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Interview: Melissa Dunphy on Her Latest Works
Mark Lawson of ECS Publishing Group Podcast
January 8, 2020
ECS Publishing Group Podcast
Interview: Melissa Dunphy on Her Latest Works
In this episode, Melissa Dunphy discusses her background in composition and her latest works. ECS President Mark Lawson guides the conversation on several works featured in the ECS Publishing Group Catalog, as well as an upcoming new work Waves of Gallipoli.
For more information, visit ecspublishing.com
Pieces heard in this episode:
Suite Remembrance
"Todtentantz" from Suite Remembrance
"All Flesh Is Grass" from Suite Remembrance
"If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking" from Suite Remembrance
"Mourning into Dancing" from Suite Remembrance
Recording Credits:
Archival live recording by the Saint Louis Chamber Chorus, Philip Barnes, Director; first studio recording issued on Regent Records, 2020. Used by permission.
Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to the ECS Publishing Group podcast. I'm Mark Lawson, president of the ECS Publishing Group. And today we are very pleased to welcome composer, Melissa Dunphy to our offices. Melissa has compositions in both the ECC, Shermer and Morningstar catalogs, Melissa, welcome to St. Louis and the ECS offices.
Melissa:
Thank you so much. I love this town and it's such a pleasure to be here.
Mark:
I know that you have been a composer in residence for the St. Louis Chamber Chorus, and that you are in town for a premiere. We'll talk about that in a little while, but first, why don't you just tell us about your background and your journey to becoming a component?
Melissa:
Sure. So, as you can probably tell from my accent, I live in Philadelphia. I have an accent. I know, it's actually a really messed up accent at this point, because I grew up in Australia, but I've lived in the Philadelphia area for a little over 16 years. So, my friends on the west coast tell me my accent is coming in Philly, and I don't think it's a compliment, but, I grew up in Australia, in Brisbane and Sydney, and I always studied music as a child. I grew up playing the piano, then stringed instruments, violin and viola and singing, of course, in choirs. I went to an all girls school. So from elementary school all the way through, up to high school, I sang in girls' choruses. It had a, really, really, huge impact, I think, on my musical sensibilities, my musical upbringing.
Melissa:
So, I didn't think about becoming a composer actually until my mid-twenties. I moved to America, fell in love with an American who lives in central Pennsylvania, and moved here. And I was dabbling in a lot of different things, really kind of searching for what I wanted to do with my life. And I got an opportunity to write some music for a play that I was acting in, ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’, you've probably heard of it. I was one of the fairies, and they needed some music. So, they approached me and said, ‘You're a musician. Can you write some music?’ And I had what I described as an epiphany when I was writing the music. Interestingly, it was vocal music for the fairies, and setting Shakespeare songs to music. And I was really pushing myself, burning the candle at both ends writing this music.
Melissa:
And I thought, ‘I think this is what I want to do with my life. Like, this tickles the right spot in my brain. And it feels really good. And this is what I want to do.’ So, at the ripe, ripe age of 24, 25, I decided to go back to school, get my Bachelor of Music. I went to Westchester University, which is just outside of Philadelphia, great state school with some really great composition faculty. And then from there, I went straight to a PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, and I got my PhD in Music Composition. And choral music was right away something that I think I really wanted to do. Every time I wrote a choral piece, I got performances and people really seem to respond to it. I love working with texts.
Mark:
And I think one of the things about your music that is very interesting is it seems like you approach things as if they were a story, and you look for interesting things that will make some kind of narrative in a way and give some kind of message. And I think that that's really unique in what you've done. So, a couple of things that I know we don't publish, but your Omaha Beach piece, for example, talk briefly about that.
Melissa:
On the storytelling thing, I also did a lot of theater and I think that that's probably where that comes from - I'm always thinking about the narrative arc of the piece that I'm composing and what story I'm going to tell, which includes things like whose words am I setting? Who am I choosing to tell this particular story? I think that's one of the most important decisions that a composer of vocal music makes. So, in 2010, I saw a YouTube video of a World War II veteran - an 86 year old World War II veteran - lifelong Republican VFW Chaplain, who gave a speech before the Maine State Senate in support of marriage equality. And it was such a heartfelt unpolished speech. This man, clearly wasn't a seasoned activist of any kind. He was just speaking from his heart.
Melissa:
And in support of freedom, what he saw is an issue of freedom and equality, which he says is the reason why he fought in World War II. And it was such an emotional speech. I remember I was just watching it on my computer screen, and I just started bawling. I mean, I soaked a whole dish cloth with my tears, watching the speech. It really hits you in a certain space. And I, when I sort of pulled myself together, I said, ‘I should set this to music’. This is something that is a unique text, but the emotions are right. And he's telling a story too. He's telling a story.
