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    A Work of Mourning Comes to New York, With No Rothkos in Sight

    Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” written for the Rothko Chapel in Houston, becomes longer and grander for the Park Avenue Armory.Few pieces of music are as tied to the place where they premiered as Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife).”Commissioned to honor the 50th anniversary of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Sorey’s work was first heard in February in that intimate room, surrounded by Mark Rothko’s brooding late canvases. But the site specificity goes deeper: “Monochromatic Light” closely echoes the instrumentation and the mournful, glacial style of Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” written for the space soon after it opened in the early 1970s.Sorey’s work wouldn’t seem fit for any other setting. But along with the chapel and the Houston arts organization DaCamera, the Park Avenue Armory commissioned the work, and from Tuesday through Oct. 8, “Monochromatic Light” will be presented there — with no Rothkos in sight.“We decided we wouldn’t try to recreate the experience of the Rothko Chapel,” Sorey said in an interview. “You can’t do that anywhere. You can’t redo that situation.”The Armory’s vast drill hall dwarfs the chapel, where “Monochromatic Light” was given a straightforward, concert-style presentation. The New York production, staged by the veteran director Peter Sellars, has grown to match.An octagonal playing space, nodding to the shape of the chapel in Houston, has been constructed within the drill hall. The audience — about 600, versus 150 at the premiere — is seated in the round and surrounded by eight paintings by another abstractionist, Julie Mehretu, blown up to billboard-size dimensions. A dancer is stationed in front of each painting, sinuously twisting and bending in the Brooklyn-born street dance style called flex.An octagonal performance space that nods to the Rothko Chapel in Houston has been constructed inside the Armory’s drill hall.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesSorey has added to the piece itself, bringing its length to almost 90 minutes, from 50 minutes in Houston, particularly broadening the music for the pianist Sarah Rothenberg. She also plays celesta (the only keyboard instrument in the Feldman) and is joined in the center of the space by the violist Kim Kashkashian, the percussionist Steven Schick, and Sorey, as conductor.Sorey said he knew earlier this year that “Monochromatic Light” hadn’t yet reached its final form, but simply didn’t have enough time before the premiere to write more. And the rehearsal process in New York, particularly the addition of the dancers, had inspired him.“At the Houston performances, while I was very satisfied, I felt I needed more of this experience,” he said. “In terms of having more material and developing off what we did at the chapel, now I’m at a place where it’s like, we’ve left the chapel. I’m dealing with everything the chapel stood for, but also things we’re dealing with now.”His additions had arrived in the musicians’ email inboxes just a few hours before a rehearsal on Sept. 14, on an upper floor of the Armory. The stress level in the room was high. But the meditative music, with its spacious if unsettling quiet, gradually brought down the blood pressure.With mock-ups of the Mehretu paintings on the walls, a few dancers stood in for what would eventually be the full complement of eight, while four singers — one for each voice part — represented the choir of Trinity Wall Street. The choreographer, Reggie Gray, a flex innovator also known as Regg Roc, sat to the side watching, and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines slowly walked around the space, intoning the score’s vocalizations, which can evoke fragments of the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”Tyshawn Sorey, center right, conducting his work, which he has expanded to 90 minutes for the Armory production.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesSellars occasionally called out cues to the dancers, representing shifts in mood that would be reflected in the staging by dramatic changes in the lighting on the paintings. “The heart of the world opens,” he cried at one point; at another, “walking on the razor-blade bridge on the day of judgment.”Gray, in a joint interview with Sorey, Sellars and Mehretu, said of the dancers’ movements: “It’ll be different every single night. It’s how do the emotions go through their bodies at that time.”When he was discussing the formation of a creative team with the Armory, Sorey said, he wanted to reunite with Sellars, after working with him on several iterations of “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine,” an evening-length recomposition of Josephine Baker songs, starting in 2016. Sellars, in turn, suggested Mehretu (with whom he had staged Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Only the Sound Remains” in 2016) and Gray (with whom he created “Flexn” at the Armory in 2015).At first, Mehretu didn’t know how closely to hew to the works in the Houston chapel. “I thought a lot about making black paintings,” she said. What she ended up producing was far more active and jittery than the Rothkos, with the swooping calligraphic gestures and kaleidoscopic, colorful flecks she is known for.