• We just had an incredibly exciting workshop where all of the American creatives and artists got to meet our Finnish counterparts for the first time for face-to-face interaction. What are your takeaways from this weekend.

The February 2018 workshop blew my mind. It was amazing to see the chorus sing and move around.

Honestly, that not something I’ve ever seen before. It was only a brief moment where the choir memorized a short passage, and then performed Antti’s choreography along with it, but it was very cool. I wish we workshopped everything in the world of concert music. It’s such a rare experience to be able to hear a piece “on its feet” before it’s prepared for performance.

I was thrilled (felt like I was on the right track) when The Crossing read through the fragments of the first four movements in December 2017, and then the first nine movements in February 2018. I really needed the feedback from Dan and Donald, and from the singers and accompanist. I needed to get a sense from the room of what was working and what wasn’t. I have a general sense of being in the ballpark with the variety of musical language(s) in the piece, though I’m still trying to figure out what the boundaries of genre and style are. How to define the musical idioms of the characters and the story with these instruments. I’m still trying to figure out how much “popular” music has a place in this score, and how far out to expand the vocal techniques. As I said earlier, this is a group that is comfortable doing just about any vocal style, extended techniques, and so forth, and there might be moments in this score where unusual vocal timbres would be utilized to great effect. I think, for me, that’s more of a 2^nd draft kind of discovery.

• Talk to us about this collaboration between you, The Crossing, and Klockrike on Aniara: fragments of time and space, and how you got connected with Donald and Dan.

It’s always exciting to begin a new collaboration. I’ve known Donald since 1992, and Dan and Donald have known each other for a long time as well. The two of them had agreed to work on Aniara with The Crossing and Klockriketeatern before I was brought on board as the composer. In August of 2017 the three of us met at Dan’s home in Porvoo, Finland, along with the actors of Klockriketeatern and the Finnish design team. We read through the draft of the libretto then, and discussed the project in general. It was an amazing two-day immersion into the collaborative process, and it was wonderful meeting Dan for the first time.

• Dan Henriksson is writing the libretto, which is an adaptation of Harry Martinson’s original text. Talk to us about the process of working with a collaborator on the text that you are setting to music, and how this influences the drama and music.

Dan’s libretto, like Martinson’s poem, is presented in fragments. We are creating a series of snap-shots in approximately 20 individual movements. The structural fragmentation presents interesting challenges to us as we navigate the through line of this 90-minute work. While there are clearly linear events (space ship Aniara takes off, it veers off course, and so forth) the piece is not really about the story as much as is it is a meditation on our purpose. Put a community of people on a ship that’s headed nowhere for the remainder of their lives, and what/who are they? What do they want? Who do they become? How do they feel? In a way, we’re already there – traveling on this spaceship Earth; where are we really headed as a community? It’s heady, philosophical stuff, and I’m enjoying floating around in the questions Aniara poses.

• You’ve written music for The Crossing before: your piece The Woman Where We Are Living was commissioned and premiered at The Month of Moderns in 2014. What’s going through your mind when you write for The Crossing?

Writing for The Crossing is a luxury. When Donald asked me if I wanted to work on this piece with him and Dan, I thought about it for maybe half a second and said “Yes!” Working on this piece is like preparing to make a meal, opening the refrigerator, and finding the perfect, most amazing ingredients. OK, that’s kind of a weird metaphor, but I enjoy cooking, and I like food, so maybe you might understand what I mean. The Crossing has a beautiful, other-worldly sound, and they’re loaded with talent and soul; there’s almost nothing I could conceive of that they can’t figure out how to do – so technique isn’t a consideration. This allows me to dream big, and dream of anything that drifts into my consciousness, or subconscious for that matter. As I’ve been writing this piece, I’ve been listening to their magnificent recordings, and one of the things I’m struck by is how fearless they are as musicians. One of the most rewarding experiences in professional career was hearing them sing the premiere of my work (The Woman Where We Are Living – 2014). It is one of the most deeply personal pieces I’ve ever written, and the care and beauty with which they presented the premiere felt like a gift.

