Composer as Responder to Current Events

Revisiting Quilt Song

In response to current events I have returned to the reasons behind creating my opera Quilt Song which premièred at The Birmingham Old Rep two years ago. This is because some colleagues on social media have suggested that words are empty gestures when not backed up by action. 

'A wind blows in the night' from Quilt Song

So what can I or have I done that shows I am prepared to put myself on the line? As an artist I have a unique opportunity to create work that conveys empathy and a call to action. I have always felt that socially reflective opera can be incredibly powerful and uplifting such as Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk which reveals the rot in the society of his time or Mozart's Marriage of Figaro which addresses the heinous tradition of the droit du seigneur when a count was allowed to have sex with a maid as his right before she got married. In both operas the oppressed win over fascism and I believe that the passion of a composer's ethical conviction can lead to creating transformative music. 

As a composer I want to create socially interactive operas that respond to the issues generated by current events. However issues raised are often better examined through similar past events than current ones. This is because of the ethics of not wanting to exploit people involved in a current tragedy. In addition I am always looking to present powerful female leads since the body of new operas are still unable to provide this. With all of this mind it occurred to me a few years back that Rosa Parks, who refused to move on a bus for white people in USA in 1965, would be an incredibly moving protagonist. Her non-violent action resulted in a bus boycott for a year and inspired Martin Luther King Junior to action. When Rosa refused to move on this bus she said that she felt like she wanted to cover herself with a quilt like you would on a winter's night. Her words led me to an 'ah ha' moment so that the opera's title became Quilt Song. 

Rosa Parks when she was arrested

I then went on to employ a methodology of composition and integration of stories and actions that drew on the principles of quilting as inspired by Rosa's quote. This meant that many contrasting facets could be held together in the grid of a quilt. Therefore the symbol of a quilt showed that diverse elements collected together can enhance and co-exist. This went on to become metaphor to describe the positive facets of a diverse society.   

The dress that Rosa Parks was working on in the bus when she was arrested

In addition to featuring Rosa Parks I was at the time incredibly shocked over the death of the MP Jo Cox. It was terrible that her assassin's action was driven by racist ideas illogically connected to Brexit. I decided to allude to her situation in Quilt Song through the character of The Muse. I specifically chose not to directly represent Jo as I felt it was too soon after the tragedy to be ethical.

The murder of The Muse in Quilt Song

At her parliamentary maiden speech Jo Cox said "We have more in common than that which divides us". Her words, alongside Rosa Parks' refusal to move, became the backbone of Quilt Song. They sing together about their call to action at the end of Rosa's bus scene. This blending of the characters' separate stories is one of the key features available within the form of opera because it has the ability to feature different time frames simultaneously in music.

 Jo Cox

Rosa Parks and Jo Cox as two profound freedom fighters are contextualised within Quilt Song's dramatic framework by being grounded in the play Abraham Lincoln, written by the Birmingham-based playwright John Drinkwater in 1918. As a secret pacifist the play's subject provided a vehicle for Drinkwater's outpouring of grief at the futility of WW1. Through Abraham Lincoln's actions and his quest to stamp out slavery he established hope for a better world. Unexpectedly the play was a big success in Birmingham, eventually transferring to London and touring to the USA. Perhaps this was because the atrocities of WW1 left everyone hoping for human kindness. The humble but decisive of character of Lincoln captured the zeitgeist. 

Abraham Lincoln

Through a synchronistic twist I found myself in 2016 with a three-year stipend to carry out my practice-based research as a composer at The Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. The 1918 centenary of the first performance of the Abraham Lincoln play in Birmingham was looming. I intimately knew about this and the reasons behind its content because Drinkwater is my grandfather. The secret of his pacifism was only ever shared orally within my family because to be honest I think some felt ashamed. In WW1 pacifists could be sent to prison or even executed. As I reflected on the play I found myself empathising with this grandfather whom I had never met (he died when my Mum was only 8). I felt his deep grief over war and his specific horror at slavery. Incrementally as I explored related subjects I became appalled to see that racism especially in USA is still rampant. Lincoln's legacy has in many respects largely failed. I am politically active however the only way I know to make an impact is as an artist so I decided to create an opera about freedom fighters.

John Drinkwater (right) with James Joyce

My doubts about my own motivations led me to create a scene in Quilt Song when The Poet shares his concerns with Rosa about whether it is ethical for him to write a play about slavery. She responds by saying that he was right to reveal the brutality of slavery to everyone. The text for this scene was originally spoken in the Drinkwater play between Abraham Lincoln and Custis, a slave who comes to thank him for abolishing slavery. It makes me shudder to realise that this was not the end of the story but only the start of a continuing battle.   

