Weeks after the premier of the opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X at the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City, Henry Lewis Gates, Jr., suggested I come to his house to interview composer Anthony Davis. The interview was conducted on November 9, 1986, in Ithaca, New York. When I submitted the transcript to Mr. Davis, I asked him to rewrite anything he wanted to. It came back with only the lightest editing—and that entirely for facts. I felt it only fair to edit my own comments in the same spirit. This is by far the most traditional interview in the book, then—not really a written interview at all.
Samuel R. Delany: I’m talking here, Sunday morning, after a pleasant brunch at Henry and Sharon Gates’ house, with Anthony Davis, composer of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which premiered a few weeks ago at Lincoln Center in New York City.
Victor Hugo’s son, Francois-Victor Hugo, did the translations of Shakespeare into French which Boito used to work on his libretto for Verdi’s Otello. In the introduction to his translation there’s a long passage in which Hugo explains that of course Othello isn’t really black, that Desdemona couldn’t possibly have fallen in love with him if he was: He’s obviously an Arab or of some strange and romantic race that makes him not really black.
But in the margin of his own personal copy, Boito has jotted a succinct and pithy note:
Pertanto sta negro! “But he is black!”
And this is arguably the controlling thought behind Boito’s libretto, if not Verdi’s opera.
From Aïda and Otello to Porgy and Bess and Lost in the Stars, we as blacks have been opera-ed, have been operated upon, have been operationalized by white composers so that there seems to be a kind of massive charge running from white musicians to us as black subjects. How did you and your brother, Christopher, who devised the story, and your cousin, Thulani, who wrote the words, feel as blacks usurping this particular position in what’s certainly perceived by most opera goers as an all- white field (with the possible exception of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha)—a field in which blacks have traditionally been the objects of white operas?
Anthony Davis: Well, we felt very good about it. We said: This is a opportunity to have our own voice—to deal with our own history, our own characters, and with our own people, in our own voice. Blacks have always been the object of operas: Today I was just looking at Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson. Black people have always been symbolic for white people, particularly in opera; in a sense it frees whites to deal in a mythological way with other subjects through us. In XI was trying to deal with our own myths. I always thought of Malcolm’s as one of the great stories—and myths—of our day. I felt it was really ripe for operatic treatment.
SRD: Did it ever occur to you guys, even jokingly, to write an opera entirely about whites?
AD: Sure. My brother had this idea: he said the sequel to X should be Brigham Young.
SRD: Wonderful! Now, opera is often an intellectually beleaguered art. Because of its direct connections with the theater, people have a tendency not to take it seriously at the time it’s being done: It’s very theatrical, grandiose—deals with the passions. But as soon as the opera sits awhile, it becomes the object of a great deal of intellectual energy by critics. Was it Joseph Kerman in Opera and Drama who said that examining its opera is the way you test the health of a culture?
Were you at all weighted down by this contradiction between the frivolity of opera, on the one hand, and the terrible, terrible seriousness with which people can take it, on the other?
AD: No, I don’t think that affected me. I was never convinced of opera’s frivolity to begin with. There’s a tradition of light, comic opera. And there’s a tradition of poorly put together melodramas. But when I looked at my models for opera, at the operas I admire, I really felt that you could create something epic; you could create something tragic; that you could make a unique theatrical experience, heightened by music. And that’s what we were trying for.
If anything, the criticism has been that we weren’t frivolous enough. But I never thought frivolity was appropriate.
I felt I could have fun with Malcolm X and fun with the times and the characters. But I felt it should be serious fun. I would play with it, but I knew that underneath was something deadly serious.
SRD: Were there particular things you wanted to do in this opera that you’d seen done badly in other operas—things you didn’t want to do in this opera that you knew didn’t work in other contemporary operas?
AD: Oh, yeah!
SRD: What were some of them?
AD: I’d seen lots of operas that used basically theatrical dialogue. The librettos were plays, where you’d have one line, then another line, and another line—a lot of modern twentieth century operas are written this way. They’re very talky.
Well, that’s something I wanted to avoid.
I was interested in building melodic material, in a way that wasn’t realistic. People don’t talk in long phrases. When you have two or three characters, you weave them—rather than let them speak in the normal way a discussion goes, where you listen to someone and then respond. Our decision not to use normal language, to make it poetry, was because—I’ve always found this—if you write with everyday speech, it moves the musical setting toward plainsong, which didn’t really interest me. That’s something I’d heard in other operas and decided early on I wanted to avoid. Basically, we were dealing with certain kinds of arguments that reflected a whole way of understanding our historical and cultural situation. When you understand Malcolm and you understand, let’s say, the street life around him—well, we had a whole rationale to express; and it couldn’t be expressed in everyday speech.
First off, you don’t have the time you have in a play. Look at a libretto. An opera libretto is fifty or sixty pages long. It’s not structured like a play. So you really have to think of it in terms of—
SRD: This was the reason Thulani used that somewhat elevated diction?
AD: Yes. You have to use images and you have to use metaphors. Just the conceit of having the characters sing, rather than speak, takes it out of the realistic mode. If you plunge back into realism, either in language or in action, it can compromise the abstraction implicit in the music.
SRD: What made you turn to opera? Had your writing included symphonic forms?
