold, many potential narrative threads are suggested, but the actual events remain ambiguous.  Ylajali, a young girl, appears in several manifestations.  Our protagonist’s state of mind is imposed upon a (potentially) living, breathing person, but we observe both her physical existence (reality?) and a distortion, a simultaneous projection of his needs and desires, performing contrasting actions on stage and her representation in multimedia.  It is never clear whether she is an extension of his psychology or if the actions performed are indeed her own, a multiplicity that is paralleled in all elements of the work including text or situations that are purposefully ambiguous or contradictory.  The audience needn’t be spoon-fed a clear linear narrative, but rather immersed in this environment, invited to engage with the work and truly use their imagination.

These ideas are translated musically in many ways, including the management of musical events in time using a series of checkpoints instead of a regular tempo or division.  This produces what I call ‘simultaneities’, flexible musical gestures rather than precise synchronizations (somewhat similar to recitative in traditional opera).  The conductor, singers, and ensemble members must react spontaneously and organically to one another, effectively ‘bending time’ around the singers who are able to perform with greater freedom and intensity.  These same ideas are applied to musical harmony by offsetting or neutralizing ‘focused’ pitches by using extended techniques and unfocused sounds, resulting in a hazy, or ambiguous sounding texture, similar to the ambiguities in narrative and flexibility in dealing with time.

Ligeti once said of his work Aventures that “something happens, but I do not know what it is, and you do not know what it is.”  Similarly, Georges Aperghis stated in 2010: “My aim is that one never really knows what it is that they are doing. You can come a bit closer but if you knew, you would stop listening to the music.  If you say: ‘Ok, this is that’, it’s all over. People pull in their antennae and that’s it.”  Where Ligeti and Aperghis have both approached some of their works by building a loose sense of narrative up from very small fragments, such as phonemes, I think of my work with Hunger as using the same principles, but from an inverse point through my collaborative work with Darcie Dennigan on the libretto.  It isn’t that the work is without narrative, but that the narrative purposefully weaves between intelligibility and unintelligibility.

— Anything more that I could say in regard to the content of Hunger, my own interpretation, or feelings towards the events that unfold, would only restrict the potential depth of the listener’s experience and imagination.

Hear excerpts from Hunger, as well as five other new American operas, at FIRST TAKE, Saturday, February 21st from 1-4:30pm at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. Admission is free and seating is first-come, first-served. Don’t miss out!