Augusta Read Thomas Sings and Dances Her Way to New Musical Mosaics

Apr 15

There’s music on the page, where it’s preserved for later use, and then there’s music when it’s played, traveling through the air. On each end of that is a body, musician reaching out to listener and touching them via sound. For Augusta Read Thomas too, that’s where the music starts, in the body. Her method of composing—creating new material, shaping it and building it into larger structures and forms—is grounded in the physical sensations of music, especially singing and movement. Sounds from the body become elements in a larger mosaic. That is the subtle, but fundamental connection between her artistry and the subject of her new piece, MAGIC GARDENS, which the Rolston String Quartet will play in its American premiere May 1, at a concert celebrating the bicentennial of the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia.

The Society commissioned MAGIC GARDENS, along with new works from Stephen Jaffe, Roberto Sierra, and Tania León, and then hung in there while this celebration, originally schedule for 2020, was knocked into limbo by the Covid-19 pandemic. But things are now ameliorated, at least somewhat, and even with the city of Philadelphia reinstating its indoor mask mandate, the celebration will go on.

As Thomas described the experience through a recent on-line conversation, the only guidance she had for making the music was that there was a 10 minute duration limit and that the piece had to be about Philadelphia in some way; so, something exacting and something nebulous, especially for a such a fascinating and historically rich place. Thomas went with the visual element—an important part of Philadelphia’s physical character is its public murals, specifically artist Isaiah Zagar’s stunning “Magic Gardens.”

The Magic Gardens of Isaiah Zagar and Augusta Read Thomas

“Magic Gardens was commissioned before the pandemic,” Thomas explains, “and the prompt for the commission contract was to have the pieces relate to some part of Philadelphia's heritage. It could be anything. And I thought that was a very beautiful, open and rich prompt. And I thought about it a lot, because Philadelphia has an incredible history, a political history, religious history, spiritual history, and an artistic, poetic, architectural … it's just phenomenal array. So what does a composer do with all of those then, an infinite number of other opportunities?”

Her answer was something, “that really captured my imagination, Zagar’s huge mural, because there's really nothing like that that I know of in the world. It's absolutely stunning.” Along with the sheer sensation of taking in the mural, Thomas was inspired by Zagar’s method. She loved, “the idea that it's built out of these little pieces, tiny pieces of ceramic, the size of your thumbnail, or your pinky. But these are all really small pieces that will have to be exactly inlaid, colored, and they're made of all kinds of different materials, clay, or glass or sand. I love the idea of this montage, musically, that interests me a lot, because of the thought of lots of little notes that fit together in a very, very intricate way … like the intricate counterpoint of Bach … how different lines are fitted perfectly.”

Bach, via Zagar, was one connection for Augusta Read Thomas, the other was her personal, human response. The mural to her is emotionally rich, and she describes sections as spiritual and prayerful, and others as playful. “I say this in the highest regard,” she points out, “humorous … it doesn’t have to be one thing.” Thomas’s music sometimes captures the onomatopoeic stained-glass feeling of Messiaen, and the link from a mosaic to her own musical thinking seems a natural.

When she wrote to the Society, she proposed a two-movement piece meant to bring out “two different emotional or textual worlds. And they wrote back and said they loved it.” Then came the composing, capturing her own response and communicated it, and that meant making music physically. To explain that, Augusta Read Thomas steps back and looks at her whole career: “In a nutshell, I spent, like the past 50 years of my life writing music every day, all day, that's all I do. And one of the key things I tried to do is have this balance between the material and the form. And it's tricky to do.

“And I would say,” she continues, “that an attribute of all of my music is that it is carefully sculpted, polished, nuanced, the scores are wildly detailed.” She looks at the first movement of this new score, and explains that “it's basically all fast music, virtuosic, and it's dealing with motives that start to form hockets and then start to turn into lines … a sense of ping pong going back and forth. So it's like you're looking at like one little part of the mosaic and then your eye goes right over to there and then it goes back to here, then to there and then to there, and then all of a sudden you're seeing like, five inch square of the mosaic.”

This is music with variations, dialogues, activity going back and forth and between the four players. Those details come together, she says, in a larger arc, a larger line. It’s playful, adds, but is also “a serious piece, like a baroque scherzo … pointillist and full of material,” still with a “modern music vibe.”

Augusta Read Thomas: “I Want Every Second to be Worthy of Your Time”

A scherzo, a vibe, maybe dancing? In a way, that’s where it stars with Thomas. She builds structure, form, pace, and the characteristic flow of her music, by playing—“all of my music is built as an improvisation,” she says. She goes on to describe her compositional process: “I am at my piano. I'm singing, I'm dancing. I'm scatting, I'm jumping up and down … is it like ‘m’boko-kiki,’ or is it like ‘ucka-keeky pop?’. I do 100 improvs!”

The next steps build from there. She will “scat the whole piece, singing it. And then I make variations. And then I’m dancing them in my living room and drawing pictures of the form because I want … every second to be worthy of your time to listen to it, I don’t want to waste anyone’s time.”

That all goes back to her own development as a musician, playing piano as a child, then picking up trumpet and concentrating on being a performer, not a composer. She sang in choirs, played guitar, and listened to Mozart and Bach but also Simon and Garfunkle. Her musical idols were Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and she used to play along with their albums. But she doesn’t integrate jazz into her composing, which is absolutely in the classical tradition—she uses her roots as a musician to play, scat, dance, create her way into a new piece, like MAGIC GARDENS. “It’s deeply processed,” she says, “deeply integrated,” she uses the metaphor of throwing all the elements of her musical life into a blender, and what comes out each time is a new piece.

Though new to audiences (the Rolston Quartet has already played it once in Europe), the piece isn’t brand new; Thomas completed it in 2019. Then, the wait. Asked how the waiting, and the changing world, might have changed her experience with the music, Thomas points not just to the deaths from COVID, but to all of society: “People don't have health care, they don't have water, they don't have shelter. People are killing each other. People don't have civil rights, people don't have human rights. So I feel in that vortex like this, it's just unbelievable and that's the most paramount thing to say. On the other hand, I wrote the piece thinking it would be played, and then we didn't, I didn't change a note of the music. I left it as something of integrity of what it is, for itself as music.”

As for how it sounds, she says, “I think all of humankind hears everything differently now. It's impossible to not have been affected. So I wouldn't want to highlight my piece like it now sounds different, that feels immodest. It feels to me like everything's different. But we get really close to the music, zoom in, then what we have to listen for is excellence of material, form, idea, personality … because pieces that are strong, they speak for themselves, in any context.”