Du Yun (1977- )

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    A Penetrating Cry in the Dark at the Prototype Festival

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    This year’s iteration marks a joyous return to theaters for the festival, which was canceled last year.A cry in the dark, gentle yet penetrating.At some moment in time immemorial, emerging from some creature, that sound must have been made: A voice was being used to make drama, and — eons before 16th-century Italy — opera was truly born.So it feels like a connection to the very roots of the art form when “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning],” Gelsey Bell’s wonderful, uncategorizable guide to what might unfold on Earth in the millions and billions of years after human history, begins with exactly such a gentle, penetrating cry in the dark; a slippery hum from singers, the barest shuffle of clapping, then lights.Presented by the bold, invaluable Prototype festival of new music-theater at HERE Arts Center in SoHo, “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning]” is an intimate storytelling ritual, a kind of campfire tale that offers a look far beyond the future as we generally perceive it.Dressed in commune-style thrift-store pattern clashes on a barely adorned cork stage in front of just over 100 people, Bell and four other performers sing and play modest instruments and objects including drizzles of water and marbles swirling in bowls; simple synthesizers; a hand-held Celtic harp and a bowed wooden daxophone.The group doesn’t ever make clear the catastrophe that has wiped out human existence. (“Within the first few hours,” we are told for a start, “millions of dogs have peed in places they’d rather not.”) But in song and speech, Bell, Ashley Pérez Flanagan, Justin Hicks, Aviva Jaye and Paul Pinto describe — poetically, prosaically, funnily, heartbreakingly — the stages of rewilding, decomposition and evolution to come.Obviously ominous but ultimately sly and sweet, wistful and winsome and altogether lovable, the 90-minute show, directed by Tara Ahmadinejad, recalls the wordless collective solemnity of Meredith Monk, the enigmatic texts and yarn-spinning ability of Laurie Anderson, and the folksy keening, shading into luminous pop sweetness, of the Duncan Sheik of “Spring Awakening.” Bell is also an experienced performer in Robert Ashley’s pathbreaking operas, to which she nods here with the use of wry, matter-of-fact speaking (sometimes in airily musical cadences) over gently woozy drones.Prototype began presenting small-scale but high-impact, carefully considered and often exciting work 10 years ago. Organized by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, it filled a niche for experimental yet professionally produced opera, much of it staged in intimate black-box-style venues, and its record of accomplishment has grown distinguished: Two Prototype shows, Du Yun and Royce Vavrek’s “Angel’s Bone” and Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “Prism,” have won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.This year’s iteration, which runs through Jan. 15, marks a joyous return to theaters for the festival, which was almost entirely virtual in 2021 and was canceled last year because of the Omicron wave. The loss of Prototype 2022 felt especially sharp because classical music and its stylistic descendants were otherwise largely spared in an outbreak that wreaked more havoc on dance and theater.Emma O’Halloran’s “Mary Motorhead” is a monodrama featuring Naomi Louisa O’Connell in the raconteur title role.Maria BaranovaThe work Prototype has presented has ranged widely, but over a decade a kind of house style (or at least stereotype) has emerged. The subject matter leans toward the politically charged and emotionally brutal, extreme even by operatic standards of suffering. Electronics are often in the mix, as is amplification even in tiny theaters, and the music tends rock-inflected and intense — and often just plain loud, with a shouting-in-your-face urgency that can be thrilling from some artists, wearying from others.Despite a couple of crashing moments, though, the three premieres over this year’s first weekend kept the volume fairly moderate. (Silvana Estrada’s “Marchita” and David Lang’s “note to a friend” open later this week, and the animated opera “Undine” is streaming.)Even without (too much) screaming, the intensity rarely flags in Emma O’Halloran’s two-hour double bill about the down and out and desperate for connection, “Trade/Mary Motorhead” — to librettos by her uncle, the actor and writer Mark O’Halloran — at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side.Directed by Tom Creed, both operas offer virtuosic showcases for daring singing actors. “Mary Motorhead” is a monodrama featuring the vivid, charismatic Naomi Louisa O’Connell in the raconteur title role of a woman in prison for killing her husband. In “Trade,” set in a hotel room where two men — one older, one younger — are meeting for sex, the Broadway veteran Marc Kudisch and the tenor Kyle Bielfield are fiercely committed as they toggle between aggression and tenderness.With Elaine Kelly conducting the ensemble