The Poet and Rosa Parks in Quilt Song 

By interfacing Rosa's story with Jo Cox's story I further wanted to enhance the message that actions speak louder than words and that standing against racism needs to be done by people of all races. When I asked the soprano Maureen Brathwaite to play Rosa she said that her heart 'missed a beat' because she had wanted all her life to sing the role of a heroic black woman. There are hardly any such roles in new opera although we can clearly see that there are many contemporary role models to choose from. I feel that I was brave to chose this subject. However I was compelled to engage on this level because the communities that I worked with in Birmingham wanted tough stories to be presented as long as they contained a feeling of upbeat hope. 

Maureen Brathwaite as Rosa Parks

My practice-based research aims to reach out to broader communities, therefore the overall message of Quilt Song became that we can celebrate diversity like differing materials held together by the structure of a quilt. 

I believe that the content of Quilt Song is needed now more than ever and I am hoping to find other companies to stage it. This video link gives a 5 minute overview of the production of Quilt Song at The Birmingham Old Rep in 2018.

https://vimeo.com/300727882 

On this second 3 minute video the backing track is from one song "This is not a game". The lyrics were created with students at The Birmingham Ormiston Academy who were inspired by the upbeat message of Olympic gold medalist Carl Lewis. 

https://vimeo.com/426205344

Carl Lewis


The vocal score of Quilt Song can be ordered via
https://composersedition.com/composers/susannahself

In the Flow

A meditation on composing while doing nothing

             Everybody has a song which is no song at all: it is a process of singing, and when you sing, you are where you are. All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing. 

John Cage (Larson, 2012: 239)

As a composer of opera I work with the complex interface between music and image. It is difficult to tell a story without being too oblique or too obvious. Often abstract concepts work better from a composing point of view. Over-clarity of story telling has the ability to create banality. Therefore as a syncretic medium, opera lends itself to making connections between unclear complexities. These can then be expressed in non-verbally reasoned ways though music, sound and image. The result can subliminally allow us as audience to draw on the unexplored depths of our imagination. 

During my doctoral research I developed a compositional methodology called quilting. From quilting flowed many compositional possibilities which I continue to develop since I completed my research Opera Quilt Song. In particular materials can be organically developed, cross-related, juxtaposed, jumbled up and transformed. Resonances with this approach can be seen via the iconic artist Robert Rauschenberg's art practice in which he observes

            Objects not only suggest new possibilities - they also set up resistances that I find very useful.

(Rauschenberg, 2017: 235) 

During lockdown I am allowing myself to engage with a state of creative unwrapping so that  I specifically choose not to seek a goal, purpose or result. I am opening myself up to infinite space and time. I have long dreamed of an extended residency that was similar to a Tibetan Buddhist retreat where a meditative state is engaged with for up to 5 years. During my retreat which contain operatic elements but which are also reflective, enlivening, provocative and meditative. This practice is an extension of the installations that I created for Quilt Song. These worked in contrast to the clearly drawn story-telling scenes so that their abstraction could allow for reflection. It is now the quality of the abstract internal that I feel drawn to develop. 

My inspiration comes from an eclectic range of installation artists like Ed Kienholz, Nancy Reddich, Robert Lepage, Bill Viola and Zimoun. Their use of visual objects is then connected to the philosophical aural by my fascination with John Cage. In particular I am drawn to Cage's interest in Zen Buddism. This quality then cross-hatches with my interest in compositional minimalism. In particular I admire Steve Reich's Eight Lines which dances with nuanced eddies of cross-rhythms and John Adam's formative work Light over Water which, created with synthesisers, achieves a minimalist purity that his later orchestral works move away from. 

John Cage was also instrumental in making me comfortable and in tune with new technology. His playful yet disciplined approach to objects of twentieth-century life like radios, loudspeakers, microphones, tape-recorders and even computers had for me the effect of empowerment. He gave me the courage to see technology as fertile terrain for creativity. 

(Adams, quoted in Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008: 20–24) 

Click on the link to see In the Flow 10'

https://vimeo.com/418601147

In The Flow grew out of the concept of 'the infinitude of dust', as explained by the Zen Buddhist Suzuki who greatly influenced Cage.

              Existentially viewed, every particular object, technically called "particle of dust": (anuraja), contains in  it the whole Dharmadhatu [pure Mind realm].                                                               Suzuki (Larson, 2012: 249 ) 

In addition Cage's work with the dancer Merce Cunningham promoted the idea that works of composition and choreography have permission to be chaotic and driven by chance impulses. The choreographer Jonathan Burrows goes on to contextualise this concept by saying:

When a piece makes sense to us it appears to reach a point where we would accept anything that happens. The continuity of unfolding objects has set up a series of clues which teach us how to read, anticipate, recognise and be surprised by what follows.

