[Musical notes to accompany Stage Director notes]
Acoustic guitars struck with percussion mallets. Eerie harmonicas and muted horns. Dusky strings, brash woodwinds, a nagging harpsichord, and a percussive harp. The instrumentation of Missy Mazzoli’s score is a darkly prismatic soundscape that haunts the physical and emotional landscape of Proving Up. Traditionally, an opera orchestra’s principal functions are to communicate the actors’ inner experience – their emotions, preoccupations, even memories – as well as the kinetic energy of what’s happening on stage. While that’s certainly the case here, Mazzoli’s orchestration is also something more tactile, as though part of the land on which the Zegner family builds its sod house. It’s also frequently symbolic. High-pitched, glassy string harmonics represent the window of glass around which the story revolves, while the quiet, steadily repeating notes of a piano represent the soft cantor of a horse. Subtler points of symbolism are woven throughout.
Acoustic guitars and harmonicas don’t belong in an orchestra, let alone guitars hung from walls and struck with mallets, or multiple harmonicas droning simultaneously in different keys. Yet these two instruments also ground the story in rural, late 19th-century America. Harmonicas, first mass-produced by the Hohner company in 1852 Vienna, came to America in the pockets of German immigrants flooding into the U.S. during the very period in which this opera is set. Like the acoustic guitar, the harmonica is a lonesome instrument – an easy travel companion. On the other hand, both instruments are here played in a way that unsettles our romanticized image of their use in the music of rural America. There are too many of them, they’re played one over top of another, and they drone unrelentingly.
The vocal writing in Proving Up is perfectly crafted, dramatically crystalline, and deeply moving. Moreover, the way that Mazzoli writes for the ghosts of two dead daughters and the Sodbuster sets them apart as somehow other-worldly. The daughters sing more often as a unit than independently, their hollow voices slide wildly from note to note, and they cackle and stutter. The Sodbuster’s dark melodies span huge intervals, craning between the deepest bass and the loftiest falsetto. By contrast, the more “traditional” treatment of Ma, Pa, and Miles’ voices makes them more vulnerably, immediately human. Theirs, after all, are the lives hanging in the balance of this at once gritty and other-worldly drama.
