‘Moving the needle’
Missy Mazzoli reflects on three years at the CSO
If Missy Mazzoli weren’t, well, Missy Mazzoli, hers might have been remembered as the Chicago Symphony residency that wasn’t.
In spring 2019, the Brooklyn-based composer was halfway through her first season as Mead composer-in-residence when a musicians’ strike scuttled her CSO debut, a new arrangement of her double bass concerto “Dark with Excessive Bright” (2018). A year later, her long-awaited CSO commission “Orpheus Undone” was fully double-barred and a month from its premiere when COVID-19 vaporized the rest of the performing arts season. The pandemic also doomed two concerts she’d curated for the CSO’s contemporary series MusicNOW, including four world premieres and an anniversary tribute to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).
Even so, when Mazzoli’s residency formally concludes this month, her legacy will speak for itself: Her stated goal to program composers not yet championed by a major symphony orchestra resulted in some of the most exhilarating, advocative programming to come out of MusicNOW in recent memory, including music by an unprecedented number of local and minoritized artists.
“Inevitably, when you’re focusing on people who have not been celebrated by major orchestras, that’s a lot of non-male and nonwhite composers,” Mazzoli says, noting that over 50% of the composers programmed on MusicNOW fit those demographics. “I’d always wanted to curate, so I’d been thinking for years about composers who I felt deserved a wider audience. Finally, I had this international platform to do so.”
When the CSO made the leap to online streaming with its CSOtv platform, Mazzoli and the artistic planning team were able to salvage some of the most feted works from the 2020 MusicNOW season. CSO Sessions Episode
21, streaming until July 9, retains trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s never-before-heard “Delta Blues” (1999) and flutist Nicole Mitchell’s world-premiere commission “Cult of Electromagnetic Connectivity.” (Mazzoli’s own “Dark with Excessive Bright” belatedly rounds out the program, played with white-hot intensity by CSO principal bassist Alexander Hanna.) Then, from June 24 to July 23, CSO Sessions will present another deferred MusicNOW commission: Courtney Bryan’s “Requiem,” sung by Quince vocal ensemble.
“Wadada, Nicole and Courtney were all amazing models of how to have a generous spirit and stay calm in the midst of so much unknown,” Mazzoli says. “There was a lot of communication after rehearsal hours to make sure the composers were happy. We’d send some recordings every night and FaceTime about the pieces. It was actually kind of awesome.”
It’s one of those silver linings artists are understandably loath to acknowledge in the midst of so much devastation. When in-person events ground to a halt last year, Mazzoli felt her creative voice become even more daring than before. For example, Mazzoli’s theatrical leanings bleed into an upcoming work for Copenhagen’s Mogens Dahl Chamber Choir, which requires singers to shuffle into different onstage configurations mid-performance.
“It sounds simple, but it’s something I never did before,” Mazzoli says. “It’s this really strange piece about human relationships.”
While she hasn’t started composing her Metropolitan Opera commission “Lincoln in the Bardo” quite yet, you can bet the past year-plus will inform her interpretation of George Saunders’ fantastical novel.
“The pandemic really changed the way I write,” Mazzoli says. “I’m always at war within myself between the inward energy of composing and the outward energy of emceeing or teaching. In a year of very little outward energy, I had more time to sit with my ideas and let them get weirder and weirder.”
It’s just another paradigm shift for a composer who wrote the book on quiet reinvention. Born to a nonmusical family in semirural Pennsylvania, Mazzoli, 40, has charted her own course most of her life. As a child, she baffled her peers with visual graphs comparing Beethoven symphonies; as she grew older, she began to seek out female role models in composition, citing even aesthetic near-opposites like the heteroglossic Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth. Her style is indebted to Bang on a Can’s genre-melding, postminimalist ethos while shedding some of its self-conscious posturing. Whether performing with her band Victoire, linking up with Wilco’s Glenn Kotche to record her original compositions, or — as she has in the last decade — engrossing herself in operatic projects with librettist Royce Vavrek, Mazzoli makes no attempt to define her output, nor parade it as a radical incursion upon musical norms. Instead, she just does.
“I don’t like the terms ‘chamber opera’ and ‘grand opera.’ Everything I’m doing is somewhere in the middle,” Mazzoli says when asked about her recent immersion in the genre. “Instead of going into composing with this very restricted mindset of right and wrong, I’ve found opera is more about getting at the core of what I want to do. It’s a place to tackle the most difficult human experiences — and certainly, everyone in the world has experienced that in the last year and a half. The operatic template makes sense for where I am emotionally right now.”
