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Casting Off the Burden of the Canon

Post author By administrator
Post date March 12, 2020
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CASTING OFF
THE BURDEN OF
THE CANON

A discussion of women composers in the operatic canon.
By Annarosa Berman

Every opera lover has a favourite soprano. If very few have a favourite woman composer, the reason is obvious. In Breaking Glass, a quadruple bill of four one-act operas composed by four women composers, Sydney Chamber Opera (SCO) in partnership with the Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Composing Women program, addresses the absence of women composers in the operatic canon.

Fittingly, composers Peggy Polias and Bree van Reyk have chosen feminist themes for their works. Neither musician had been thinking of writing an opera until the opportunity of an SCO collaboration came up. Polias imagined that it would come later in her career, if at all, and van Reyk didn’t think she’d ever write an opera.“The expense of grand opera is intimidating to begin with,” she says.“And opera is so problematic for women. It almost always involves a woman dying or being raped. Do we really want to glorify this?”

Moreover, Polias says, opera composers of the past all being male, “the burden is the canon and companies wanting to stage and restage it because that’s what their audience wants to hear.” She doesn’t see this as an insurmountable problem though. “It’s about finding the audience who wants to hear what you have to offer. You wouldn’t force punk on someone who likes rap, would you?”

The idea for van Reyk’s opera, The Invisible Bird, came from thoughts about women’s invisible contribution to society. “We are not lauded as the great heroes or masters or saviours of the world,” she says. She saw a parallel between women’s contribution to society and birds, whose beautiful sound enrich our lives even though we often don’t see them.

The night parrot, the subject of her opera, was long thought to be extinct, yet found again in the early 2000s. “Someone found a dead night parrot by the roadside, then ornithologists found a nest with three eggs nearby. But the next day the eggs had gone – eaten by snakes.” A ground-dwelling bird, the night parrot’s survival was always unlikely, but the arrival of settlers, who brought introduced predators with them, and who hunted the bird as a prized trophy, made matters infinitely worse.

“The fact that everyone thought it had disappeared and yet it was still there, plays into the idea of invisibility – if you’re not looking in the right places, you won’t see anything.” That goes for women too. “It’s not that they haven’t been there; they just haven’t been included.”

The Invisible Bird has no narrative arc, and van Reyk wrote the libretto – the names of birds currently extinct or endangered – herself.

Polias, who chose a feminist angle for her opera, Commute, because the commission came at the height of the #MeToo public discourse of 2017/18, likewise wrote her own libretto.

“I was hearing my friends’ #MeToo accounts, and I’d had my own experiences in that regard.” As a composer, it was logical to explore the theme through music rather than through social media. As for the focus on a commute: “Most women have had scary experiences walking home from work. Commute asks the question: where does this walk home lead?” The work is about navigating public spaces safely.

Yet Polias found the idea of a narrative along the lines of “woman walks home and all these things happen to her and you’re going to see it on stage” uninspiring. “Many Hollywood films do that; I was not interested in perpetuating the same tropes.” Thus, Commute is an interior journey.

As for the libretto: Polias, who has Greek heritage and reads a little ancient Greek, found inspiration in the Odyssey’s episodic structure, where Odysseus vanquishes or outsmarts some creature in each episode. The text is mostly in English, with some Modern Greek, and a short quote from the Odyssey in Ancient Greek.

Both composers found the SCO collaboration inspiring. Polias says: “Writing an opera for the first time, the temptation was to throw everything but the kitchen sink at it. But you learn that you don’t have to express everything in the music; that some meaning will happen in the lighting, the costumes, the acting. Getting input from different perspectives has been amazing. ”

“The expense of grand opera is intimidating to begin with,” she [ composer Peggy Polias] says. “And opera is so problematic for women. It almost always involves a woman dying or being raped. Do we really want to glorify this?”

Van Reyk, who has been working as a percussionist and drummist since graduating from uni twenty years ago, began to compose a decade ago. “I have a punk rock/garage rock upbringing and played drums in lots of bands,” she says. She later played as a casual in the opera and ballet orchestra, but could never see the singers. “And what you hear down in the pit is crazy.”

Polias grew up learning piano and trumpet, “mucked around” on the guitar, all while acquiring a strong grounding in theory. From around the age of ten she started sketching composition ideas “for when I had more skill”. In high school, shy as a performer, she wrote little pieces for other people. She did her masters in composition at Sydney University under Anne Boyd and applied for the Composing Women program because she wanted to “push her craft” a little more.

She’d love to revisit the opera format again some day. “I like the compressed thirty-minute form, and I love the quad bill; it’s a really great format for presenting new work. But maybe one day I’ll write a massive grand opera, who knows?”

Van Reyk is looking forward “to just keep writing music”. The next couple of things she’s working on are less political though: “To be thinking of feminism all the time can be quite exhausting.”

Composing Women offers aspiring composers either a masters of a doctorate, which includes collaborations with SCO, the SSO, and a soloist. Founded by Matthew Hindson, the initiative addresses the fact that among first-year uni students worldwide, equal numbers of women and men pursue composition, yet in the professional world, the ratio between women and men drops to 1:4.

