Jason Cady
Soprano and curator Chelsea Hollow interviews composer Jason Cady about his song “I Could Not Allow That To Stand” using text from a speech by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This song was premiered digitally at a webinar on Arts & Activism (February 2021) organized by Freemuse and the United Nations Office of Human Rights. This interview shows clips of that premiere and the full music video can be found on Chelsea’s youtube channel.
Interview Transcript
CHELSEA HOLLOW:
Hi, I'm Chelsea Hollow, founder of concert Rebels and I’m here presenting you with a short video series of discussions with me and some of the wonderful composers that I've had the privilege of working with lately. At the height of the covid-19 pandemic, desperate to connect with artists once again, I created a Call for Proposals with one main criterion: to create an art song or song cycle based on an activist text or theme. In this conversation, I talk with Jason Cady about his song, “I Could Not Allow That to Stand” which sets the text of a speech given by his very own representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. We chat about how he defines opera, what it's like to work with activist and non-poetic text, and the many different musical genres and literary movements which inspire his music. [In February 2021] I had the privilege of speaking on a panel discussion on Arts and Activism organized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights during which I presented a virtual premiere for this song, which will see clips of later in the video.
So Jason, welcome! I'm going to read a little bit of your bio; I hope I don't embarrass you. Jason Cady is a composer and librettist who performs on pedal steel guitar and modular synthesizer. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times, described his video opera I Screwed Up The Future as a “charming fantasy” and Opera News described his opera I Need Space as “delightfully weird”, “hilarious” and “dry and endearingly poignant”. Cady founded Experiments In Opera where he now serves as co-artistic director with Kamala Sankaram and Experiments In Opera has presented the music of over 50 composers. Cady was born in Flint, Michigan and now lives in New York City and is an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.
Wow Jason, that's quite a bio! Welcome to my first ever video interview! I'm curious, it seems like most of the repertoire I’ve seen that you've created is extremely innovative and you're always updating the definition of opera and classical music. As someone who is often trying to push those boundaries myself, in my own craft, I'm just curious, how do you define what is an opera and what is classical music.
JASON CADY: I’m going to answer the first part of that. You said opera and you said classical music, but I'm just going to answer the opera part of it because my answer to that will already be long enough. So, I would say that whatever the definition is, it is a handful of several characteristics. So, what all those characteristics are I don’t necessarily need to lay them out, but you know: a large-scale work with a certain type of singing and theater and staging, the particular forms of recitative and aria and all that; and one could go on and on with many more characteristics. Any one piece, if it's going to be called an opera, is going to have more of those but not necessarily all of them. So that's my first definition to it and the second one is that it is a particular historical lineage and anyone producing work that's coming out of that lineage is part of opera. So, you know, to give an example, I mean I don't really know the repertoire of musical theater all that well; you know, I've seen a number of musicals, but if someone is a musical theater composer, they're going to know Rodgers and Hammerstein really well and I, for example do not, but I know the work of Robert Ashley really well and Philip Glass, but also Monteverdi and Mozart and others. So, if someone wants to define opera very narrowly as being Puccini and Verdi, I think that's a little bit too narrow of a definition. I'm more for an expansive definition.
CHELSEA HOLLOW: Yeah, I like thinking of it in those terms of the lineage of which your training comes from the song. The song we worked on together, “I Could Not Allow That to Stand”, which I’ll introduce in a second, while the electronic track could easily be turned into a pop song, I think you're right that you see that how it was designed and the choices you made that are in your lineage of training. Add to it, a classical soprano and piano and it’s definitely classical sounding.
[musical example of song] “These were the words that Representative Yoho levied against a congresswoman. The congresswoman that not only represents New York’s 14th Congressional district, but every woman in this country.”
CHELSEA HOLLOW: Your song “I Could Not Allow That to Stand” uses the text of your congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her response to Representative Yoho’s harassment on the steps of the Capitol. I'm curious what interested you in this project and have you ever worked with activists or political text before?
JASON CADY: Yeah, well I did a sound installation in 2008 that's called Chorus of Refuge. It was a collaboration with my wife, Ann Heppermann and her radio partner at the time, Kara Oehler. It was based on interviews from refugees from five different cities and refugee populations in the US.
[musical example of Chorus of Refuge]
JASON CADY: To some extent, I didn't necessarily think of it as political but considering the climate in this country, it unfortunately is kind of political; but I guess in somewhat of a soft way, in terms of here are these stories, listen to them. I can't imagine anyone listening to that piece and listening to those stories and not coming away feeling more compassionate. If they were not already feeling that way to begin with.
CHELSEA HOLLOW: Yeah, I love that. I think for me I call myself an operatic activist and for me it has two different meanings. Personally, I love activism in doing what I can to participate in making our society be more aware of things that are going on and be more connected to the more immediate issues in our society. But I also feel that these activist texts are so relevant and they are telling the stories of people who are alive today, struggles that are happening right now and they're so compelling that I feel it's a sort of activism that brings in new audiences.
