Sweet Land (2020)

This aggressively innovative, almost uncategorizable new work won the Music Critics Association of North America's award for Best New Opera 2021. .... the piece is an unusual collaboration among two composers - Ravon Chacon and Du Yun - and two librettists Aja Couchois Duncan and Douglas Kearney. Sweet Land uses startling extended techniques (both vocal and instrumental) and abandons traditional narrative in its effort to demolish received wisdom about our country's founding myths.

Sweet Land is anything but sweet. It's noisy and strange but oddly compelling in its nihilistic vision. 

In the concluding "Echoes and Expulsions".... The theme of universality of immigrant suffering is unmistakable. It's inspiring to hear this amount of innovation and commitment in a heartfelt work of edgy opeatic activsim, even if there's a fair amount of cacophony and betwilderment along the way. 

Best New Opera Award

An ambitious, sprawling, “gut punch” of an opera…

Watching and listening to the video version, you can’t help but notice the music and libretto taking the central place they occupied all along, even if that required more than one sitting to comprehend. Sweet Land was shot and recorded on a single evening and edited in a mere two weeks, but the sound and editing are so superb that, by itself, the soundscape creates the landscape.

There was never any question that the performances, both the instrumental ensembles for each part and the arresting singers, were terrific. But experiencing all of that close-up shows just how terrific.

Then there is the score by the composers Raven Chacon and Du Yun. Here is how you can tell this is real opera — its bones, blood, sinew, skin and consciousness all in the music. The experience that seemed more than complete outside was that only because all along it was the score that gave everything else meaning.

The music is complex. Chacon draws on his Native American roots, Du on her Chinese émigré ones. Both composers are highly adept in avant-garde instrumental and vocal techniques. Both have a sophisticated understanding of electronics. Repeated listening reveal scores with layers upon layers of coexisting elements that include a host of musical traditions, be they from Baroque opera or various kinds of spiritual ceremonies.

Sweet Land astonishes…

Sweet Land is America before and after colonization. Kind of. There is the native population, the Host community. There are the Arrivals. But there is also the land, its Nature and mystical spirit. The Hosts recognize that spirit, but even they have an uneasy relationship with it. The Arrivals are, of course, despoilers.

An opera of pairs, Sweet Land has two composers. Du Yun, who arrived in the U.S. from China and has quickly moved up the avant-garde ranks. In the next months, L.A. Opera will mount her Pulitzer Prize-winning Angel's Bone, and she will be featured with a new work in an L.A. Phil Green Umbrella concert. Raven Chacon is a Native American artist with CalArts composition credentials and a background in installation, performance and film. The composers, while highly individual and attuned to each's respective cultures, have a sophisticated sense of the abstract sonic potential of music. Both are superb sound artists.