An interview with WAR OF THE WORLDS composer Annie Gosfield
How did this collaboration with The Industry begin?
It all started with the air raid sirens. Tanner Blackman and NowArt approached Yuval Sharon and The Industry about a project that would incorporate decommissioned air raid sirens on the streets of Los Angeles. Yuval then proposed using the air raid sirens in a project based on the radio drama “War of the Worlds” to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. A year later, when I was writing a piece for their Green Umbrella series, the LA Phil contacted me. Yuval and I had exchanged a lot of friendly emails, when he lived in New York a few years earlier, but strangely we had never met in person. In fact, I had been trying to get in touch with Yuval, hoping to meet with him during my visit to LA for the Green Umbrella premiere. I had read about “Hopscotch” and other compelling work that Yuval had done with The Industry, so it was a wonderful surprise to get an email about this project out of the blue. I was also thrilled because when I lived in LA in the 1980’s, I was fascinated by the air raid sirens, so this opportunity was a way to realize a very esoteric artistic fantasy.
The collaboration was a little bit like being a mail order bride – we were committed to a big project before we had actually met face to face. The technical aspects of the opera were unusual and unprecedented. It became clear that we wouldn’t know exactly how some of the elements of the piece would fit together until late in the rehearsal process, but the opera still needed to be written. Yuval always able to maintain his good nature, adapt quickly, and roll with the punches, which made the collaboration fun as well as exciting. I was amazed at how Yuval and The Industry were able to take such a fluid, creative approach with such a technically ambitious project. A lot of my life as a musician has been dedicated to improvisation, so it was wonderful to collaborate on an opera that had such a strong sense of artistic freedom through the entire process as we developed a very complex multilayered work. The musicians of the LA Phil contributed to this wonderfully supportive environment – in addition to being great players, they were very engaged and able to turn on a dime. The technical team and everyone at the LA Phil, The Industry and Now Art also did wonders with a very challenging premise.
War of the Worlds takes its title from the 1938 Orson Welles radio program. How has this reference influenced your approach to composing the music?
Listening to the original radio program helped me keep the many pieces of this puzzle in order. Before I tackled a new section, I would return to the 1938 broadcast to listen carefully to that part of the radio drama. Reviewing the Mercury Theater broadcast before setting each scene to music gave me a sense of the story, the dramatic flow, and how it fit in to the overall narrative.
Radio itself was an important reference on many levels. The original radio drama featured a series of broadcasts by dance orchestras from different ballrooms in New York City. (Which were actually fake – the music was credited to different orchestras in different locations, but it was all performed in the studio by the NBC orchestra led by Bernard Herrmann.) Yuval and I knew that our “War of the Worlds” would start as an ill-fated concert, but we weren’t sure what approach we would take for the opening music. At first, Yuval suggested arranging the instrumental music that opened the 1938 program, “Stardust” and “La Cumparsita.” My workflow was a little backwards: I had to compose the vocal pieces first, so the opening pieces were actually composed last. The libretto described the opening instrumental music as “innocuous” and “sweet.” I couldn’t figure out how to combine the potential impact of our “overture” with something described as sweet and innocuous, so instead of composing the opening, I worked my way to the end. When I finally circled back to writing the first pieces, I imagined a modern take on the opening theme of a radio show; fast, catchy, and a little extraterrestrial (sweet and innocuous be damned). I thought ahead to the second piece, and considered what could have been on the radio in 1938. I pictured James Hayden (who had auditioned for the role of “Commander”) as a smooth, slightly off kilter crooner, backed by our imaginary ballroom orchestra, like a slightly demented Herb Jeffries. In the meantime, we settled on the idea of basing our interrupted concert on the centenary of Holst’s “The Planets.” The first two planets in our galaxy fell into place: Mercury, our imaginary radio theme; followed by Venus, the languorous vehicle for our crooner. Earth wasn’t far behind. I was excited to be able to use the low, subterrestrial frequencies of Disney Hall’s awesome organ for Earth, but only briefly; the piece is rudely cut off by Martian feedback after an intense minute-long blast.
The transitions from Disney Hall to the outdoor public performance sites make use of radio noise as well, representing a virtual turn of the dial, or a manifestation of the Martians jamming our earthly signals. As the alien invaders make their presence known, radio noise creeps in, and things start to go haywire The Martian sound is represented by “La Sirena Ensemble,” who add stratospheric, unearthly sounds from a soprano, theremin, sampled radio noise, and percussion. The trio performed in a baffled plexiglass box suspended high in the concert hall, sonically isolated, and piped directly to air raid sirens on the streets of LA, like a Martian radio intervention.
Individual scenes were drawn from the storyline of the 1938 radio broadcast. Mr. Wilmuth, a local farmer in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, was transformed to Mrs. Martinez, a local restaurant owner in Downtown LA General Lansing sings lines from his 1938 counterpart, with an added emphasis on a “wall of defense,” and repetition brought on by increasing panic and madness. Three military airmen are drawn from the original script, and report on the Martian attack, singing from imaginary planes circling overhead.
The Coda, which ends the opera, uses text that was originally from the H.G. Wells novel, and read by Orson Welles in the beginning of the 1938 radio program. It is from the perspective of an observer after the Martian attack: “Now we know that our world was being watched closely.” The music reflects the dark nature of the aftermath of the alien invasion, with thick textures countered by a solo cello, echoing Welles’ voice, seemingly alone in the ruins. The text “Was it by design, or by chance / Mankind inherited this spinning fragment / of solar driftwood / from the dark mystery of time and space?”
ends the coda, and a dark drone is gradually overcome by radio signals. “War of the Worlds” reverts to its “native soil,” as the sound returns to radio noise, and the story of a destroyed planet fades into the ephemeral static crackle of the airwaves.
This is a multi-site production, taking place between the Walt Disney Concert Hall and several decommissioned air raid sirens in Los Angeles. How did you conceptualize the approach to presenting music in various sites simultaneously?
The setup was so technically intricate that we had to leave a lot to faith, but it literally felt like magic when we heard the music unfolding at multiple sites for the first time.
The first step was to develop the story and the characters at each site, and choose the appropriate instrumentation to accompany each scene. I imagined street musicians standing with Martinez and Morse, playing violin and bass, as the text shifted between Spanish and English. General Lansing inspired a battalion of military drums. Pierson, with his isolated, disembodied voice reporting back, was countered by a swooning solo cello. All of the siren site performers have their own personal encounters with La Sirena, (the voice of the Martian) in a series of individual interplanetary communications. The biggest challenge was how to fit these smaller on-site groupings into the big picture. I created crossfades that sustain and overlap as the music shifts between the concert hall and individual sites. The crossfades can be shortened or lengthened, to provide a seamless transition in the face of possible glitches in communication. When multiple locations were performing together, I composed music that could be rhythmically forgiving, not knowing exactly what the latency (time lag) in communication might be. Sometimes this meant layering overlapping atmospheric sustained notes or abstract textures, at other times it meant creating driving rhythms that still worked if they were a beat or two out of sync.
The production focuses on the idea of fake news; a creative concept inherent in Welles’ radio program as well as a current cultural phenomenon. How do you situate your approach to fake news in the current political climate?
When we were first discussing the project in early 2016, we had no idea how timely fake news would become. One of the aims of the 1938 broadcast of “War of the Worlds” was to encourage listeners to question all sources of information, and to not automatically believe what they heard on the radio. Like 2017, 1938 was an era of instability, fast-breaking news bulletins, and natural disasters. There has been fake news for millennia, and the term “fake news” is actually over one hundred years old. It’s important to know that these tactics have always been used. We all need to be aware of the source of information, now more than ever. I hope “War of the Worlds” will inspire people to dig a little deeper into all sources of information, and develop the knowledge and skills necessary to identify what is real and what is fake.
Annie Gosfield/Tyler Matthew Oyer interview Jan 10 2018