• Talk to us about the instrumentation for Aniara: fragments of time and space. It’s a bit of a strange ensemble – why were those decisions made for specific instruments?

Aniara is currently scored for choir, 2 actors, dancer, and 4 instrumentalists. Everyone will be amplified, and we’ll be able to process all of the voices and instruments (with reverb, delay, distortion, etc.) The budget allowed for an instrumental quartet that would accompany the choir and actors. Donald, Dan and I began discussing the specifics of the instruments once I started writing music. The first choice was guitar because the opening movement is like a folk-song (musical excerpt?); Dan suggested that this might be a Kalevala tune (he sang one into my iPhone so I’d get the general idea) and the accompaniment would be like a drone, setting a nostalgic mood, recalling a memory of the beauty of where they had come from before the Earth (called Maa in our story) had been ravaged. So, the acoustic guitar came first. Later on, when I began writing the movement titled “Phototurb,” which is essentially about the nuclear bomb, I started wanting the grit and the drive of an electric guitar (with distortion, and perhaps even delay). After the guitar, we agreed on percussion, since Antti, our choreographer, has training in Beijing opera dance, and percussion is an integral element. Also, percussion can provide so many varied timbres and grooves that will drive the piece. Up till now, the percussion battery includes vibraphone, crotales, a make-shift drum kit, and some other hand percussion. In addition to the guitar and percussion, we wanted to add more lyrical, long-lined instruments, so we chose a string (cello) and a woodwind (clarinet), two of my favorite instruments. Clarinet was my first instrument after piano. Actually, to this point, I’ve solely written for bass clarinet, as that’s one of my favorite tone colors. Both instruments roughly cover the entire vocal range as well.

• Aniara: fragments of time and space is hard to classify in terms of genre. We’ve been using the term “choral-theatre”. What does this term mean to you and how does it fit into your body of work as a composer?

It’s hard to describe exactly what our adaptation of Aniara is as it relates to other works. The term for these kinds of pieces these days is “choral theatre,” though that’s hardly a well-established genre, and I don’t know that there are commonalities among the pieces that live in this interdisciplinary space. In Aniara, there are two actors who speak, sometimes with, sometimes without music being performed simultaneously. In our February 2018 workshop, we began exploring movement and dance by the choir, sometimes when they were silent, and sometimes when they were singing. It was thrilling and new (for me!). In the final production there will be costumes, projections, sound design, lighting, and so forth. There is clearly a story, and there is an over-arching journey that will last about 90-minutes. I have been relying on my experience as a musical dramatist who frequently works in the genre of musical theatre to envision scenes and fragments for this piece. I’ve been trying to think about song forms and dramatic structures that work well on stage; that add up to something larger than the individual movements and moments. Add to that the setting of the future and outer space, with the chorus as inhabitants aboard an enormous spacecraft – well, we’re just not in Kansas anymore.

• Talk to us about where you are at currently in the process of thinking about Aniara: fragments of time and space. What’s on your mind at this moment?

I’d very much like to present a deep dive into a specific musical moment, but I’m hesitant to do so at this stage because I feel like I’m still figuring out the trajectory of the whole. I keep having this uneasy feeling that there’s going to be a moment when I realize, “Oh wait, I need to re-think everything from the start.” Hopefully that’s not actually true, but I know I won’t feel entirely comfortable with my work on the piece until I’ve written a draft of the score that takes us all the way through to the end. I tend to write in broad strokes at first, and then go back and refine and reshape. It helps me to see the forest rather than focusing on the trees. I’m hoping in the next few months to have a complete draft!

1.

There are small stories and there are big stories. And then there is Aniara – the earthly lovestory, placed in cosmic solitude. The legend of the human race, who ruined its only home, the blue planet. A story about the hubris of man and the end of the world. About the longing for Paradise.

