Performing Arts

I remember a quote from somewhere or someone that the best concerts should make you feel like you’ll never die. Whoever’s responsible for such wisdom is a kindred spirit of the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle.

This is more than just the feeling of seeing an amazing show, which everyone at the Cedar was treated to. Darnielle’s stage presence goes beyond the usual clichés of intense, high-energy, playful, exuberant. There is a happiness and comfort on-stage for him, it seems, a sense that he’d be the same way performing in front of 10 people as he’d be 10,000. His frequent shouts to band members, singing off-mic or moving away from the mic before finishing a line, and playful interactions with boisterous audience members exudes an unabashed joy that is neither forced nor presented as a mask.

Darnielle’s voice, a combination of singing, shouting, and preacherly oratory, is the Mountain Goats most recognizable elements, and it cut through the band even at its loudest moments. The group performed songs from a wide range of albums, many from their most recent record, The Life of the World to Come, but also older albums such as Heretic Pride, The Sunset Tree, and even more obscure albums such as Isopanisad Radio Hour and Full Force Galesburg.

Given his more recent exploration of religious themes and imagery—all of the songs on the most recent record take their cues and titles from specific Bible verses—Darnielle is well aware that we all die, and doesn’t shy away from this fact of life. One of the best lyrics of the entire concert is from “Isaiah 45:23,” from the perspective of a terminal cancer patient: “I won’t get better/but someday I’ll be free.” Others take a less individual perspective, referencing an apocalyptic “burning fuselage of my days” on “Psalms 40:2”

Most of the music that serves as these lyrics’ bed, though, didn’t match the morose, grotesque, even violent character of these and other lyrics. Much of it is bright folk-rock-pop that had the tightly-packed crowd moving as much as it could, exuding an optimism that not even the darkest lyrical subjects can overwhelm. And the band can flat-out rock. There were even some moments that I forgot this was a Walker show, like their encore performance of the raucously positive “This Year,” caring little for how aesthetically innovative the words or music might have been and simply the enjoying the abandon that comes with the best rock ‘n’ roll.

One of the things Darnielle and the Mountain Goats are best known for is their lo-fi sound, at least until his more recent albums. There was a nod to that, it seemed, with the choice of keyboard Darnielle used for songs like the darkly ponderous “Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace,” another apocalyptic tale about the necessity of moving forward as the world ends around you. While on The Life of the World to Come, the piano parts are played on what sounds like your standard grand piano, the digital piano sounded slightly thin and tinny, the synthesized equivalent of a spinet. Whether a choice of economy over aesthetics, it just seemed to fit.

Although lo-fi has become its own category of experimentation, the more traditionally experimental side of the night was presented by its opener, Final Fantasy (aka Owen Pallett). I’m a complete sucker for real-time digital looping, and Pallett uses the technique masterfully, recording highly intricate melody lines on keyboard and violin that danced polyphonically through the Cedar’s sound system. Pallett employed much more than loops, with octave transformations, distortions, delays, and other processing effects that heightened the power of his violin. Using a slight delay, he created the illusion of double-time pizzicato, while another time, he made a col legno intro (playing with the wood of the bow instead of the string) even more eerie through the use of a jittery echo. As opposed to Darnielle, Pallett’s warm, rich tenor voice often got lost in the swirling cascades of sound, becoming another instrumental voice. (Comparisons to Andrew Bird are unavoidable, and the two worked together on Pallett’s Pays to Please EP.) Pallett also joined Darnielle for a number of songs, including “Genesis 30:3,” about the “alternative living arrangements” of making a family with three instead of two, and “Orange Ball of Hate.” Before playing this last song, off  of 1994’s Zopilote Machine, Darnielle happily remarked that its gray hair had been shed with the infusion of Pallett’s musical voice.

In the midst of Darnielle’s solo set, a voice from the crowd called for him to do a backflip. Not missing a beat, Darnielle launched into a childhood story about trying to execute the maneuver on his parents bed when no one was looking. For him, not seeing it is the key: unseen, its perfection can never be questioned. The devoted fans who stayed and sang through Darnielle’s second encore, a communal re-telling of the Hold Steady’s “Positive Jam,” could’ve cared less about perfection; they were overjoyed simply to have seen.

The McGuire Theater was turned into a sonic Icelandic outpost Thursday night as múm, Sin Fang Bous, and Hildur Gu∂nadóttir treated the audience to an evening that mixed awkwardness, dreaminess, and exuberance.