Chicago audiences will experience that emotional core firsthand in January, when Lyric Opera presents Mazzoli’s “Proving Up” (2018) in an off-site performance at Goodman’s Owen Theatre. (A Mazzoli opera was last heard here in 2016, when Chicago Fringe Opera presented her 2012 one-act “Songs from the Uproar.”) The taut, unsettling work follows a homesteading family whose lives are upended by prescriptivism and greed; I witnessed the 2018 New York premiere at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre and left haunted by the stark staging and crawling, economically orchestrated score.
“Proving Up” similarly captured Enrique Mazzola’s imagination. He says the smaller-scale opera was being floated for a future Lyric season when he was named music director designate in 2019. When it came to deciding what to program for the 2021/ 22 season — Lyric’s first live season since his appointment — he advocated strongly for “Proving Up’s” inclusion. He’s studying not just that work but the rest of Mazzoli’s oeuvre, which recently culminated in a March performance of her 2006 work “These Worlds in Us” with the London Philharmonic.
“The score is very precisely written. It’s full of mystery; it’s passionate. It can be difficult, but it’s intriguing throughout,” Mazzola says of “Proving Up.” “I’m very proud to conduct the work of an American woman composer, and a composer with strong ties to Chicago’s artistic world.”
Nor will that be Mazzoli’s last word in Chicago next season — far from it. From Oct. 7-9, CSO music director Riccardo Muti will also lead the orchestra in performances of “These Worlds in Us”, then “Orpheus Undone,” Mazzoli’s CSO commission, will finally premiere on a still-to-be-confirmed date next spring. (In a case of uneasy resonance with the past year, Mazzoli’s written description of “Orpheus Undone” says the piece “explores the baffling and surreal stretching of time in moments of trauma or agony.”)
Mazzoli has also gotten a worthy send-off in cyberspace: Besides the “Dark with Excessive Bright” performance and adapted versions of the two canceled MusicNOW concerts, a December CSO Session featured Mazzoli’s bracing 2010 string quartet “Death Valley Junction,” and Civic Orchestra musicians’ February performance of her chamber work “Still Life with Avalanche” (2008) is still available for streaming via CSOtv. Civic will also present her 2014 orchestral work “Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)” on July 8.
Though Mazzoli grew up on a steady diet of CSO recordings, she says she was constantly gobsmacked by the sheer virtuosity of the orchestra musicians, with special shout-outs to “Dark with Excessive Bright” soloist Hanna and MusicNOW regulars Cynthia Yeh (principal percussionist), Katinka Kleijn (cellist), Baird Dodge (violinist), Emma Gerstein (flutist), and Charles Vernon (bass trombonist).
“I’d watch [players] and think, ‘I don’t know how they’re doing this right now.’ Not, ‘Oh, they must practice a lot,’ or ‘They’re physically strong’ — like, ‘I don’t understand how this is possible,’ ” Mazzoli says. “I loved seeing those people come back again and again to play on MusicNOW. We were able to have this shorthand during rehearsals.”
Now, with her residency formally coming to a close, Mazzoli is passing the baton to Jessie Montgomery, a composer who has also carved out a singular presence in the contemporary classical world. Mazzoli programmed Montgomery’s string quartet “Break Away” (2013) and her arrangement of Julius Eastman’s “Gay Guerrila” for a May 2019 MusicNOW concert. She says she wasn’t part of conversations surrounding Montgomery’s appointment but is ecstatic about the news.
“Her writing has this exuberant confidence, which I imagine comes from being an amazing performer herself,” Mazzoli says. (Montgomery is a violinist who regularly performs with the Sphinx Virtuosi, Silkroad Ensemble, and the string duo big dog little dog, among other groups.) “She’s such a fresh voice. I know that’s a term that’s overused, but I don’t know how else to say it. She creates a language that’s at once surprising and comforting.”
While she held a composer-in-residence title at Opera Philadelphia from 2012 to 2015, Mazzoli’s CSO stint was a huge milestone as her first-ever residency with a symphony orchestra. That peek behind the curtain, she says, was even more valuable than hearing her works performed by an ensemble as vaulted as the CSO.
“I learned so much about how these massive institutions are run, and how [its] decisions are made,” Mazzoli says. “Every young artist will have issues with large institutions; I think that’s inevitable. But my approach has been to put myself in a position where I can help [the CSO] be more expansive and embracing of living creators.
“That was my single goal going into it — it wasn’t about promoting my own work. My goal was to move the needle in a better direction for symphony orchestras everywhere.”
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