Music: Opera/Music Theater

Program note:

Lightning at our feet is a song cycle based on poems by Emily Dickinson. I chose twelve poems, many of them dark. Diving into her work, I found that Dickinson's poetry for the most part uses two types of rhythmic schemes: one is a sing-song, almost childlike rhythm that is disarming in its simplicity and lulls the reader into a sense of security, allowing the poet to unexpectedly hit you with an often strange or bizarre thought or image; the second type is closely related except that the rhythm is slightly irregular, the beats don't always add up, the words twist just a bit.

It was the irregular rhythms of this latter group of poems, along with the irregular half rhymes that struck me. It was as if Dickinson was trying to shove the words into a space in which they couldn’t fit. These were the poems I chose to comprise most of the libretto for Lightning at our feet.

Something else I found compelling in Dickinson’s words was that they embrace an anxiety that is very modern. There is no nineteenth-century formality, no distancing for the raw emotion. I think that is one reason that, once discovered in the early 1900s, her poetry played to an increasing anxious twentieth century.

Because I wanted to put her in a contemporary setting with contemporary music, I avoided all poems that had what we would now think of as antiquated English, like thee or thou. In addition, the poems I selected were mostly written during the Civil War. Although none mention the war explicitly, the shadow of death is never far.

It was impossible for me to escape the allure of Dickinson’s life story, and why try? In the course of working on Lightning at our feet, I visited her house in Amherst, Massachusetts and stood in the room in which she spent most of her days. I wondered about the “strange melodies” that were heard emerging from the Dickinson house when Emily was young before she shut herself away. But I was wary of worshipping a mythic figure, and I was wary of the images of Dickinson that I had read about or seen put forward.

The general impression is that she was a witty New England spinstress, baking cookies for children and raising exotic plants. A one-woman play on Broadway depicted her as one’s eccentric Aunt Tillie, full of bon mots and sly humor. But this was a woman who didn't see anyone once she reached her mid twenties. Her withdrawal was gradual –– at first she would run up to her room when strangers came to visit. Then she started staying upstairs during dinner parties. Soon her isolation was complete – even friends and family would have to sit in the corridor outside her room, what she call the “northwest passage,” i.e. uncrossable, and converse with her with her bedroom door, slightly ajar, between them.

I had to re-imagine Emily Dickinson. In my mind I transformed her into a combination of Patti Smith and Janis Joplin. Re-imagining her in this way, I was able to connect to the fire inside her words. Lightning at our feet was conceived as a theatrical presentation, with a cast of four women singing and performing on instruments. I wanted the stage to look like a girl band –– women who would make you believe the words they sang were written by a punk poetess who lived in the cool and edgy part of town.

The original production was designed by Ridge Theater and featured a set of four rolling scrims, panels that at times opened out with the expansive imagery of the words and at other times closed up like the little room in which Dickinson spent her life. The title comes from a letter Emily Dickinson sent to the poet T.W. Higginson as consolation for the death of his infant daughter. The passage reads: These sudden intimacies with Immortality, are expanse— not Peace—as Lightning at our feet, instills a foreign Landscape.
––Michael Gordon
Lightning at our feet was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music for their 2008 Next Wave Festival and the Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston.

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Review
At times Mr. Gordon’s score moved through stretches of dreamlike, sustained textures, laconic passages redolent of the Velvet Underground, hard-driven string figures and sections part sung and part recited by Ms. Charles in a pianissimo growl that suggested a connection between Dickinson and Leonard Cohen.
—Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/12/2008