You know most classical song texts are sourced from poetry. Do you approach these texts that are sourced from either the stories of refugees or this speech— I'm curious how you approach these texts when composing classical music.
JASON CADY: I pretty much always start with the text and usually I write the words myself. There's many nice things about that: not having to secure rights, having texts that are musical to begin with, being able to make adjustments to the text while composing. Getting into the AOC piece, there were many wonderful speeches that she has done; this was one that just had a particular feeling of drama to it.
[musical example of song] “My father, thankfully, is not alive to see how Mr. Yoho treated his daughter. My mother got to see Mr. Yoho’s disrespect on the floor of this house towards me.”
CHELSEA HOLLOW: Yeah, I think just having sung the text, it was delivered almost poetically and the repetition and rhythm, the flow of it feels almost musical.
JASON CADY: Well I tried to bring that out. You know, there's a certain amount of editing to the text mostly because it's a 10 minute speech and setting that to music would have turned it into like a 25 or 30 minute piece; and we didn't want that. When you're editing for content, I’m also thinking of, where is she using repetition as a rhetorical device? As a composer, I'm going to respond to that artistically also.
[musical example of song] “...and that I could not allow. I could not allow my nieces, I could not allow the little girls that I go home to, I could not allow victims of verbal abuse and worse to see that excuse, and to see our Congress accept it as legitimate. I could not allow that to stand.”
JASON CADY: There's a few places that I think I was able to bring out some rhymes that maybe if you just listen to the speech would necessarily be present. I love poetic devices. I love rhyming. I think people just naturally find that delightful. Some people find that true too traditional and they want to avoid it, but I'm not afraid of fun. I mean, could you imagine if a rapper came out and didn't rhyme? I mean maybe that would be kind of cool to be something different but the whole point is to rhyme and use poetic devices
CHELSEA HOLLOW: Well and it’s so genius in the way it's done. When it's done well. I mean, I love listening to how emcees and rappers will really get into a flow where there are these internal rhymes and just layers upon layers of intricate word discovery and wordplay. My brain loves the way words can play together and I think both opera and rap take advantage of that.
JASON CADY: Rap is arguably the most popular music in the world.
CHELSEA HOLLOW: Well, yeah and look how relevant [rap] is. I think about—you know, often classical musicians when we talked about rap are quick to jump into Hamilton, so I'm just going to put up a disclaimer that I'm sorry that I'm about to do that—but talk about taking a story that is old and forgotten and modernizing it and updating it; Hamilton absolutely does that. And the genius of using rap to do that makes it feel relevant. It makes sense that [rap] is so popular; I love it; it's cathartic. This is very connected to why I choose activist text for my own performances.
Do you want to talk at all about the music of the song?
JASON CADY: Sure! The basic overall structure, just to get slightly technical for a moment, it's in F Lydian and then it modulates upwards in major thirds. So it goes F Lydian, then A Lydian, then D-Flat Lydian, and then that leads it back to F Lydian. So that's the overall structure.
CHELSEA HOLLOW: Did you come up with that concept before creating the melody or was that something at the melody kind of drove you towards?
JASON CADY: Yeah, I created the structure first. It’s not that every detail is pre-planned, but I don't believe in always relying on intuition and spontaneity. I think that sets us up with the danger of doing something too derivative because if we're only relying on what we hear, then there's an interaction with all the music that we've heard and loved. I mean that's fine, but I was always attracted to a literary movement called the OuLiPo that was sort of an anti-surrealist group. So surrealism is all about creating art from the unconscious and so the OuLiPo is all about creating art from the conscious mind and what that meant for them was creating restrictions. So there was one member of the group that wrote a novel, which has been translated as A Void (La Disparition by Georges Perec) and it doesn't contain the letter E in any of it.
CHELSEA HOLLOW: Through the whole book?
JASON CADY: Right, so it is roughly a 300-page novel and he restricts his vocabulary to words that don't happen to have the letter E in them. So that's the kind of thing that they would do and that's more of an unusual thing to do in literature than it is in music. One also has to have a balance; I am very much influenced by improvisation and jazz, but generally, I don't start writing without some kind of plan.
CHELSEA HOLLOW: Jason, thank you so much for joining us today. It's really wonderful to get to know the works better and take time to get to know the composers better.
For anyone watching this, if you're curious about more information about the concert—whether it's already happened, or if it's coming in the future—you can find out more in the description below. As of now, the concert Cycles of Resistance is planned for January 28th in San Francisco, and it will be live-streamed. So come check us out and hear Jason Cady's “I Could Not Allow That to Stand”.
Bye!
JASON CADY: Bye, thank you.
CHELSEA HOLLOW: Thank you!