NOVUS NY, O’Halloran shapes lucid, communicative vocal lines; the text always sings out. “Mary Motorhead” finds its protagonist sometimes angry, sometimes exhausted; “Trade” has the relentlessly, effectively weepy emotionalism of Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which recently played at the Metropolitan Opera, but is more affecting without the Met work’s overblown trappings.O’Halloran rides these stories’ waves of feeling with some squealing electric guitar riffs, but Du Yun’s “In Our Daughter’s Eyes” — a collaboration with the librettist and director Michael Joseph McQuilken and the baritone Nathan Gunn at Baruch Performing Arts Center in Kips Bay — has more of the chamber-metal spirit that is a Prototype trademark.Structured as a series of diary entries written by an expectant father who struggles to avoid falling off the wagon after learning that his unborn child has catastrophic health problems, the work (and Maruti Evans’s set) has a naturalistic core but also dreamlike flights. Gunn, once a hunky star in Mozart and Britten, is now in his early 50s and the physical and temperamental embodiment of the earnest American dad. He’s masculinity incarnate, in all its confidence and anxieties — direct, sonorous and conversational even as the tragedy builds.The score is intriguingly varied and eccentric: sometimes spare yet warm, as in a clever passage bringing together cello and muted trumpet; sometimes noirish Badalamenti-style cool vamping; sometimes chilly instrumental squiggles and shards; and sometimes exploding in raucous, frantic energy.Du Yun’s “In Our Daughter’s Eyes” is a collaboration with the librettist and director Michael Joseph McQuilken and the baritone Nathan Gunn at Baruch Performing Arts Center.Maria BaranovaThe more blaringly rock passages have much in common with “Black Lodge,” McQuilken’s recent, wailing collaboration with the composer David T. Little, which premiered in Philadelphia a few months ago. As in that piece, the music here is rather more interesting than the text, which could use a little more subtlety. And the 75-minute length is palpable in a one-man show; “Mary Motorhead,” by comparison, lasts a compact 30.Despite a bit of lag toward the end, “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning],” felt considerably tighter, without losing its charmingly patient way of unfolding. One of its most memorable scenes is a wittily nostalgic look back at humans and their habits, once the Anthropocene has been left far behind: “I liked their sustaining fealty to two-dimensional imagery in rectangle frames,” one line goes.The quiet climax of the piece is a song that relishes the moral that “nothing lasts forever.” Climate change is the work’s unspoken context, of course, and Bell offers a considerably more accepting (indeed, Zen-ly optimistic) vision of its deadly consequences than the current liberal consensus — something closer to that early-pandemic fantasy that “nature is healing.” Disaster is a fait accompli, Bell seems to be saying, so why not embrace what’s to come?But is the piece’s implication that control over our destiny is an illusion and resistance is (at best) futile complicit in climate denialism? I’m not sure, and that question is why “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning]” left me smiling yet unsettled. And wanting to hear it again: Bring out a recording, please. 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      Du Yun Revisits Her Early Music Theater at NYU Skirball

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      A program at NYU Skirball pairs “Zolle” and “A Cockroach’s Tarantella,” youthful works from when the composer felt “like a fish out of water.”When the composer Du Yun was a doctoral student at Harvard in the early 2000s, she felt like a fish out of water.“Very much out of water,” Du Yun, 44, said in a recent interview. “It was my first time not in a conservatory setting since I was 6.”But Du Yun — now the Pulitzer Prize-winning conjurer of exhilaratingly elusive and often moving sound worlds — did have a rich community of artistic collaborators. She was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, the group of new-music specialists started in 2001 by the flutist Claire Chase, a fellow Oberlin conservatory graduate. And when the ensemble had an opportunity to create an original work of theater, Du Yun, who was resistant to opera, instead wanted to stage a set of songs.