Gu∂nadóttir opened the night, with a quirky, shoeless bounce to her step that was reflected in her 3 songs. The first was for solo cello, as long tones gently morphed into digitally-processed responses; an entire cello ensemble eventually unfurled.  (This ensemble, however, was interrupted by someone wanting to Gmail chat with her; 6 beeps total marked her performance, and her scrambling to close windows after the piece finished clearly showed that such aleatoric intrusions were not intended.) As she added musicians for the rest of her set, they all expertly blended timbres, with the rasp of her cello melding with the synth and trumpet lines of Eiríkur Orri Ólafsson, resulting in soothing, almost gauzy harmonies and soundscapes.

A few of the same musicians performed with Sin Fang Bous, the experimental project of Seabear’s Sindri Már Sigfússon. Whereas Gu∂nadóttir’s set was dreamy in a sort of floating-along-the-clouds way, Sigfússon created a world that was close enough to daily life (evinced by the very pop-oriented nature of the songs) but just askew enough to keep a listener on her toes (unexpected syncopations, extended guitar techniques, vocal distortions, and opaque lyrics). One lyric in particular, “looking at me through broken eyes,” summarized his stage presence: never before have I seen a more vacant look on someone’s face while performing. Most of the songs simply petered out, punctuated by a slightly practiced-sounding “Thank you.” The last song was the exception, which finished with a huge buildup over Sigfússon’s wordless falsetto vocals.

múm took the stage abruptly after Sigfússon’s set. Two of the members came out, sat down at the Steinway, and performed “Ladies of the New Century,” from their latest record, Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know. (The majority of their set was culled from there.) A bunch of the same musicians who performed earlier in the evening took the stage as part of múm, including Hildur Gu∂nadóttir. Elements from earlier in the night marked múm’s performance, for better and for worse. There were some incredible musical moments, with wonderfully-matched harmonies throughout the group, especially from Gu∂nadóttir and fellow vocalist-instrumentalist Sigurlaug Gísladóttir. There were also more of the mesmerizingly blended timbres, this time spread throughout melodica, cello, violin, synth, trumpet, piano, and guitar. I quickly stopped listening to the lyrics, though. At times the words were thought provoking, as on “Show Me,” with a desire to “show me the way you worship little things,” but for the most part I found the lyrics a bit inane. Turning off that part of my brain allowed me to bathe in their soundscapes and really appreciate the best part of the show, which was their utter happiness in performing. They even did a bit of audience interaction: Dana the band’s monitor person held up fluorescent signs akin to a bouncing ball during “Sing Along,” expressing the band’s love for this particular crowd. Such joy and exuberance seems capable of melting even the coldest Minnesota—or Icelandic—winter.

BLK JKS' Linda Buthelezi. Photo by Justin Schell

“Enjoy the rainbow. It’s not about the pot of gold at the end.” So said guitarist Mpumi Mcata near the opening of  BLK JKS’ 90-minute set at the Cedar Cultural Center. The opening of the 2009 Global Roots Festival (the first year the Cedar’s usual “Nordic Roots” festival has gone global), it’s hard not to hear echoes of Nelson Mandela and the idea of the “rainbow nation” as an idealized post-Apartheid South Africa in the Jo’Burg group, “a rainbow nation,” in his words, “at peace with itself and the world.”  Anybody who has followed South Africa over the past 10 years—or at least has seen District 9—knows how complicated such an idea has become.

While this kind of politics only briefly appeared during their set—more on that later—the packed house at the Cedar was treated to a bewildering mix of genres, with roots in music from Soweto to Kingston to London and all points in between. Their roots seem to be in prog rock, with the band’s long, winding guitar and bass lines and on-the-fly shifts in mixed meters, while at other times I felt like I was listening to a spontaneous dub record, especially with the processed drum sounds and vocals. (In a 2008 cover story, Fader described them as “afrogothic,” a neologism that only hints at the variety of styles and influences churning beneath BLK JKS’s surface.)

There was lots of obvious communication between Mcata and the rest of the members of the group— Tshepang Ramoba on drums, Molefi Makananise on bass, and lead singer and guitarist Linda Buthelezi—as they seemed to figure out their path through the songs as they played them. Their positions on-stage, in a straight line instead of the usual drummer-in-back hierarchy, lent itself both to this ease of communication as well as no one musician occupying the center of attention. All this led to sometimes startlingly different versions of songs like “Molatatladi,” “Summertime,” and “Tselane.” This last song was especially striking, a slow, almost dirge-like song at times, with a long buildup that seemed to match the eerie nature of its subject, a folk tale-cum-bedtime story about the ogre Dingwe kidnapping little girls.

