The apartment building with the creaking doors. The old house with the squeaky stairs. The new build whose windows rattle in the winter wind.
Buildings, like people, sometimes make their feelings known. And Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec has known any number of buildings with big personalities. The setting of his 2016 opera The Shining, based on Stephen King’s novel of the same title, is the demonically possessed Overlook Hotel. And for Moravec the hotel is more than a sinister setting. It’s the lead actor.
“The Overlook Hotel is a character in the opera. It’s somehow mysteriously alive and has its own will,” Moravec said. “And it’s trying to get Jack Torrance to kill (Torrance’s son) Danny so it can absorb Danny’s supernatural powers, which are called the shining. So it’s a malevolent, evil character in this story.”
The hotel is also the title character of both Moravec’s orchestra work The Overlook Hotel (2016), drawn on his score for the opera, and of the new recording of it by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and conductor Gil Rose (The Overlook Hotel, BMOP Sound). The disc also features three other works by Moravec inspired by physical structures.
Architecture’s tactile physicality and music’s physical elusiveness may make the two art forms seem incompatible. But Moravec says they’re closer in nature than they may seem.
“A composer is always thinking about structure, even before beginning a piece – how long is it going to be? What is the arc of it?” Moravec said. “Music is a temporal art, but I think of it in spatial terms and even in terms of geometry and so on. So it seems to me that there’s a natural connection between temporal structures and spatial structures.”
The Pantheon in Rome is one of Moravec’s favorite architectural structures. As he says in our video interview, the Pantheon’s perfect proportions are analogous to the harmonious ratios that abound in music. In that sense, architectural and musical forms are made of the same rational substance.
But as rational as musical structures are, music ultimately reaches listeners not through the intellect, but instead through the emotions.
“It works on our central nervous systems directly, in other words, kind of subverting our higher, rational powers,” Moravec said. “I think the appeal of music is ultimately emotion. It’s ultimately, in a sense, irrational.”
That’s how the umbrous and glittering sound world of The Overlook Hotel menaces us, and how Moravec’s Serenade (2004), also on The Overlook Hotel recording, fills us with feelings of aspiration, longing, playfulness and wistful repose.
Inspired by the Great Western Staircase of the New York State Capitol building, Moravec’s Serenade comes alive with the human stories literally carved into the massive so-called Million Dollar Staircase.
Decorative animals and the faces of 77 historical figures – including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony and Benjamin Franklin – are carved into the marble. The more than 500 artists who created the intricate adornments also carved into the staircase their own faces and those of their friends and family.
“There’s something kind of poignantly democratic about including the faces of people who are known only to their friends and families, and they’re immortalized forever in this staircase along with the celebrities,” Moravec said.
The democratic spirit leavens Moravec’s orchestra work Brandenburg Gate (2008). Composed for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s New Brandenburgs project, Moravec’s Brandenburg Gate bears in its scoring and formal outline the DNA of the musical structures in Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto.
But the deeper inspiration for the work was the 1989 dismantling of the Berlin Wall – which ran on either side of the historic Brandenburg Gate – marking the collapse of the Iron Curtain and contributing to the fall of Communism in Europe.
“When the wall suddenly came down unexpectedly, we were astonished and amazed, and it was joyous – I never thought I would see this in my lifetime, quite frankly,” Moravec said. “And so that’s what this piece is about, as well. It’s about exuberance, it's about freedom, it’s about celebration.”
The work sizzles with the energy of revolution champing at the bit. Chorale-like tunes and sparkling counterpoint weave a glimmering tapestry. And in the final movement, pizzicatos represent the sounds of pickaxes chipping at the wall.
“If there’s a structure involved here, apart from the Brandenburg Gate, it’s really about the Berlin Wall,” Moravec said.
The most recent work on the recording, Scorpio Dances (2019), is inspired by George Steinmetz’s renowned aerial shots of rippling, undulating desert forms. Moravec said the vastness of the views and the possibilities latent in Steinmetz’s pictures were some of what he found striking.
“Also, they seem to be organic forms. I mean, these enormous sand dunes and so on. There’s something beautifully living about these landscapes,” Moravec said.
The lifeforce of Stravinsky’s great neo-classical ballet scores bristles at the opening of Moravec’s Scorpio Dances, which then seem to expand time much like a view from an airplane window opens a vista. And the dances suggest that life continues to expand into the celestial realm, well beyond the limits of the space- and time-bound structures here on Earth.
“The final image in the ballet is (of) these dancers making this beautiful rendering with their bodies of the Scorpio constellation,” Moravec said. “It’s great.”
