composition as explanation

Program Notes

Notes by David Lang

I have had the pleasure of working with Eighth Blackbird for many years now. One thing that has always impressed me about them is that they like a challenge. They have a very wide definition of what a chamber musician should be able to do, and this wide definition has frequently led them into making work that employs staging, movement, speaking, and theater.

When Eighth Blackbird asked me, in 2016, to propose a project that they could perform at the Chicago Arts Club in conjunction with the Club’s centennial year, I started thinking of other kinds of actions they might concentrate on that would transform them. I began to think of what it would be like to make a piece that required them not just to act, but to become actors: in order to perform it they would be forced to take acting lessons, to study diction, to study the art of theater. In other words, my piece would not just ask them to move and to speak, but it would ask them to commit themselves to a rigorous education process that would transform them as performers.

Upon doing a little research, I discovered that Gertrude Stein had spoken at the Chicago Arts Club in 1934, after she had already become famous for her writings. I started looking at her published speeches as possible texts for this piece and settled on using parts of Stein’s 1926 lecture “Composition as Explanation,” in which a yet-to-be-famous Stein explains to her audience what she is doing in her writing, in the same repetitive, plainspoken, and circular format that she uses in her writing. In other words, she has blurred the relationship between content, form, and performance — in much the same way that I have tried to blur the musicality of Eighth Blackbird.

I have used almost all of Stein’s text in my piece, except for a few stray lines here and there and the parts of her lecture that deal with details of specific books she had written, which seemed too literary for my purpose. In particular, I wanted to highlight her implication that the changes in her writing were, in some measure, a response to the First World War, which had ended only a few years before and had changed so many of the artists who lived through it.

I want to thank Janine Mileaf and the Chicago Arts Club, where primitive versions of a few movements of this piece were performed in 2016. I want to thank the Estate of Gertrude Stein for their permission to use this text. And I want to thank all of the members of Eighth Blackbird, past and present, for asking me to create it.