by Thom Andrewes
Assistant Director on TRIPTYCH
For more of Thom's writing: thebitingpoint.wordpress.com
After months of preparation,
devising and rehearsal, it has been very gratifying to take a step back from
the ‘finished product’ of the opera – the composers’ scores, the design, the
Company’s treatment – and tease out the various themes and motifs that run
through these three pieces, so different in narrative and musical style. Gavin Turk’s set design determines a lot of these
motifs, by effectively preventing each piece from sitting comfortably in its
own world. Just as Turk’s ‘fake’ art gallery of ‘fake fakes’ ironically reverts,
at several points in the piece, to the ‘real’ location of the singers who
remain onstage for the entire opera, so representation, mediation, reproduction
and recomposition remain central themes, as well as important musical
processes, in each piece.
For me, though, the most
interesting and important idea that the piece investigates is that of the
Voice. The Voice is, of course, the central concern of all opera. However, Triptych
can be seen not just to interrogate the place of the Voice in opera, but to
make use of the medium to extend this interrogation to the various unique
qualities, dimensions and potentialities of the Voice in the world.
In Triptych, voices are
both located (in space, in time, in social class, in gender) and dislocated.
Each piece makes use of the superimposition of voices that are present and
voices that are absent. The presence of absent voices is, in fact, the most
striking musical link between the three operas. These voices call up all that
is uncanny about recording, the voice as ‘partial object’ in psychoanalytic
theory, the voice as artefact, the mediated voice and the reproduced,
represented, reframed voice.
‘Reunion’
(Singing in Tongues)
Mediation – technological, social,
interpersonal – is conspicuous everywhere, beginning with the multi-layered Nun
piece (Christian Mason’s ‘Reunion’)
which juxtaposes at least three very different modes of vocalisation. We
are presented with an interview – two recorded voices, talking ‘on record’, as
it were – and an attempt to articulate, or re-articulate, a past experience or
intangible, unbearable truth. To realise something latent, by
drawing it into (recorded) speech, and preserve it therein. The key word:
‘confession’, a paradigmatic ‘speech act’ if ever there were one.
Against this, we hear a religious
ceremony in which the voices are the actors, effecting a transcendental
transformation not only through linguistic content but also through its
utterance, and its utterance via prescribed melodic contours. In such
ceremonies, vocal (and musical) quality becomes a kind of magic catalyst that
transforms mere words into divine actions (words which, if read on a page,
would hardly have the same ‘agency’). There are two layers of content here: the
language itself appears plain – ‘I vow’, ‘I profess’, ‘I pronounce’ – but
beneath it is a more esoteric content which can never be fully understood.
This third layer is comprised of
every aspect of the Voice that is not reducible to
words. ‘Reunion’ is a repository of unparsable content, not just in the
ceremony itself which enacts more than it expresses, but in the rigid constructions
of the melismas and, most pointedly, in the vocalisations which form the
majority of the amorous nuns’ musical material. Whole passages of text are
initially heard spoken and then sung, foregrounding the ‘gap’ between the
two. In this way, the piece plays out the (often gendered) politics
supposedly present in much opera, wherein the expressive content of the
(female) voice exceeds the ‘logocentrism’ of the words that contain it, and
that drive the often downright sexist narratives.
‘Reunion’ is, in some ways, about a
male imposition into a female-gendered world, although this world is itself
determined by a kind of transcendent, absent maleness, in the figure of
Christ-as-bridegroom. I’m not sure whether it can convincingly be read
as a feminist piece, even though it was informed from early on by various
real-world feminist aesthetics, yet it certainly engages with the gendered
context of opera (the palpable division of vocal types across the pitch
spectrum), as well as the immediate context of the Company, which is primarily
female in constitution. The final moments of the piece, when the embittered Man
finds himself expelled from the nuns’ world, features an ecstatic ensemble
chant, devoid of linguistic content, which nevertheless affirms the
inexpressible, inarticulable truth that the young nun has found in her new
life (perhaps even a truth that cannot be reduced to a male gender pronoun).
‘A
Party’ (Me Sing Pretty One Day)
The Voice takes an even larger
presence in the Comedy piece – Thomas
Smetryns’s ‘A Party’ – which is effectively about learning to
speak. Both this and the final piece could be said to make use of the
‘hauntological’ qualities of the Voice, although these qualities are more
expressive of a comedic failure in the second, and a poignant lack in
the third piece, than an uncanny present-absence. The piece is replete with
references to the failure of vocalisation, of speech and communication. There
are effectively zero instances in which two characters speak (or
sing) to each other in everyday communicative dialogue. In every case, the
speech comes pre-mediated, problematised, its mechanics awkwardly exposed. I
see this as a necessary dimension of opera, whose vocalisations are
always-already problematised; nobody can ever just ‘speak’ in opera, because
they’re always singing as well. It isn’t normal, it screams out its
own abnormality. For these reasons, it’s an incredibly productive medium for
investigating the real barriers to communication, the real impossibility of
dialogue.
In ‘A Party’, speech is reproduced
as soon as it is produced. The piece’s sonic score is composed entirely of
repurposed recordings, plundered from an actual English language audio course
from the ’50s. Through an ingenious performance conceit, speech is determined,
mediated, socially instrumentalised in the moment of its utterance. As a
kind of ironic riposte to the crisis of expressivity in the previous
piece, we are shown how we are socialised through language, and at the same
time, the sheer inadequacy of such a social adhesive is made
glaringly clear. The piece culminates in an orgy composed entirely of
social niceties.
‘The Tall Office
Building Artistically Considered’ (Reported Song)
The final piece in Triptych, Chris Mayo’s ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’, is
a mystery, which places absence (the disappeared architectural photographer Richard
Nickel) at the centre of its narrative. All the ideas of the recorded voice
as artifact, snapshot, trace etc, find their visual analogies in this piece,
which is obsessed with piecing together both narrative and identity from
remnants, ruins and traces.
As in all the pieces, the presence
of an absent voice is balanced by the necessary incompleteness of present
voices – the singers who are not fully characters, whose voices are
semi-autonomous, who appear as mouthpieces for a patchy narrative which
nevertheless instrumentalises their bodies, their human presence, to draw us
into an emotional attachment to the absent Nickel. The text style is one
of reporting and quotation, even the aria at the end – giving voice to the
doubly-absent fiancée Carol Sutter,
partially obscured in the hopeless search for Nickel – is a quotation,
performed as a quotation of a quotation, however seduced we might be by the
material reality of the singer’s presence and the affective power of her
voice.
The refusal to naturalise or
normalise sung speech within the ‘world’ of the opera is, I believe, an
important position for new opera to explore. The music remains a problem, it is
conscious of itself; opera cannot pretend it is identical to theatre, nor to a
concert performance, nor to mainstream musical theatre. In his director’s note
for Triptych, entitled ‘Reverse Engineering Opera’, Patrick Eakin Young calls the piece ‘an attempt on many levels
to disassemble, analyze, and reconstruct opera itself’. A re-analysis of the
place of the Voice in opera is central to this process.
