Interview with Orpheus Unsung Director/Producer Mark DeChiazza by Liquid Music

by Libby Holden

Libby Holden is a Schubert Club board member and has been a member of Theoroi, the Schubert Club’s young professionals group, for the last four years.  She credits her grandmother, Harriet, for encouraging her love of the performing arts and volunteering. Libby lives with her partner and their rescue dog in Minneapolis. 

We asked Libby to interview Orpheus Unsung producer/director Mark DeChiazza in preparation for this week's world premiere performance of the work at the Guthrie Thursday through Saturday. Orpheus Unsung casts the electric guitar as the disembodied voice of Orpheus, who seeks to reverse fate and regain an irrevocably lost Eurydice. In this wordless opera, the myth is shattered and ultimately re-made within a space that fragments story and identity, and hangs in teetering balance between solidity and hallucinatory illusion. Orpheus's journey is illuminated in new musical/visual/theatrical language, as sound collides and fuses with the expression of the body, cinematic imagery, and transformations of physical space. Read last week's interview with Orpheus composer Steven Mackey here. Special thanks to Libby for putting this interview together for us.


photos by Janelle Jones

photos by Janelle Jones

Hi Mark. Your website and other materials suggest that this has been a long, meandering road to be able to present this work with you and Steven. 

It has been a long, meandering road. I can illuminate that for you. 

This was the first project that Steve and I ever talked about doing when we first met. That was 2009, at the Ojai Music Festival. We were both involved in major productions there, and liked what each other were doing, respectively. So, that was when Steve and I first agreed to make a piece with electric guitar and dance. We didn’t have any sort of venue or producer and ended up making a lot of other projects together before this ever could possibly happen. That’s part of the meandering. 

It has been seven years in development, though. How do you stay excited about something that takes that long, from concept to delivery? 

It’s interesting. I mean obviously the piece has been something that Steve and I have talked about a lot, but we hadn’t ever talked about the fear of the piece. 

The fear?

The fear of the piece. Yeah - this is a really ambitious work for each of us. It calls on both of us, in our own way, to go deeply back into something that we did before, and to bring it into conversation with the work we are doing now. Until we had our residency at Carleton College, where we did an initial showing of Orpheus Unsung, it felt very successful. People responded to it, and we felt like, “okay, we did this thing.” Then we went out for coffee and we both confessed to each other that this piece has been something that has been terrifying us for years. When something feels deeply personal and important, then the stakes are much higher. Both of us felt like this was a push into the unknown. The other projects we had done together, I wouldn’t say they were unambitious, but they didn’t feel nearly as ambitious as this. 

That makes a lot of sense, so there’s this fear driving you guys, in addition to the art. 

Yeah, fear and desire, together. 

I think that is actually a part of the Orpheus myth. 

We didn’t have the Orpheus myth to begin with. It felt like this was the Orpheus myth for each of us, in a way, because we’re both going back to works we did in our past, trying to bring them into the present, and make them relevant and new. With the hubris and the necessity of that, it’s all of those things together. 

You and Steven could have taken Orpheus Unsung anywhere. Sure, it has some of its creative juice in Northfield, but you could have debuted this in really any place. Why Minneapolis?

People love this piece. They love what we’re doing with it. Talking about it, before we made it, was very difficult. You can’t show people something until you get a chance to make something, but Kate Nordstrum and Liquid Music gave us a chance to make something. She had the faith in us and what we were doing, to trust us and to let us do something. That’s huge, and that’s why Minneapolis. 

There’s already a lot of other interest in it, but that outside interest wouldn’t have happened if Orpheus Unsung hadn’t gone to Minneapolis first. 

What’s your next seven-year project? It sounds like projects like this don’t come up often in a director’s life. 

I had a career as a dancer, before that I was a filmmaker and set designer and visual artist. I didn’t start as a dancer, but a substantial part of my career was as a dancer.  Then, as I built my career as a director and I started working in music and film again, I never really went back into dance. But, I always use what I learned in dance, in filming; I use it in editing; I use it in everything. 

