Instrumentation: tenor, violin, piano/keyboard, pre-recorded sounds, spoken voices (recorded or live)
First Performance: Paul Appleby (tenor), Miranda Cuckson (violin), Anthony Cheung (piano/keyboard). Victoria Chang and Arthur Sze, poets. Sound design by David Bird. Ojai Music Festival, June 10, 2022.
Commissioned by the Ojai Music Festival for the American Modern Opera Company, with a generous gift in honor of Nancy Sanders, and dedicated to Miranda Cuckson
Duration: approx. 50 minutes. (revised abridged version is 40-45 minutes).
Read Thomas May’s program note “Networks of Memory” at the Ojai Festival site.
1. The Network (Arthur Sze)
2. Misconjugate (Jenny Xie)
Interlude 1
3. The Golden State (Cathy Park Hong)
Interlude 2: Expenditures (Jenny Xie)
4. In Search Of (Jenny Xie)
5. The Gift (Li-Young Lee)
Interlude 3: Dear Grandmother (Victoria Chang)
6. The Gift (Ocean Vuong)
7. A Guide to Usage: Mine (Monica Youn)
Interlude 4: Sleepers (Arthur Sze)
8. Brownacre (Monica Youn)
Interlude 5: Memory (Victoria Chang)
9. Transfigurations (Arthur Sze)
(Original texts and order. A revised version from 2023 includes some changes, and suggestions for new readings)
the echoing of tenses is a multi-movement “song cycle,” a series of reflections and ruminations on memory, bringing together the texts of seven prominent and multi-generational Asian-American poets. Memory here is made complicated by the circumstances and tensions of cultural and personal identity, family, migration, loss, and reflection. Opening with Arthur Sze’s “The Network,” which presents the image of a photograph lost to history – a kind of origin story of Asian-American immigration – the cycle begins by looking backwards. But in ensuing texts by Jenny Xie and Cathy Park Hong, past/present/future tenses elide and become confused in dreamlike states. Musically, these are connected by interludes in which strange and unfamiliar tunings in the keyboard overlap with processed recorded sounds. Ocean Vuong’s “The Gift” converses with Li-Young Lee’s earlier poem of the same title, turning to striking childhood memories of each author’s mother and father, respectively. Monica Youn’s raw but dispassionate style contrasts strongly with the emotionally vulnerable explorations of intergenerational trauma in Victoria Chang’s Obit and the epistolary Dear Memory. Xie’s poems from The Rupture Tense share Chang’s exploration of postmemory, which Marianne Hirsch defines as “the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before — to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.” With sound design by composer David Bird, the samples of processed sounds and field recordings mixed with recorded voices amplify the sensation of time and place. The choices of lyrical and contemplative texts by Li-Young Lee and Arthur Sze were directly inspired by Paul Appleby’s voice, especially in the final “Transfigurations.”
I am incredibly grateful to Ara Guzelimian at the Ojai Festival and Barry and Nancy Sanders for making this commission possible, to the staff and artistic leadership at Ojai and AMOC* (Matt Aucoin and Zack Winokur) for believing in the project, and my wonderful collaborators Paul Appleby, David Bird, and especially Miranda Cuckson – to whom the piece is dedicated – who invited me to create something together in the first place. And finally, thank you to all the poets whose words made every sound possible.
Anthony Cheung