“I just began writing stories,” she said, as an exercise. “And then I used those stories for a kind of structure.”Fanciful, allegorical and open to interpretations personal and political, they became “Zolle,” which premiered in 2005. A tale of a wandering soul in the afterlife, it was followed a few years later by a work set in what Du Yun sees as a preparational “before-life”: “A Cockroach’s Tarantella,” a fable about a pregnant cockroach’s longing and plans to become human. Now, the two have been paired — an interplay that casts both in a new light — for a diptych that will be presented at NYU Skirball on Friday and Saturday.In the early months of the pandemic, Du Yun recorded “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” with the JACK Quartet, the players accompanying her narration in elevated speech. Its sense of yearning for another, freer life was freshly affecting at a time when the album could be heard only at home in isolation. (In 2021, Los Angeles Opera made a digital short called “The Zolle Suite.”)With the return of live performance, “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” and “Zolle” were staged together in October at the Lucerne Theater in Switzerland, directed by Roscha A. Säidow, who also did the surreal scenic and costume design. Du Yun acted as the narrator, and another vocalist took on the role in “Zolle” she had previously sung.That production is being adapted for Skirball, played by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, with Du Yun storytelling onstage and, again, a new singer: Satomi Matsuzaki, from the rock band Deerhoof. In an interview after a recent rehearsal, Du Yun spoke about how the two works speak to each other, and to different audiences, and what it’s like to revisit them now. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.What makes “Zolle” and “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” a diptych?Before I finished “Zolle,” I just thought it was so melancholic, because it starts with this woman being dead, and it has to do with so many sorrows, and she’s stuck in her memories. And then I realized: You know what? I need to write a really funny piece — sort of like a “life before” thing.Stylistically they are quite different.There is a small musical relation, but other than that I wanted to have a contrast. In “Zolle,” the writing is very full-bodied, with a group of instruments and singers. But I wanted “Cockroach” to be simple: a string quartet that behaves like one instrument, with a narrator.I also want to tell you, I was doing horribly at Harvard with writing fugues. They were like, You have to write a Bach fugue. And I was like, Why can’t it be a Du Yun-style fugue? I grew up and memorized all this Bach; it’s in my head and it’s in my hand. But I never understood why on these tests it had to be resolved a certain way. So in “Zolle” there’s a bit of Baroque style, and that was my way of proving that I could do it, and do it my way.Kamna Gupta, right, rehearsing members of the International Contemporary Ensemble ahead of the Skirball performances.Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesThese invite a lot of different interpretations. I’ve seen “A Cockroach’s Tarantella” compared to Kafka, for example, though on the surface it seems more like “Rusalka” or “The Little Mermaid.”It was much more “Little Mermaid,” right? Wanting to be human and let go of who she was, and then having that struggle. When I wrote it, I was also very frustrated with the idea of heaven — the idea of it, the betterment, the pursuit of happiness. I’ve written this before: At the time, I was living in government-subsidized housing that had a lot of cockroaches, so I became fascinated by them and learned that, you know, they can just release eggs for their entire life. It’s kind of mind-boggling.So like “Zolle” had people thinking about immigration and belonging, “Cockroach” had funny moments but hit audiences differently. You can see it as being about this female body thing, but I also have a Chinese version of it, and women in their 30s and 40s were really crying when they saw it because of lines like “I want to be pregnant out of love.”Right. For all its levity, it’s actually profound.It’s very profound.And I feel like, standing alone, each piece can be open to X and Y reading. But pairing them changes that. The “Tarantella” has so much hope and defiance, but when you follow it with the lonely afterlife of “Zolle,” it becomes devastating.Audiences connect with these however they do. But I want to mention that when we recorded the digital short of “Zolle” for LA Opera and I was narrating some of the portions, I got really, really emotional. I was thinking about Asian hate, and it really got to me because this piece was almost 20 years ago and it still rings so true. There is a line of saying something like “I am an immigrant, even in this ghost world.” Then I realized it’s something that me, you know, as an immigrant I will always carry with me. [Du Yun was born in Shanghai and moved to the United States to study at Oberlin.]What else are you feeling as you revisit these works?You know, this is the International Contemporary Ensemble’s 20th anniversary season. We feel like 100 years old, but we’re also transitioning into another era with George Lewis as the new leader.But this was the first stage production the International Contemporary Ensemble ever did. So even though they’re moving into different models and we’re bringing in Satomi — I’m a big fan of Deerhoof — this feels like a kind of homecoming. Which is fitting, because these pieces are really about homecoming. Homecoming, but also sending off as well. More

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      Asian Composers Reflect on Careers in Western Classical Music

