American Settings (2024)

In the fall of 2016, I was in Brooklyn rehearsing for a show when the infamous “hot mic” incident involving Donald Trump occurred, where he was heard insulting women through a microphone that was supposed to be off. That very day, a sigh of relief went through the entire creative team: it was impossible for Trump to politically survive such a scandal.

Obviously, that wasn’t the case. Trying to make sense of what had happened in that election, I spent the following years consuming information compulsively, which only corresponded to a growing personal apprehension about the future, about people, and about the planet — only to come to the conclusion that the answer was too complex to bring me any peace.

Discovering the poetry of Terrance Hayes and Tracy K. Smith, while searching for a way to deal with this feeling of unease in my work, was a revelation: here were two artists who, in the eye of the storm, somehow managed to create an admirable balance between the present and the eternal, blending languages and scales in a dynamic universe where nothing seemed left out. Vernacular and philosophy, carnal desire and metalanguage, everything was combined in a dizzying and moving spiral of words that was as much meaning as they were music.

And, pacified by the discovery of these singular poems, I composed in 2022, in a cathartic gesture, a cycle of songs for voice and percussion (now transposed for orchestra) that are a kind of imaginary folklore of the America that exists in my mind: a dizzying spiral of excess and transcendence that fascinates and terrifies me in equal measures. Idyll and apocalyptic, with nothing in between.

In the two contemplative songs, the voice slowly inscribes itself in the orchestral landscape, just as the narrator unveils the world around them — interior and abstract in “Wind in a Box,” the coast of Flores Island in “Flores Woman.” In the two songs of confrontation, the orchestra acts like a second skin to the voice (rough and constrictive in the sonnet dedicated to Trump in “The Umpteenth Thump”), elastic and organic like the intimate tension in “Semi-splendid.”