Music for New Bodies (2023)

Movements
1. Cryo
2. I [know myself…]
3. Deep Water Trawling
4. Prying / Dis-
5. Poem

Ever since I decided to write a full-length work of music-theater based on Jorie Graham’s astonishing recent poetry, I have known in my heart and my gut what Music for New Bodies needed to be; for months before I started composing, I could hear the still-unborn music lapping like ocean waves in my inner ear.

But knowing what a piece wants to be is very different from knowing how to talk about it, and whenever friends and colleagues have innocently asked what it is I’ve been working on for the past two years, I have found myself tongue-tied. Is this piece a theatrical song cycle? An oratorio? Some kind of vocal chamber symphony? Music for New Bodies may well be all of those things, but none of those appellations feels quite right.

It’s only in recent weeks that I’ve realized what this piece is: it’s an opera. Of course it is. It doesn’t have anything like a conventional narrative—it doesn’t even have characters! —but no other term is quite capacious enough to capture this piece’s state of being.

*

Graham’s work has always been operatic in its scope: the very title of her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Dream of the Unified Field (1995) suggests an ambition to help poetry leap across the borders of the humanities and take its place alongside mathematics and particle physics as a means of investigating the essential properties of matter. Over the past decade, however, Graham’s poetry has reached a newly exalted pitch of visionary urgency, prompted by her acute awareness of our species’ abandonment of our duties both to the planet we live on and to ourselves, to the very idea of humanness.

These two disastrous tendencies—the abandonment of the planet, the abandonment of the human—are related but distinct. As we know, we human beings are poisoning and heating up both the oceans and the air we breathe. We have known this for far too long. And as this knowledge, for many of us, has curdled into weary resignation, a pair of distressing notions have taken hold: first, that we might as well give up on this planet and find another one to live on; and second, that we might as well replace human beings (for most of life’s tasks, anyway) with post-human, AI-generated “agents,” frictionless beings who surely know better—after all, we’ve given them practically everything we have, all the written and spoken data that constitutes the sharable evidence of our existence.

How to make music, or poetry, out of this quietly burgeoning chaos? And how to combat the forces of apathy, exhaustion, hopelessness, the creeping sensation of distance from physical reality? Graham has done so through radical acts of imaginative empathy; or, put another way, she has greatly expanded the bounds of who might be speaking in any given poem. In Graham’s three most recent collections of new work—fast (2017), Runaway (2020), and To 2040 (2023)—a number of the poems’ speakers do not seem to be human, and they have frightening messages to tell us. “Deep Water Trawling” seems to be spoken by the voice of the bottom of the ocean; or rather, the poem is a dialogue between a number of human “questioners” and some formidable ocean-spirit, an emanation from the grievously polluted bed of the Atlantic. Another poem, “Prying,” seems at first to be spoken by a person undergoing an intense, invasive medical treatment, but over the course of the poem, that voice undergoes repeated metamorphosis: are we hearing the voices of doctors in the operating room? Or is it the chemicals themselves speaking—the toxic and yet possibly lifesaving chemicals singing to us as they course through the patient’s veins? Elsewhere, voices from the imminent, immanent future mingle with voices from the deep past: in the poem “Cryo,” voices of people who seem to be setting out on the “long stilling voyage” of cryogenic freezing are interrupted, startlingly, by the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich’s visions of Christ on the cross, his “body dried all alone [for a] long time”—another vision of provisional immortality, another inexplicable transcendence of the body. And finally, the poem that is simply called “Poem” features the voice of the earth itself, a voice that’s singular in its serenity, a voice that underlies all the chaos of our life up here on the surface, a voice that knows it will outlive us.

*

From the beginning, I knew that any musical setting of poetry as synesthetically potent as Graham’s could not possibly feature just one singer. No: this is a world composed of a dense tissue of voices that are inextricable from one another. The temptation for such a richly polyvocal world might be to write a choral piece, but I had a visceral aversion to the idea of involving a chorus. A large chorus is composed of too many individuals for their individuality to be felt by the listener; the mass of voices, in a chorus, typically dissolves into a new unitary entity.

I ultimately settled on five singers, a slightly larger and more unruly ensemble than the perfectly balanced quartet of soloists that we might encounter in a Requiem mass or a four-part chorale. There is something nicely unbalanced about a quintet: with five singers, one is capable of creating a density of utterance, an overwhelming mass of sound or an intricate thicket of counterpoised lines, but the listener is still able to aurally distinguish each singer as an individual.

The five singers of Music for New Bodies may, at different times in the piece, be understood to be five individuals; to be multiple aspects of a single consciousness; or to be a single, composite voice, not necessarily a human one. The orchestra, an ensemble of eighteen musicians, is as central to the drama as the singers are; the instrumental ensemble frequently takes over in the moments where language reaches a breaking point, where words fail.

–Matthew Aucoin