ARTicles vol. 2 i.2: American Roots

RM: The music that you’ve composed for Snow in Juneis very eclectic. How did you settle on those musical styles? PD: When we began working, Chen Shi-Zheng said that he was staging an adaptation of a play from the popular musical theatre of China – a piece about the day-to-day lives of the common people, not kings and queens. He didn’t want to turn it into a western opera, and he wanted to avoid the two principal non-operatic choices for musical theatre: cabaret in the tradition of Brecht/Weill, and the American musical. He wanted to reset the piece using American-roots styles such as bluegrass, Delta Blues, and Appalachian, Cajun, and Tex-Mex music. All these idioms come from rural rather than urban environments, and I think part of Shi-Zheng’s attraction to them is that they aren’t normally associated with the theatre. They’re also styles I’m very comfortable with, because I grew up playing Delta Blues and other American-roots forms. I’ve therefore composed in a melange of roots-based styles. For example, the scene with the apothecary, who’s a kind of snake-oil salesman, is set in a bluegrass tone, and there’s a choral street scene that draws from black gospel music. In our developmental workshop last May, Shi-Zheng considered techno music for the street scene, because he liked the driving beat. But I didn’t think techno fit into the world of the play, so I stole the transcendental rhythmic power of the gospel tradition for that episode. RM: Have you drawn from any Asian musical traditions? PD: I studied North Indian classical music for about ten years and I studied Indonesian music. I’ve traveled to most of the countries in the Far East and lived in Indonesia and India. I’ve been involved with Asian music for so long on such a deep emotional level that what I’ve absorbed from Asia is composted in my musical awareness. But I am specifically avoiding Chinese musical references in this piece, because that would be the default place to go. There are some superficial connections between Chinese music and country music. Both use pentatonic scales, and some American rural instruments can sound like Chinese instruments. The banjo, for example, has a skin top and many Chinese instruments use a skin resonating top. But I’m not really looking for those connections in this piece. RM: What instruments are you using in Snow in June? PD: We’re working with a band called Andromeda, which is led by Evan Harlan. He plays the accordion and the keyboard. The group also has a violinist, an upright bassist, and a guitarist who also plays banjo and mandolin. RM: What attracted you to those instruments? PD: They’re all musically versatile. They also evoke different kinds of folk music – especially the accordion and the guitar. The banjo and the mandolin are instruments associated with bluegrass and certain kinds of Appalachian music. Much of my work with my own group, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, is a hybrid of electronic and acoustic sounds, but this ensemble is primarily an acoustic group. It was important to give this piece an acoustic sound in order to keep it rural. RM: One of the lead performers in Snow in Juneis Qian Yi, a singer who was trained in the Chinese kunju theatre. Has her background forced you to compose differently? PD: Qian Yi is an incredible singer of Chinese music, but most of her songs in this piece are not from that tradition. We’re trying to preserve the charisma of her Chinese idiom and simultaneously asking her to take completely different approaches to singing and acting. She’s being asked to express emotions that she would never express in the Chinese theatre. So she has to reconfigure her performance style without losing her inherent charisma. I’m actually trying to see how far Qian Yi can go with melodic and harmonic writing that is not closely set to what she would perform in China. The one exception is the last fifteen minutes of the piece, when Qian Yi sings seven short songs from the traditional Chinese play. I have a different task at that point, because I need to orchestrate around what she does and create a musical world that supports both her and the idioms of the piece. In the Chinese original she would perform this section with a flute that almost doubles her. I have to give her pitch support so she doesn’t get lost. The flute part from the Chinese score has become the basis of the music I’m writing for that section. RM: Has working with roots-based styles led you to write differently? PD: When I was a teenager, I stopped taking classical piano lessons and starting playing a lot of steel-string guitar. I grew up with fingerpicking traditions like Delta Blues and country music, where the guitar is a virtuoso instrument. Then I put down the acoustic guitar for thirty years and began playing the electric guitar. And so my acoustic guitar sat in the closet until the beginning of this project. It was so invigorating to go back and combine my love of the acoustic guitar with the knowledge of music I’ve accumulated over the past thirty years. And even after all these years, my fingerpicking came back to me. I didn’t set out to make the finger-picked acoustic guitar the focus of this composition. But maybe half of these pieces are written in a fingerpicking style. This is also the first time I’ve written a piece in a key signature in about thirty years – I stopped thinking about notes in that hierarchical way a long time ago. But with this project, it’s relevant to write music in key signatures. When you’re working with folk music traditions, the music becomes inauthentic if you push the harmony too much. If you want to evoke the atmosphere of a country tune, you have to use the harmonies that are appropriate to that style. Rural music rarely modulates; its expressive power doesn’t come from the harmonic complexity that is typical of opera in the European tradition. Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg.