Gershwin, Rapper

ENO’s new-ish rap opera on Gaddafi was, as it turns out, a neo-classic gesture.   After all, the first rap aria entered the American repertory in 1935.

We held our second ALT class at the apartment on Monday.  I named it “Recitative;” though a better title would be “Singing the book.”  I proposed that composing an effective solo, duet, chorus or ensemble is a showier, but also easier, challenge than creating a fresh and convincing texture—all musical and all narrative at once—from which those numbers (should you choose to compose them) could emerge. 

So we looked at examples: the thousand authentic cadences that allow the Monteverdi of Poppea to pivot, with his characters, from thought to fugitive thought: and how he introduces steady pulse and orchestral richness to focus the ear when a moment demands deeper exploration. We marveled how Marc Blitzstein, in Regina, takes the world’s least promising musical situation—six characters in Lillian Hellman’s so-naturalistic parlour, pouring brandy and volleying pleasantries—and shapes it, points it: punctuating the conversation with Brechtian choral interruptions, in which the characters comment wryly on their own good manners, and deploying micro-versions of 1930′s American theatre song to advance the narrative in the same way that Monteverdi uses his tiny dominant-tonic cadences to advance his. 

Is recitative a matter of brevity of, not distinctions among, materials?  Not exclusively: I spoke a bit about designing the chromatic and dryly scored recitative in Little Women to frame the more richly textured, tonal themes—trying to extend into harmony what Monteverdi did with orchestration, with pulse—and was glad that J was not there to hear me compare the tone-painting at the opening of The Ghosts of Versailles to Debussy and (gulp) Wagner, his least favorite artist.   The Ghosts prologue, I argued, begins more like Das Rheingold than, say, Vanessa: both Corigliano and Wagner—by embedding the vocal lines in an orchestral texture that does not shift dramatically with every character entrance or turn of phrase—are telling you to take in the mise-en-scène (the Rhine, the haunted palace) first, the personae second.  (It’s recitative in long-shot: compare Copland’s The Tender Land to Floyd’s Of Mice and Men.)

Lastly, we turned to a scene from Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, for a perfect, perfect example of how to raise the temperature of a spoken scene so gradually, so sensitively, and so precisely that the shift from speech to song is as inevitable as it is thrilling: and contrasted it with its exact opposite number—a unique piece, as far as I know, in the American or any other operatic theatre—in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess: Maria’s (all-too-often cut) rap aria, “I Hates Your Struttin’ Style,” in which Gershwin pulls off the amazing and counterintuitive feat of making the character’s spitting threats of murder too intense for song!  Only offbeats and snarled Afro-American Sprechstimme are forceful enough to chase this drug dealer of Catfish Row off Maria’s stage.

We confined ourselves to (largely) contemporary English-language repertory, and still we ran over three hours.  In two weeks, my writers come in with their own responses to this challenge, including one attempt at recitative in electronica/musique concrète.  Cannot wait.