New York Classical Review

The ongoing Run AMOC* Festival at Lincoln Center brought out one of its major productions Thursday night, the local premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Music for New Bodies. This is a headline event in David Geffen Hall, with Aucoin conducting and Peter Sellars directing this work, which has a libretto from poet Jorie Graham that includes verses from Julian of Norwich.

There is a libretto, dramatic elements and a shadow of a linear narrative, but this isn’t an opera. The model is Das Lied von der Erde, as this is a song symphony (with a chamber orchestra), also coincidentally in five movements. The other Mahlerian element is that the themes are an abstracted wrestling with mortality, and a focus on the internal world of thoughts and emotions. Aucoin’s notes are clear about how this comes out of poet Graham’s struggles with cancer. The specific moods, perhaps even the texts, are grounded in her recent book, To 2040, which is about both her own illness and those of the Earth’s environment. Norwich’s mystical lines appear as backlighting.

The five singers in this premiere were sopranos Song Hee Lee and Meryl Dominguez, mezzo Megan Moore, tenor Paul Appleby, and bass-baritone Evan Hughes. Yet with the depth of all this material and talent, Thursday night’s performance felt like less than the sum of the parts. 

The playing and singing were in no way bad. Even though this was a first hearing, the musical performance was technically excellent and confident, the musicians and singers showing knowledge of and assurance with the material. The problem was with the music, which was often confused about what indeed it was trying to say.

Aucoin is an exemplar of the younger generation of American composers working in mainstream styles. He knows his history, he knows how to orchestrate, he knows how to lay things out transparently. You can hear his technique, his knowledge of music, which he shows (and shows off) in this score. 

What one heard were his ideas about sound, the legacies of previous composers, and his own craft. Yet all this mostly covered over what he may have thought about the texts. With an instrumentation heavy on woodwinds and percussion, and lovely solo vocal parts and close harmonies, this was all attractive to the ear, while often producing little to no response.

This seemed to be the result of both what Aucoin chose to set, and what he did with it. Some words and music had greater effect than others. There was a kind of built-in cliché to this, with the few settings of Norwich in clear rhythms and modal lines that brought out possible meanings and had an inner glow. 

Graham’s writing is far more abstract, yet still an invigorating combination of modernism and blunt, concrete images and moods. Some of this writing, especially for the sopranos, had the wide-interval vocal writing that has long been a problematic way to show deep emotion, while at other times the vocal music and instrumental accompaniment was just too finely engineered to have a real impact. Too often it felt like Aucoin was showing what he could do with the words rather than what he thought of them.

The shame of this is the libretto is the kind of thing that hints at a haunting power that should disturb in the moment and linger long afterword. There are words about illness, falling apart, a kind of grim agitation to keep going in the face of hopelessness. There is a stretch about the violence of surgery that is textually gripping and musically thin. A mysterious movement about the depths of the ocean should have been powerful, but Aucoin’s setting is monochromatic and not well proportioned, starting forcefully and evaporating.

Most of the expressive strength in Music for New Bodies, is not in the vocal writing. There are fantastic solos for oboe and contrabassoon that urgently press against the limits of technique, and have an obsessive insistence that there is a point to be made, There’s also a surprising debt to Robert Ashley in some quasi-parlando vocal ensemble passages; these and the Norwich settings are the stretches when the music communicates with not just clarity but a sense of purpose.

Sellars moves the singers and musicians around the stage, the lighting changes colors, and there’s some tables that singers and musicians sit around, or on top of, or lie on. It’s minimal in practice and inconsequential in the scheme of things. The final movement, the planet telling humanity that though we will be gone, it will itself be okay, is paradoxically the best, as if Aucoin didn’t really understand the humanity in the words, but got the philosophical part. The rest is attractive but distant, like a beautiful stranger who seems to be smiling at you, but is really looking past.

Music for New Bodies will be repeated 8 p.m. Friday. lincolncenter.org