Buthelezi and Ramoba seem to be foils for each other, the latter’s frenetic energy and churning drums seemed sometimes at odds with the almost disaffected singing of Buthelezi. For much of the time, Buthelezi looked suspicious of those in the first couple rows. By the end of the show, however, he had shed this stoicism, as he threw guitars and mics to the ground, pecking the entire body of the guitar and twiddling knobs to bring forth ever weirder sounds from his amps.

The group’s audience-demanded encore started out as the most politically-engaged moment of the show, with shout outs to Steve Biko and African Youth organizing in 1974. In fact, it was the most straight-ahead song, with much less of the rhythmic elasticity that marked the rest of the set. (Mcata did say it was a popular political rally song, but I couldn’t recognize it or catch the title over the wash of distortion that crowded his words.) As the minutes went by, dreads, sticks, and microphones, guitars, and cymbals flailed in an incredible, Acid Mothers Temple/Boredoms-worthy freak out, an incredible release of all the built-up energy of the previous 80 minutes. While this might not have been the usual pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, both the path and the end BLK JKS painted at the Cedar were thoroughly enjoyed by both the band and audience.

When I first heard Jewellry, the debut LP from Micachu & The Shapes, I was simultaneously irritated and instantly a fan. Noises grate and lyrics obfuscate amidst the wry, spastic, educatedly uneducated music of Mica Levi, aka Micachu.

The boyish, blond-mopped Micachu shared the Cedar’s stage with Marc Pell and Raisa Khan, Pell on drums and Khan multitasking on laptop, auxiliary percussion, and keyboards. They not only looked young, they were young, all in the early 20s. (This was one of the few shows I’ve been to recently where I felt old.)

Most of Jewellry, the group’s debut album, is danceable as hell, while at the same time intellectually satisfying on an headphone-close listen. There are very few songs that sound similar on Jewellry, each a testament to timbral and sonic subtlety. These sounds are spread out in all parts of the stereo spectrum, and Micachu’s voice effortlessly dips into and out of the digital washes behind it. Such detail is due in part, no doubt, to the masterful presence of Matthew Herbert. And this combination also make it impossible to sit still on songs like “Vulture,” “Lips,” “Golden Phone,” and the Pee Wee Herman-channeling “Calculator.”

Unfortunately, neither of these elements were really on view at the Cedar, the band’s first date on their first US tour. The level of detail on Jewellry wasn’t there during the live show, which can mostly be chalked up to the live atmosphere,  which doesn’t easily allow for the kinds of details possible on record. There were some moments that showed why the band should play these songs live, such as the intricate percussion duets between Pell and Khan (played on everything from garbage can lid cymbals to cowbells to bottles) and the explosive bass of “Floor” that seemed to catch everybody by surprise. And it was entertaining just to watch Micachu, whether it be her vocal delivery or the variety of instruments she played, which included a Frankenstein-ish acoustic bedecked with adaptations, a seemingly constantly de/untuned electric, and what looked like a home-made (anti-)Auto-Tune contraption. While her stage presence itself is nothing extraordinary, she has a wonderful, if unintentional, sneer while delivering her lyrics, lyrics that are opaque enough already without the accent.

It didn’t help that the audience was one of the stiffest I’ve ever seen at a show, at the Cedar or anywhere else. It wasn’t until the very last song that they started whoopin’ it up with joyful responses to “Golden Phone.” I was expecting a twitchy mass of spastically dancing hipsters, but few obliged.

Nothing about Micachu & The Shapes is all that new, whatever Pitchfork might say; shades of Deerhoof, Aphex Twin, Sonic Youth, Harry Partch (who is appropriately, if unexpectedly, thanked in the liner notes), Brainiac and numerous other pop/avant-garde acts all echo in Micachu’s overtones. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the show was a drag or Jewellry is any less impressive. Let’s just hope that the audiences on the rest of their tour will be a bit more effusive in their appreciation.

There’s little debate about Thelonious Monk’s place in the jazz pantheon, yet Jason Moran is not content for Monk to just be revered. In My Mind is Moran’s multimedia exploration of the continued presence—and present-ness—of Monk, in particular his landmark 1959 Town Hall big band concert.

