Soul Music

Elīna Garanča at The Broad Stage, A Walk in the Woods, and Grail Project

By Steven Leigh Morris

“All the sounds of the earth are like music.”

                      — Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!

Note: The links below referring to music selections go directly to recordings.

Let’s face it, for those bemoaning the increasingly shrill tone of public discourse, the machinery keeping America inclusive and democratic and open to multiple, contradictory points of view has always worked sporadically, on four out of six cylinders. Our history includes, for starters, slavery; gerrymandering electoral districts; the systematic abuse of Irish immigrants, Chinese immigrants, and now immigrants from Central and South America; African-American citizens lynched, Japanese-Americans citizens interned — all rationalized through some kind of bruised theology. These are stories of when we forgot or ignored America’s founding principles, along with her higher callings. And when the machinery of American principles did work, those were our finest hours. When it did work, a synthesis of opposing viewpoints led us forward. Slavery was outlawed. Women got the vote. Gay marriage was legalized. In the aftermath of financial collapses, federal programs emerged to protect at least some of the most vulnerable among us.

I was a child when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. The moon landing wasn’t a socialist conspiracy to demonstrate the enobling power of a federal program. It wasn’t some partisan circus. It was a breathtaking, inspiring accomplishment, and a fact we could all agree on, reported by a universally trusted CBS anchorman named Walter Cronkite, long before the mainstream media became the “enemy of the people.”

It’s no great insight to suggest that somebody, or some phenomenon, has taken a sledgehammer to that machinery of American principles once more – perhaps even existential principles, since there’s less and less consensus on what even constitutes a fact. Much has been written about the Facebook algorithms that feed stories only to people with a predisposition to like them, and the related, ensuing tribalism that, rolling across decades, results in camps demonizing other camps for the crime of having a dissenting view, as though we’re not all Americans. Facebook is now implicated in the theft of its users’ personal information. The accounts of 50 million Facebook users were hacked by Cambridge Analytica (a Russian connection, again), in order to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 election. So add duplicity and deceit to tribalism.

Though the theft was in service of the Trump campaign, the larger phenomenon pre-dates Trump, who has merely exploited the already cracking cultural fissures for his own ambitions. As far back as 15 years ago, I felt like a living anachronism bemoaning the ugly, hostile tone of public discourse, even within in our own theater community, wondering why, if people have a dispute, their remedy of first resort must be to lash out on social media. Belittling, aggrieved, and sanctimonious: These are the prevailing sounds of our age, now tweeted loudest by the man who leads our nation, while most of those around him look on in some combination of consternation, dread, disbelief, and embarrassment.

Elīna Garanča

It was from weariness with the caustic sounds of our culture that I sought refuge in the voice of mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča, who performed at The Broad Stage early this month. Her repertoire for this concert tilted towards Spain – Ruperto Chapí, Pablo Luna, Gerónimo Giménez, Santiago Lope, Manuel Penella. I was actually grateful to not understand Spanish, and took pains to ignore the simultaneous English-language translation, to bypass the semantics of language in order to fully absorb, without distraction, the power of sound, and of tone.

With almost ostentatious vivacity, Karel Mark Chichon conducted the impeccable full orchestra in the Broad’s intimate hall. The statuesque Garanča, who looks a bit like a Latvian Renée Fleming, hardly said a word. Trying to articulate the richness of a voice is as pointless as trying to explain a vibration – other than to say that the blend of orchestra and voice was soul-restoring, life-affirming. Here’s a recording of Garanča singing Carceleras from Las Hijas del Zabedeo, which at the Broad she performed before the intermission break.

It was hard not to equate the power of the recital with the theater – the ensemble, the soliloquies, the compendium of voices combining into a larger Voice, or vision. For me, it was a revelation of how we in the theater – particularly in the U.S. and the U.K. – tend to invest in the primacy of the Word rather than of the Voice or the Sound or the Tone. It’s no coincidence that Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter; Molière, in verse; Calderón, in rhyming couplets. These greatest playwrights of their respective nations and eras understood that the way a play sounds is no less important that what it means. Perhaps the way a play sounds is what it means. Perhaps that’s why plays that insist on articulating their larger themes are so self-important and tiresome.

The meaning of the words, like the meaning of words in politics and maybe in families, is mere decoration or deflection, and sometimes pointless.

