{"id":783,"date":"2013-04-08T10:44:13","date_gmt":"2013-04-08T14:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/?p=783"},"modified":"2014-07-30T10:51:04","modified_gmt":"2014-07-30T14:51:04","slug":"bringing-uproar-to-the-opera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/2013\/04\/08\/bringing-uproar-to-the-opera\/","title":{"rendered":"Missy Mazzoli"},"content":{"rendered":"

A \u201cpostmillennial Mozart\u201d composes alternative music for centuries-old instruments.<\/h2>\n

By Andrew Thurston | Photo by Stephen S. Taylor<\/h4>\n

In October 1904, Swiss explorer Isabelle Eberhardt was 27 years old and about to die. Her clay home would be no match for the flash flood surging through the small Algerian town of A\u00efn S\u00e9fra.<\/p>\n

Born in 1877 to an aristocratic mother and anarchist father, Eberhardt was as unconventional as her family tree. She began her daring adventures at the age of 20 when she first traveled to Africa. Within seven years, she\u2019d converted to Islam, lived as a man among an ancient Sufi order, warded off a saber attack (later sparing her assailant\u2019s life), and married an Algerian soldier. She\u2019d also poured all of her exploits\u2014and her churning thoughts about them\u2014onto reams of journal pages.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWhen I sit down to write a piece, I rarely know what\u2019s going to make it interesting in the end.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cI am not afraid of death,\u201d she wrote, \u201cbut would not want to die in some obscure or pointless way.\u201d She would perish saving her husband from the flood; he, in turn, would save the pages of her journal.<\/p>\n

Today, Eberhardt\u2019s prose has been revived as opera lyrics. In Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, <\/em>composer Missy Mazzoli (\u201902) rescues the pioneering Swiss from history. The opera has garnered five-star reviews and prompted Time Out New York <\/em>magazine to label Mazzoli\u2014a composer known for convention-busting explorations of her own\u2014\u201cBrooklyn\u2019s postmillennial Mozart.\u201d<\/p>\n

New Music, Old Instruments<\/strong><\/p>\n

A friend of Mazzoli\u2019s calls her compositions \u201cNew music for old instruments.\u201d Mazzoli likes this phrase more than some of the other labels, from \u201calt-classical\u201d to \u201cart-rock meets chamber music,\u201d used by enthusiastic reviewers in the New York Times<\/em> and elsewhere when trying to give listeners a flavor of her original works.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

Photo by Stephen S. Taylor<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

From her New York studio, Mazzoli (who attended the Boston University Tanglewood Institute in 1998) has composed film scores and solo, ensemble, and orchestral pieces. She also plays piano in a seven-piece ensemble that\u2019s performed in classical venues and at rock festivals. Even opera emerges from her pen with an unfamiliar sound: behind the protagonist\u2019s mezzo-soprano in Song from the Uproar<\/em> are a flute, clarinet, electric guitar, piano, double bass, and electronics. \u201cI\u2019ve studied classical music my whole life and I feel very close to it,\u201d says Mazzoli, \u201cbut I\u2019m also 32 years old and it\u2019s 2013. The classical era ended more than 150 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is an attitude she cemented early in life. Living with nonmusical parents\u2014the house piano was rescued from a flea market and \u201cnever in tune\u201d\u2014meant she didn\u2019t feel constrained by conventional boundaries. \u201cBecause they had no idea what I was doing, I thought, \u2018Well, no one\u2019s listening, I can do whatever I want.\u2019\u201d She allows herself the same freedom today.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I sit down to write a piece, I rarely know what\u2019s going to make it interesting in the end. It\u2019s a process of discovery; just letting really random, wild ideas come into my head without judgment, grasping onto one or two or three, and turning them into a piece.<\/p>\n

Familiar and Unexpected<\/strong><\/p>\n

You can hear that experimental process in Song from the Uproar<\/em>, recently released on CD. The opera opens at the moment of Eberhardt\u2019s death as her life flashes before her; the only narrative is a \u201csurreal, abstract, nonlinear\u201d series of stories culled from the explorer\u2019s journals.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt like a lot of women I saw in opera were reduced to stereotypes or female archetypes,\u201d says Mazzoli. \u201cI saw this as an opportunity to write a big dramatic piece about a very complicated and interesting woman.\u201d<\/p>\n

The opera\u2019s music is also complicated, featuring one of Mazzoli\u2019s self-described trademarks: \u201crepetition that\u2019s not truly repetition,\u201d a technique that requires audiences and musicians to really engage with a performance.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s when something repeats, but doesn\u2019t repeat exactly. There are subtle changes,\u201d she explains. \u201cI also try to combine the familiar and the unexpected. I\u2019ll draw the listener in with something that is known to them, a chord, a rhythm, or a pattern that is very simple or familiar, but then I\u2019ll change it up on them and I\u2019ll insert some sort of surprise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since debuting Song from the Uproar<\/em> in spring 2012, Mazzoli has thrown herself into the operatic world. She\u2019s currently composer-in-residence with the Opera Company of Philadelphia and recently completed a mini-opera, Salt<\/em>, about Lot\u2019s wife. She\u2019s found opera suited to her desire to \u201ccreate worlds that the audience could walk into.\u201d Though she admits that it might sound \u201cridiculous,\u201d Mazzoli also gets satisfaction from listening to the music she\u2019s composing. \u201cI make music that speaks to me\u2014and my time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

Photo by Kim Nowacki\/Q2 Music<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A \u201cpostmillennial Mozart\u201d composes alternative music for centuries-old instruments. By Andrew Thurston | Photo by Stephen S. Taylor In October 1904, Swiss explorer Isabelle Eberhardt was 27 years old and about to die. Her clay home would be no match for the flash flood surging through the small Algerian town of A\u00efn S\u00e9fra. Born in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6143,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6143"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1719,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions\/1719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}