What often makes Monk’s piano playing so incredible is his almost infinitely malleable sense of time, how he could stretch and pull apart the rhythm of a song to its very seams yet remain firmly in the pocket. Moran and the rest of the rhythm section—Tarus Mateen on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums—transferred this concept to the entire section and took it as the foundation for all of their interpretations, resulting in a skillful and subtle pushing and pulling of time that always kept each other—and the audience—on their toes.

For the most part, unfortunately, the work’s visual elements lacked the subtlety that marked so much of the evening’s music. For instance, at one point Moran cut back and forth between live video of the band and fractured collages of 1959 newspapers, which didn’t leave much to the imagination. An exception, however, was a digitally-weathered, almost stop-motion slideshow of Moran’s studio, as he described his musical history, one intertwined with Monk’s own. (He was introduced to Monk’s music when he learned about a plane crash that killed a family friend and it was this music that made him want to take the piano seriously.) The half photograph, half-sketch images not only blurred the lines between these two different life stories, but also the process of influence that In My Mind foregrounds both as representation and end result.

In the end, I found that the evening’s best moments actually had very little to do with the work’s visuals, one which was intentional and the other which most likely wasn’t.

The first was the work’s opening, with Moran walking on stage and donning headphones. Soon the opening notes of “Thelonious,” the first song on the original record (The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall), dimly fill the hall; it was like the audience was in Moran’s mind, overhearing the explorations and results of his working through the past as he vacillated between doubling and embellishing Monk’s piano lines.

The second was near the middle of the performance, after the performers had walked off stage following a particularly pointed comparison between Monk’s slave grandparents and his own beating at the hands of police. Recorded music accompanying the visuals made Nasheet Waits’ snare rattle with sympathetic vibrations. This normally annoying occurrence—a snare that the drummer forgot to switch off ruining a particularly intimate moment—actually crystallized In My Mind nicely, the music from the past serving as a catalyst, both literally and figuratively, for the creation of something new.

(Like my colleague Mark, I’d also like to thank Michelè and everyone involved at the Walker for giving me the opportunity to write about this year’s concerts. I’m excitedly anticipating another slate of impressive concerts next year.)

I need a late pass on David Longstreth and the musicians who these days make up Dirty Projectors. I hadn’t listened to them before I did some prep for last night’s show earlier this week.

Shame on me.

The intrigue began at the name. A dirty projector, whose images are skewered and fractured, obscuring  but simultaneously revealing things missed in an uncluttered viewing. The spastic Longstreth led the assembled audience on a 90-minute trek that explored—and joyously reveled in— the sounds made possible when things aren’t quite right. Such an aesthetic is true even down to his voice, a swooping multi-octave warble that’s somewhere between Cee-Lo, Tom Verlaine, Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), and his recent collaborator, David Byrne.

It was very easy to hear the sounds of Longstreth’s influences, a mix of things that don’t usually go together but somehow work in the hands of these musicians. He spoke of many of these Thursday night at the “Making Music” interview, everything from the Beatles, Fugazi, Black Flag, Pavement, the Beach Boys, to Wagner and Mahler to West African guitar and hocket patterns. This last element, a musical technique found throughout the world where two voices alternate in quick succession, was performed expertly throughout the show, not just between vocalists, like on their version of “Gimmie Gimmie,” but also between keyboards, vocalists, and Longstreth’s electric guitar.

This last song, from Rise Above was originally done—very differently—by Black Flag, whose music Longstreth “re-wrote from memory,” aiming not for faithful reproduction, but rather a reimagining through his own wide-ranging musical sensibility. Even though the sounds of Black Flag aren’t anywhere near Longstreth’s “version,” the spirit hasn’t evaporated in the glittering guitar lines and cherubic harmonies. Brian Mcomber’s drumming had to be rock-solid, because Longstreth isn’t always the most precise guitarist, going for expression more than strict temporal synchronization. The shifting, interlocking rhythmic patterns, both intentional and unintentional, kept everybody on their toes, audience included.

The three women serving as both backing instrumentalists and vocalists—Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian, and Haley Dekle—seemed to channel the Rheinmaidens from Wagner’s Ring, three densely harmonizing sopranos that set the 16-hour epic in motion. While it was tragically hard to hear them at times, when they did emerge, their Louvin Brothers-meets-the-Beach Boys close harmonies were astoundingly precise and moving.

Many of the songs last night were from their far-too-off album Bitte Orca, to be released in June on Domino. Longstreth candidly admitted that they had only played some of these songs once or twice before. The best of this bunch was “Temecula Sunrise,” which Longstreth also performed in a scaled-down version Thursday night at the “Making Music” event. Its chorus, set amidst a utopian vision of abandoned suburbs brimming with skate-punks and other folks usually unwelcome, offered a glorious illustration of making music as the sun comes over the horizon of a new day.

