The late Pauline Oliveros is having her moment. How Long Beach Opera is making it even bigger
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- A new generation of musicians is discovering the pioneering composer, professor, accordionist and feminist thinker who saw music as healing.
- Long Beach Opera is taking the radical risk of devoting its entire season to Oliveros’ works, performed at sites including the Queen Mary.
“Here’s our slogan,” Long Beach Opera’s interim managing director proudly announces during a recent conversation about the company’s upcoming season, “We’re not the Met!”
For an art form hardly accepting of understatement, such a slogan is insurgent understatement. The oldest opera company in the Los Angeles area and America’s oldest purveyor of consistently progressive opera is about to embark on the most uncompromising season of any company of its size or supposed mission anywhere. Ever.
Marjorie Beale may be interim in her role as managing director, but she had been board president before she stepped down to help find a new course for the company, which had gone through administrative turmoil over the last few years. A former professor of European intellectual history and critical theory at UC Irvine, she is now a revolutionary opera empowerer.
I’m meeting with her, LBO artistic director and chief creative officer James Darrah and music director Christopher Rountree over a boisterous lunch, and my first question is: So whose idea was it to devote an entire season to Pauline Oliveros?
Rountree: “I don’t know the answer.”
Darrah: “I don’t know that there is an answer.”
Beale: “It’s like it came from deep inside all of us.”
Rountree: “But there was a moment where it was in the air. And then Jim said to me, ‘What if it’s all Pauline and nothing but Pauline?’ That would be a dream for me.”
Darrah: “Weirdly it felt like what we should be doing. It’s why I came to Long Beach.”
Beale: “I was overjoyed.”
Another question for Beale: So how many board members has she enraged when even a single production by so experimental a composer surely alarms even the most courageous opera board in this artistically and financially cautious day and age?
“We’ve only lost one board member,” Beale answers sunnily. She also notes that she spent the holidays sweet-talking patrons and donors with her Christmas cards. Many have apparently come around. “I would say our board is pretty hardy,” Beale adds.
The LBO team, moreover, is convinced that since Oliveros’ death in 2016 at age 84, her relevance has grown to the point where we are in an obvious Oliveros moment. She was a pioneer composer of electronic music. She was a pioneering, shamanistic accordionist. She was a pioneering feminist and lesbian composer. She was a pioneering professor at Mills College in Oakland, at UC San Diego and elsewhere who inspired a significant number of today’s venturesome musicians. She has such acolytes as star flutist Claire Chase, who will be music director of this year’s Ojai Music Festival. A one-time outsider, Oliveros is taken seriously throughout the musical world.
But opera?
Oliveros was in no way, shape or traditional form an opera composer. She was, though, a brilliant maker of acoustic spectacle. Galvanized by sound in yawning subterranean caverns, she made her calling “deep listening” as a way to overcome the world’s ever-increasing surface noise. She discovered that once drones — be they calming or grating — resonate within our bodies they have the urgent power to alter our very sense of being. She further instructed us to tune into the little sounds of nature.
By exploring situations in which musicians share their profound awareness of how these sounds operate, how they reach others and the pleasure gained from their response, her work proves startlingly dramatic in performance. Given Oliveros’ delight in outrage, fine sense of humor, obsession with process and ability to anthropomorphize all sounds, no matter the source, it doesn’t take much to turn works, especially those with texts, into full-blown theater.
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When Oliveros titled a piece “Beethoven Was a Lesbian,” as she once did, she wonderfully stimulated (and stymied) the imaginations of performers and audiences alike. The next step becomes opera, whether she called it that (only a couple of times) or not. It’s the kind of magical musical thinking, in fact, that led Rountree to form his revolutionary new-music ensemble Wild Up 15 years ago. It’s exactly what Darrah, who also heads UCLA’s opera program, believes opera needs to move forward.
Beale’s response to anyone who says this isn’t opera: “It doesn’t matter.” She says that recalling the startling, sheer beauty of Oliveros’ works at the Ojai festival nine years ago, when Peter Sellars programmed them at Meditation Mountain. She realized how much they said about healing, about coming together, about recovery. “I knew we need to do something like this right now,” Beale said.
