Explosions of the Voice

When I spoke to Paola Prestini over Zoom, we immediately started talking about her dream to make an opera from Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, a novel about two women whose lives are forged in response to each other. Prestini’s music is just as defined by her collaborations. In an interview ostensibly about her, she tended to highlight the work of other artists. Her career puts this in practice: As both a composer and artistic director of National Sawdust, Prestini is attentive to the way art grows within a creative ecosystem—and whether that ecosystem is healthy or not.

Like a public square, each Prestini piece is a meeting place across aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural lines. Recent projects include “Houses of Zodiac,” a “solo cello album” that features no less than four poets, four films, two choreographers, and one throat singer. The upcoming opera/research project “Sensorium Ex” is the result of a years-long collaboration between scientists, artists, and the voice-related disability community. In 2015, Prestini co-founded National Sawdust, one of the few New York cultural institutions led by women. An incubator for a wide variety of experimental music, the Brooklyn venue models what an equitable classical music environment actually sounds like.

We sat down to talk about Prestini’s most recent opera, “No One is Forgotten,” co-composed with foley artist Sxip Shirey. Commissioned by the Dallas Opera and inspired by true accounts from detained journalists and aid workers, the radio opera uses 3D audio technology to depict two women in captivity. Searing, imaginative, and darkly funny, the work is another extravaganza of collaboration: it was produced by Eve Gigliotti, who also gives a spectacular performance; features exceptional actors and musicians; and is adapted from a play by Winter Miller worth reading on its own. The hour-long production can be streamed anywhere.

VAN: “No One is Forgotten” tells a topical, political story about a journalist and an aid worker in a cell. How much research do you do before you sit down to compose, especially for a piece like this?

Paola Prestini: I usually do a ton of research before I start a piece to figure out the sound worlds that I want to do, and I’m also often very involved in the dramaturgy, especially of the bigger works. For this piece, Winter [Miller] was an extraordinary resource because she studied journalism and worked at the New York Times and had already done so much research on prisoners of war.

So the question became: How do we create the physical and psychological space of these two characters through 3D spatial audio? Because you never see the staging, the sound has to become the set. And that became the main investigation with Sxip Shirey, who I co-wrote the piece with, in order to create an invisible opera.

When I think of your music, I immediately think of striking visual collaborations, from puppetry to handing out VR goggles to the audience. Did your composing change when you suddenly took away the visual?

This project still reinforced a philosophy that I feel really strongly about, which is that it’s important to spend money on people, not stuff. For me, this piece was a chance to make a work entirely about sound, and to collaborate with a composer whose work is very different from mine, but with whom I feel a deep affinity.

Especially in Western composition, there’s not a lot of discussion, in terms of intellectual property, about what it means to fully collaborate with people who are not creating in the same Western stylized way of writing. What does it mean to collaborate with an improviser like Helga Davis or [Inuk folksinger] Tanya Tagaq? Someone like Sxip doesn’t necessarily write everything down, but still composes a sound world through foley.

You said elsewhere that “collaboration is an art form in itself. It takes time, just like practicing your instrument or composing.” To me that pushes against this idea in Western composition where the composer tends to be seen as the ultimate, singular authority.

Yes! And that often means not naming who you’re collaborating with, which is insane. I mean, it’s not only incorrect, but that lack of transparency doesn’t help the next generation understand how these processes really work.

Plus, so many unnamed collaborators tend to be women.

And especially those who write in styles that are not recognized with credit or monetary compensation. In American intellectual property law, if you don’t write things down, you basically don’t own it. Any kind of indigenous practice, any oral tradition, any musical creation that doesn’t get written down, you don’t own. That kind of invisibility is written into our law.

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Because interdisciplinary collaboration is so rarely taught as a skill, do you have any ground rules you recommend?

I actually have this thing written above my desk. These are my own guidelines for how I write, which informs how I collaborate:

• Where you can tighten language, tighten.
• Tighten structure and form before, during and after.
• Don’t forget to analyze your work.
• Where are your holes?
• What do you fall back on when you’re feeling strong?
• Challenge all your assumptions.
• Edit the balance with instinct.

In collaborations, I’ve learned that you need to be very secure in your voice and your process first. Then at the beginning of working with someone, you essentially lay the groundwork for expectations. Like, “Are you comfortable with me looking at your libretto and putting suggestions in there? Let’s talk about what I like to do.” Setting up ground rules like that and being clear about what you expect from each other.

Especially as a woman, when you collaborate you have to strengthen your voice. When I was younger, I didn’t always name what I contributed and now it’s like, yeah, I should call myself a dramaturg. That’s one of my strengths. There’s no problem with it.

“No One is Forgotten” looks at what it means to have a voice in isolation, “Sensorium Ex” explores the voice and disability, the “Hubble Cantata” creates a sonification of astronomical data. How did you approach duet writing here?

A friend of mine, Robin Coste Louis, is a beautiful poet, and she introduced me to the concept of erasure poetry, where you create something new by erasing [words]. Instrumentation in opera tends to have a much larger palette than I used in this piece, which has two people, two soprano voices, and then solo cello and foley. A lot of dyads. And then the text and the music is another dyad. I wanted people to hear the music as an explosion of the speaking voice.

I’m curious what your early musical influences were, especially growing up in such a hybrid cultural context coming from Italy to Nogales, Arizona.

