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Creativity & Arts Spotlight : Steve Everett

Emory Composer Premieres New Chamber Opera

On November 15, 2008 at 8 p.m. the Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta will present the world premiere of a new chamber opera Ophelia’s Gaze as part of its Emerson Series in the Schwartz Center’s Emerson Concert Hall. Ophelia’s Gaze, written by Steven Everett, Professor, Department of Music, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, is a new work for soprano, string quartet, and interactive audio and video. The chamber opera is based on the poetry collection, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002, Graywolf Press) by Pulitzer-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, English Professor, Creative Writing Program faculty member, and Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry, Emory College of Arts and Sciences. The work merges the diverse media of image, text, and sound into a dreamlike meditation on Ophelia, Trethewey’s principal character in the poetry collection. The text is sung and narrated by Parisian soprano Katherine Blumenthal, who interacts musically with the Vega String Quartet and with her own images reflected in video mirrors. Video cameras and microphones are used to transform her visual identity and voice through interactive computer-processing programs operated by Everett.

Steve Everett teaches composition and computer music in Emory’s Music Department, and directs the Music-Audio Research Center at Emory. He is also an affiliate at the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture. In addition he has recently been a visiting professor of composition at Princeton University, Eastman School of Music, Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève in Switzerland, Rotterdam Conservatory of Music, and Utrecht School of the Arts. In addition to substantial experience conducting opera and orchestral repertoire, he has presented over 200 works of contemporary music as conductor of Thamyris New Music Ensemble in Atlanta since 1992. Thamyris will give a free concert in the Schwartz Center on Friday, February 6, 2009.

Everett took some time from rehearsing Ophelia’s Gaze with Katherine Blumenthal in Paris to talk about his new composition.

Q: What elements of Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia inspired you to compose Ophelia’s Gaze?
A: As soon as I finished reading this collection of poems, I knew I wanted to set them in a music-dramatic composition. I even had a fairly clear concept of how the work would be structured, what musical and visual forces would be used, and how to merge my visual and aural images with Natasha’s text. After reading these poems, I felt that I had a strong sense of this imagined character, given the name of Ophelia, and the physical and psychological world in which she existed. Having this clearly defined artistic concept after one reading has rarely happened in my life. I felt a real empathy for this young girl in Natasha’s poems and wanted to create a performance opportunity for her to speak, sing, and dream. I wanted to give Ophelia, who lives a life being constantly stared at, the chance to cultivate her own gaze onto the world. The aural ‐visual relationship in the composition unfolds as a series of tableaus using the consciousness of dreams, memories, and reveries described in French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s last work, La Poetique de la Reverie. Ophelia’s Gaze attempts to merge the media of image, text, and sound into a dreamlike meditation on this fragile and complex character who E.J. Bellocq first captured in photograph in 1910 and Natasha Trethewey gave voice to in 2002. It is through our combined gazes that Ophelia fully steps into the world in 2008.

Q: How has it been working with Katherine Blumenthal and the Vega String Quartet?
A: When I conceived of this work, I knew very quickly that Katherine was the ideal vocalist to develop this role. She has a stunning ability as a vocalist to connect to a real depth of meaning in interpreting poetry. She also has great vocal technique and versatility. She is a coloratura soprano with a highly developed agility and upper register, but can also produce warmth and a rich palette of sounds in the low register. She is also very bright (an Emory alumnus) and learns very quickly. Her light, versatile voice and her youthful beauty were a perfect match for the voice I imagined of Ophelia. The Vega Quartet has been such a blessing to have in residence at Emory. They play at such a high level and are consummate professionals. They are also a delightful group of people. Their cordial personalities, eagerness to make great music, passion for the ideas embedded in music, and their spectacular playing make them one of the most enjoyable groups with whom I have ever worked. They make the ideal compliment to Katherine in developing a rich and expressive voice for this character.

Q: Did you have to make any major changes to the piece as you were developing it?
A: Surprisingly, no. Composing for me usually involves a great deal of time in order to develop a coherent, linear organization and to find the appropriate spectral colors to represent the concept or ideas I am trying to evoke. Because the image I had after reading Natasha’s poetry was so powerful and clear, I was certain of much of the musical organization from the beginning.

Q: What’s the biggest challenge the piece faces?
A: I flew to Paris in October to rehearse the work with Katherine and to meet with the French video artist, Isabelle Dehay, who has created a fantastic film for the final dream ‐sequence of the work. Here again, everything fell in place quite easily. Katherine and I seemed to have a very similar understanding of Ophelia’s character and inner thoughts, and Isabelle created a film, without very much discussion and only looking at Bellocq’s photograph, that perfectly captured the physical and imagined worlds in which Ophelia must have existed. In order to bring together the visual and aural images and text for a unified presentation, I have chosen to utilize several new technologies in order to accomplish this. A motion capture, live video system and several types of new audio speaker systems will be used in the work, as well as live audio processing software to expand the colors of Katherine’s voice in the work. I have been composing for interactive computer music programs and live performers for more than 20 years, but the complexity and challenges of these systems rarely seems to diminish. At the same time, these technologies have developed into very robust and expressive devices for the performance of contemporary music.

Q: What can the average audience member expect to see/hear at Ophelia’s Gaze?
A:Natasha’s poems should be front and center in this work. The character that she imagined from looking at Bellocq’s photograph is very real in these poems. I did not want to create a work that distracted from that reality. Consequently, the poems are both sung and read during the work. In my composition and in Natasha’s poetry, there is a chronological sequence of events in which Ophelia moves. At the same time, each poem is an independent glimpse into her thoughts at a given moment. The listener is invited to simply experience each scene or reverie as a separate experience, but will hopefully understand the evolution of the character’s life by the end of the work. (Running time: 85 min.)

Q:Just for Fun: What’s your favorite piece of electronic equipment in your studio and why?
A: Of course the Macintosh computer is the primary tool for most composers today. But it is the specific software for which one develops artistic preferences and attachments. In this work, the three programs that were essential in composing and performing the work are MaxMSP sound design environment, Isadora live video system, and the Open Music composition program developed at IRCAM in Paris. All of these programs are open architecture systems that allow the user to custom design musical and visual components in a work. Because they are not fixed, restrictive systems, they actually encourage a richer, imaginative process of artistic creation.

Interview by Becky Herring
Edited by Jessica Moore
Communications Coordinator
Arts at Emory

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