AD: Yes. I’d written two symphonic works. I did a work for the Brooklyn Philharmonic (which was also done by the New York Philharmonic); and I did a work for the San Francisco Symphony, a piano concerto. After I had done my first orchestra pieces and was looking for the next thing to do, it occurred to me that opera would be a logical step. Also, I felt my music was uniquely dramatic. Most composers—my contemporaries—are very uncomfortable with drama. They’re uncomfortable with the notion of music having dramatic tension. It’s partially the legacy of John Cage that’s brought that perception about. But I always felt that drama was present in my music; so I decided opera would be a natural form for me.
SRD: What were your first experiences of opera? How did they affect you?
AD: My first experience listening to anything like an opera was probably Kurt Weill. When I was a child, my father had the records of The Threepenny Opera , with Lotte Lenya—and I was terrified of it! I remember listening to it Sunday mornings: Every Sunday morning he’d play it. And I’d hide under the table.
SRD: So opera was very powerful?
AD: Yes, it was very powerful. My father had some Wagner records. But I wasn’t really interested in them at that point. It took me a long time to get over the racism of Wagner to reach the music.
In school, at Yale, I did an intense study of nineteenth century opera, particularly Wagner and Strauss. I had to do a lot of analyses, particularly of Wagner. Later on when I began my own exploration of opera, the first ones I attended at the Met—my violinist plays in the Met orchestra and he gets me into the operas—were mostly Wagner. I learned a lot from them; from Parsifal, which is one of my favorite Wagner operas, and Die Walküre, which is another of my favorites. They provided interesting models.
SRD: You mentioned Parsifal. I was wondering—in fact I wrote it down among my notes to ask you—whether Parsifal might have been, in some ways, a model for X. If not Parsifal, possibly Tannhäuser—
AD: They were the first two operas I ever saw.
SRD: Tannhäuser and Parsifal? The reason I ask is because you have that wonderful, spiritual climax in X, where Malcolm, in Mecca, is with the chorus of praying men. And it’s very hard to see it and not to think of Parsifal.
AD: Yes. Basically that’s about the search for faith—it’s about faith; and, in Parsifal , about Christianity.
If you want to make an argument for where minimalism began, you could say that Parsifal was the first minimalist opera. Probably the second act of Parsifal—I’d start with that.
Bringing back motifs, using thematic material in different sections of the opera to link it, insisting on recurring themes—that all comes from Wagner. I was building toward that moment in the third act—I always thought of that as the climax—the moment in Mecca, when Malcolm sees his name: El-Shabazz—naming is so much a part of black culture. Where he discovers his religion, he discovers who he is. That moment where he does it is the resolution of a kind of quest.
SRD: When we were talking last night, you mentioned Janacek as a favorite composer. Do Janacek’s works have anything to do with, or any bearing on, X?
AD: Well, I came to Janacek a little later. I had already started writing X. My director, Rhoda Levine, had done the premiere of House of the Dead, which is one of Janacek’s greatest operas. She’d also done a number of his other operas. She’d told me about him, and as a birthday present she gave me the records. So I began to study it. I was fascinated with it. But it will probably influence me more in the next opera I do.
SRD: Janacek, then, is a recent enthusiasm?
AD: Yes. I think what’s interesting about him is his ability actually to deal with melodrama, to deal with family situations in a fresh way. And also his use of orchestration—he’s a beautiful, a wonderful orchestrator. He really uses the orchestra to paint with—and the call and response between the orchestra and the voices. The voice says something and the orchestra responds. It’s a very different form from what I do.
SRD: What were the circumstances around X’s beginning—how did you come to this particular opera that a month ago we all saw at the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center? How did it grow up?
AD: It was originally my brother’s idea, about five years ago. He said, “Why don’t we do a musical about Malcolm X?” I said, “A musical?” I couldn’t do that. I thought, well, maybe I could do it as an opera.
Then, three years ago, we brought in Thulani; and we started to write it.
We received some grants for it. Finally it was done at the Kitchen, in downtown New York City. We did a series of workshops—one at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia. It was a whole learning process, because none of us had ever done an opera before—though our director, Rhoda Levine, had had lots of opera experience.
The libretto was written—mostly—first. I worked with it, edited it, then set it to music. Sometimes I would change lines around—I always brought in more ensemble material. That’s my tendency.
We started from the beginning with a synopsis. My brother would submit a synopsis. We’d argue about it, the three of us. We’d tear it apart—then we’d go back to it. But after about a year or so we had the structure together. And we’d already written almost two acts.
SRD: In terms either of the writing or of the production, do any incidents or anecdotes stand out?
AD: Mostly I remember my director having problems with the fact that I liked having orchestral interludes in the opera. She didn’t know what to do with them.
SRD: Interludes [laughter], just like a real opera!
AD: In a way she didn’t understand what happened when the words stopped. And I just said, you know . . . it can stop. I mean there doesn’t have to be talk all the time. It’s not a play.
In Louise’s aria, I used to have a long orchestral interlude, and I didn’t have the recitative leading up to it—that was written later. I thought, well, maybe I could put recitative over this and it would help. It did. It really became a very nice moment in the opera.
For me there’ve been a lot of funny things; for example, in the production you saw, the characters Street and Elijah were played by the same singer. Originally Street was a bass-baritone part and Elijah was a tenor. When I auditioned Thomas Young, and we agreed that he would be Elijah, he told me he was singing in a club downstairs in my building, at Manhattan Plaza. He said why don’t you come hear me.
I went; and I’d never heard a jazz singer as good as he was before. I’d already accepted him as an opera singer—to do Elijah Muhammed’s part. Now I said, well, you have to do Street too.
SRD: It certainly adds a resonance to the opera to have Street and Elijah the same singer.
AD: I think it’s great. It ties the work together. When we did the first workshop performance, one problem was that Street disappears after the first act—and Elijah Muhammed comes in. That means most of the characters Malcolm confronts in the first act disappear for the second; and that’s a structural problem. Because you have no conflict; you have no sense of protagonist/antagonist. This gave us an idea how to effect that continuity and it also made a connection between Malcolm’s two father figures . . . . That was lucky. When I heard him sing, I told him, “Well, you’re going to do Street too.”
I had to transpose the Street part up a fifth, because of his voice. It took a little extra work; but it was worth it.
The problem is, I don’t know if anyone else in the world could do both parts.
SRD: At one point in the early scenes of the opera there’s a long section where Malcolm is mute, where he doesn’t sing at all. Now when a character in an opera stops singing, it makes a very powerful statement to an opera audience. What was the feeling that you wanted to project there?
AD: Well, we wanted to see the way he was being affected by things around him—the way he was taking things in. Silence is a very demanding thing for an actor, especially an opera singer. One of the demanding things about Malcolm’s role is that the singer has to be able to listen. In the whole first act you’re responding, you’re changing, you’re being affected by the people around you. You see Street, you see all these others—his mother, earlier on, and then Ella. The big payoff is the aria at the end of the act, when he finds his voice; and that voice comes out in rage. Finally he can express himself as a man—but only at the end of the act.
We always had fights about why can’t you have him do or say something here, react to something there. But we decided to go with the notion of making Malcolm’s first-act aria that much more powerful by not letting him sing as an adult until that point. There, song makes sense: he’s a man in prison, and he’s down, he’s at the bottom of his life. Then you hear his response to the whole of what he’s seen before.
He talks about his father. He talks about his mother. He talks about his whole situation. And that was what we were trying to set up.
One thing I was very concerned with was the relationship of the chorus to the soloist. I wanted to create a sense of Malcolm’s community. Because Malcolm is a public man—and a political man—it seemed rational to me always to show him in the context of other people.
SRD: The first time we hear Malcolm; it’s as the child’s voice—a very rarefied boy soprano singing just after his mother’s mad song. This is followed by Malcolm’s long silence—almost twenty minutes. After this terribly weighty quietness from just the one character—of course, music is going on all around that silence and certainly that’s effective—the next music from Malcolm is a man’s voice.
Yes, it’s very strong.
Indeed, the opera struck me as very richly musical. In the generous New York Times coverage during the week before the premiere, there was some talk of it’s being a jazz opera. But what I heard seemed to be a lot closer to the tonalities of German music in the beginning of this century—Berg, Schoenberg; even if it wasn’t using their serial techniques. In that sense you could say the music was very conservative. How does this assertion strike you?
AD: Oh, I don’t know what that means, because—
SRD: Not as a value judgment, but just simply as—
AD: No, I would accept that. It’s funny, because music has been so divided. What’s radical in music is a somewhat different thing today: the use of an improviser, I think; employing certain rhythms and repetition—those kinds of things. Academics have tried to define musical development only in terms of harmonic and melodic material. But basically the end of that kind of development was the twelve-tone school. You had responses to it, from the minimalists, to the Cage stuff, to the electronic stuff. I think X hearkens back to a more conservative mode. But then, I’m very interested in form—form in music.
Musically, I’ve never been able to accept the arbitrariness of chance operations. Really, music has been hiding behind certain intellectual concepts, or—better—hiding by not allowing itself to be expressive, by not allowing itself to be direct. And directness is important to me. It’s also been hiding, I think, by being afraid to confront form: It’s been afraid to create works with the same kind of formal development one hears earlier in twentieth century music. A lot of my contemporaries haven’t developed their music formally in the ways earlier music does.
SRD: The thing that comes to mind when you say that is the way in which the various scenes in Wozzeck are each in a different musical form: Act One, Scene Four is a passacaglia—actually a chaconne—with twenty-one variations on a twelve-note theme; Act Two’s five scenes form a five-movement symphony with the first scene the sonata movement and the fourth a double scherzo; Act Three, Scene Four, is an invention on the key of D-minor . . . and so forth. Were these the kinds of formal structures you were working into X? They’re things that would be very hard for a general audience to pick up, without being told, even after several hearings.
AD: Well, I don’t use a twelve-tone system. There’s a sense of tonality, a sense of key structure. I was trying to be consistent within the dramatic structure by reinforcing it through the musical structure. I have recurring themes, recurring tonalities, also certain recurring intervalic relationships. Often I think of the key as a rhythm—not just a succession of tonal intervals. It can be a pattern.
Throughout the whole opera I use this B-flat/A-flat major second.
I put it in the opera so many ways, I was getting embarrassed about it. Every conceivable way. It became a game for me. You start playing these games. I mean, I’d never written anything of this length. It’s almost required of a composer to justify the length by having everything connected. By the time you get to the third act, everything you do has to have some relation to something you’ve done before. There’s no way you can introduce something completely new. From the opening of the overture you hear that opening interval.
