Bloom Against All Odds
A #360ofOpera interview with The No One’s Rose team, written by Yutong Yang.
The No One’s Rose, which world-premiered at Stanford University’s Bing Concert Hall on August 25, is a collaboration between American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale (PBO). In their multifaceted, genre-defying piece, composer and 2018 MacArthur Fellow Matthew Aucoin seeks to answer alongside his team the question that all of society have to confront: where to find hope as we suffer or recover from a catastrophe that continues to consume lives and turn the world we knew upside down.
To this end, the narrative structure loosely mirrors that of The Canterbury Tales, exploring individual struggle and frustration with a highlight on human connections and eventual joy and catharsis. This communion of some of the most ambitious talents of our generation took place over the course of six years, from personal conversations to AMOC’s utopian summer retreat. We had the privilege of talking to Mr. Aucoin, tenor Paul Appleby, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, and percussionist Jonny Allen about this feast of music, poetry, dance, and theater, after a year’s postponement due to COVID-19.
Matthew Aucoin (Photo Credit: Stephen Laxton)Matthew Aucoin
360° of Opera®: Why Celan?
I’m hardly the first composer to have fallen under Paul Celan’s spell. In the years after World War II, he felt this extraordinary impulse to reinvent German poetry—almost to reinvent the German language itself, which he felt had become tainted by its associations with Nazism. And I think what he did is he distilled his own language into a kind of music; he stripped it of its usual associations and treated individual words as mysterious musical objects.
And then there’s the fact that AMOC wanted to make a piece about how to recover after a catastrophe. Celan undertook an extraordinarily courageous act of spiritual recovery in his poetry, so we thought of him as our spirit guide.
360° of Opera®: What allure do period instruments hold for you? What makes composing for them a unique experience?
Well, I should mention that I’m married to a Baroque bassoonist, so there’s a certain personal allure mixed in for sure! But there are also a number of objective musical qualities that I find appealing: the dark-hued texture of the woodwinds, for one thing, and the wonderful transparency that you can achieve with the strings.
There’s also a culture in the period-performance world that I really admire. Most Baroque orchestras are much younger, as organizations, than modern-instrument symphony orchestras, and the self-starting, self-sufficient attitude has persisted in the period-instrument world. There’s a real feeling that the orchestra is a family, and everyone shares responsibility—not just the conductor. I certainly felt that with Philharmonia Baroque. It’s wonderful.
Matthew Aucoin (Photo Credit: Stephen Laxton)360° of Opera®: The piece features music by Bach, Berlioz, Schubert, Sam Cooke, and Paul Simon. How did these five composers inspire your composition?
They didn’t inspire my composition so much as they inspired certain AMOC members who wanted to sing their music. Paul Appleby sings a wonderful rendition of Paul Simon’s “American Tune”—which happens to be based on a Bach chorale that features in the piece—and Davóne Tines wanted to sing Sam Cooke’s “Lost and Lookin’” as part of his scene.
The Performers
360° of Opera®: What story did you contribute to the show? How did the show evolve with you during the pandemic? Would you tell it a different way, now that you’ve premiered it and engaged with the audience?
Paul Appleby:
I respectfully decline to answer the question about my story. Firstly, it is personal and it involves people close to me whose stories I do not have the right to share publicly.
Secondly, if I told you my story, it would erase the purpose of The No One’s Rose. At the risk of getting too broad and philosophical, I believe that my role as an artist is to create a metaphorical object or space for my audience to interact with. The key is that the artistic thing I produce is not merely a description of my own experiences or feelings. The details of my life are for me and my friends and family to share with me as an individual, as a human being. The art that I create is to be shared with anyone who will hear and observe it. If I were to provide my audience with a detailed explanation of the relationship between my personal experiences and the art that reflects and processes it, that would risk distancing the audience from my art. My story is mine, but how I feel and react to it abstractly and through my art has the potential to resonate with the feelings and intellect of my audience and their experiences. Art is a community and I hope to create enough space for my audience to bring themselves into the art object I offer them—to do that I can’t fill up all the space with myself.
I will say about my experience over the pandemic that, like many of us, the world’s stoppage allowed/forced me to consider my life from a different perspective. I went on my own kind of personal journey and dealt with many personal issues that the normal pace and demands of life make difficult. Because my colleagues in AMOC are not just colleagues, but partners and friends, I was able to share part of that journey with them so that they could help me process it and articulate it in the forms we undertook in our show. So no, I can’t say that I would present it a different way, because it was the process itself that led to the final presentation, and for me, the art is the product of the process, and we don’t have complete control over that process.
Davóne Tines:
My role in the opera is deeply personal because, like everyone’s roles in the show, it is based on in-depth group conversations we’ve had over the course of the past year, and the relationships we’ve built over years. The Canterbury Tales structure allows my personal vignette to live in community with the vignettes of my fellow collaborators. The structure allows our stories to connect, juxtapose, counter, and bolster each other. It’s a stunning tapestry as complex and multitalented as the mapping of any community and their interwoven narratives.
Jonny Allen:
I suppose my contribution was less of a story and more of a feeling. That feeling was one of exertion without any real progress—like treading water, or screaming into a void—and the general frustration associated with that. It also felt like the world was splitting into pieces and I didn’t want that to happen. After having these development sessions with AMOC, and listening to other people’s experiences, somehow I started to feel these pieces of the world coming back together again. That was one sort of evolution, and sharing it with an audience seemed to cement it together even more.
