Transfixing Art: Julia Bullock Launches Her Cal Performances Artist Residency

Collaborative Creativity and the Expansion of Harawi

By Thomas May, Cal Performances-commissioned writer, critic, educator, and translator

The first time Julia Bullock heard Harawi, Olivier Messiaen’s song cycle from 1945, she recalls that both the poetry and the music “shook me to a fundamental core … even though I didn’t fully grasp the depths of the content and the references on first listen.”

The internationally acclaimed classical singer collaborated with her colleagues in the American Modern Opera Company (also known as AMOC*, of which she is a founding member) to create a boldly original staged production of Messiaen’s work, which was premiered in the summer of 2022 at the Festival Aix-en-Provence and subsequently toured across Europe.

Cal Performances presents the United States premiere of this production to launch its 2024–25 season of performing arts (September 27, Zellerbach Hall). At the same time, the event inaugurates Julia Bullock’s season-long artist residency at Cal Performances. She will return for a second engagement to perform a very different program when she joins the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, one of the world’s pre-eminent period-instrument ensembles, early in the new year (January 19, 2025, also at Zellerbach Hall). Her presence as artist-in-residence additionally includes interactions with the UC Berkeley campus and broader community during two campus visits. These will involve a series of conversations and public and private programs in conjunction with her performances.

Committed to Musical Meaning

It was more than a decade ago that Bullock first fell in love with Harawi. The work so captivated her that she spent a day immersed in “the poetry and also all of the various recordings that I could find of this 50-minute song cycle that Messiaen wrote for voice and piano,” Bullock says.

Determined to develop a program around Harawi, she envisioned various configurations to bring it to life onstage. It took five years “to find the team and the time to gather the forces together to support this iteration of the piece.” Bullock is especially proud of what she and her AMOC* colleagues—director Zack Winokur, pianist Conor Hanick, and choreographers/dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber—have been able to achieve: “The dedication is fierce from everyone involved, and I do feel it radiates off of all aspects of this work.”

The intensity of her response to the potential of Messiaen’s song cycle strikes a familiar note to anyone who has experienced Bullock’s artistry. The expressive warmth and luminosity of her soprano envelope the listener but have an edge: her voice is “shot through with steel,” as Musical America put it when naming Bullock one of its 2021 Artists of the Year. The arresting beauty of her singing would in itself be enough to make her one of the great singers of our time.

Yet this is merely the outer layer of her deeply thoughtful, deeply informed approach to conveying the meaning embodied in a piece of music. Much as Bullock herself was affected by her Messiaen discovery, her ability to forge powerful emotional connections with whatever she chooses to sing in turn makes an indelible impact on her audience.

“In addition to having a beautiful instrument and all of the technical resources that a great singer needs, there are an indescribable magnetism and curiosity to Julia Bullock that transfix everyone who hears her,” says Jeremy Geffen, Executive and Artistic Director of Cal Performances.

Geffen recalls that the first time he heard Bullock sing was when she was still a student at the Juilliard School and had been selected as an alternate for a master class led by Jessye Norman at Carnegie Hall. “Since master class singers never really get to hear each other, Ms. Norman had the unusual idea of asking them all to sing for each other the night before. I heard Julia sing ‘Résurrection’ from Messiaen’s Chants de Terre et de ciel [“Songs of Earth and Heaven”].” What followed was “a moment of deafening silence—that moment where you hear the proverbial pin drop.”

Redefining the Singer’s Role

Over the past decade, Bullock, who was born in 1986 in St. Louis, has not only established herself as a leading performer of her generation but has become widely admired as a thought leader in the field. Her innovative programs, advocacy for historically marginalized voices, engagement with new music, activism, and commitment to making the arts more equitable for all reflect a far more encompassing understanding of what being a 21st-century singer means. For Geffen, “Julia Bullock is a perfect example of what an artist-citizen can look like today.”