This night, however, ended with Longstreth, Coffman, and Deradoorian just in front of the crowd to perform an entirely unamplified encore. This moment of intimacy set the audience down gently from their sonic travels, although there was a palpable desire in the crowd for more. For many of them, June’s release, and the tour that will hopefully follow and bring Dirty Projectors back to the Cities, can’t come soon enough.

UPDATE: MFR has videos of a few songs performed at the Walker.

Minneapolis is an appropriate place for Ray Lee’s Siren. One of the many things I love about this city is its emergency sirens. After moving here from Milwaukee, where all of them consisted of the same tone, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Minneapolis’ differently-pitched sirens. When multiple ones go off across the city, whether in as a test or in a real emergency, the result is a mesmerizing sonic collage that makes me want to stay outside during a tornado just to listen.

This is the only experience that comes close to describing Siren. The performance took place on the McGuire Theater stage; all of the curtains were closed and we were encouraged to walk around the space. Upon entering, all we could hear was a low-frequency hum. As the performance began, Lee’s assistants began switching on the more than 20 machines individually, tuning each note with a screwdriver. Each machine consisted of two sets of circuits and speakers; different speakers were used to achieve more subtle gradations of tone. The piece began with a perfect fifth, one of the most basic of musical intervals, although many of the other sound bars were tuned more closely together, usually a 2nd or 3rd apart.

As the piece slowly developed, I started to forget where I was as the sounds swathed the theater and its occupants. It’s a testament to Lee, however, that his work never collapses into a jumble of undifferentiated sound. Even as they swirled around me, individual sounds and novel combinations continually emerged through the soundscape. At times the soundscape sounded almost hurdy gurdy-like, with overtones popping seemingly out of nowhere; it was enveloping without being overpowering, or, as I’ve also experienced with some sound art, physically debilitating. The final touch was to turn out the lights, revealing small red lights on each speaker that twirled like insects at different speeds. Near the end, the low-frequency hum that served as the work’s foundation suddenly disappeared, seemingly unmooring the sounds to float freely in the space.

The work ended as it began, with a perfect 5th from a lone sound bar, after all the others had stopped spinning and were turned off one-by-one. And after this was shut off, the very air itself possessed a newly-charged silence, interrupted only by return-you-to-the real-world applause from those in the room. This is easily one of the best things to come through the Walker since I’ve lived here and should not be missed.

From his spot in the middle of the McGuire theater, surrounded by various digital accoutrements and the Maarifa Street band, Jon Hassell treated a nearly-full house to 90 minutes of his slow-moving, subtle, and eclectic music that attempts to encompass many of the musical traditions of the world, both past and present. Unfortunately, to my ears, all of the adjectives generally used to describe this music—atmospheric, celestial, ethereal, etc—didn’t quite fit this performance as well as a less generous one would: boring.

Don’t get me wrong, there were some exquisite sounds throughout the evening, which was divided between an hour-long “set” of a number of segued pieces and a final 10-minute piece after Hassell introduced the group. At one point, swells of Hassell’s laconic trumpet, digitally processed into a multi-voiced ensemble, rode upon a wave of synthesizer and bass created by the rest of the band. There were snatches of music that dotted the sonic landscape from across earthly time and space, whether it be Bitches Brew organ, didgeridoo, pan pipes, or digital glitches, just to name a few.  These were all blended together with extreme subtlety and precise attention to tone and timbre.

While these came in fits and starts, there was one consistently fascinating element to the night: the live sampling of the Norwegian Jan Bang. While Bang was integral throughout, many of the pieces in the first part of the evening were linked together through a swirling recombinant soundscape comprised of sampled and manipulated snippets produced just minutes before by the rest of the band. Problem was, these re-imagined imaginings, as it were, were more stimulating than the music they drew upon!

Frankly, though, these elements didn’t go past this surface level of interest, disparate sonic bits  not adding up to a coherent whole. And it certainly didn’t support the cultural baggage of being “Fourth World,” a hybrid music “both ancient and digital, composed and improvised, Eastern and Western.” While the vaguely “ethnic” sounding elements throughout the night gave the music this “global” character, the music seems to strive for a conception of placelessness, perhaps even a utopian sonic landscape that we aren’t quite ready to achieve in this mundane world.