The space ship Aniara, with eight thousand souls in need of comfort and coherence, dashes through the sea of space, like a bubble of air in the glass of a bowl – infinitely slow, without a goal.

The goldonder Aniara – one of thousands alike – is loaded with emigrants leaving Earth, with Mars as intended destination. They are refugees in space, from a desolated planet, destroyed by themselves.

Does it sound all too familiar?
I had in mind a paradise for them
but when leaving the one we ruined 
the night of empty space became our sole home
a never-ending chasm where no god would hear us

Aniara veers off course and heads out into the cosmos. Outer space seems bigger and different laws apply. Who are we and where are we heading? When we believe there is an answer, we soon realize that the unknown also expanded.

The Chief Astronomer gives a lecture on board Aniara:
We’re coming to suspect now that our drift
is even deeper than we first believed,
that knowledge is a blue naiveté
[assuming] the Mystery to have a structure

2.

Aniara (1956) is the magnum opus of Swedish author Harry Martinson, and the work which gave him the Nobel Prize in literature, almost twenty years after the publication. In the summer of 1953 he managed to get an image of the Andromeda galaxy in his telescope. He later recalled this encounter as a moment of inspiration. It was a decisive impulse for his imagination, a strong experience and insight. He dictated the first third of Aniara during a couple of summer weeks, in a poetic outburst, with his wife writing down the words. His impotent rage was channeled in a therapeutic session.

A word for powerlessness (vanmakt in Swedish) is quite frequent in Martinson’s texts. His conscience would today be described as global. He was tormented by despair at the Second World War and especially the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and at the Soviet hydrogen bomb a few years later.

The Nobel Prize (1974) was awarded for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos. In Harry Martinson’s entire output, love for nature and the earth is a continuous theme. The wonder of the dew drop.

Between the poetry of your heart and the poppy
there is a contract
written by the wind and signed
by perishability.
It is written with the quill of a crane
dipped in the blood of a mayfly

In the space epos Aniara we still have Earth in focus – the blue planet mirrored in the cosmos. Aniara is a cosmic tale about humanity at the grand crossroads. Martinson gave Aniara the subtitle a review of man in time and space.

More than sixty years later, the reader is blinded by how much the poem was ahead of his time. On board we have artificial intelligence, a source for possibilities and comfort – mima is a telegrator; had invented half herself. The book is a cry of distress, born out of confrontation with the threat of nuclear weapons –  they cry out of stones with Cassandra.

Martinson sees the global impact of environment pollution. He plays with the technical development, seducing and destroying. Space becomes the stage for a science fiction adventure. Man in search of himself, and at the same time the universal threat remains.

There is protection from near everything
from fire and damages by storm and frost,
do add whichever blows may come to mind.
But there is no protection from mankind.

3.

A couple of years ago we were with Donald Nally – The Crossing’s conductor – strolling on a beach down the Jersey shore on a windy day in July. Aniara popped up as a thought, as material for the new piece we were sketching out. Aniara examines several of the themes we wanted to explore. “Why didn’t I know of this book!” was his reaction soon after, when he had read the book.

Aniara is a distillate of one hundred and three songs, written on verse in a rich and poetic Swedish – the reason it is such a challenge to translate it to other languages. Like all great art Aniara contains an ambiguous explanation. There is a struggle between light and darkness. To interpret the deeper meanings is a never-ending play with thoughts.

How does one read beyond Harry Martinson’s boyish curiosity about science fiction? His fictitious technical jargon and the breathtaking dimensions of the space adventure crash with astronomical inconsistencies. Curved space glides over in religious images.

The mythical level drowns rational objections. The dream is sometimes light as the Nordic summer night, in the next moment we meet a coal-black sun. We find archeological and paleontological fragments, the Ice Age settles. Did climate change happen when man with radiation poisoned and overshadowed the sun?

Aniara examines the development of the collective. The space ship is, like the earth it left behind, filled with human pettiness. One can recognize the need for affiliation, context, nearness and love in all its shapes. Dictators from the past are present. Detention cells, camps and execution plutoons are mirrored against Vasco da Gama and the walls of Niniveh in an ancient golden era. Cults, rites and religions seem as comic they can be from a distance, while human inside the collective is burning.