In the Bay Area alone, for example, Bullock has been showing the astonishing range of her interests through appearances in multiple venues. She first sang at UC Berkeley in 2016 as a featured performer in the Ojai at Berkeley festival (in Kaijo Saariaho’s La passion de Simone and Josephine Baker: A Portrait, with music by Tyshawn Sorey).

The following year marked Bullock’s debut at San Francisco Opera, where she created the role of Dame Shirley in the world premiere of Girls of the Golden West by John Adams—one of several leading contemporary composers who have been inspired to write for Bullock’s unique combination of vocal and theatrical presence. (She also sings on the work’s debut recording, made with the Los Angeles Philharmonic made with the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Adams conducting, which was released this past spring and selected as an editor’s choice by Gramophone magazine.)

Bullock is also widely in demand in concert halls, as exemplified by her close association with the San Francisco Symphony. She served as a collaborative partner with Esa-Pekka Salonen following her residency there during the 2019–20 season. Bullock has also held residencies with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and Guildhall School and was even chosen to be artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2018-19.

The past season has been replete with fresh career landmarks. Bullock made her Metropolitan Opera debut in a lauded new staging of John Adams’ El Niño directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz and conducted by Marin Alsop. Bullock’s close connection to that work is evident in a related project with which she has toured: El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered, a distilled, chamber orchestra version of the original arranged by her husband, the conductor and pianist Christian Reif.

“Over the course of my life, there have been only a few musicians whose material had me transfixed to such an intense degree after having listened to it for only a few minutes,” Bullock writes in her “note” to Nonesuch’s 2022 edition of the Collected Works of John Adams. “Messiaen’s music certainly did that for me … and after listening to El Niño, I could say the same about John Adams.”

Bullock also made her debut at Barcelona’s fabled Gran Teatre del Liceu in the European premiere of another Adams opera, Antony and Cleopatra, singing the role of the Egyptian queen that was written with her voice in mind. (She had had to withdraw from the world premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2022 while expecting her first child.) Meanwhile, Bullock won the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for her solo debut album, Walking in the Dark, made in collaboration with Reif.

A Two-Way Street

“One of the things I especially admire about Julia is her artistic restlessness,” says Geffen. “She has never wanted to simply be plugged into a grid of roles—although, obviously, she can sing the standard repertoire extremely convincingly, and that has its place in her career. For Julia, creation is a two-way street.”

Along with portraying familiar characters by composers like Mozart, Massenet, and Janáček, Bullock shapes lesser-known roles in collaboration with contemporary artists. Sometimes this involves a radical reconsideration of material written centuries ago, as
with her much-noticed interpretation of the title role in Henry Purcell’s 1695 “semi-opera” The Indian Queen. That production, which critiqued issues of colonization in the original, was directed by Peter Sellars, who has been an important mentor for Bullock.

Bullock has also reimagined Handel’s Theodora in a probing, modern-day staging at the Royal Opera House directed by Katie Mitchell. A previous collaboration with Mitchell in 2019, Zauberland (“Magic Land”), was prompted by the plight of Syrian refugees and interwove lieder by Robert Schumann with new songs by the composers Bernard Foccroulle and Martin Crimp to address issues of grief and displacement.

Embodying Duality in Harawi

Messiaen’s Harawi exemplifies the layered approach to existing sources that has become a signature of Bullock’s work. A relatively early piece, Harawi is the last of three song cycles the French composer wrote for voice and piano. The title comes from an ancient Andean tradition—known as yaraví to Spanish speakers and nowadays particularly linked with Peru—that combines Quechua poetry, music, and ritual. Harawi songs typically express the pangs of lost love but can also address other types of sorrow; meditation on death is likewise an important feature.

Messiaen wrote not only the music but his own texts for this cycle of a dozen songs, imbuing each poem with his dreamlike, spiritually tinged brand of Surrealism. He amalgamated traditional harawi imagery of love and death with his interpretation of the European myth of Tristan and Isolde—though these figures make no explicit appearance in the cycle: the Isolde prototype is called Piroutcha, while her lover is never named.