That’s the recurring motif: You hear it all over the opera.
I do it in different ways. At the same time I was consistent. One time I had these twenty-five B-flats paired with this pedal-point A-flat that I use. The first time you hear it is with the quartet of men after Malcolm’s father has been killed. Then you hear it again when Malcolm first starts his ministry on 125th Street. He says: “When I was little, they called me nigger; they called me nigger so much I thought it was my name. . . .”
And everyone laughs.
But what’s underneath it is the same rhythmic pattern, the same ostenato, that you heard underneath the report of his father’s death: “They say that Earl was on the tracks; they say a streetcar ran. . . .”
So I had these little jokes. But the idea of using these recurring ostenatos, these patterns, bringing them back, bringing back the mother material—you know . . . [He hums]. I brought that back in the second act with, “Who shot the bomb and destroyed your home? . . .” I brought that back, because, even if the audience doesn’t realize they’ve heard something before, it still affects them in a subliminal way. It gives depth to the scene: All of a sudden they say, “Oh, man!”—because of the emotional weight that comes from the way you used it before.
Also I had these rhythmic games. Once I had a conductor come up to me and say, “What’s this with the number eleven in your music? The whole opera is in eleven.” Eleven this and eleven that. . . . Eleven-eight. I had patterns of eleven. He showed it to me, and I mean it was there—everywhere. I remember when I was studying Machaut’s or Dufay’s motets, that kind of thing about using numbers, like in isorhythmic motets—where you’re using certain lengths in different ways as the underlying structure of the music. That’s really, really prevalent in my work. I would go back to a certain pattern, and I might turn it around, and do it a different way. For me what was fascinating was the whole notion of constantly borrowing from something you did before. In a sense, you’re always building musically on something that happened in the past. So the opera has an overall development. It hearkens back to more dramatic forms—as opposed to the Italianate form of Verdi, which, while beautiful, is more a question of tunes. Verdi’s operas, in a way, are structured not unlike a Broadway show. But because of the beauty of the music and what’s within the infrastructure of it, it becomes something else.
But I was more interested in the form of Wagner and Strauss, which was more through-composed.
SRD: As you discuss the structure of your opera, clearly it’s through- composed. Yet you seem comfortable with terms like recitative and aria, terms and concepts that “through-composers” of operas, like Wagner, tended to eschew. You apparently think of your opera in those terms. You didn’t find any difficulty dividing the opera up in your own mind in patterns like that? Or did you? Or is it just for my benefit—because you’re talking about it with me?
AD: It’s very funny. I only had one real recitative in the whole opera. I mean, someone would say, oh, you know, that’s a recitative. And I’d say, yeah, you know, you’re right.
SRD: The premiere night for X had very much the sense of an Event. It was impressive to go into Lincoln Center and see three-quarters of the audience black. For me, that was a truly marvelous thing! But at one point in the opera Malcolm sings, “I don’t hate white people.” And suddenly—and it was the only point in the opera, where I did—I had the feeling: We’ve only rented this space . . . from them. It was almost as though that particular line was somehow being given to the white establishment structure that controls the art-world of this country. At no other time in the opera was I made aware of that larger—
AD: Right!
SRD: Did you at all feel this was some kind of placation that had to be included in the piece? Or was it just an attempt to show several sides of Malcolm—an attempt that I overread?
AD: No. Actually it says, “We don’t hate the white man.” But it’s also meant to be funny. You have to consider Malcolm’s humor in terms of the whole passage [Sings]: “It may sound bitter. It may sound like hate. But it’s just, but it’s just . . . the truth! We don’t hate the white man: His world’s about to fall. But it’ just, but it’s just. . . .” There again, I’m playing with the music. It’s the same music that you have behind, “They called me nigger; they called me nigger so much I thought it was . . . my name!” It was a gas to try to capture Malcolm’s humor. It’s always in his speech. But also it’s in how he would say serious stuff: He could do that with humor too. Also he uses repetition, which is great for me. You can use the classical comic motif three times—bam! pow!—hit you with a zinger! That was hard to do because a lot of opera singers aren’t used to that. [Sings:] “When I was little, they called me nigger; they called me nigger, they called me. . . .”
When Avery Brooks did it—because he’s more of an actor, who came up through the whole black tradition of improvisation—he would improvise by talking in between the music. It was unbelievable stuff. And every night it would be different. “When I was little . . . yeah!” Then he’d catch someone’s eye and make them respond. By the end, he had the whole cast going. He’d sing “They called me. . . .” And someone would come back with, “Yeah, well what did they call you?” That whole thing created an atmosphere of Malcolm with the people around him on the street.
No, I didn’t try to placate. The only time I had to placate, really, was with the other side.
HLG: Our side.
AD: We had to be very careful in dealing with the break-up between Elijah and Malcolm and the issues that represents. Also we were dealing with people who’re still alive. Betty Shabazz, Malcolm’s wife, was right there, watching the opera—where someone is singing her words!
SRD: Yes. That’s a real situation that has to be dealt with. In the overture to the opera, in the production, the curtain starts out open; and during the overture, one after another, all the characters come out. Is that written into the opera? Or was that simply the director’s notion of how to do it?