Aniara is a cosmic tale about humanity at the grand crossroads. That is why also the song about the Samaritan’s humanity and collection of funds for aid stations is included, to show possible paths. The longing for love is a continuous theme. But what is the style the poet switches to, when he dives in to the lust of the body, looking for comfort in the womb?

A classic work is one that is in a dialogue with the present, with the here and now of the reader. When I write these lines my mother has very recently passed away. The very last moment, a diminuendo into death, opened up another interpretation of the song of parting on board of Aniara:

Not visible for our eyes she drifted away
to the region of the Cardinal Numbers
with laws and reserves to be called upon
when Chance is installed and inspired
– –
When your loved one reaches the Gate of Death
Space seems colder and more brutal than before

When your beloved has reached the door of death, space stands out harder and more cruel than before. The Mystery has many names. Martinson did not confess to any particular religion, but it is obvious to find traces of both taoism and buddhism. The epic poem Aniara ends in an expectation of liberation.

And Nirvana’s current rinsed us all.

Aniara was born out of wonderment, but probably even more out of powerless despair. To me comfort and inspiration are hidden in the thought that mankind can support the future of the Earth.

I want to make pieces that help me make sense of the chaos.
I want to make pieces that remind us of the wonder of the Earth, even as we threaten that wonder.
I want to make pieces that allow me to see the world, and my emotional reactions to it, with greater clarity.
I want to make pieces that allow me to understand those emotions.

Aniara is doing – will do – these things.

I suppose a blog by its nature begins with the “I.” I always hope that the pieces The Crossing inspires reduce or eliminate the “I,” as Celan says:

a language not for you and not for me—because, I ask you, for whom is it meant, the earth, not for you, I say, is it meant, and not for me—a language, well, without I and without You, nothing but He, nothing but It, you understand, and She, nothing but that.”1

But the task at hand is to write about my experience in developing Aniara, so I am the “I,” for better or worse. So begins the record of the journey.  

As I have wandered through my crazy journey of opportunities, missed or embraced, I have occasionally encountered minds that I recognize as having similar ideas about art, theatre, music, and even life. These are the people I want to return to; I want to live with them artistically, through projects we care about. The artists of The Crossing represent a group of such people.  Dan Henriksson and Rob Maggio are such people.

I met Dan on a production of Verdi’s Macbeth at Opera Philadelphia. He was primarily in charge of shaping the scraggly band of witches and, as chorus master, they were my wards.  His work began with character definitions, dispensing of a (sadly) common approach to opera choruses, in which the chorus is treated as singular personality, not a group of individuals.  With Dan, we dug deeply into Shakespeare’s characters, their reason for being, our similarities and differences. There was Verdi to contend with as well; his work with librettists Francesco Maria Piave and  Andrea Maffei to distill the persons, relationships, and scenes of a complex play with a lot of words into compact musical contexts that sharpen our understanding.  The witches and I quickly came to love the work, the team, Dan. We recognized a shared respect for author and composer, a desire to get to the root of their art and deliver just that. As the production came to a close, we said goodbye to Dan and he headed back to Finland, but with a pact that we would someday work together again.

Fifteen years later, we finally found our project: Aniara.   Changes in our country, and our increasing divisions, inspired a feeling of urgency to bring together The Crossing with Dan’s company, Klockriketeatern in Helsinki, and create something unique.  The Crossing was ready: the chaos of Jeff’s death was passing, the enormity of Seven Responses was waning, and we needed another big project to push us, make us grow, ask questions, force our organization to build better infrastructure, and challenge the feeling of comfort in having established a recognizable artistic profile. (Status.  It opens doors, but it can close minds.) I knew joining hands with a group of theatre folks from Helskinki who recently traveled Europe dressed as the Three Musketeers, singing songs to people on the streets, would provide that challenge. Dispelling skepticism, I pointed to Klockrike’s dizzyingly creative productions of classics like Uncle Vanya to assure my friends I wasn’t nuts.  The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage encouraged us, recognizing that there is a little “nuts” in all big ideas.