The dramatic soprano Marcelle Bunlet, whose “flexible voice and extended tessitura” Messiaen admired, inspired the extraordinarily difficult vocal part he composed. “I’ve preserved only the idea of a fatal and irresistible love, which, as a rule, leads to death and which, to an extent, invokes death,” Messiaen wrote, “for it is a love that transcends the body, transcends even the limitations of the mind, and grows to a cosmic scale.”

“The piece deals with duality and actually dichotomies in pretty extreme ways,” says Bullock. “So, the love relationship, life and loss; spirituality and sensuality; feeling connected or in communion with oneself and those around, and then dismissed or forgotten; and the embodiment, or—maybe better—the full expansions of being a man and a woman.” Visualizing and making concrete this duality and, with it, the physical, human aspects of Messiaen’s songs became a priority.

For Bullock, this called for a multiplication of performers beyond the original duo specified (singer and pianist) by the composer. “Because the performance arts practice of harawi also incorporates dance, I thought, ‘Okay. Well, what if we added dancers into the mix?’” Thus this production of Harawi evolved into its expanded cast featuring additional members of the company along with Conor Hanick as the pianist. The husband-wife team Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber participate as choreographers/dancers in a staging that matches the music with eloquent movement.

For his vision as director, AMOC* cofounder Zack Winokur suggested a link between Harawi’s mythic, archetypal aspects and Messiaen’s personal experience of loss as his first wife, violinist Claire Delbos, suffered a degenerative mental illness. Regarding the performance originally scheduled for the 2022 Ojai Festival, for which AMOC* served as curator (cancelled at the last minute when Bullock tested positive for COVID), he said: “What is it to maintain connection with someone who is losing their memory and, as they’re moving through time with you, to realize all of the things that you’ve created with them are going away?”

Illuminations: “Fractured History”

Harawi also launches Cal Performances’ new theme for this season’s focus in the ongoing Illuminations series, an initiative intended to grapple with pressing issues of our time through the lens of the performing arts.

The theme, “Fractured History,” is about the dynamic reality of history (in contrast to commonplace perceptions of the past as a static “given”). That dynamic character is inextricably connected to and reflected by how we perceive, examine, and narrate history. “Our understanding of ourselves, the culture in which we live, grows based on new information or influences that come to us,” as Geffen puts it.

With respect to Messiaen’s Harawi, the perspective of “fractured history” means interrogating the relationship between a French composer in mid-20th-century Europe and his allusions to an ancient Andean tradition of singing and folklore.

“In addition to the Andean tradition, you also have to take into account Messiaen’s fascination with the Tristan myth, for example,” says Geffen. “So you’re getting impressions of impressions. What does revisiting a source material at a specific time—nearly 80 years after Harawi was created—reveal to us about the culture in which that reflection was made?” He adds that Harawi was not originally intended to be staged. Thus, with the doubling of singer-pianist through the dancer-couple, “you’re getting a reflection through this staging that is reflective of the piece. So it’s a reflection of a reflection of a reflection.”

For Bullock, the “fractured history” angle is closely related to questions of appropriation, which are “big and important.” Messiaen’s knowledge of the authentic Andean tradition seems to have been limited to a folk song collection published in 1925 by a French ethnomusicologist and her husband. Bullock decided to seek out present-day practitioners of harawi and came across two women who danced and sang traditions that had been passed down. They lived in Germany, where the singer and her family also make their home (in Munich).“We just had a bunch of conversations,” she says. “With fractures in our consciousness, part of the joy—at least I feel as a musician, and I guess an anthropologist in some maybe amateur way—[is that] I’m healing some of those fractures, or at least trying to rebuild some things.”

“I deal with classic art and the classics. All that means really is that we are returning to the material again and again, hoping that it will become more illuminated or we will somehow become more illuminated in the process and learn something. As long as we are responsibly engaging with material—and that means looking at history closely—then the cycle of appropriation and the erasure that sometimes or often accompanies it can be halted and potentially healed.”