Mirror Ritual is a seventeen-minute chamber ballet in three tableaus with choreography by University of Michigan Professor Jillian Hopper. The work, scored for a thirteen-piece chamber ensemble (flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano, and 2.2.2.2.1 strings,) premiered in February 2023 in the Power Center for the Performing Arts as part of the University of Michigan Department of Dance’s annual showcase, titled Sleek Disturbances. Mirror Ritual was choreographed with an ensemble of sixteen graduate and undergraduate dancers.
The conceptual framework of Mirror Ritual sits at the intersection of multiple streams of compositional and musicological inquiry, combining my long-standing interest in theatrical composition and recent research into perceptions of “American-ness” in music and culture. The primary nexus for this co-inquiry was Aaron Copland’s 1944 composition, Appalachian Spring, written in collaboration with choreographer Martha Graham. Appalachian Spring bore the weight, in many ways, of a post-WWII search for an nationalistic identity by the United States; the resulting work largely centered and idealized rural whiteness and sanitized the rugged individualism and extractive process central to the country’s ideas of Manifest Destiny.
Mirror Ritual stands as a response to Appalachian Spring—not to refute Copland and Graham, but to ask the same questions of current artists and discern how our answers align with or vary from those in 1944. The more that Jillian and abstracted these questions to examine the entire tapestry, the more we became transfixed by singular threads. Our approach tells a small story—one of personal migration, of alienation, and of found family. Derived from our experiences and the experiences of our cast, we relied heavily on asking questions rather than answering them: what is our relationship to place? What do we take with us from the places we’re from? How is our identity constructed in relation to—or in opposition to—place? In this, we sought to leave interpretive space to allow audiences to insert themselves, and thereby see themselves, in the work.
This work also reckons with the concepts around an “American” sound in music. The trademarks of Copland’s compositions (sparse harmony, pandiatonicism, folk song quotes,) are, to many, synonymous with “American-ness” in Western classical music. While I do not subscribe to the idea that a Coplandic musical language encompasses the American experience (and its breadth of diasporic histories and experiences,) it felt prudent to approach this idea of American-ness through its most essentialized form; this allowed me to live inside of expectations of an “American” sound while examining them (and subverting them.) The resultant musical language allowed for a personal and audible deconstruction of the sonic tropes surrounding “American-ness” while also achieving the interpretive openness we hoped for.AMUMusic: CompositionUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/178002/1/gcandey_1.pd