Mark:
I think that's one of the pieces that really put you on the map.
Melissa:
Yes, Simon Carrington, in fact, I didn't know when I finished it, what would happen with this piece. I sent it out to a bunch of calls for scores. And honestly, it was my first ever acapella choral work. And I didn't even know if it was any good. I wasn't sure what was going to happen with this piece. So I sent it out to a bunch of different calls for scores, and one of them was the Simon Carrington Chamber Singers Composition Competition. And a few weeks later, I get a letter in the mail saying I've won and, the rest is kind of history, but, I'm so grateful to Simon Carrington who I'm sure everybody knows who he is, and the incredible influence and pull he has in the choral community. People really sat up and took notice.
Mark:
I know you've had a long relationship with the St. Louis Chamber Chorus. And one of the pieces that you did for them and that we do publish is a kind of a newer, shorter, multi movement work called Suite Remembrance. And talk a little bit about that, where that came from, and a little bit about that composition, how it came together.
Melissa:
Phillip Barnes approached me with the initial concept for this piece and he offered, he has some really interesting concepts and things that combine different disciplines and different genres. And, he'll sort of plop a bunch of ideas on my lap and say, ‘see what you come up with in this theme’. All of his seasons and his concerts have very specific themes. So, I believe he was doing a concert around a sort of Memorial Day theme, but he was really interested in the concept of Memorial dances, which is not something you think of immediately, when you think of, say, a funeral. You're not thinking of people dancing. But, this is in fact, a long tradition in several different cultures around the world, the idea of dancing as an expression of grief, or as a way to memorialize somebody. And he just sort of plopped this brief down and said, ‘come up with something’.
Melissa:
Which is right up my alley, because I love doing a lot of research into different things. I basically went, took his lead and researched the kinds of Memorial dances that he was referring to, which includes things like Totentanz, which is this German dance of death. And also a Bible passage, which sort of says ‘you have turned my mourning into dancing’, right, as this sort of Psalm of praise. I hit upon this idea of framing a set of four dances using Baroque dance forms. Baroque dances of course are differentiated by rhythms and sort of styles of melody, so you can kind of take some inspiration from the form of, say, a gavotte, or a gigue, or these kinds of things. And then wrote some dances for choir, using texts that relate to the idea of Memorial or funereal, themes. So, we have four different movements, they’re very contrasting.
Mark:
That's great. And so these are all actually published separately, or together, in a collection.
Mark:
So then, let's bring us to the newer piece, that you're in town to do, and it was wonderful, by the way, the premiere was fabulous. And there's just quite an interesting story behind this piece. So, again, why don't you tell us the title and then kind of where this came from?
Melissa:
Sure. The piece is called Waves of Gallipoli. And again, it was a Phillip Barnes concept that I took and ran with. He went on a trip to Turkey. He went to see the city of Troy because, of course, he's a classics teacher, and he took a detour to Gallipoli, which is on the coast of Turkey, and is the site of a horrible World War I battle in 1915. He was looking for the grave of his great uncle, who had died in this battle, Private Gray, I believe. And, during this trip, during this fact-finding trip to see his uncle's grave, he saw a number of the cemeteries, which are dotted all around Gallipoli, and they had a really big emotional effect on him, I think. Particularly, the Australian gravesites. Now, I haven't been to Gallipoli, but I think I could tell him about this, because, Gallipoli is uniquely powerful and important in the Australian cultural psyche.
Melissa:
I think this is why he probably contacted me to write this piece, because, he knows I'm Australian. And he knows I probably know a little bit about this battle. The Australians sent a disproportionate number of troops to Gallipoli, and the battle was such a disaster, and Australians died by the thousands - Australians and New Zealanders died by the thousands. And, the soldiers that did survive came back to Australia, and really changed some of the idea of the Australian consciousness. Prior to Gallipoli, a lot of Australians sorted themselves as pseudo-British citizens. We were part of the British Commonwealth, it hadn't been that long since we'd settled in Australia. But, Gallipoli kind of changed everything because the Australians and the New Zealanders weren't allowed to become officers. They were all just privates. The British officers made so many mistakes on the field in Gallipoli, and sent so many of those young men to their deaths, that the Australians coming back were very bitter and angry at Britain. And, really added to this cultural movement to define Australia as being separate from the UK. We're no longer British citizens. We are Australians and we are own culture. It also added to this idea of Australians as, the sense of ‘mateship’ is so central to Australian culture. You know, we'd look out for each other, we're all in the same boat, we’re battlers, we’re strugglers, but we look out for each other with good humor, and with mateship.