AD: It was the director’s notion. But soon it became a part of the opera.
I remember the first rehearsal we had, she came in and said, “Well, where’s the overture?”
What overture? You write the overture after you write the opera, right? I had no idea that . . . oh, you want an overture?
“Yeah, I’m staging the overture.”
You’re staging the overture? I guess I’ll have to come up with an overture for this.
So that’s how it happened.
I had this piece that was written for a Robert Hayden poem, called “Middle Passage”—a piano piece. Basically that’s the piece that became the overture.
It was kind of interesting, because, we’re all in the “Middle Passage,” somewhere.
SRD: In a way the staging seemed—well . . . I said at one point that the music seemed conservative without a value judgment: It seemed to come out of the German tonalities, structures, you know, of Schoenberg, or Berg.
The staging seemed conservative in a different way. It struck me that the basic model for the staging was Our Town—Thornton Wilder’s old show with no scenery. For me I found that detracted from the musicality of the opera. I wanted something more radical in the presentation to underlie the complexity of what I heard as real musical invention and richness.
AD: Her idea of having the actors create the scene often came because there was so little time. I move from scene to scene so fast musically that the transitions have to be made pretty fast . . . Thornton Wilder—I’m not sure what the relation is to that. I think it could be done other ways. I could see other ways of doing that opera. But I felt that we had committed ourselves early on to how she was doing it.
SRD: What are your thoughts for future operas? Is there anything there you’d be willing to share with us?
AD: Well, yes—a number of them. First I’m going to do an opera with Debbie, a science fiction opera. It’ll give me the opportunity, for one thing, to use a smaller cast—about eight singers in it and, I guess, some supers—some actors in it, too. It’ll give me a chance to do a more lyrical form of opera.
It’ll also incorporate some of the experiments I’ve been doing with electronic music. I’ve been working on a project at MIT with a computer. What I’ve done is to take spoken language and manipulate it. For example, I can change the speed of speech without changing the pitch. I can isolate different parts of the sound. I can make really beautiful musical effects with just spoken words. You can find all this music within speech.
The opera is going to be about issues of telepathy and the responsibilities that come with it. I want to have people hearing words and thoughts all the time. What would that really be like. And how do you express that in musical terms. You’d hear these fragmented musical statements, that could come from the computer, interacting with voices, and with spoken language.
There are two twins in the opera . . . and a mother, a stepfather, and a real father, who’s what’s called the gashulya: someone who’s been surgically altered to live underwater. I have a painter friend who does black-light paintings—he does all his painting in the dark [laughter], and he’s dying to do this: In the set we could use ultraviolet light so that when you look at the backdrop, it would just look like it was going back for miles. So underwater landscapes are possible. It’ll be completely different. It couldn’t be more different!
SRD: The Swedish Nobel Prize-winning poet Harry Martinson wrote a poem, Aniara, that was the basis for a science fiction opera thirty or forty years ago. Did you ever come across it?
AD: No, I haven’t. I’d like to. Who wrote the music?
SRD: I don’t remember1—if the mumbled truth be known! But it took place on a generations-long interstellar journey. And there was a singing computer in it, called the “Mima.”
Are there any things that you think an opera composer should never do?
AD: Should never do? No. [Laughter.]
SRD: I mean, something that will always make the results bad. So that you’ll end up with a bad opera? Is there a mistake that you see contemporary opera composers making that you have decided that you will never make?
AD: Actually in terms of subject matter, no. I would say no.
SRD: Not necessarily subject—but musically.
AD: Oh, yes. I think . . . don’t write a play. You can’t sing a play. I would say that’s the main thing.
For another opera I was thinking of doing something on the Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison; I’d love to do that. And I had an idea for this opera called Tania, based on the Patricia Hearst kidnapping. I really wanted to do that. [Laughter.]
SRD: Broad political ideas.
AD: Yes. It would be like Lulu, you know? It’s another identity story, but it’s a tragedy in the sense that the woman never finds it. First she identifies with her boyfriend, then with her family and that life; then she identifies with her captors and Cinque, and that whole thing. But it has a comic element. You see this woman emerge with her battle fatigues and then you see her identification, later on again, with her prison guard, whom she eventually married. I’d probably be sued, but it would be fun.
SRD: It’s certainly an interesting notion.
HLG: I sense a relationship with Afro-American literature, in terms of your wanting to develop a relationship between the music and the literary tradition. Where does this come from, or why?
AD: It’s probably genes. [Laughter.] I mean, man—you couldn’t be in my father’s house and not do that. I think that’s where it comes from. We first talked about Malcolm X, I remember, sitting at the dinner table. We talked about the possibility of doing something with that. And The Invisible Man too. I always heard it with music.
HLG: Really? And he plays it in music, as Louis Armstrong.
AD: Louis Armstrong—I would do that. I have a friend, Olu Dara, who’s this trumpet player. I even know who would play the trumpet in this. And I’d have him do that. But the orchestration I would put underneath it—it would be so out! It would be like the strings and stuff that you hear. [Sings.] Like, “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” or something.
SRD: Is there any advice that you would give a composer who was thinking about writing an opera? At this point, having emerged from your first large-scale professional production, what would you tell a young composer aspiring to write opera?
AD: Find good people to work with, mainly. And find subject matter that grabs your emotions—that’s important to you. It can’t be done as an academic pursuit. There’s too much involved. The subject matter has to be important.