While there was definitely more substance here than most “new age” music—give me this over Yanni, George Winston, or John Tesh any day—I left the theater feeling that despite the heights of possibility and potential in the concept of his music, what was actually put forth could’ve been so much more.

It has to be hard for anybody to fashion a narrative for a 100-minute opera from Gertrude Stein’s famously difficult, many believe unreadable 900+ page novel, The Making of Americans. Jay Scheib’s re-imagining, which surely achieves more through its use of multimedia than any other attempt to bring the novel to the stage, highlights key moments not only in the lives of the families that are the subject of Stein’s novel, but perhaps much of humanity itself. The creators of the opera seemed to strike a balance between a narrative involving marriage, broken relationships, and death and the images that make the work resonant far beyond these individual characters and families.

Hometown new music-heroes Zeitgeist and the JACK Quartet from New York deftly performed Anthony Gatto’s score. Much of Gatto’s music was post-minimalist in character, appropriate for a work so dependent in form and content on repetition. At other points, though, passages sounded like an almost Bach-like chorale and, elsewhere, the rich, slow moving harmony of a Debussy piano etude; the joyous wedding music that opens the work was some of Gatto’s best. The singing was generally expressive, clear and, in-tune, though at times sounded a bit strained, perhaps explained by the fact that many of the characters were attempting to sing in extreme registers while in all sorts of positions.

The opera not only drew upon the content of Stein’s novel in its exploration of the Hersland and  Dehning families, but also its form. In addition to her almost tortuous repetition of precise grammatical structures, Stein foregrounds her own presence throughout the book, calling attention to the very processes of creation that are crystallized in the final work. The opera reflected and built upon these ideas: the musicians were on stage right, stage lights descended from the ceiling to the middle of the stage, and little effort was made to hide microphone battery packs. The aspect that best bridged the gap between form and content, though, was the projection of footage from the cameras inside Chris Larson’s house from Crush Collision were projected onto a screen suspended above the stage; their slightly grainy and delayed image gave the impression of YouTube voyeurism, a sense of looking in at this family, and being made slightly uncomfortable for our efforts.

Much of the work’s visual logic emanates from Scheib’s idea of “motion portraiture,” the slow moving development of moving images, both in terms of film as well as the developing images that make up the opera’s visual and sonic landscape. Despite the potential embedded in such a concept, Stein’s words were far more powerful than most many of the work’s images. (Many of them seemed predictable, with their emphases on roots and trees, both plant and familial.) The constant repetition with a crucial difference of words such as being, dead, history, and repeating opens up a window to the possibilities of reflection and imagination that language in Stein’s skilled, almost obsessive hand, affords us.

Through this language, Stein’s words extend far beyond two American families, which Scheib echoes in similarly universalizing tones in his Director’s Notes:

I hope that [The Making of Americans] will remind us of the perfect depiction of an event—a marriage, a funeral, a divorce—a motion portrait of ordinary lives. Something about becoming Americans, about doing the best we can with the time we have. And about it only mattering so much, since the next generation will do the same. And it just goes on like that.

I have to say, this statement left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. Such bald generalizations—are Americans the only people that do “the best we can with the time we have”?—seem out of a place within an artistic and philosophical environment of such detailed introspection about the nature of familial ties, be they part of one’s own family or a more utopian idea of a “human family.” There’s a history of white Americans believing the world revolves around them, and many histories have been written through this lens Americans alone, often with disastrous consequences.

And while all involved see the opera as possessing meaning for the contemporary world, it seems hesitant to ascribe any meanings that might be too specific, such as the wide-ranging and often inflammatory debates about immigrants as “becoming American.” By not really going down that path, the work in the end seems ambivalent about who actually fits into the category of “a real American,” a phrase repeated incessantly near the beginning of the opera.

Illustrating this was the fact that the actress Tanya Selvaratnam, who is of South Asian descent, was the only prominent person of color on the stage. Her performance as Mary Maxworthing that ended the opera, though, contained the most powerful moments of the entire evening. Numerous people in the audience were moved to tears as her character reflects on the fate that awaits us all.

There is, of course, so much in both versions of Making of Americans that you could most likely come up with an alternate interpretation to address whatever criticisms I may have. Yet the attempt to make the ordinary extraordinary, which Scheib and the rest of those who expertly brought forth this multi-faceted imagining of Stein’s novel, threatens to be hamstrung by all-too familiar ethnocentric conceptions that structure much of the world’s inequality today, inequality that all families, including those in America, must live under.