That same sense of coming together and healing made Oliveros a favored composer among far-flung musicians for Zoom performances during the COVID-19 shutdown, as it did when Oliveros’ “Ringing for Healing” once became part of a street agitprop in New York.
What does matter to Darrah and Rountree is the discovery of potential for opera. “We need to build the Black Mountain College of opera in L.A.,” Darrah says, referring to the experimental North Carolina college that hosted noted artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage.
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“It’s like Jamie Barton comes to us and doesn’t sing Azucena but Oliveros,” Darrah says. Lest LBO be mistaken for New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the Met mezzo-soprano who starred as the gypsy in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” will sing whatever animal is needed in Oliveros’ “El Relicario de los Animales,” which will be mounted at Heritage Square Museum on Feb. 15 and 16.
A graphic score for female vocalist and 20-member instrumental ensemble invites musical gestures for channeling the sonic wonderland of animal life and nature into mystical harmonic space. Darrah has added a second singer, Brenda Rae, a soprano also noted for her performances of more standard repertory, who will double as a percussionist.
“Relicario,” which was first given as a concert work at the 1979 CalArts Contemporary Music Festival, will be the first of LBO’s so-called three Oliveros operas. As a preseason tryout of the Oliveros idea last summer, the company presented one of Oliveros’ best-known works, “bye bye butterfly,” a haunting eight-minute electronic piece from 1965 that uses a recorded bit of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” and is often interpreted as a metaphor for women’s place in society. Puccini’s heroine here is overwhelmed by oscillating sine waves. LBO turned this into an enthusiastically engaging group improvisation.
In December, as a preview to the season, LBO staged “Earth Ears” in San Pedro at the Angels Gate Cultural Center. It began outdoors, and the first thing Darrah and Rountree discovered was an amazing five-second echo in which instruments resonated from the cliffs of Rancho Palos Verdes miles away. For the performance inside, the room was decorated with shredded paper (Prairie T. Trivuth will be designer for all the Oliveros productions), and instrumentalists scattered about the room and among the audience interacted in rigorous ways indicated by the score but also with just enough freedom that anything could happen.
Rountree says he was confronted with figuring out what Oliveros’ rules allow. “Do they force musicians toward introversion and introspection or push back against that? Is that tension even allowed to exist?” he asked himself.
“At the rehearsal, everyone was doing the rules, and the effect was a kind of shimmering. It felt like night music, like the piece was going to a place. But when we finished the rehearsal, it could not go to that place. I thought, if it does, it does. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. It would go where it wanted or always stay on the horizon.”
But during the performance, a jazz-like solo here, a different kind of response there, led to what became a grand theatrical moment. You could feel a collective awe from the audience.
“The work is about commitment and presence,” Rountree concludes, “so why not just commit completely to the work. The only way to engage is to go fully underwater.”
The other two productions will be “The Library of Maps: An Opera in Many Parts,” a collaboration from 2001 with poet Moira Roth, more a concert piece to be turned into an opera in April on the Queen Mary in Long Beach; and “The Nubian Word for Flowers: A Phantom Opera” in July (venue still to be determined). This is Oliveros’ most operatic piece and was given as a work in progress by Yuval Sharon and the Industry at the Hammer Museum in 2013, when Rountree and Wild Up participated. The LBO production will be the West Coast premiere of a chamber (or pocket) version with a libretto by Oliveros’ partner, Ione.
Beyond that in the next two seasons, Beale says, the company will present the premiere of an opera by Shelley Washington as well as some traditional opera. Darrah is eager to stage Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte.” There had been some talk of including “Cosi” this season with Oliveros additions, but the company didn’t want to compete with Los Angeles Opera’s production of Mozart’s opera in March or Yuval Sharon’s Detroit Opera staging in April. Darrah promises his own innovations.
In the meantime, Beale says she is determined to use Oliveros as “a kind of giant reset.”
Walking out of “Earth Ears” with Darrah and Rountree, she saw the sun set over the ocean, and the three of them just stood and looked.
“I thought to myself, this is the first time that we’ve done something that wasn’t in some way influenced by what was in the past,” she says. “Now we’re looking forward to what we’re going to do together.
“We’re really doing what we say we’re about. We’re not holding back. We’re not hiding in the corner. We’re just going for it.”
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