SRD: I remember years and years ago, when I was, ever so briefly, at City College, Rudolf Bing came and talked to us when he was head of the Metropolitan Opera. There were some of us there who were interested in opera. I’d been involved in writing one myself, only a year before. But I recall that, basically, Bing told us: “Don’t bother.”
Your opera, he said, will never get produced.
He said it very nicely. But basically he was saying, “Don’t waste your time writing an opera.” Now of course this was twenty-five years ago—
AD: He was right.
SRD: The actual mechanics of getting an opera on the boards—from the point of view of someone sitting in the audience, it looks daunting! How does that happen?
AD: Well, we were told a number of times that we should scale down the piece, make it a music theater piece so that you could do it in repertory theaters—that kind of thing. But we decided early on that it was for an opera house. They’re going to have to swallow this one whole. [Laughter.] It’s been an interesting phenomenon just how we’ve been able to get into this position—how we’ve been able to get City Opera to accept us. Actually, I never really approached them. They came to look at the opera at BAM [the Brooklyn Academy of Music] and that’s how we got there.
SRD: It was originally done at BAM?
AD: No, we were doing a workshop at BAM; and people from the City Opera came to see it. But I think basically what there is, is a void. No contemporary American opera has really taken in people’s imagination. The reason X became the phenomenon it has, and has had the success it has, is basically because we stepped into a situation where there was nothing there. There wasn’t that much of any quality. And so it was unique. It had very little to do with the black and white issues; there just weren’t that many good operas around—period. The field was really open.
I think that as a black composer, I had a tremendous advantage, in that our tradition has never strayed that far from the voice. When we write music, when I improvise, I can sing what I improvise. For me music has never been that far from the vocal traditions. I was talking to one of my contemporaries, about the black composers I know, and I said, “You know, it’s really open for us.” For example, the whole academic school of modern classical music, from after the 1940s—people who have been inspired by Schoenberg and Berg and Webern and those people—basically haven’t been able to create an opera that anyone wants to hear [Laughter.] And so, basically, there’s a real opportunity for the Afro-American tradition to become the dominant force in opera in America.
I really feel it.
SRD: Is it that nobody wants to hear their operas—or that nobody wants to produce them? I know that when I hear of a new opera, a new contemporary opera, I go—if I possibly can. I remember in London, going to see The Mines of Sulfur—by Beverly what’s-his-name.2
AD: Yes, I go too.
SRD: The idea of a new contemporary opera is something very exciting for me. On the other hand there’s the barrier of the production costs, just the realities of production, that stand in the way of people hearing—
AD: You know basically there’s a musical problem, in that people don’t really go to new operas. Opera has always been on the border between what would be “high art” and “popular art.” There has to be something immediate in an opera. When you write an opera, something has to create an immediate response, an immediate musical response.
But that means you have to communicate on a number of levels as a composer: The first level is the melodic interest and whether you can draw an audience into the music. The patronage system has resulted in the composer’s isolation—the patronage system which is academia, which is basically the substitute for the Church, or the substitute for the Court, or for the other forms of patronage. The isolation it’s created makes a situation where the works are not written for any real audience; or they’re written for a very small audience. But opera has to be on a larger scale. At least it’s supposed to be.
HLG: Don’t we encounter racism when we start to juxtapose blackness and opera? Didn’t you encounter some of it?
AD: Yes, of course. Definitely that’s true. There’s an attempt to dismiss what I’ve done. But that’s something you have to—
SRD: How so?
AD: Well, the New York Times critic, for example, said that basically X was just a polemic, and that it was just about words, it wasn’t about music—basically he wasn’t able to deal with what’s in the music at all. And then the next Times critic used an argument about vernacular art. This was Rockwell—it was really a funny thing. He was very condescending. He said, it’s a very good effort for a first opera, etc., but he wished that we would become looser. He compared it with Duke Ellington’s Queenie Pie. He said that Queenie Pie came from an era when black composers felt less self-conscious about letting their vernacular roots show and allowing their audience to have a good time. [Laughter.] Here we go again. I think that there was this kind of response. What was amazing to me was that to see the response of the audience. We were sold out for every performance!
SRD: You had an incredible amount of support from the community. Any opera that I go to and my mother goes to, three days later (without a word from me, either: when we talked to each other, a week later, we were both surprised that each other had seen it)—I mean, that opera has won over the community!
AD: We got standing ovations. But in the Times piece they were trying to dismiss it almost as if it hadn’t happened. They were trying to dismiss what had happened. The work was a success. It managed to communicate to an audience. No one would have had that response if it were just “about words”—whatever that’s supposed to mean.
HLG: The Times wanted it to be more like a musical.
SRD: Why isn’t this Porgy and Bess?
AD: Also he said I had to make my ideas gray.
HLG: What an insult! As opposed to black or white?
AD: Yes. I think that people are wrestling with the whole notion of black art being serious art; white folks always have a problem dealing with the notion that this is a serious work of art. I would say that my opera is no more vernacular than Lulu. If you’re going to say that’s vernacular, fine. But to talk about “vernacular art”—those arguments are so confused. Shakespeare is vernacular, you know. But they’re not talking about it in those terms, because when an American critic says that, it can’t be said without racism. It’s about class distinctions and it’s about racial distinctions. It’s about those kinds of things and not really about the art or the work.
