AM I BORN | VAN MAGAZINE

Not Even Past

A cantata where a painting sings, and an opera featuring an instrument for bad girls

by Olivia Giovetti. May 25, 2022

One of the composers I kept going back to while listening to “Mỹ Lai” was David T. Little, both thanks to his own critical anti-war monodrama, “Soldier Songs,” and his percussion quartet “The Haunt of Last Nightfall” which, more than “Soldier Songs,” lives in the echo chambers of memory and trauma. I hadn’t listened to Little’s oratorio, “Am I Born,” since it premiered in Brooklyn in 2012 with soprano Mellissa Hughes, and conductor Alan Pierson.

The ghosts of history also permeate “Am I Born,” moving like a palimpsest. The work’s name comes from an 1816 hymn, whose text in turn was written by Charles Wesley in 1763. It was originally written for the Brooklyn Philharmonic when Pierson had taken the lead as the orchestra’s artistic director and had dedicated part of its season to performing around its namesake borough as a means of emphasizing history. The core inspiration for the piece comes down to both ghosts and history as well: Francis Guy’s 1820 painting “Winter Scene in Brooklyn,” which depicts a Bruegel-esque snowscape that, half a century later, would be razed in order to accommodate the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. (Guy died the same year that he completed the painting.) 

Royce Vavrek culls all of this history and limns it down into a sparsely elegant libretto: “I believe in a rhythm, a meter to the lives,” he writes at one point. “I believe in a rhythm, an intersection of time like once-visible breath.” The chorus stands in as the Ghosts of 1820 (originally written for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, this recording represents a revised score composed for the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, who appear on this recording with the church’s ensemble NOVUS NY). The soprano soloist stands in as Guy’s painting as it gains consciousness and steps from the Brooklyn of the early 19th century into the Brooklyn of today. Confused and isolated from the rest of the world operating at its 21st-century pace, she is a refugee of time. Hughes’s voice—raw with frost, dark with the otherworldly, and imbued with the lyricism of a more elegant time—is perfect in this role of the outsider. When commanded by the Ghosts of 1820 to return to the site of her old home on Front Street, she responds, “I am afraid to walk that road, afraid to feel like a visitor in my own home.”