composition as explanation
Photo by Alex Boerner
It is understood, by this time, that everything is the same. - G. Stein
Eighth Blackbird has been pushing the interpretative boundaries of chamber music since its first choreographed program in 1996. So far, the organization has created 7 full evening-length productions involving choreography. What began as an experiment has become a repertoire. Called “Super Chamber Music” by composer David Lang, this still-unofficial genre falls in the cracks between music and theater. and has been a conundrum. Nonetheless, 8BB does it anyway. This gray area between disciplines is the inevitable extensions of Eighth Blackbird’s artistry and our inner workings. It is the guts and it is the bones of our artistry.
Take the process of a recital program: learn, rehearse, interpret, organize, perform. The most visible element of this process is performance, but the most vital element is interpretation. Beyond the instrument each ensemble member plays, what do they really do?
They decide what choices to make with the sounds they are creating.
A composer creates a score and indicates "forte", meaning 'strong'. Ok, well, HOW strong? Strong relative to what? The volume of the other instruments? The dynamic range of their particular instrument? A decibel meter? The size of the room? Interpretation begins with every note. Where does it end? What are the parameters? Are there limits?
If there are limits, 8BB has yet to find them, or perhaps simply we don’t believe in them.
What happens if we sit in a chair and play our instrument? What changes if we stand and play instead? It turns out it makes a big difference. Huh. Might as well walk and play. What then? Is it heard differently? Does it change our sound when it looks different to the audience? What does directionality cause?
These unending questions have repeatedly led 8BB to try, to experiment, to fail miserably, to revise, to discover extraordinary beauty, to expand possibilities, to expand our experience, to expand the audience experience by creating community during the evening we have together through shared discovery. And it IS discovery. Here's a secret: Just like you, we don't really know what's going to happen during this show. 8BB has a fair idea, but we interpret in the moment. 8BB adjusts. 8BB makes mistakes! 8BB figures it out. But 8BB won't know what happened until the end of the show. You, The Audience, will bring your interpretative layer to this experience as well. You may not have thought of yourself in this way, but you are also performing a role, you're following a rehearsed ritual, you're bringing an energy, you're choosing how you will express yourselves. What began as a concert for you has become a collaboration between us. We, all of us, we're really in this together.
Everything is the same, except composition, and as the composition is different and always going to be different, everything is not the same. - G. Stein
David Lang writes: I have had the pleasure to work with the ensemble Eighth Blackbird for many years now. One thing that has always impressed me about them is that they like a challenge. They have a very wide definition of what a chamber musician should be able to do, and this wide definition has frequently led them into making work that employs staging, movement, speaking and theater.
When Eighth Blackbird asked me in 2016 to propose a project for them that they could perform at the Chicago Arts Club, in conjunction with the Arts Club’s centennial year, I started thinking of other kinds of actions that they might concentrate on, that would transform them.I began to think of what it would be like make a piece that required them not just to act, but to become actors - in order to perform it they would be forced to take acting lessons, to study diction, to study the art of theater. In other words, my piece would not just ask them to move and to speak, but it would ask them to commit themselves to a rigorous process that would transform them as performers.
Photo by Alex Boerner
Upon doing a little research I discovered that Gertrude Stein had spoken at the Chicago Arts Club in 1934, after she had already become famous for her writings. I started looking at her published speeches as possible texts for this piece and I settled on using parts of Gertrude Stein's 1923 lecture "Composition as Explanation," in which a yet-to-be-famous Stein explains to her audience what she is doing in her writing, in the same repetitive and plainspoken and circular format that she uses in her writing. In other words, she
has blurred the relationship between her content, her form and her performance, in much the same way that I have tried to blur the musicality of Eighth Blackbird.
I have used almost all of Stein’s entire text in my piece, except for a few stray lines here and there and the parts of her lecture that deal with details of specific books she had written, which seemed too literary for my purpose. In particular, I wanted to highlight her implication that the changes in the composition of her work are in some measure a response to the First World War, which had ended only a few years before, and which changed so many of the artists who lived through it.
I want to thank Janine Mileaf and the Chicago Arts Club, where primitive versions of a few movements of this piece were, in fact, performed in 2016. I want to thank the Estate of Gertrude Stein for their permission to use this text. I want to thank Anne Bogart, for her work transforming this into a theater experience. And I want to thank all the members of Eighth Blackbird, past and present, for asking me to make it.
Photo by Alex Boerner
Everything is the same and everything is different. - G. Stein
Anne Bogart writes: During the winter of 1925-26 Gertrude Stein wrote “Composition as Explanation” in which, for the first time, she discussed her approach to writing and the concerns that shaped her early work. The irascible British poet Edith Sitwell, confident that a public appearance by Stein would go a long way to cultivate a wider audience for her work, convinced her to deliver the piece as a lecture to the Cambridge Literary Club and later that following summer, at Oxford University. “Composition as Explanation” was eventually published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.
Apparently, before delivering the lecture, Stein suffered intense stage fright. Although she was aware that the invitations to lecture presented an opportunity to share her approach to writing with a new generation, Stein was frightened by the prospect of performing in front of a large audience. In the end, her reputation as an eccentric writer drew large audiences, she found her footing as a public speaker, and both lectures turned out to be a great success. Nobody had heard anything like it before.
Stein’s lecture “Composition as Explanation” is designed to lead to deeper levels of understanding through experiential encounters with her non-linear language. As a theater director, I have been deeply influenced by the “how” of Gertrude Stein’s writing. In sync with the inventions and discoveries of her modernist era, Stein’s non-traditional prose is imbued with her feeling for innovations in science (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity), art (Braque and Picasso’s Cubism), psychology (Freud’s discovery of the unconscious), philosophy (William James and Henri Bergson), Darwin, Marx and so on. The writing is not only melodic and meditative, but also poetic and philosophical, reflecting uncertainty, indeterminacy, and relativity. Based upon the body and on intuition, it is multi-sensory in its rhythmic qualities, idiosyncratic and playfully repetitive.
When I discovered that David Lang had created a new music composition based upon Stein’s lecture and that Eighth Blackbird would perform it, I was delighted to be invited to direct it. The combination of these 21st Century musical pioneers taking on Gertrude Stein’s undeniable genius is thrilling.
David Lang's composition as explanation was commissioned by the Arts Club of Chicago. With its deeply compelling history of gathering artists and scholars to engage in artistic discourse, the Arts Club of Chicago could not have been a better place to cultivate new work featuring the writings of Gertrude Stein.
Now with a next round of incredibly generous commissioning and production support from the extraordinarily innovative Duke Performances at Duke University, composition as explanation is a fully staged theatrical production under the extraordinary guidance of Anne Bogart. Additional support was provided by Richard Replin and Elissa Stein, the Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond, and the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation. Support for the upcoming recording provided by Cedille Records.