(Burrows, 2010: 37)

For In the Flow I actively disrupt synthetic set patterns available within the programmes of Logic Pro. Starting with interlacing bells a Zen-like stasis is set up of cascading cross rhythms which are generated by the plug-in Zen Garden. The video simultaneously features close-ups of lily pads and reeds in water. Dancing on, and in, the water are tiny insects and refracted light. Using a negative visual filter I reflect the pulsating dance of the light on the water with disrupted cross rhythms using the plug-in Splatter Cycles. These morph into further complexities using the gorgeously named Gnarly Trance Pluck. The video intensifies its colours to a numinous rippling pink. Transformation of sound then arrives with Quantiser Patterns, Celestial Voices and me panting shamanically into the microphone. This new raw energy is reflected in dynamic footage of rolling waves which culminate aurally in a cascade of Splatter Cycles. From this energetic movement emerges the solemn Studio Strings who play the tones embodied in the work so far. Now the installation becomes a deep reflective meditation as the orange filtered images of the encroaching tide slowly fade out.

Bibliography

Adams, J. (2008) Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Burrows, J. (2010) A Choreographers Handbook. London: Routledge.

Kienholz, E. and Reddin, N. (2002) The Hoerengracht. New York: Pace Wildenstein.

Larson, K. (2012) Where the Heart Beats. New York: The Penguin Press.

Rauschenberg, R. (2017) Exhibition catalogue. London: Tate Publishing.

Reich, S. (2002) Writings on Music, 1965-2000. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Self, S. (2018) Quilt Song [opera]. London: Composers Edition.

Discography

Adams, J. (1986) Shaker Loops; Light over water [CD]. Eindhoven: (Philips NA014CD).

Lepage, R. (2010) “Tristan and Isolde” – Behind the Scenes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJYN4gSwaaw&list=PL1FD0A02114471FC2&index=34

[accessed 6^th September, 2017]  

Zimoun (n.d.) website http://www.zimoun.net

[accessed 29^th October, 2016] 

Nurturing Our Creative Spark

How has lockdown been for you? Have you finally found the time to get down to your creative passions or have you run into an impasse? It’s not easy and I freely admit that, amidst the liberal creative play that I now enjoy on a daily basis, there have been times when all I could manage was bingeing on Netflix or gazing distractedly into the sky. This virus is scary and news is chaotic in terms of weighing up the real facts. My strategy has been self-isolation with my composer husband Michael and our border terrier Tristan. A few days into the lockdown it dawned on me that although this is a time of terrible unexpected tragedy my creative being was feeling very alive and open to the idea of new creative possibilities. Every upcoming performance I am involved with is cancelled: my opera Artemisia, my commission for Spitalfields Festival. Instead lies an extended period of time in which I can really search inwards. This is an unprecedented opportunity to open up to an inner space though a: 

Liminal dream-like state. This leads on to allowing myself to take up unexpected directions and engage with creative flow. The key to its motivation and effectiveness is to allow myself to be playful. Therefore as soon as I took up this approach I realised that setting specific project objectives was a mistake. Instead I have decided to use this unique opportunity as a way to see where zany ideas may lead. On a practical level I set up my recording studio in the loft in my home in North Norfolk. I already paint there. I made sure that I could see the beautiful field view from my computer desk, replenished my paint supply, stretched a large canvas, gathered fire wood for the wood burner, burnt wild sage and created a shrine in the niche of the loft’s entrance. Situating a double bed under the velux windows allows for extended moments of sky gazing and doing nothing. Feeling fully relaxed and being receptive to each moment is now available because I don’t have to rush to get to a city or another country for a gig, a presentation, a pitch. 

This state is what I have been waiting for all my life, but it was never going to happen because I normally use my drive to power me through. Perhaps I do this because I feel direction gives my life meaning. Don’t get me wrong, I am not knocking drive but rather than fighting with the reality of the current situation I have laid myself open to the idea of Wu-Wei or letting go as suggested in Zen. Flexible thinking I am discovering is very powerful and inadvertently has already led to an invitation to perform online in America. In creative flow playing and mucking around rules. To strive for discernible goals at the moment is rather tenuous anyway. Alongside my artistic indulgences I also set out to facilitate the creation of a beautiful composing studio for Michael in a separate space. Immediately I saw him transform in a new and vibrant way.

My Loft Studio

 Then one afternoon last week Michael sent me an email titled: Some Deep Thought About Jungian Psychology...