We had a lot of opera in the house and a lot of Mexican folk music because I was raised on the border. We were singing in the house all the time, so it makes total sense that I’m writing so much music for voice.

Once I started studying, I was obsessed with Palestrina and Victoria and [Giacomo] Carissimi and 16th century counterpoint. And then I loved the whole poly-stylistic approach of Zorn and was really moved by Glass and the collaborative aspects of what he was doing. And, also, honestly, a lot of pop music.

They shouldn’t be mutually exclusive! 

I don’t listen to things to not like them. I listen to try to find something that I like. At [National] Sawdust, I don’t see myself as a gatekeeper. I’m creating the systems and the financial structure so that other people can thrive and create a regenerative system through a revolving curatorship.

How did you first decide that you wanted to become a composer?

I was raised by a very hard-working single mom who was passionate about me playing the piano, but I hated it. I was not a performer and really struggled with anxiety around performing. I would tell her I was practicing for two to three hours a day, but really I was writing my own stuff.

So she found somebody to help me write things down, a pianist, and at a certain point she said, “You have to go to this place called Interlochen. I can’t help you with what you want to be doing.” So I went to Interlochen and stayed for high school and studied composition. It was always in me to write. It was never a question.

Has your view of what it means to be a composer changed since you were starting out?

Yeah, definitely. I came out of a very classical system, in a time where there was no transparency in terms of what it took to be a composer or have a career. In many ways, success when you’re younger means meeting benchmarks that other people put out for you.

What kind of benchmarks?

First you win this award and then your teacher introduces you to this conductor. And because [Juilliard] wasn’t the kind of environment I could thrive in and also wasn’t a very fair one, I knew I wasn’t going to get any of that. So I had to create this other world that I was going to make music and live in.

So for me, being a composer also means building systems. Like, “Sensorium Ex” is a whole system. But I think we need to be transparent about what it takes. All these things took time, just like having a child takes time. But you do them intentionally because you want to. And that doesn’t take away from my writing. It actually enhances it and betters the systems that I’m a part of.

At Juilliard, you were one of three women out of a class of 50. Reporting by Sammy Sussman in VAN brought multiple sexual harassment and discrimination allegations from that time to light. What kept you going?

I was very depressed at the time because I had had such different expectations, especially growing up with such a strong mom. All of a sudden, I found myself in honestly such a non-nurturing environment with so much misogyny. I didn’t know what I was getting into. I thought I was going to school. I thought I was going to be mentored. I didn’t realize that I was getting into a hornet’s nest.

You can shut off in response to that, and I didn’t want to shut off. I was also learning a lot there, and it was a huge opportunity. I had very strong friendships there that carried me, and just had to silo myself into another way of being.

That’s why I started my first nonprofit, VisionIntoArt, while I was a student with Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, who is a leading Hollywood film composer now with her wife Laura Karpman. That was my refuge. That was how I could affect change and create a multicultural, multi-disciplinary and multi-language environment. Both the people I met at Juilliard and VIA gave me purpose, and allowed me to keep going.

But, you know, I wasn’t well. I didn’t have the language or the maturity to deal with it all. Only now in my 40s have I been able to kind of contend with my time there, and really understand how it affected me.

It’s been about a year since the story broke. Do you have any reflections about this past year?

When everything started to come up, I was so scared and so sad. I never thought this was going to be dealt with. I’m very grateful to Sammy [Sussman], and to the women who spoke up, and to the broader community that has investigated this. There were many conversations that could have led to the right thing being done in the past, and it’s a shame that it takes journalistic fearlessness for things to really change.

Now the question is, how does this affect the industry? There’s a long road, and sometimes it’s the smaller institutions who can do bigger leaps of justice. If a school like Juilliard took responsibility, other people would listen. But nobody wants to name it. They think it’s just a little blip of bad press. They don’t think about reparations and who’s been left behind, or what it models to young composers of any gender. Because people are traumatized by this, even if they’re not a woman who has experienced harassment directly. It’s traumatizing for everyone.

My great-grandmother went to Juilliard and Peabody in the 1920s and had similar experiences with discrimination and sexual harassment. Her response was to stop composing.

It’s literally taking someone’s voice. Whether it’s harassment, whether it’s discrimination, you’re taking away someone’s opportunities, someone’s voice, someone’s right to be there. And that gender and racial discrimination persists in the classical music industry.

So much of the work that I’ve done at National Sawdust has been because I truly believe that if you create a better context, it’s not just better for your own music. There are a lot of people doing great work, and it all fits together to keep mobilizing.

You mentioned at the beginning that you’ve been thinking this year about including female friendship in your work, which sounds like it was also at the center of how you responded to your time at Juilliard.

I love that you make that connection. Thank you. That’s beautiful.

Anything you’re excited about in particular?

“Sensorium Ex” is a collaboration with Brenda Shaughnessy, who’s an amazing poet and friend. She trusted me with a personal story, and I take that very seriously. Then my next piece about the proto-feminist Sor Juana is with Magos Herrera, who’s an incredible jazz singer. And then after that, I’m embarking on a piece about Denmark Vesey with Robin Coste Lewis, who I mentioned.

I really think of collaborations as journeys of life. I think my best work comes out of these deep relationships. ¶