Missy Mazzoli

Scofield: Missy, just a few years ago your music was performed at the BBC proms. The work that they performed is called The New Dark Age, and it contained the work of three female composers. The Royal Opera House called it “A breathtaking multimedia experience”. Now usually, as you know, at that house they put on the works of Verdi, and Puccini and Wagner. So how did it feel to have your music programmed along with those other greats?

Mazzoli: It’s amazing! I know the other composers in the program, particularly Anna Meredith and Anna Thorvaldsdottir, I admire them so much. It’s really interesting, because if you just listen to a little bit of our work, you would not really hear that much of a connection, but there really is a deep connection. I feel very musically connected to these women. I think it was the director Katie Mitchell, who sort of had the vision to bring us all together. It was perfect! And you know, my contribution is a piece that I wrote a couple years ago called Vespers for a New Dark Age, and the sort of cornerstone text of that piece is “I know I belong in this new dark age”. It’s a phrase by a poet Matthew Zapruder, and there could be no better time to sing that than at this dark but very hopeful moment in our history.

Scofield: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative] So this work kind of invokes the technology of today, and the dark ages of a thousand years ago. There is technology bringing us to a new dark age.

Mazzoli: You can read the phrase in a couple different ways. It could be a new dark age as if we’re going back to the dark ages, or it could be a new, dark, age. I see the light and dark in everything. My whole career is built on finding the light in the darkness and presenting them right next to each other. Sometimes in the same chord, sometimes in the same phrase. So yes, things are dark undeniably, but I think that makes the light brighter, and I think that technology is the same thing.

It’s impossible to make just a blanket statement about it. I know that I, as a young-ish female composer, would not have a career without the internet, and the internet was the first tool that I was able to harness that allowed me to present myself to the world on my terms, and where I was not waiting for anyone else to discover me or anything. And I feel the same way about social media. I find it in some ways very liberating, and of course we all know the dark sides of it too. I think that that phrase “I know I belong in this new dark age” sort of encapsulating the light in the dark. It’s dark, but it’s where I feel I belong. This is my time to be an artist in the world.

Scofield: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative] Very interesting about that contrast, because I think this work was commissioned by the Carnegie Hall, the great performance hall in New York a few years ago, for their Ecstatic Music Festival. So rather than something dystopian, maybe did you originally compose this to inspire ecstasy?

Mazzoli: Sure! I love the word “ecstatic” and “ecstasy”, and I use it a lot in my music actually, as a performance direction. I’ll direct players to play something in an ecstatic manner, that is how I, sort of, find ecstasy, by looking things right in the eye. I don’t think that it’s so dark as to say it’s dystopian, but ecstasy has a sort of dark side. There’s always like a coming down from that ecstatic feeling. There’s always a flip side.