Death Speaks in New Hampshire

One of my favorite projects from the back catalog is Death Speaks, a work composed by David Lang for me, Owen Pallett, Bryce Dessner and Nico Muhly. David gathered us as a symbol of artists who bridge the divide between composer and performer, popular music and classical. I get to perform the song cycle rarely, but I’m currently gathering my strength to fight fascism during an artist residency, arranging My Brightest Songs and ending the week with a performance of Death Speaks. This will be a pleasure, as far as embodying the grim reaper can be a pleasure, I suppose. I do think it is a kindly presence, and for those experiencing loss or preparing for your own transition, there’s a lot of comfort offered.

If you happen to be around the New Hampshire countryside this weekend, I invite you to Avaloch Farm Music Institute in Boscawen NH, Saturday June 13th. Directions are here.

There’s a pre-concert talk at 4pm on death as letting go, then at 5:30 the concert titled Death and Transfiguration - with 2 Pop Songs on Antique Poems: A Letter from the Afterlife by Dinuk Wijeratne, Death Speaks with yours truly and … drum roll, Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht - which I have never heard live and am very excited to listen to myself.

David Lang made the text of Death Speaks by excerpting all the moments where Franz Schubert has the character Death speak throughout his art songs. He describes the process:

Death is personified. It isn’t a state of being or a place or a metaphor, but a person, a character in a drama who can tell us in our own language what to expect in the World to Come. Most of these texts are melodramatic, hyper-romantic and over-emotional; one of the knocks on Schubert is that he often saved his best music for the worst poetry. Nevertheless, I felt that taking these overwrought comments by Death at face value just might lead me someplace worth going.

I went alphabetically in the German through every single Schubert song text and compiled every instance of when the dead send a message to the living. Some of these are obvious and some are more speculative — Death is a named character in “Der Erlkönig,” the brook at the end of Die Schöne Müllerin speaks in Death’s name when it talks the miller into killing himself, the hurdy gurdy player at the end of Winterreise has long been interpreted as a stand-in for Death. All told, I have used excerpts from 32 songs, translating them very roughly and trimming them.

My own beloved grandfather (the traveling evangelist, guitar-playing one) had transitioned not long before we recorded this album, so I felt very near the portal at that time. There’s a tenderness on the recording that I hear now as the perspective of human grief. I wrestled with embodying this character fully. Death here is never impassioned. It presents itself with a kind of soothing and comforting assurance, while underneath the impossibility of escaping its power is nearly left unspoken. It is coming for us all, but may it not be too soon I say!

Today I feel closer to the coldness of that inevitability. As an interpreter I work to pull out every nuance I can find. The work stays alive through discovery. The tones shift - each day offering a different interpretation, a different body chemistry as the voice changes - an unrepeatability cast upon the same set of musical instructions. In any case, I do hope the song cycle is an accurate picture: that there is sunlight on the other side of this dimension too.

June 13th: Boscawen, NH - Death Speaks

June 27th: Ann Arbor, MI - Top of the Park with My Brightest Diamond

Now til August 15th: Detroit, MI - Half Winged installation at Wasserman Projects