ARTicles vol. 1 i.4: Bending the Voice

Ryan McKittrick: How did you begin working on The Sound of a Voice?

Philip Glass: I had a long relationship with the A.R.T. after doing The Juniper Tree and The Fall of the House of Usher there, and I wanted to do a new work for the Theater. I remembered two haunting, emotional plays that David Henry Hwang had written in the early eighties. They were very linear, but they had an abstract quality that I liked very much. At first I wanted to make them into two one-act operas, but I decided to do something different – a real combination of theater and opera. I was interested in the interaction of characters and the impact of what characters say to one another. In opera, the voice often becomes a spectacle in sound, but in theater you have interaction. I tried to make the voices as conversational as possible, but still have them singing. What you have are encounters of personalities. The parts are not chanted or spoken; they’re still very melodic, but they’re much lower in the voice. David’s libretto, which has so many back-and-forth exchanges, was a perfect instrument for inventing an opera that is about encounter and dialogue. There aren’t even any duets in the piece. When I presented the piece to Robert Woodruff, I told him that this is an opera for a theater company. And he really understood that the piece combines opera and theater in a form you’re not going to see very often.

RM: Does this form place any unusual demands on the singers?

PG: It’s very difficult. The performers have to be conscious all the time of the character they’re singing to, and they have to be careful not to let the piece get too dramatic or operatic. There’s a kind of restraint that has to be applied to the music so that it doesn’t become grand opera. (A singer’s voice wants to do that. It’s been trained to do that.) There has to be a kind of modulation, an awareness of the sound of the voice. The voice has to bend itself to the dramatic needs of the story.

RM: What attracts you to David Henry Hwang’s language?

PG: He invites me to complete the thought. The words are suggestive and sketchy. They can be very precise, but there’s often an emptiness in the writing which leaves room for the music. David raises interesting questions of identity and culture in all his pieces. His work is profoundly existential, yet it really comes out of his life. I think that gives his plays their immediacy and strength.

RM: Could you discuss your choice of instruments?

PG: I wanted to do a piece with the pipa player Wu Man for a long time. I combined the pipa with a cello and a flute–the cello to provide the harmonic basis for the music, and the flute for the extended melodic music. The vocal parts are short, but the flute gave me the longer lines that I wanted. The percussion provides a very atmospheric and stable rhythmic basis for the piece. The music has both an ethnicity and transparency. It was very challenging to make the music complete with such a spare collection of instruments. I don’t think I could have written this piece twenty or thirty years ago.

RM: What do you mean by “ethnicity” and “transparency?”

PG: The pipa has a whole vocabulary of strumming and bending of notes which is peculiar to that instrument. In Baroque music, all the ornamentations aren’t written out. You learn to do the ornamentations when you learn the music. In the same way, a pipa player knows what the turns and strokes of the instrument can be. The music is completely composed, but at the same time the player brings to it the style of the instrument. When I say transparency, I mean that there’s no instrument that plays chords. Everything is linear. It’s not like a piano or a harp. You can strum a little on the pipa, but it doesn’t give you the strength of the chords that you would get from a string or brass section.

RM: In rehearsals, we’ve discovered a number of thematic parallels between The Sound of a Voice and Hotel of Dreams. How do the two pieces relate to one another musically?

PG: I designed them to be musically different. The Sound of a Voice is mythic and dramatic, while in Hotel of Dreams the characters are older and more reflective. The Sound of a Voice has nine scenes and Hotel of Dreams has four, so the first piece is choppy and the second more uniform and continuous. The instrumental parts tend to be jagged in the first piece and more lyrical in the second. You move from the mystic and unknown to the introspective and personal. That’s the trajectory of the evening.

Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg