Founding Mothers: An ode to my matriarchs

From Anthony Brandt, composer of Maternity:

Today, the federal government published the census data from 1940, enabling us to trace our parents and grandparents at a crucial moment in US history.  Where were they?  What were they doing?  It is that curiosity about our heritage that animates in the libretto of “Maternity.”  The text is adapted from David Eagleman’s short story “The Founding Mothers: An ode to my matriarchs—every last one.”  In David’s original story, the narrator celebrates Mother’s Day by spending “ five seconds thinking about each woman in the proud line of matriarchs who brought me here…”  David invented a special ancestral notation: great²grandmother, great³grandmother, etc.  Eventually, the narrator’s thoughts are carried back millions of generations, to the first female in history, the “moment when gender splits into being.” 

Turning David’s ode into a libretto, we made a few immediate decisions.  Instead of using Mother’s Day as the jumping off point, we decided the narrator was singing to her child.   Thus, the libretto begins “You are here because of me.”  We reasoned that the “five seconds” limit wouldn’t be musically plausible, so that was dropped from the text.  Asking the soloist to sing the ever-expanding matriarch notation–great^88,299,894grandmother, great^334,281,202grandmother—would have been too cumbersome and inadvertently humorous.  So we decided that the notation would be projected in synch with the music.   Once those decisions were made, work on “Maternity” began…

to be continued…

ROCO will perform Maternity on Saturday, April 21, at The Church of St. John the Divine. More…