360° of Opera®: Where did you arrive at by the end of the show, both literally and metaphorically? Where do you intend the audience to arrive at, or is this journey never really over?
Paul Appleby:
At the end of the show, I arrived at a place of greater compassion for the world that has been so deeply wounded by this pandemic, for my colleagues, and for myself. By sharing of each other in the process of creating The No One’s Rose, we were able to witness each other's struggles and in so doing, gain a fuller perspective on what had been going on over this difficult year and a half (and counting). As brilliant and perspicacious as we human beings are, every single one of us has a blindspot: ourselves. An eyeball can’t see itself. My hope is that through this show, we are able to offer our audience a kind of mirror that affords them a fuller perspective. And no, the journey never ends.
Davóne Tines:
At the end of the show we arrive at some new version of what happens at the beginning of the show: The entire cast sitting family-style at a table. But this time there are changes in the setting physically and emotionally based on all that the show has taken the individual characters through. A once clean table is now covered in dirt. Roses appear where there once were lemons. What was an abrupt interaction in the first scene is now a hug in the last. This is meant to show that our lives are full of cycles and revisiting of events in varying contexts and scales, but that with each reincarnation we have the accumulation of what has happened before. In a way, it is meant to offer hope that what has happened will happen again, but in a new form and in a new light.
Jonny Allen:
At the end of the show, I’m back in the orchestra (where I started) though my role has shifted. Rather than playing a somewhat antagonizing drum part, I’m accompanying Julia Bullock’s beautiful melody. I feel connected, though my last musical gesture—the final gesture of the whole piece—is anything but a resolution. The music simply goes out like a candle. This evokes several feelings in me, the darkest of which is that existence can, does, and possibly will come to an unforeseen finish. Pandemics can be a poignant reminder of this. At the same time, I think the ending is also a sort of passing of the baton. The show vanishes into thin air and each person is left with themselves. We are all still there... What now? I think each person has a different answer at that moment. Personally, I feel gratitude in and for that moment. I try to carry that feeling with me into the future.
360° of Opera®: What does it feel like to premiere the show after almost a year’s postponement?
Paul Appleby:
To be honest, the postponement was a kind of gift in the sense that it gave us an unavoidable topic that we had to address in the show. I don’t mean that we had to address Covid and the pandemic necessarily, but that the threat to our work as artists and our well-being as individuals that it posed forced us to consider what it was that we were doing with our lives before the pandemic struck. The best part about working with AMOC is that we spend a lot of time together, not just in rehearsals and meetings, but socially. The best part of this process was all the hours we logged as a group, first over long Zoom sessions, then over our initial staging rehearsals at our retreat in Vermont, and then over three weeks in Palo Alto as we prepared for our performances at Stanford University’s Bing Hall. It is personal and artistic ties that we as an ensemble have made by binding in this way over time that feeds our work together. There are so many subconscious and subtextual intimacies that accumulate over time by working in this manner which enrich our work in indefinable ways. It is what makes being a member of AMOC so special, and which I believe makes the art we produce rich and meaningful: we are a community striving to strengthen our bonds with each other and seeking to better understand each other. For me, that is what the function of art can and should be. I am very proud to be a part of AMOC.
Davóne Tines:
The piece has deepened in ways that we would have never been able to predict. The pandemic has taught me that most projects will season and deepen with time.
Jonny Allen:
This might be where my feeling of gratitude comes from. I feel grateful to premiere the piece after a year’s postponement. Many things did not make it through the pandemic, I'm so appreciative that this did. And ultimately, The No One's Rose wouldn’t have existed without the pandemic, or at least it would have been an unrecognizably different piece. How can something so devastating as a pandemic give rise to something I find beautiful? This is something art does, and I might actually prefer it to remain a mystery.
My favorite moment from the creative process was actually a moment that never made it into the show. It was a draft of my scene that involved me running, jumping, falling, and crawling around the stage trying to strike my percussion instruments but being intercepted, blocked, or otherwise diverted by the other members of the company. First of all, this was just a fun way to spend an hour or two and it really developed an added layer of physical trust between all of us. What I liked even more, however strange it may seem, is that we ultimately decided this wasn't the right direction for the scene to go in. This takes emotional trust for no one to feel like that time was wasted. Our priority is not our time or our egos, it’s the show. This process of trial and error often isn't seen or even known, but it’s critical to any creative development.
The No One’s Rose captures delicate feelings and ephemeral imagery against the backdrop of turbulence in a broader social context. We see the characters portrayed by a stellar cast torn apart when something mysterious enters the air, and relive the anxiety, fear, and anger we experienced at the onset of the pandemic.
As the characters each figure out their most urgent needs, we are reminded of Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, whose poetry inspired the show. His reconceived language in “Psalm” blossoms into the No One’s Rose that fiercely defies nothingness with its existence. It is this courage to thrive and bear witness when trauma threatens to blind that may lead us in our reconstruction.
A nothing
we were, we are, we
will stay, blooming:
the nothing-, the
No One’s Rose.
- written by Yutong Yang
- stage photography: @runningamoc
- headshots: philarmonia.org