Opera News Sept 2020 Review of Place by Daniel J. Kushner

COMPOSER TED HEARNE and poet Saul William’s Place, for vocalists and chamber orchestra, is an experimental exploration of the complex and often overlooked racial bias that’s baked into gentrification. It benefits from evergreen subject matter, but following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks by police, it’s impossible not to hear the piece with a new sense of urgency and outrage. Place articulates the chasm in communication that still exists between white and Black America on the topic of race.

Privelege has allowed some of us to avoid being honest with ourselves about institutionalized racism, providing the space in which to be willfully inactive about it; others have to live the unjust realities of suppression and systemic marginalization every day, with no space to escape the social, political and economic chains forged in American slavery and the displacement of people of color. Gentrification, a more subtle and by no means new vehicle of racial injustice, has perpetuated the cycle of socioeconomic exploitation, segregating people of color into poor city neighborhoods only to push them out when a profit can be made from outside business development and incoming white renters and property owners.

Hearne and Williams unpack and translate this difficult conversation in a three-part musical narrative that dives straight into the uncomfortable. Part 1 details Hearne’s insular perspective on his immediate surroundings; in Part 2, Williams breaks through this myopic viewpoint to illuminate Hearne’s more complicated relationship to the larger world around him — and the communities to which he may have been oblivious. Part 3, called “Colonizing Space,” imagines how prejudice and gentrification may change yet stay the same in the future.

Hearne ratchets up anxious tension in the music, weaving a complex sonic tapestry from threads of musical theater, pop, hip-hop, R&B and classical. The cast, including gospel singer Isaiah Robinson, Ayanna Woods, Sophia Byrd, Josephine Lee and Hearne himself, exhibits profound versatility and a sensitivity to timbral nuances that prevent the vocals from becoming trite.

In Part 1, in particular, Hearne relies heavily on the electronic manipulation of the voice. Blatant dissonances create a rich choral vocabulary that doesn’t obliterate the melody, but it does obscure its primacy. At times, layered pop-choral aesthetics meld into vocoder-addled vocals so synthesized that the words become indecipherable and blend into the instrumental mix.

On “Interview” and “Maps (Appropriation),” the composer incorporates sound-collage techniques. In the latter, he creates a kind of ramshackle gospel song that moves at a stately pace and repeats a satisfying plagal cadence, but strings swell, and horns add to the cacophony. With startling disparity, “Breakup Letter” contains a digitized recitative addressed to a prior partner of Hearne’s, interspersed with text from James Baldwin’s Fire Next Time.

Hearne’s words on “Guilt” suggest that white guilt is a dead end for dismantling racism, enabling avoidance. String instruments screech and skitter over a slow moving and mellow-dramatic dirge, hinting at self-indulgent hand-wringing and a co-opting of the conversation about race. Vocalist Steven Bradshaw displays the expressive flexibility of his voice with flawless countertenor tone.

At this point, Part 2 abruptly begins, with William’s polemic response to apathetic, out of touch and toothless attitudes towards racial inequality. He pulls no punches, with singer Sol Ruiz feigning pity: “Awww, is it O.K. to say white supremacy in white spaces? Can we get to the bottom of this?”

“What About My Son?” takes it further, implying that a lack of awareness isn’t preventing people from empathizing with the Black experience in America — it’s willful ignorance. Hearne utilizes William’s poignant use of lyrical repetition to create post minimalist hooks reminiscent of Steve Rech’s seminal spliced tape loops from the ‘60s. But rather than fragmenting previously existing audio recordings, Hearne chops up his original vocal writing over a loping pop-R&B rhythm, creating what feels like a sampled hip-hop beat.

William’s wordplay is clever, biting and succinct. “And the land was mined. And the land is mine” is a recurring lyrical motif throughout Part 2, as the poet exposes the weaponization of white privilege at the heart of gentrification. Hearne’s signature compositional style — with its ecstatic, full-throated approach to the human voice — quickly becomes manic in “Running to Us All (written for hands over mouths),” as portions of the hard-hitting text are obscured by the literal muffling of the voices. “Hallelujah in White” features a clash between traditional gospel sounds and the haunting reappropriation of iconic melodies from Handel’s Messiah, followed by the searing truth of William’s poem “A Thought.”

Place is exquisite, a work of genius whose premiere recording seems to arrive both at the right cultural moment and entirely too late. Hearne and Williams, with director Patricia McGregor, have created a blistering secular oratorio about race, containing bitter medicine not only for white America as a whole but for the white establishment in classical music and opera. For reasons both musical and thematic, this piece should be listened to closely.