Goth male soprano plumbs darkness in new show
>> What kind of music does M Lamar play? It’s a simple question, but there’s no easy answer. Lamar’s lush and gloomy new show, Funeral Doom Spiritual, is an assemblage of old spirituals — but it isn’t your usual Sunday at church. And while he has over time trained his penetrating, whooping soprano register with the help of an opera coach, it isn’t like any opera you’ve ever heard, either.
Lamar — who is the twin brother of Laverne Cox, the transgender Orange Is the New Black actress, and has appeared on that show as Cox’s pre-transition self — inhabits a musical genre pretty much his own. He embodies, as he put it in a recent interview, a “gothic-devil-worshipping-free-black-man-blues tradition”. He plays death soul. Or maybe blues metal. Or maybe apocalyptic lieder gospel.
The hour-long Funeral Doom Spiritual, which had its New York premiere on Friday at National Sawdust in Brooklyn as part of the Prototype festival of contemporary music theatre, is fuelled by the anger and sadness of the Black Lives Matter movement. But instead of explicit protest, this otherworldly, goth-tinged projection into the distant future of our violent, racially and sexually charged present offers a space of alluring, ultimately stirring reflection.
Charting the stylised journey of a man mourning the loss of his love, Funeral Doom Spiritual follows him over the centuries as he hopes for a resurrection. The songs’ lyrics may describe movements from life to death, but the work tries to reverse that course, seeking a state that Lamar calls deathlessness.
“What the dead gotta say,” he sings at one point. “They say, ‘Don’t give up on me.’”
While the focus of the piece is the gangly, black-draped Lamar, 32, sitting at the piano and singing, no singer-songwriter has ever sounded quite like this, unless you’ve imagined the love child of Tori Amos and Marilyn Manson.
But he does have antecedents and contemporaries. His malleable, ferocious voice and his taste for despondent political contemplation may remind you of transgender singer Anohni and anti-Aids siren Diamanda Galas. Trippy and unhurried, his compositions echo black avant-garde jazz masters like Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. And two young artists, soprano Julia Bullock and composer Tyshawn Sorey, recently created an evening of Josephine Baker arrangements that slowed her songs into a desolation as glacial as that of Funeral Doom Spiritual.
The new piece has its roots in Lamar’s childhood in Alabama, where he was a boy soprano in his church choir. He grew up obsessed with opera stars Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman and Marian Anderson, imitating their style.
Lamar hung around with the musicians in school but initially followed a visual art path. He enrolled in graduate studies in sculpture at the Yale School of Art before dropping out when his dabbling in performance began turning more serious. He moved to San Francisco and then, in 2006, to New York to study with Ira Siff, a noted vocal coach who is still his teacher and was for years chief diva of lovingly campy drag opera troupe La Gran Scena.
“We go a lot through diction and enunciation,” Lamar said. “Like, pronouncing things when you’re singing with a bel canto line is a thing. You want a beautiful sound but also to always be intelligible. And lots and lots of scales and technique so the voice has dexterity, has flexibility, has movement between registers.”
He started off writing individual songs; they gradually gathered into larger pieces, mostly set in the historical past of slave ships and the Jim Crow era, but clearly resonant with the current moment. When his multimedia work Negrogothic, a Manifesto, the Aesthetics of M Lamar was presented in 2014 at the Manhattan gallery Participant Inc, Ken Johnson wrote in The New York Times that he “plumbs the depths of all-American trauma with visionary verve”.
Funeral Doom Spiritual arose as Lamar was singing one of his favourite spirituals: the gently defiant My Lord, What a Morning, a Marian Anderson calling card (and the title of her autobiography). Hearing the words as if for the first time, he asked himself, using notably sharper language: What the hell was this about?
He researched the lyrics online and found alternate versions. “I realised, oh, it’s this end-times thing, like when the Rapture comes,” he said. “And I thought, wouldn’t it be lovely if it had a setting, a piano setting, that reflected that content?”
The idea of a doomsday spiritual dovetailed with what he called “this negro zombie apocalypse idea I’d had”, an extension of concepts he’d been exploring in works like Negro Antichrist and a requiem, Speculum Orum: Shackled to the Dead. He found common ground in an image from the work of legal scholar Anthony Paul Farley: “The idea that the dead are singing means that they’re not really dead,” Lamar said. “They’re asleep, which always leaves the possibility of waking.”
Dark costumes with executioner-style hoods and projected film images of lynching trees and burning cities echo the boiling music. The visuals have continued to develop through a stretch of workshops and since the official premiere last spring at the University of Southern California.
“In order for me to get to this stage of a piece,” Lamar said, “I have to play it a lot. Not just rehearse it, but actually perform it a lot.”
However you classify it, the work exerts a strange, dark power. At the rehearsal, in a cramped studio a few blocks south of Penn Station, Lamar and a small ensemble read through Oh, Graveyard, a combination of trembling piano, rueful string quartet harmonies and spidery electronics.
“There is this thing where you’re singing well when you feel sort of superhuman,” he said a few minutes later. “And it doesn’t happen in the low register. It happens up high. You’re in the stratosphere. You can transcend any muckiness of the world.”