Phil Crowley and Nan McNamara in A WALK IN THE WOODS at Actors Co-op. (Photo by Matthew Gilmore)

It was through this prism that I viewed Lee Blessing’s A Walk in the Woods at Actors Co-op, and Grail Project, presented by Theatre Movement Bazaar at Bootleg Theater.

Blessing’s 1988 play, about the mercurial, forest-setting negotiations between a Russian diplomat (Phil Crowley) and an American diplomat (Nan McNamara) is as relevant as ever, 30 years after it was first produced. It’s a given that any fruitful outcome of these talks (which the American regards with naïve gravitas, the Russian with jocularity) are ultimately going to be torpedoed by the diplomats’ respective governments; everything else is a dance or, more to the point, a concerto for two violins. The Russian is more playful. He challenges the American to be frivolous, to enjoy the moments as they pass, to be a friend rather than a mere diplomat. The American finds all this gratingly silly, a diversion. The play’s psychology offers personal and political explanations for all this, but the larger takeaway is the music, which director Ken Sawyer directs with aplomb: Crowley’s impishness contrasted against McNamara’s elegant and sometimes stern comportment. It’s a theater-version of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins – one violin sets a theme, and the other dances around it, until they reverse roles. Then listen to Bach’s later adaptation of the same work for two pianos. Same notes, same lines, new actors, new voices, and the tone changes. And with the change in tone comes a shift in meaning.

Mark Skeens, David Guerra, Mark Doerr, Lamont Oakley, Kasper Svendsen, Jesse Myers, and (reclining) Prisca Kim in GRAIL PROJECT from Theatre Movement Bazaar. (Photo by Eric Gutierrez)

Grail Project (which will perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this coming August) is the latest nine-member ensemble performance, directed/choreographed by Tina Kronis and written by Richard Alger. It’s a style of performance they’ve been doing for decades, with many of the same actors. Kronis and Alger take an established text or legend – in this case, The Knights of the Round Table — then they fracture and choreograph it in a wistful style, peppering it with contemporary insights on topics ranging from consumerism to sexual politics. The show’s irony-filled humor comes partly from the punctuated cadences in Alger’s witty repartee, but largely from a sound design you might not notice. For example, in a brief riff on consumerism, playing as a backdrop is the opening solo bass opening to Tom Waits’s “Step Right Up” – it never gets to the lyric of Waits’ gravel-coated voice, which is so idiosyncratic, it would suffocate the intended subliminal effect. Rather the bass keeps recycling, propping up the sarcastic dialogue with a tone of piquancy. Forgive the broken record, but the tone is everything in the conveyance of the show’s meaning. (The ensemble consists of Mark Doerr, David Guerra, Prisca Kim, Jesse D. Myers, Lamont Oakley, Elle Parker, Paula Rebelo, Mark Skeens and Kasper Svendsen.)

While speaking to theater students at Cal State L.A., I played them the closing song of Hamilton (“Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story”) – pointing out the connection between rising emotional grip and the rising key signature, before transitioning, without comment, to the largo movement in Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins. One woman, on hearing the Bach, thought she was still in Hamilton, which I found exhilarating – the clear connection between what’s among our most popular musical forms (American hip hop) and 17^th century Baroque music. We heard more Baroque, voices dancing in fugue around a common motif, and then segued to “When the Saints Come Marching In” as performed by a Dukes of Dixieland band. Again, the rising key signatures. Again the cornucopia of voices dancing around a simple motif, seemingly about to fling out of orbit, until they return from chaos back to harmony. Is that not the hope for our times?

The late neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote a series of case studies in his book Musicophilia, in which he demonstrates how music is more primal than almost any of the other tools of perception, certainly more than language. One story tells of a man in his 40s, a rock music aficionado, who was one day struck by lightning in a phone booth. After a near-death experience, some memory issues subsided and he thought he was back to normal, when he suddenly felt the insatiable desire to listen to and then to compose classical music. He would hear piano music in his head, he would get up in the middle of the night to write it down – all this with no predisposition in his life to believe that he was musical in that way. A subtle rearrangement of some neurons due to the lightning strike had awakened subconscious, primal impulses.

I’m starting to believe that it’s through the prism of music and musicality that we absorb theater, and life. And that the pain of our times is less ideological than an awakening: The tone of discourse has become unbearable, and on some primitive level, our ache for harmony supersedes our penchant for chaos.