“I contacted Peter as I was working and said, ‘These are not monochromatic,’” Mehretu recalled with a laugh.Among the performers are members of the choir of Trinity Wall Street, left, rehearsing here with the production’s director, Peter Sellars.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesBut, Sellars said, “a lot of the staging is monochromatic light. Seeing these paintings under these single lighting temperatures or colors, they get new identities under monochromatic light.”The underpaintings — invisible in the final works — are blurred images, mostly taken from the news, including coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va. Those ghosts of history and trauma, personal and societal, are a veiled presence, like “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” in Sorey’s score.“It’s constantly playing back as the piece is going, but you only hear it now and again,” Sorey said. “You have this musical information that is in a lot of ways inspired by that spiritual, but you only really hear it from time to time. It’s there, and it’s not there.”In Sellars’s telling, the past is invoked in this way in “Monochromatic Light” in order to heal and press toward the future. “Coming out of the two years we’re coming out of, it’s important to move forward,” he said, “The past is ongoing, but we have to move this whole thing forward.”Unlike in Houston, where audience members faced in the same direction toward the performers, the Armory’s in-the-round presentation also has political reverberations. “It’s about a society looking at itself,” Sellars said. “There is no way out; we’re all in this together. None of us is experiencing the exact same thing, but we’re with each other.”Sorey’s music, he added, “is experiential. It’s lived in; it’s an experience.”The question is how audiences will respond to an experience so long, spare, rigorous and ritualistic. “It is about endurance,” Sellars said. “How long a minute can be. Not ‘Oh, let’s change the subject.’ We’re going to stay here until we really find something. It’s a space of concentrated investing.”And the music gives the sense that it could keep on quietly expanding forever. Sorey, however, said that he thought it had reached its final form: “This feels like what it is.”Then, with a grin, he added: “I’ve got another hour to add. Easily, right?” More

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    50 Years Later, the Rothko Chapel Meets a New Musical Match

    Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” written for the chapel’s anniversary, is a tribute to the first music performed in the space.Before Tyshawn Sorey composed a note of his latest work, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, he spent hours inside its octagonal temple containing more than a dozen dark canvases.Immersing himself in Mark Rothko’s fields of seeming black, Sorey noticed that the paintings shifted subtly over time — and that time itself appeared to dissolve. The colors changed to match the sun coming through the chapel’s skylight. When he would go outside and return, his adjusting eyes made it feel as though the works were coming to life.Few people can give Rothko the time or space to perceive what Sorey saw. But “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” something of a sonic distillation of what he experienced, might give them an idea. Written for the chapel’s 50th anniversary — and delayed a year because of the pandemic — his new work will premiere there on Saturday, ahead of a staged presentation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York this fall.The piece is in part a tribute to one of Sorey’s heroes, the composer Morton Feldman, whose “Rothko Chapel” was written in 1971 for the building, a project by the arts philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil. Feldman’s piece — scored for percussion, celesta, viola, choir and soprano — was an abstract analogue to Rothko’s canvases. Deceptively formless, it is music to be inhabited. But near the end, the viola plays what Feldman called a “quasi-Hebraic melody” that he composed as a teenager, an invocation of and memorial to his (and Rothko’s) heritage.The Feldman is “a special piece,” said Sarah Rothenberg, the artistic director of the presenting organization DaCamera, which, with the chapel, commissioned Sorey’s premiere. “It’s a remarkable synergy between space and music that has become a kind of ambassador.”In conceiving a 50th-anniversary commission, a new ambassador was desired. Sorey came to mind, Rothenberg said, because of how he engages with the history of Black Americans — a parallel to the chapel’s civil rights-minded mission. And his style, she knew, had been shaped by Feldman.Sorey, 41, was first exposed to Feldman’s music in college, when he heard his teacher Anton Vishio practicing “Piano.” “It was just beautiful,” Sorey said, adding that the music, its sonorities and its patience “really spoke to me more than anything else I was listening to at the time. Pretty much any composition I’ve written is in some ways inspired by Morton Feldman. It’s hard to shake off such an influence.”Maurice Peress conducting the premiere of Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel” in 1972.Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Hickey-Roberston, via Rothko Chapel ArchivesAlong with other influences, including Roscoe Mitchell, Feldman taught Sorey the goal of reaching a place in music where time no longer seems to exist and a listener can become truly present in the moment. “Every sound has its own world at that point,” Sorey said. “You could talk about the technical parts, but the quality that I want to get out of it is presentness.”For “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” he chose virtually the same instrumentation as “Rothko Chapel” — in a way that the director Peter Sellars, who will stage the piece at the Armory, said reflects lineage in music, “how your granddaughter has your grandmother’s eyes.” But in lieu of the quasi-Hebraic melody, Sorey quotes, in his refracted style, the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” He added a piano (played by Rothenberg, doubling on celesta) and changed the soprano soloist to a bass, which he felt better matched the tone of the paintings.Sellars recalled that when he went over the score with Sorey for the first time, they looked at the part and, more or less at the same time, said who they wanted to sing it: the bass-baritone Davóne Tines. Sorey has contributed treatments of spirituals to Tines’s “Mass” recital program, a collaboration that began after Tines first heard what would become “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine,” Sorey’s evening-length work inspired by the life of Josephine Baker, written for the soprano Julia Bullock.“I realized he was able to open meaning in text by recreating it in his voice,” Tines said. Together he and Sorey have revisited the catalog of spirituals, because, Tines said, “Tyshawn is able to reveal the truer psychology of what those songs mean.”The Rothko canvases, Sorey said, change color with the sun coming through the skylight.Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York TimesFeldman referred to “Rothko Chapel” as a “secular service.” While Sorey emphasized that Feldman is just one of the influences on “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” the idea of a secular service is what he aims for; it’s why he prefers to call his performances rituals. And it permeates this work, beginning with the first measure: Lasting indefinitely, it is a dissolution of time in which tubular bells resonate at near silence, with pitches of two chords struck at random as the other performers enter the space.“It’s kind of a similar feeling to when I first walked into the chapel,” Sorey said. “It’s almost this cathartic sort of emotion, the moment you get when you walk in there; it’s like a religious experience. So by having the resonant sound happening, and you’re not sure what to make of it — it’s almost a ceremonial, spiritual thing going on. You’re eliminating any sort of external obstacles, for that type of clarity that I think Rothko was always going for in his art.”Once the choir joins later, its members sing without vibrato, staggering their breaths to create seamlessly suspended streams of sound that, Sorey said, are not unlike the paintings surrounding them.“To me, the voices are like these panels,” he added. “The sonorities are expressive, expressing a certain type of emotion, like tragedy or grief. So like Rothko, my sonorities and the way I choose to use these voices is not so much about being abstract as much as expressing this feelingful experience. And I’m seeing the listener being surrounded by these ever-changing emotions.”“Like Rothko, my sonorities and the way I choose to use these voices is not so much about being abstract as much as expressing this feelingful experience.”Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York TimesFew people — about 300 people over two performances — will get to experience the premiere this weekend. But there are plans to release an album of the work on the ECM label, as a follow-up to its 2015 release of “Rothko Chapel,” which featured artists, including Rothenberg, who return for “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife).”Then, in late September, the piece will travel to the Armory, where the audience will be immersed in panels by Julie Mehretu, an artist whose abstractions share preoccupations with Sorey and Rothko. On the surface, this cavernous space could not be more different from the intimate chapel. But, Sellars said, “what’s beautiful about the Armory is, it can create the occasion for something.”He continued: “What Tyshawn is creating is memorial space. Rothko and Feldman created memorial space from silence, from grief, from darkness, where you could feel the presence of erased histories and erased lives that are nonetheless present and moving and speaking within these fields of darkness. ­Feldman and Rothko brought their histories to that space. And I think this group of artists will, too.”Details are still being worked out — such as whether to hide the choir — but at the very least, Sorey said, it will “become more intensified” than the presentation in Houston.“How can we make it more of a ritualistic or ceremonial event?” he added. “How can we intensify the spiritual, metaphysical matter in which the piece is received? That’s what I want: to really magnify that experience.” More