Olivier Messiaen’s Harawi

Surrealism, Appropriation, and Reconciliation in Messiaen’s Harawi
Fri, Sep 27
6:30–7:45pm
Zellerbach Hall Mezzanine
Free for ticket holders

This Illuminations: “Fractured History” performance will be preceded by a round table discussion in which a group of scholars and practitioners explore the ethical and aesthetic facets of Harawi. Messiaen modeled his 1945 song cycle on the Andean harawi lament tradition, adapting and recomposing traditional melodies he found in a published collection of Inca music and inserting untranslated blocks of text in the Quechua language into the French poetry. This staging by the American Modern Opera Company approaches the bodies of the singer and dancers as living archives imprinted with traces of Messiaen’s personal circumstances when he composed the songs and of the ancient tradition that animated his complex rhythms and melodies.

How can we come to terms with the fact that Messiaen’s style owes so much to unacknowledged, and sometimes misunderstood, indigenous models? How can a dramatic staging of the song cycle help to confront and perhaps partly reconcile Messaien’s debt? This round table will reflect on the entanglement of avant garde aesthetics, mysticism, and cultural appropriation in this fascinating performance.

Panelist Bios:

Tamara Levitz is a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published widely on musical modernism in Germany, Cuba, Senegal, and France in the 1920s and 30s. Her book Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone (Oxford University Press, 2012) won the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society. Her current research focuses on structures of white supremacy and racial exclusion in the formation of the music disciplines in the United States, and she is at work on a monograph to be titled Settler Colonial Humanists and the Racial Foundations of Comparison.

Edmund Mendelssohn is a lecturer in the Department of Music at UC Berkeley and author of the book White Musical Mythologies: Sonic Presence in Modernism (Stanford University Press, 2023). The book traces the approaches to sound and musical presence in the work of four twentieth-century composers (Satie, Varèse, Boulez, and Cage), showing that the crucial aspects of the conceptions of innovation and immediacy in this music were derived from encounters with the music and thought of non-European cultures. Mendelssohn’s research also focuses on jazz improvisation in the mid-twentieth century (with an emphasis on Mary Lou Williams and Miles Davis) and on musical kitsch.

Mary Ann Smart (moderator) is a professor in the Department of Music at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera and of Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Italy, 1815-1848. With David Levin, she edits the “Opera Lab” book series at the University of Chicago Press. She is currently at work on a book about shifting attitudes and practices related to sound and music in France after World War II.

Christopher Yerke has made the study and performance of indigenous and mestizo music from the Andean Cordillera his preferred pastime for the last 30 years. In 1998 he received a fellowship from Cornell University to spend a summer in Bolivia studying the Quechua language. He has been a part of three wind ensembles focussing on autocthonous festival music from the altiplano, and is a multi-instrumentalist who researches and performs mestizo Andean roots music from up and down the Cordillera. He is presently part of the quartet EstudiAndina, playing music from the Estudiantina folk orchestra tradition.

Zack Winokur is co-founder and Artistic Director of the American Modern Opera Company (also known as AMOC*), and director of this production of Messiaen’s Harawi. He was recently appointed as Producing Artistic Director of Little Island (New York City) and has also served as artistic director of NYPopsUp (2020) and (with AMOC*) as curator of the Ojai Festival in 2022. Recent directing highlights include Mammoth, featuring Yo-Yo Ma 400 feet underground inside Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky; Tristan and Isolde at the Santa Fe Opera; Harawi at the Aix-en-Provence Festival;  and productions for the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Dutch National Opera.

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