Spotlight on VOX: Alice Shields

 

This week, composer Alice Shields talks about her new work, Criseyde, which will premiere at this year's VOX festival in May.

 

 

 

Middle English is of course medieval English, a variety of dialects spoken in England after the Norman invasion.  The English spoken before the Norman invasion, Old English or Anglo-Saxon, is truly foreign to modern speakers of English, and has to be studied as a foreign language in every way.  Middle English is earliest version of English that we modern English-speaking people can still largely understand when we hear it, although there are significant differences in the way vowels were pronounced.  When you look at a page of Chaucer, you see basically a phonetic spelling, where each letter represents an actual sound, unlike our Modern English spelling, in which many words are spelled in ways that no longer match the way we pronounce those words.  Middle English is sort of "funky" because it's like when we moderns use special slang spelling that actually represents the sounds of the word when it's spoken, like when someone writes "I luv ya!" or "''cuz" instead of "because."  Middle English is "real" in a way that modern English is not: when Chaucer is read aloud, you can actually hear the language largely as Chaucer would have pronounced it.  Middle English is funky because it's street-smart and real -- it's the sound of how at least some people 600 years ago actually spoke English, even though in the case of Chaucer it's coming to us through the skill of an astonishing poet.

 

 

As I read Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde over and over in Middle English with Nancy Dean, the medieval scholar and playwright who commissioned me to write the opera, I was repeatedly shocked and angered over how Chaucer was treating the lead female character.  Many of the various denigrations and abuses experienced by Chaucer's character Criseyde are experienced by modern women around the world every day, and have been experienced by me in my own life.  I identified strongly with Chaucer's Criseyde, and what happened to her.  I formed the action and drama of the opera Criseyde out of these feelings.

 

 

No.  I became a composer first.  When I entered graduate school in composition, I was starting to write an opera, so I decided I needed to know the voice better in order to write better vocal parts in my own opera.  For that reason, I began to take voice lessons, and found it to my surprise a great joy and very natural to me, and very soon started singing in opera workshops.  In my first summer in composition graduate school, after about nine months of vocal study, I received an AGMA Apprentice Opera Composer contract with the Lake George Opera Festival, in which I performed as both singer and composer.  Thereafter, for about twenty years, I functioned as both opera singer and composer. 

 

Your lyrical style is described as "encompassing Gregorian chant, Indian ragas, and electronic music."  What does this mean for the audience, and what kind of response do you hope this will provoke?

 

It means that I prefer melodies that are physically pleasurable to sing, which means mainly stepwise melodic movement, or small leaps, and a lot of gentle dynamics and ornaments and some degree of coloratura.  I studied and performed traditional Indian classical music for 10 years in my search for a more nuanced use of melody.  I have gradually absorbed some Indian melodic development into my own music, and find myself automatically using some aspects of raga development and ornamentation.  I have also transcribed and used medieval chant in many of my compositions, such as in "Kyrielle" for violin and computer music, which I wrote for violinist Airi Yoshioka.  That piece uses Gregorian chants associated with the Virgin Mary.  Or my opera, Mass for the Dead, which is based on the chants from the Requiem Mass for the Dead.  I have done a lot of electronic music, and as a genre electronic music has been considered by some people as the opposite end of the aesthetic pole from opera.  Not my electronic music.  I have always used quite dramatic texts of setting in my electronic work, which often have voice (often my own voice) in them, such as my electronic piece The Transformation of Ani, in which my recorded voice is electronically manipulated chanting words from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, or my electronic piece Shaman, in which I sing a duet with a coyote.

 

 

I hope to learn whether the way I have used this story resonates with the people who hear it, and what people experience when they hear the Middle English sung, and how people react to certain critical spoken lines being spoken in Modern English at VOX.  Then I will have a better sense of these issues as I complete composing the opera.  Future plans for Criseyde are in development, and all interested are invited to go to criseyde.com and we'll be happy to address any questions.  The American Virtuosi and conductor Kenneth Hamrick, who will be performing excerpts of Criseyde on April 24th at Elebash Hall, will be presenting parts of Criseyde in various venues, and we plan to collaborate with people in related fields such as fields of English literature.