Monday, April 1, 2013

Tomorrow, in a Year (Part whatever)


Earlier I said that Tomorrow, in a Year isn’t really about Darwin and Evolution, and is instead about grief and time and brilliance and change, and it’s fair to ask why, exactly, I think that.  It’s time to get some close reading done, and that means examining what, exactly, is being sung.  Strictly speaking, the words “time”, “sea”, and “age” occur frequently, though “time” refers both to a duration and an incidence, and thanks solely to “Mountains” the most frequently used word in the libretto is “white”.   This isn’t terribly helpful.

I mentioned earlier that Tomorrow, in a Year is both about and not about Darwin and Evolution – you can tell because neither word is ever spoken (this is, admittedly, a cop-out, since “Charles” is mentioned twice, but when the time comes, I’ll argue that there’s an important distinction between the use of a given name and surname.)  Also conspicuously absent: God, nature, creation, and all the other words a North American audience would expect from a work dealing with Evolution, since that word is still an issue over here. 

So what we can establish is that if Tomorrow, in a Year wanted to be about Evolution and Darwin in a proximate sense, it may have done well to actually mention either of those things, but it actually seems to go out of its way not to.  What it chooses to talk about instead is time, from it’s title on down, and much of the time it doesn’t speak about anything explicitly.  So what are we talking about when we talk about time?  We examine fossils and strata of rock: “layer on layer, life embedded in stone” is the line used elsewhere.  What we’re looking at, then, is the way living things change over time, and not the growth exhibited by a single organism, but the glacial, relentless change shown over generations and eons.

“Letter to Henslow” and “Shoal Swarm Orchestra” are instrumental pieces, depending on how you define an instrument.  “Letter to Henslow” is a fantastic mashup of human voices mimicking bird songs and bullfrog roars. In the artists’ roundtable discussion, they mention how much fun this track was to make. There are probably entirely convincing ways to imitate animal noises, if you really need to, so let’s assume that the artifice is part of the art.

There’s a rhetorical path we could tread down here that would invoke the simulacrum, but since I’m really tired can we just agree that a simulacrum is an imitation of something that didn’t really exist to begin with?  Our formulation of nature operates almost exclusively in this mode.  

“Shoal Swarm Orchestra” evokes a storm, and the story behind it involves Olaf Dreier spending some time in the Amazon rainforest with a tape recorder.  It’s a lush digestion of an environment’s sound, and if you wanted to you could probably argue that this may have been something that Darwin heard while travelling to wherever it was that he went, but that may be a hard rhetorical row to hoe because it sure as shit wasn’t the Amazon.

 Since this work is all about growth and development, “Shoal swarm orchestra” doesn’t remain static. Something like a distorted string instrument picks up recurring tones and hunts for a melody.  Maybe “hunts” isn’t the right verb, maybe it is; anyways, a storm obliterates it before it manages anything too sophisticated.  Other synthetic noises emerge from the storm but before long they too vanish, and that’s about the time when I realize that this is exactly the same trick that “intro” played, only with a more sophisticated seed. 

So what we have then, are two songs: the first is are human voices mimicking bird calls and bullfrog roars, and the second is a digesting (present tense, ongoing) recording of an exotic wilderness – in the industry we call this a dialogue, and the order is really, really important, because this is where that order changes.

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