Andrew Waggoner: Lovely, Lost...

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Andrew Waggoner: Lovely, Lost...
WCM Chamber Ensemble
Carol Wincenc, fl; Phillip Solomon, cl; Jerry Bryant, tp; Levi Boylan, tb; Colleen Bernstein, pc; Mimi Solomon, pf; Nurit Pacht & Mari Sato, vns; Kathryn Lockwood, va; Caroline Stinson, vc
Lovely, Lost is both love letter and remembrance, written in, for and about New Orleans in 2022 for a premiere in Seattle (another city wrestling with its own relationship to the water that surrounds it). As the title suggests it hovers in a space between beauty and despair, celebrating the city that is, pining for the city that was, mourning the city sure to slip away. Conservative estimates put the amount of coastal land loss in Louisiana over the next fifty years at 2,250 square miles; continued plunder of the region’s resources will no doubt result in a much higher number. Harder to predict is the cultural loss precipitated by the botched response to, and subsequent monetized recovery from, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Figures for the loss of the city’s essential blackness are as sobering as those for the coastline: people of color made up 67% of the population pre-storm, and under 60% afterwards. Whether in fifty years the area will remain as more than a NOLA-themed resort for wealthy tourists remains to be seen. For now, however, New Orleans abides, clings fiercely to what makes it essential, holds its head high. The city and its culture represent a signal human achievement, a cultural lodestar born of depraved avarice and moral, political and social insanity. Its beauty is intoxicating, its people possessed of the grace that comes from spitting in Charon’s face and dancing at the gates of hell. When it goes it will not be replaced.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this is music both deeply personal for me and yet also the most open to the world of any I’ve ever composed, bearing traces of Ligeti’s Clocks and Clouds; the great harmonic-wave tradition of Steve Reich, from works such as Music for 18 Musicians and Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards; and John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean. What I like, though, is how comfortably these composers seem to reside alongside the me that, no matter how hard I try to escape him, seems to pop up at every corner like Ned from Groundhog Day. The chords, the river that runs through them (through the entire piece in fact), the climax of dense canons, they’re all mine, for better or worse. Every piece, every work of art, exists in conversation with other works, other times, other cultures. Like New Orleans itself, Lovely, Lost… is an extended experiment in finding a way to share the terrain.