SRD: I only saw the first Times review, and it was a clearly a very tentative review by somebody who was—equally clearly—neither comfortable with the Event nor comfortable with the music.
The Times, remember, is not a highbrow culture organ. It’s furiously middle-brow; and nobody seriously interested in the development of art—especially anyone black—is going to read it as anything else. I assume that a good number of the black people who attended those sold-out performances knew how to read those very frightened, up-tight and oh-so-predictable reviews.
And I would imagine that most people who had heard X, then read those reviews, would have felt, at the very least: “Wouldn’t it have been nice if this man had said something about what happened last night in the theater.” On whatever level: either on the stage, in the orchestra, or with the audience.
AD: Well, the Times critics couldn’t. Of course I believe X works on all these levels. But I think that they couldn’t possibly, considering who they are, speak out: That just won’t happen right away. It’s very funny: Critics outside New York were able to do that. But New York is too political. It’s too much about their stance on cultural politics, not about reviewing a work. And trying to see where the work falls in terms of what they’re trying to advocate.
SRD: Whenever you conceive of yourself as an arbiter of culture, rather than as a creator of culture, you become purely a political mouthpiece—of the most vulgar sort. And, sadly, that’s the problem with most New York critics who have a major outlet. And it doesn’t matter what the political slant of the work under review.
But think how strange it must have been to be a white critic in that audience. They were in another world—a world they’d never been in before. We were in another world—let’s face it—that most of us certainly haven’t been in very often. But it was ours. It wasn’t theirs. And that must have been very upsetting. The upsetting part I suspect was not that that world was hostile to them. That, they—some of them—could probably have dealt with. Rather it was ignoring them. And that, I’m sure, was far more disorienting.
After all: What do those reviews, largely, say? Please pay more attention to the traditional values we whites have imposed on operas about blacks that we’ve written and approved of in the past: looseness, entertainment, melody. And what excludes them is a major opera house full of black people, giving a standing ovation to a black-authored work that’s musically rigorous, run through with wit, and steeped in passion.
AD: I found it funny that no one would say what the audience was—the fact that the audience who turned out for X was so overwhelmingly black, and that that’s unique for an event of this kind. There’s been no phenomenon like it. I felt a little disappointed with the reports, in those terms; but I guess I shouldn’t have. That’s the major sense in which I feel I haven’t had the recognition for what was really achieved. But that happens all the time.
HLG: People don’t know how to read it or hear it.
AD: I thought that was unfortunate. I think also because of the political—
SRD: It’s as if all of the reviewers turned into Parsifal and were unable to ask the proper questions.
But I remember the same thing happening back in the middle sixties, with a very different sort of opera: in 1967, Al Carmines’ and Helen Adam’s San Francisco’s Burning played over three weekends at the Judson Poets’ Theater to packed houses with twenty-minute standing ovations each night. But the Village Voice reviewer—we’re not even talking about the Times here—gave the most lukewarm of reviews, wondering if this was “what a musical evening really ought to be,” hardly mentioning a performance or a performer, and never referring to the standing-room-only audiences and their thunderous approbation.
There was so much flack over that, I recall, that two weeks later, after a column full of letters, very grudgingly the Voice re-reviewed it at a slightly higher level of enthusiasm . . . once the run was over.
Which only means that what we’re talking about here is the particularly, and specifically black form of the “new art work” problem. And, of course, it does have its own and very real black form. But that form shares congruences with other, very real problems.
AD: Also, it’s so easy to write about the subject matter of this opera. The subject matter is one reason it got produced, too. It grabbed people. But it also enabled them not to deal with what was being done with that subject matter. And that’s too bad. But I anticipated that; it will take a number of years before people really understand or really listen to the opera, to what it actually does. It’s funny. The audience will do that before most critics will.
SRD: There’s a kind of tradition in conducting opera in New York, for some reason—certainly all the operas that come out of Lincoln Center—to conduct them small. Do you know what I mean? I remember Levine conducting Tristan one evening as though it were Debussy. Did you feel that the conductor conducted it with the sonic richness you wanted? Were you happy with the sound of the opera, in the house?
AD: No. But there are reasons for that. The acoustic balance. The house is very difficult. The orchestra basically had to play very quietly throughout the whole thing to have the singers be heard. Ideally, you would want to be in a position where the orchestra could play out so that the richness of the music comes through more. It’s kind of like hearing the music through cotton gauze: because they couldn’t really play out. Some of that had to do with some of the performers having trouble projecting through the orchestra in that house. But if I do a record of it or something, that won’t be a problem. You’ll be able to hear everything.
SRD: I’m waiting for the small-score to be published, so that I can sit there and follow it.
HLG: How about the rhythm?
SRD: Again, that goes back to what we were saying before about jazz . . . . What was jazz doing in the opera for you and what is rhythm doing in the opera for you as a composer?
AD: Okay. In terms of the so-called “jazz parts,” I think that basically I was using them to set up time and place—the early sections in Boston.
SRD: You were using jazz for musical scene-painting.