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Blog Posts

Two Directors and a Quadruple Bill

Post author By administrator
Post date March 12, 2020

TWO DIRECTORS AND A QUADRUPLE BILL

An interview with directors
Danielle Maas and Clemence Williams
By Annarosa Berman

It’s not often that two women directors get to direct four operas, all composed by women, in one over-arching bill. Yet in Sydney Chamber Opera’s quadruple bill, Breaking Glass, the all-female angle is the point: the four composers are products of Sydney University’s Composing Women program, established in an attempt at addressing the imbalance between male and female composers in the music industry.

As Danielle Maas, who directs two of the operas, Georgia Scott’s Her Dark Marauder and Josephine Macken’s The Tent, puts it: “There are extraordinary works by contemporary male composers, and yet making the conscious choice to give more space to female composers is really important – in the same way that it’s really important to give more space to creators of colour, and creators of different classes. It’s about making space for a multiplicity of perspectives when historically, male composers have had the pie almost all to themselves.”

Clemence Williams, who directs Peggy Polias’ Commute and Bree van Reyk’s The Invisible Bird, explains the logistics of two directors steering four operas that are part of a bigger whole: “We’re the captains of the ship for each individual opera, but we have an exceptional creative team who work across all four.” That in itself draws the four operas together. More importantly: “They’re young female Australian composers. They’re going to have a synergy that connects them to the whole.” While there’s room to champion the individual qualities of each of the operas, they’re always going to be seen as a group.

Williams describes Peggy Polias’ Commute as “at its simplest, about a woman’s journey home”. Inherently that journey involves fear – “Margaret Atwood said men were afraid of being laughed at and women, of being killed”. Polias’ sonic landscape vividly describes the fear women experience in the simple act of trying to get home. She’s layered her story with allusions to Greek mythology, so monsters appear along the way. Conceptualising Commute, says Williams, has been “a joy” despite the challenge of representing an internal journey on stage. “It took imagination,” she says, with a laugh. “If this were a play I would have been tearing my hair out! But the exciting thing about opera is that it allows us to exist on different plains simultaneously; we can meditate our way through, rather than go on a little journey with a character.”

Bree van Reyk’s The Invisible Bird presented a different but equally enjoyable challenge. “Bree has used the sad story of the night parrot that was thought to be extinct, only to be found again, as an allegory for women’s voices across the history of Western classical music,” says Williams. Exploring the canon from the inside out has been a deeply rewarding experience.

For Danielle Maas, whose wish list for directing includes new work, women composers and electronic music, directing Josephine Macken’s The Tent and Georgia Scott’s Her Dark Marauder, is a dream come true. The Tent is a meditation on a Margaret Atwood short story, “where the idea of creation becomes an act of self preservation in the face of ecological trauma and disaster”, Maas says. Since the work is almost completely without text, Maas imagined it as a world where language is breaking down. There’s very little emotion expressed, and there’s ambiguity as to the meaning of what people are saying. “The style of the piece has resulted in symbolism, Maas says, “which is not particularly trendy in theatre at the moment, but it felt right to create a world with several layers of ambiguity.”

In Scott’s Her Dark Marauder, once again the audience is let in on a meditative experience, rather than taken on a linear journey. Maas says: “The opera is about the main character’s relationship to her depression, and what we asked ourselves was, how do you give an audience a sensorial experience of depression? Because if we can experience what depression feels like, maybe that’s a way to empathy.”

Finding a directorial angle is what directors do best, but when directing a new opera, negotiating a complicated score for which no piano reduction or recording exists, can be a headache. Williams, a trained classical singer and percussionist, reads music fluently. “If anything I need to be reminded sometimes that there are words,” she says, with a laugh, adding that it’s “a joy and absolute thrill” to be hearing a piece of music for the very first time; to be “the first set of eyes and hands to mould it into something tangible”. Yes, Breaking Glass is full of complex music, but having written music for the theatre herself, and having recently completed a course in electronic music, Williams felt able to “unlock the components of a piece of electronic music”.

“There are extraordinary works by contemporary male composers, and yet making the conscious choice to give more space to female composers is really important – in the same way that it’s really important to give more space to creators of colour, and creators of different classes. It’s about making space for a multiplicity of perspectives when historically, male composers have had the pie almost all to themselves.”

Maas, on the other hand, when asked about difficult contemporary scores, throws up her hands up and laughs: “I’m the ultimate layman…lay woman…of opera! It’s amazing that I even work in opera because I’m musically illiterate! It’s terrifying!” But all is never lost when Breaking Glass conductor Jack Symonds is near, she adds.
“I sat down with Jack and he talked through the score and what it was doing. He’s exceptionally good at explaining what things might feel like or sound like. He’ll explain a moment to you, and he’ll go, it sounds like a decaying garden. And you’ll go, Great!” The score she was given included detailed notes by Symonds and the composers. “So you work out how you’re going to translate those notes into a dramatic experience. And once you’re in the rehearsal room, you pay attention to what every musician is doing, because their bodies respond to the music.”

Thanks at least partly to the delightful challenge of Breaking Glass, in future both directors would love to continue working in opera. As Maas puts it: “This is exactly the kind of work that I would love to make for the rest of my life.” Williams can only agree: “Making new opera with a team of accomplished professionals…it’s just terrific.”