Ritornello

[workshopped January 2012, at High Concept Labs, Chicago]

In baroque opera, an aria is essentially one moment or thought extended into song (in contrast with recitative). Ritornello operates on this principle, eschewing narrative in favor of a delicate meditation, through film and music, on a single moment of the tale of Rip van Winkle, just before his waking from an accidental twenty-year slumber in the Catskills. The central image which returns again and again (mirroring the ritornello aria form) is that of paper folding and unfolding, like a map, or a letter, or some document of time. The use of real, physical paper (shot frame-by-frame in stop motion animation) is almost a fetishization of physical objects, of old-fashioned pencil-and-paper in a world that is increasingly digital — a world that has changed greatly in our own past two decades. These folding sequences are punctuated by images suggestive of different ways of taming and understanding space and landscape – maps, grids, aerial views – as well as whimsical sketches and Twombly-esque renderings of Rip van Winkle’s twenty-year-long beard. The musical vocabulary is rooted in American hymnody, baroque ornamentation, and a modernist consideration of timbre. The use of a loop pedal (with viola and vocals) enables phrases and sounds to be layered over each other, sometimes like spare mantric recitations, at other times more dense and expressionist. Fragments of text are adapted from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and from the original Washington Irving story, “Rip van Winkle” (1819). Overall, the piece tries to evoke the notion of time folding in on itself, repeating and forgetting and unfolding again. Ritornello was conceived and developed almost entirely during the two-week operaSHOP residency at High Concept Laboratories. This performance is the first iteration of what may evolve into a broader work in an alternate format.