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      For all their shared experiences, each of these five artists has a unique story of struggles and triumphs.Asian composers who write in Western classical musical forms, like symphonies and operas, tend to have a few things in common. Many learned European styles from an early age, and finished their studies at conservatories there or in the United States. And many later found themselves relegated to programming ghettos like Lunar New Year concerts. (One recent study found that works by Asian composers make up only about 2 percent of American orchestral performances planned for the coming season.)At times, the music of Asian composers has been misunderstood or exoticized; they have been subjected to simple errors such as, in the case of Huang Ruo, who was born in China, repeated misspellings of his name.For all their shared experiences, each of these artists has a unique story. Here, five of them provide a small sampling of the lessons, struggles and triumphs of composers who were born in Asia and made a career for themselves in Western classical music. These are edited excerpts from interviews with them.Tan DunMusic is my language. To me “West” and “East” are just ways of talking — or like ways of cooking. I’m a chef, and sometimes I find my recipe is like my orchestrations. It would be so boring if you asked me to cook in one style. Eastern and Western, then, have for me become a unique recipe in which one plus one equals one.I am in a very special zone historically. I’m 63, and part of the first generation of Eastern composers after the Cultural Revolution to deal with Western forms. But it’s just like rosemary, butter and vegetables. You can cook this way, that way — and that’s why the same orchestras sound so different, from Debussy to Stravinsky to myself.I’m lucky. When I came to the United States as a student, my teachers and classmates gave me enormous encouragement to discover myself. And I learned so much from John Cage. After this, it felt so easy to compose. And when people approach me for commissions, I re-approach them about what I’m thinking about. I remember when Kurt Masur asked me to write something for the New York Philharmonic — the Water Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra — I said, “Can I write something for water?” He said, “As long as you don’t flood our orchestra.”Yes, we often are misunderstood. It’s like when you cook beautiful black bean with chili sauce and chocolate. They may say, “Hey, this is a little strange.” But you explain why, and that can be very interesting. Thank God I love to talk. And there has been progress for us. I am the first Eastern composer to be the dean of a Western conservatory, at Bard. That’s like a Chinese chef becoming the chef of an Italian restaurant. That’s the future: a different way of approaching color, boundary-less, a unity of the soul.Du Yun”If I’m a spokesperson,” Du Yun said, “it’s for my own voice.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesOne thing about composers like Tan Dun: They came out of the Cultural Revolution, after a door had closed for so many years. So there was so much focus on what China was doing, a lot of curiosity — curiosity rather than active racism. Our generation — I’m 44 — is so different.We learn Western music with such rigorous systems. And we do not close our ears to different traditions or styles; that attitude determines early on that you don’t have that kind of boundary, or ownership. But you still hear those conversation topics about “East meets West.” It’s so tiring. East has been meeting West for thousands of years; if we’re always still just meeting, that’s a problem.Programming Chinese composers around Lunar New Year is in general very problematic. Do we need to celebrate the culture? Yes. Do we need to celebrate the tradition? Absolutely. But it can be part of the main subscription series, or a yearlong series. Then you can really tell stories, not just group people by a country.My name does not give me ownership of Chinese culture. There are so many things I don’t know. There are so many burdens and fights — as the woman, the woman of color, the Chinese woman — that I decided to fight nothing and just create my own stuff. I told myself that if I had a great body of work, that would speak to what a Chinese woman can do.I never wanted to be pigeonholed, to be a reduced representation. I wanted to always open that Pandora’s box of messiness — and I encourage others to celebrate messiness, the unclean narrative of your life. Every immigrant has her own path; your work should absolutely be reflective of that. So if I’m a spokesperson, it’s for my own voice. And through that particular voice, I hope there is something that resonates.Bright ShengWhen someone asks Bright Sheng whether he’s a Chinese or American composer, he responds, “100 percent both.”Nora Tam/South China Morning Post, via Getty ImagesWhen I left China, it was a time of economic and, in a different way, cultural reform. I’m glad I came to the United States, but I do have a little bit of guilt. I probably could have done more there. But my agenda was to try to learn Western music and become the best pianist, conductor and composer I could be. I was fortunate to meet Leonard Bernstein, and I was under his wing for five years. Now, at 65, when