true pearl (2018) 30'

program note

true pearl is the result of a conversation I had several years ago with Scott Nickrenz, who was the music director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Scott invited me to look around the museum and think of a provocative way to use music to animate the space. I had had my music played at the Gardner before, when concerts took place in the Tapestry Room, and I remembered how imposing and powerful it was to hear music in the presence of such strong images. I started imagining what it would mean to write an opera that was so connected to the tapestries that it could only be understood in their presence. It occurred to me that if I made music to be heard by an audience with headphones, standing in front of the tapestries, not only would it encourage listeners to look very closely at each image, but also that the tapestries themselves could become the set and the scenography and the characters of the opera. I asked my friend, playwright Sybil Kempson, to look at the tapestries with me, and to think of how we might make a piece that would live best in that one location.

true pearl is an opera made specifically to be seen and heard in the Tapestry Room of the Gardner Museum. The opera is in five scene’s – one for each tapestry in the Gardner’s spectacular 16th century Flemish series based on the life of King Cyrus of Persia. true pearl is not meant to be performed live, but is recorded on special headsets, so that patrons of the museum can listen individually, as they move from tapestry to tapestry, from scene to scene. In this way it is a personal opera, allowing each audience member to pay attention both to what he or she is hearing, and to how he or she sees.