Western man, Jung saw, always wants to do something, to “get somewhere”; this kind of restlessness is characteristic of us all. A few years later, when Jung met the Pueblo chief Ochwiay Biano during his trip to Taos, he told Jung that the whites were always dissatisfied, and that this led to their cruelty. The kind of consciousness Jung encountered in North Africa was content with what is. At an oasis, Jung felt that “everything here was exactly the way it should be and the way it had always been.”28 Westerners usually feel this only after a few drinks or under the influence of drugs, hence their popularity. We find it inordinately difficult to relax, but what Jung found in North Africa was a consciousness that allowed the ego to slow down and sink into the warm embrace of the unconscious, as if after perpetually treading water, we suddenly discovered we could float. 

― Gary Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings

Jung suggests that being driven can lead to a form of internal capitalism whose primary goal is to quantify and package. In contrast the arts have the potential to create universal connection with the artist performing the role of an intermediary vessel between universal human need and available materials. 

 ...the shaman descends to the underworld to find a cure, not just for his or her own psychic wounds but for those of all the community.

 Small, 1998: p180

Shrine to Art: Self 2020.

Curiously meaningful and powerful art often emanates from artists who abandon success and financial reward as a primary objective. Instead the motivation becomes the desire to push out the question ‘what if I do this now?’ The painter Van Gogh and composer Charles Ives both earned virtually nothing from their output yet ultimately they became key players in their fields. The power of art making is therefore so much bigger than money or internal capitalism, likewise so are we as human beings. This is why we demand a free NHS and that is why we really need the arts to nurture our lives. As a creator I am holding two qualities:

 1. Allow myself to play at all times and not stress about a result.

 2. Be receptive to receivers by creating socially interactive work.  

Lockdown has resulted in what should have been done by publicly funded organisations decades ago: Allow free online access to performances so that productions for example from the National Theatre and Royal Opera House are available to people who live too far away or who cannot afford to watch their productions on a live stream in a cinema. This leads to art being socially inclusive with the potential to increase our humanity and make a better society. Returning to my newfound liminal space, here is a link to one of my lockdown installations: Island Dream. It comprises smooth vocals and synths composed and sung by myself with video footage from my kayak in the North Sea. The 3-minute installation ends with the word Sadika which means a woman of good deeds in Sanskrit and Hebrew. 

Click on this link to view  https://vimeo.com/409182248https://vimeo.com/409182248

Still from 3-minute Installation: Island Dream: Self 2020 

Silence: John Cage meets 2020

Operatic installation of soundscape and film.

Creator: Susannah Self

Narrator: Michael Christie

In his book Walden Henry Thoreau removes himself from life’s distractions and lives in a cabin by a pond. During this current time of self-isolation I have been making early morning bike rides to the secret springs in Little Walsingham in North Norfolk. Clearly these symbolise the very source of life. This led me to reflect how my research as a composer has been deeply influenced by working with John Cage. I imagine he would love the multiple burbling springs whose hopefulness is contrasted by a surrounding desolate wood. At times the peace is peppered with guns going off. In the installation a stream is loud then silent but with movement on the film. Dead leaves left on a hedge from last autumn fibrillate to show the fragility of life. A tea pot is filled and accompanied by gongs that suggest a Zen tea ceremony. Cage made heavily brewed black tea to replace booze and drugs. It was unbearably strong but the sip he offered me facilitated a transubstantiation to his ever-living presence. Cage’s words speak directly to us in a section from his Lecture on Something in his book Silence while the film explores the pond. This paves the way for an intense operatic ceremony. In the more verdant woods of Little Walsingham Abbey pulsing frame drums and synthesiser suggest a looming catastrophe. From the woodland Greta Thunberg delivers her emotional speech. She emerges from the earth like Erda in Wagner’s Ring. Both warn of destruction. Greta’s frank vocal delivery is deeply operatic. The memory of my 15-year-old self directly identifies with her depth of feeling. To my delight and amazement Greta is heard internationally. The planet can still be saved if we plant millions of trees and our current pandemic is directly linked to the insults we have meted out. After Greta’s speech home-made instruments play: a primitive violin, two out-of-tune ukuleles which are reminiscent of the tintinnabulation of cathedral bells. These instruments are inspired by Cage’s prepared piano and Harry Partch’s invented instruments.  Forced to self-isolate we can only make music with what we have left at home. The installation ends with man-made synthesised sounds set against silent dead leaves. The future choice is stark. 

Here is a link to the installation:

https://vimeo.com/402113805

Silence: John Cage meets 2020 is the first in a series of operatic installations that I am creating to be viewed online.

Publisher: https://composersedition.com/composers/susannahself