Mark:
That's great. And I think that Phillip told me that he noticed quickly that the graves of the British soldiers had just basic information.
Melissa:
Just like a serial number and a name.
Mark:
Right. But then the graves of the Australian soldiers each had small epitaphs.
Melissa:
Epitaphs, right, little lines.
Mark:
So, the text comes from a collection of these epitaphs.
Melissa:
Right, exactly. So, he told me about these graves, and he had written down a few of them, but, of course, now, with the internet, you can go online and see a list of every epitaph, on every gravestone in Gallipoli, which is kind of amazing. And really heart-wrenching, actually, to read through them all at once. It's like depressing as heck to read through all of these gravestones all at once. But, I went through the gravestones, and I noticed that a lot of the epitaphs – the Australians gave the families of the soldiers, a character count - I can't remember how many characters, but as many as you could fit on this gravestone, and it was just enough characters that you could fit a couplet onto a lot of the gravestones. And a lot of the people who got these gravestones put a couplet on. So, I chose a bunch of the couplets. And then, I thought, should I just set these epitaphs or, is there a framing device that I can use? And I went back to the poetry of World War I, which I've always felt a really strong connection to, I think, for some reason…
Mark:
There was a lot of great poetry that grew out of that.
Melissa:
Incredible poets, both British and Australian and all kinds of things. But there was a poet called Leon Gallert, who fought at Gallipoli, he was Australian, and he survived. And he came back to Australia and became a school teacher, actually, and lived into his eighties. But he wrote a number of poems about his time at Gallipoli. And there's just a poignancy there because of what he went through. So I took some lines from a poem that he wrote about remembering the dead at Gallipoli. And then of course, that made total sense to, in the middle of this poem, insert some of these epitaphs that literally remember the dead from these young men's families.
Mark:
So one of the things that struck me was the vocal interpretation of the waves that you begin the piece with. And I heard, I think Phillip said that you even downloaded or found a recording of the waves and you, the waves really represent the rhythm of the real waves.
Melissa:
Right, well in a perfect world, we would have unlimited money and I would have taken a trip to the Dardanelles and sat on the beach, which sounds like a lovely life, doesn't it? Sat on the beach and listened to the waves for myself. But, as I mentioned, we live in the internet age, and amazingly, you can go online and search specifically for recordings of waves taken out Gallipoli, or on the Dardanelles, in the Aegean Sea. And I'm really glad that I did that actually, because I had some ideas about what waves would sound like. And then I listened to the waves, and they were much quicker than I thought they were going to be. It was a very fast sort of lapping. And so I sort of thought, oh, I have to change some of the tempo of the waves I was thinking of in my head. Then there's the idea of the wind whistling through the trees, as well, as another kind of wave. And then, of course, the metaphor here is the waves of human beings were coming up against the shore. The dying, and the waves of dead in the cemeteries. So, I really sort of sat and thought about the best way to represent waves, and you can do it melodically, or you can do it with vocal effects using consonants, using sibilance to represent the wave sounds and just sort of subtly putting those in. It seemed to have a really nice effect. It was great. I had several members of the audience coming up to me afterwards asking me how it was done, which it seems very simple to me on the page, but I guess audiences are not used to hearing…
Mark:
Not used to hearing it like that. Well, it was a very, very powerful piece. So I just thought it was particularly moving. So, congratulations. We're very glad that that will be available for other choirs soon!
Melissa:
Yes, it should be!
Mark:
Well, thanks for taking time to visit with us. And, we will be looking forward to seeing more of your music in the future!
Melissa:
Definitely, always a pleasure. And if you are curious for another podcast to listen to, I also have my own, it's called The Boghouse, and it has nothing to do with music.
Mark:
That’s right, I should have gotten into that. I mean, matter of fact, let's just take just a second before we move on to talk about that. So you bought a building in Philadelphia to do as a performance space, is that what you were hoping to do?
Melissa:
It was a performance space when we bought it. It was a magic theater for magic shows. But we're certainly not turning it back into a magic theater. We are turning it back into a multi-disciplinary performance space. But that's sort of beside the point of the podcast - the podcast came about because during the construction that we did, we discovered two privies from the Revolutionary War, full of artifacts from the 1770s and accidentally - we didn't plan this – accidentally, became amateur archeologists. So, when I need a break from composing, I really feel like my life is very bifurcated. Yes, I go to dig in soil - in 250 year old ‘night soil’ as they call it, which is a polite term for, you can guess what. And come out with all kinds of interesting pottery, and wash it, and put it together, and chat with archeologists. Everybody needs something that doesn't have anything to do with their work, right?
Mark:
Yes, they certainly do. Well, thanks again for being here, and best of luck!
Melissa:
Thank you!