someone asks me if I consider myself a Chinese or American composer, I say, in the most humble way, “100 percent both.” I’m well-versed in both cultures.There has been racism and misunderstanding, but that is inevitable. Would that be different if there were Asian people running orchestras? Yes, of course. My response has just been to try to write the best music I can. I wrote an opera for San Francisco Opera — “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which they’re reviving. It’s a very popular Chinese story, and when I worked on it with David Henry Hwang, we asked ourselves: “Is this for a Western audience or Eastern audience?” We decided first and foremost it should just be good, and it had to be touching. Good music transcends.For example, a piece of mine, “H’un (Lacerations),” premiered at the 92nd Street Y in New York. It is subtitled “In Memoriam 1966-1976” — about the Cultural Revolution — and it is very harsh and dramatic, with no melody. My mother was there, and she said it brought back a lot of painful memories. I was also sitting next to this very old Jewish woman, and after I took a bow onstage, she leaned over and said, “If you changed the title to ‘Auschwitz,’ this would be just as appropriate.” That was the highest compliment.Unsuk Chin“I believe in multiple identities and think that without curiosity,” Unsuk Chin said, “any style or any musical culture atrophies and risks becoming a museum.”Julie Glassberg for The New York TimesThe Korea of my childhood and adolescence was a very different place from what it is today. In the 1960s, it was an impoverished developing country, devastated by colonialism and by the Korean War, and until the late 1980s, there was a military dictatorship in place. In order to develop as a composer, one had to go abroad, as there didn’t exist an infrastructure for new music. Now 60, and having lived for 35 years in Europe, it remains important for me to contribute to the contemporary music scene in Asia.When I moved to Germany, there was a tendency to put composers in certain boxes, with all the aesthetic turf wars back then. Since I was neither interested in joining any camp or fashionable avant-garde or other trends, fulfilling exotic expectations, or assumptions of how a woman should or should not compose, I had to start a career in other countries while still living in Germany. Prejudices such as viewing an Asian composer or performing musician only through “sociological” lenses are still relatively common in various countries, but times are changing. Of course, there exist prejudices and complacency in the whole world, including in Asia. Perhaps the only remedy to this apparently, and sadly, all-too-human impulse is try to retain a sense of wonder and attempt to find distance to oneself.I have worked in different countries for decades, and have felt a need to stay curious about different musical cultures, traditions and genres. I believe in multiple identities and think that without curiosity, any musical style or culture atrophies and risks becoming a museum: Art has always thrived when there has been cross-fertilization.At the same time, one should be wary of the danger of exoticism and superficial cultural appropriation. I think that a contemporary composer needs to study different cultures, traditions and genres, but make use of those influences in a selective, historically conscious and self-critical manner.Huang RuoHuang Ruo said that if he spoke English with an accent, he composed with one, too.Rathkopf PhotographyWhen people heard I came from China, they would often say, “Does your music sound like Tan Dun?” I don’t think they meant any harm, but it shows a certain ignorance. I tried to explain that China is a big country, and we all speak with our own voice.I started as an instrumental composer, and a lot of those works got programmed at Asian-themed or Lunar New Year concerts. I didn’t notice at first, but you begin to see patterns. I don’t feel my work has any less quality than my other colleagues who are not minority composers, but for conductors, programmers and artistic directors, it doesn’t seem to come to their mind that you can naturally program an Asian composer’s work next to Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.That’s one of the reasons I turned to opera. I thought, there must be no opera company having a themed season devoted to Asian composers. So finally, I got to be programmed next to “Fidelio” and “Madama Butterfly.” That was my revenge. Also, I’ve wanted to write on subjects that reflect Asian or Asian American topics, to really share these stories. In this case it is actually me making the choice.Someone once told me I speak English with an accent. I said, “Otherwise, how would you know that’s me speaking?” I feel the same way as a composer. I want to have my own originality, to speak with my own accent — with my love of Western musical styles, but also this heritage I carry of Chinese culture.Without coming to the United States, I would be a different composer. If I went to Europe instead, I would also be very different. But I feel I made the right decision, and at 44 I fully embrace who I am today, and where I am as well. More