AD: Yes. I tried to get into the big-band period—Lionel Hampton and Duke—because we were talking about dance halls and dance hall stuff. I was trying to use the music to create the scene. Then I thought I would set up a healthy tension between that and the expectation, so that when you actually get to the dance hall, the music goes somewhere else. Finally you realize that the dance hall is really about a kind of alienation, and not really so much about the dance. In his aria at the end of the opera, Malcolm sings, “You can jitterbug and prance, but you’ll never run the ball.” I took that as a model for the dance hall scene. In terms of rhythmic use, I see something more complicated. In the opera, I’m trying to use the rhythms as the building blocks of the drama. As the rhythm becomes more complex, as there’s more rhythmic density, you get a certain tension.
SRD: There’s a great deal of cross rhythm.
AD: Yes. There’s a clash of rhythm, of rhythmic structures, using repetition to create tension. I find that rhythm like that creates tension. And I use—I guess, the word would be—antiphony, antiphonal choirs, basically pitting them against one another, while you have one recurring line. For these moments, using the chorus in that way, I divide up the chorus in different parts and then have them go at the same time. So you have these warring choirs. I do that with the orchestra, too. I might use radically different material for different parts of the orchestra, and have them occur simultaneously, so that there’s a sense of development out of conflict between opposing musical ideas. That was really something I tried to work on in the opera all the time.
Also the use of rhythm as tonality. In a way I think my study of South Indian music inspired me to that. I studied with a master drummer. Certain talas have a sort of—well, when you switch from one tala to another, from one pattern to another, the change is very significant. It’s not only the raga—or scale—that determines the emotional impact, but also the rhythmic structure: how you subdivide the rhythms.
I tried to be pretty systematic about this. I was very careful about where I introduced new rhythmic material—usually at very significant points in the opera. In the opera, rhythm is always the metaphor for violence—for the underlying violence. Even though there might be a melody above it, and, if you isolate the melodic material, it might even sound gentle, what’s going on underneath is tense—the inner workings of a demonic machine. That’s what I wanted to create: a kind of machine going on and on. I felt aggressive with the whole idea of how Malcolm, in the opera, says, “I’m going to beat you down,” and the beat—you beat it. I’m going to beat these things into you, you repeat and repeat. Beat it, beat it.
It’s not some serene thing where you use repeating structures and sit back and get in this mesmerized, or hypnotic, state.
I was more interested in the way music can push people and shove them in a certain direction: call it manipulative. It’s a strong word. But that’s what it is.
SRD: The first act of so many operas—from Don Giovanni and Tosca to West Side Story and Phantom of the Opera—ends with a stretto, a great marshaling of all the voices on the stage. But your first act ends with a single voice, singing alone. It creates a great deal of tension with the form opera audiences usually expect. It is, I think, a very effective way of highlighting your main character’s struggle. And, of course, he’s in jail, wholly isolated, while he’s singing.
To change the subject, somewhat: Have there been any concert productions of the opera that you have been particularly satisfied with in the course of its life?
AD: Yes. I did a concert production in Springfield, Massachusetts. I’m going to do some more this year, different excerpts from it.
SRD: Have there been tapes made of those and, if so, is there any way I could get hold of one? So that I could listen to it again.
AD: I have tapes from the Philadelphia production. I have a bootlegged tape from the City Opera production. There are some tapes—of varying quality because it’s usually illegal to make them.
SRD: I was once a super at the Met in Samuel Barber’s Anthony and Cleopatra that opened Lincoln Center back in 1966 or ’67; I got to see it from the inside through its five or six performances. It struck me that, as an opera, it was just not very interesting. Nor do I particularly mean the music. There was a static quality to it as drama that did not make you want to surmount the very real and necessary complexities of the music in the way that a Wozzech, a Lulu , or an X does.
I don’t think that “the larger audience” you must appeal to is the Broadway audience. The audience you have to appeal to is that audience interested in new aesthetic experiences, the audience who is serious about its art—these are the people who somehow have to be talked to by the work. One reason I enjoyed X so much is that I felt the music constantly aimed at that part of me; and that’s at least one of the reasons I liked it as much as I did.
The music was taking me as seriously as I was taking it.
So I hope we get a chance to see it in several different forms, with new productions. Is there any possibility of this happening? What has been the response to it in terms of its falling into some repertoire somewhere?
AD: Oh, it’s been very good. There’s a possibility of doing it in Atlanta—and in Houston, at Houston Grand Opera. We’re going to do a completely different production in London, I think. With a different director. I’m not sure what that’s going to be. I have a feeling that we’ll probably star Avery Brooks in that production. He may end up directing too. I wouldn’t be surprised—because he is a director. . . . Then we’re also trying for a film version. We’ve had a lot of interest from video and film people, and we have to decide whether to film the production, you know, as a PBS kind of production; or BBC. Or whether to make a film, which would be something different altogether. Or maybe do a kind of combination of the two: a video production that would incorporate things on stage, or on a stage set. It’s a delicate balance. We’ll be working on for a while.
SRD: That might make a good finale for our conversation. I think we might declare our interview to be officially over now. Okay. This was fun. Thank you, Henry, for your questions and comments. Tony, it was wonderful getting a chance to talk with you.
1. Swedish composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl (1916–1968) premiered his opera Aniara at the Stockholm Festival, in May 1959. The libretto was by Erik Lindergren, based on the book-length poem by the Swedish poet Harry Martinson.
2. The Mines of Sulfur, by Beverly Cross.