‘Killing Jar’ is an experience designed to test the limits.
Sometimes art isn’t meant to be “enjoyed” in the usual sense of the word. It may make us “feel” something. Or conjure inspiration. Or provide a hint of enlightenment. But it doesn’t mean the experience was “enjoyable.”
Friday night at The MATCH — with a second performance Saturday night — Musiqa presented a program titled “Playing Havoc” that comprised just one work: Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist Kate Soper’s “Voices From the Killing Jar.”
It is not an enjoyable piece of work.
The sparse audience at Friday night’s performance experienced a score composed in a modernist aesthetic, fueling a disquieting performance that spoke directly to the #MeToo and #NeverAgain movements. Pretty was never the point.
“Voices From the Killing Jar” takes its title from the device that entomologists use to trap and kill insects with minimal damage. Given in eight movements, the music is a gallery of portraits of eight women in literature, each trapped in her own unique killing jar.
Soper’s score most often employed a disjointed, fragmented style that demanded — and got — committed performances by Soper, a Rice graduate, and the instrumentalists accompanying her. The unusual sonic lexicon calls upon all manner of unorthodox sounds, from both voice and instruments, to express the violent worldview of the protagonist of Haruki Murakami’s “Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” or the bleak prospects of Henry James’ Isabella Archer trapped in a tragic marriage.
Clytemnestra’s monomaniacal obsession over her husband’s sacrifice of their eldest daughter is expressed by repetitive figures in the score, Soper’s harsh, straight-toned vocals mirrored by a saxophone in its high register.
A lively and tuneful Celtic folk tune sung by Lady Macduff to her soon-to-be-murdered son, but sinister, distorted electronic mutterings and laughter disrupt her song, and eventually bring it to a halt, signaling the tragic fate she shares with her child. Sprechstimme, from percussionist Blake Wilkins, was deployed to interrupt the lyricism of the last movement’s paean to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan, as Gatsby finally reduces the beauty of Daisy’s voice to a monetizable commodity.
The rare moments of levity come in the fifth movement, as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary seeks to rise above the banality of her life with an evening at the opera. Soper’s vocal acrobatics run the musical and emotional gamut, as snippets of Mozart and Verdi collide with one another to absurd effect. Overall, this movement is a preposterous mash-up; what opera might sound like to someone who’s never experienced classical music of any kind.
Musiqa’s previous concert adventurously explored the union of music and film, while this performance seems to blur the line between new classically based music and performance art. The performances by vocalist Soper and the six musicians accompanying her favor expressiveness over any traditional sense of tonal beauty. Everyone onstage works intently to bring off each expressive effect in every moment of this difficult score.
As an audience member, you’re asked not to “enjoy” “Voices From the Killing Jar,” so much as allow yourself to feel unsettled and disturbed for the work’s hourlong running time … then remember that feeling when you encounter #MeToo moments out in the world at large.