Aniara was Dan’s suggestion and it has quickly proved a perfect vehicle for some of the theatrical questions I aimed to investigate.  We want to make a piece that explores the intersection of music and theatre. Sure, it’s been done before. Opera, for example. Choral theatre, for another. But, I’ve grown weary of seeing performances in which one medium – for example theatre – is dressed in the art of another – for example choral music – and the results are a dissatisfying acceptance of various levels of discomfort for performer and observer.  We want to find out what happens when a particular type of choral ensemble and a particular type of theatrical approach intersect; what works, what doesn’t, what are the frictions, how to overcome discomforts or acknowledge them and use them.

I first read Martinson’s Aniara in one sitting. It’s a kind of simple presentation, presented in 103 cantos; on the surface, they read as

This happened
I felt
I remember
Life went on despite…

Even reading that little distillation I see a certain recognizable melancholy that invades the work and captured my imagination.  The book is more relevant today than Martinson may have imagined it could be when he finished in 1956, though, it’s not so much nuclear Armageddon we fear, it’s our destruction of the resources that make human life possible, and our inability to engage humanity’s great tool, imagination, to fully understand and reverse that.

But, what initially struck me – moved me – about Martinson’s work is the feeling that on this ship – a large gondola for 8000 refugees of Earth, headed to a distant constellation that all on board know they will never reach –  there is a palpable presence of love that has no direction. Love that can fill know vessel; an environment with a cultural aversion to receiving. It feels so relevant to the fears we live with and the cruelty almost systematically reinforced by our own government – a numbing disregard for the benefits of giving and receiving.  The little voice (in the vastness of space) of Aniara’s narrator is also grappling with the systems and organizations of their culture, his own vast pool of feelings and their suppressions, and the rise of an authoritarian regime in the claustrophobia of their hopeless world. But one can feel that love lies underneath his thoughts, his actions, his need to write.  His story plays out against a tide of brilliant philosophical and artistic ideas, while the vastness of space unfolds before them in ways they could not have imagined back on Earth.

Surely, the origin of Aniara lies in warning: we have one Earth, we are the unelected curators of it, it will continue to spin without us, our destiny lies with us. Martinson notes:

The strangest omens would be seen in space
but, since they were unsuited to the program
of our day, they were promptly forgotten. 2

But the work moves far beyond this warning; like most great art, it is a story about us.

The initial development of our Aniara coincided with the passing of both of my parents over an eighteen-month period.  The grace of Martinson’s story and his words were perhaps magnified for me at that time and I realize that we are also making a piece about his simplest premise: leaving home.  Alongside the complex scenes in which catastrophe strikes; authoritarians rise; suicide strikes closely; rage, hope, and fear become indistinguishable; and love slowly disintegrates, is a truth we all share: at some point, we can no longer go home. In fact, like the Lost of Aniara, we are all, always, moving away from home.  And the farther we wander away in our own space and time, the greater the desire to remember – to capture the images of a time when things were simpler. Perhaps, when they felt secure. A time we owned.

And yet, the narrator of Aniara persists in his need to tell his story, to understand his world, and to remember. As do we.  

When someone you have loved has reached death’s door
Space stands harder and more brutal than before. 3

What a gift, to tell stories with friends.

May 6, 2018

1. Conversation in the mountains, Paul Celan, From Collected Prose, trans. By Rosemarie Waldrop, The Sheep Meadow Press, 1986.

2. Canto 87, Aniara; a Review of Man in Time and Space, Harry Martinson, trans. Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg, Story Line Press, 1999. (Subsequent references from this edition.)

3.  Canto 89, Aniara.

In my next blog, I’ll talk a bit about Rob Maggio – our history, and his vital role in Aniara.