With Orpheus Unsung, I’m going back to this thing that I really, consciously left behind and trying to bring it back into the present again, bring it back with me. And that was an incredibly fearful experience. I set it as a task for myself, on purpose, because I knew that it kind of scared me, and I thought it was appropriate for this project that I should do that. But, the discovery that I had in the process was really incredible. I think that I re-learned what is special, what is challenging, what is beautiful and what is difficult about dance. Things I once knew but forgot. This project brought that part of my history back into my practice in a more concrete way, and I think that it will probably stay there. 

That’s so cool. 

That’s what I think changed, and that was not what I expected when I started this. 

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Orpheus Unsung interview with composer Steve Mackey by Liquid Music

"IT'S THE MOST AMBITIOUS PIECE I’VE EVER WRITTEN FOR ELECTRIC GUITAR." 

American Composers Forum President John Nuechterlein spoke with Steven Mackey about the June 2016 world premiere of Orpheus Unsung, copresented by Liquid Music and the Guthrie Theater.  Labeled a “guitar opera,” the work is a collaboration with Jason Treuting of Sō Percussion and director Mark DeChiazza.  The conversation explored how the work was conceived and created, and how the audience might put the various elements into context. 

Hear more about the making of Orpheus Unsung at Music in the Making: Steven Mackey with Jason Treuting and Mark DeChiazza at the Guthrie on June 13 at 7:00pm (FREE).

JN: Can you summarize the legend of Orpheus for us and why it appealed to you for this project? Where did the idea come from?
SM: I had the idea for a theatrical piece for guitar and dancer when Mark and I first met in 2009. After several other collaborations Mark came up with the idea of using the Orpheus myth as the skeleton for our original guitar/dancer idea. Orpheus, the son of Apollo, was known for his extraordinary ability to play the lyre. It wasn’t difficult to consider the electric guitar as a modern version of the lyre, and in fact, using the instrument as the story teller for the ancient legend.I’ve written several pieces for electric guitar and orchestra, but never a piece for the electric guitar as an orchestra unto itself. I was fascinated by the concept. The story is classic: Orpheus falls in love with Eurydice, who is bitten by a snake, dies, and falls into the underworld. Orpheus uses his skill on the lyre to convince the gods to let her come back to earth, but sadly he fails a critical test at the last minute and she returns to Hades. The twists of the story fit well with the topography of my music, and I jumped at the chance to find ways of using the guitar to express such a wide range of emotion. It also made sense that if we were going to do an “unsung opera” we should use a familiar story.

Work-in-progress showing of Orpheus Unsung at Carleton College

Work-in-progress showing of Orpheus Unsung at Carleton College

An opera without words is an unusual form. Tell us how the story gets told.
The guitar itself does the singing. I use a wide range of musical ideas to characterize the many different elements of the story and electronics (effects pedals and loopers) expand the sound palette of the guitar into something more orchestral. Combined with Jason Treuting’s brilliant drumming I don’t think it is much of a stretch to imagine the music as a grand, operatic narrative that follows the story quite closely and linearly. Mark has created an amazing tableau of movement that at times parallels the musical action but generally is less literal, at times cutting against the music’s narrative and at times runs obliquely to it. Video imagery also helps set the stage, and I think it all works really well together.

I take it there are no supertitles if there are no words?
For a while we actually considered inventing words for the guitar’s “arias"  but in the end we think the story has the right amount of clarity without them.

Most operas begin with a libretto, but clearly that didn’t happen here. How did the process work?
Mark literally gave me a two-page synopsis of his understanding of the plot points in the Orpheus myth. I surprised both of us by following that “script" closely.  In the beginning, Mark and I each worked separately on our vocabularies - our lexicon of materials.  Then we started putting them together to see how they worked in tandem. Once we added the dancers it became a process of understanding the timing of each section.

Have you done anything like this before?
No!  It’s the most ambitious piece I’ve ever written for electric guitar, and it’s been a thrill ride!