[Text of the composer Vasco Mendonça about «American Settings», 2024]
In the autumn of 2016, I was in Brooklyn rehearsing a show when the infamous ‘hot mic’ incident involving Donald Trump occurred — where he was heard insulting women through a microphone that was supposed to be off. That very day, a sigh of relief ran through the entire creative team: it seemed impossible that Trump could survive politically after that scandal.
Obviously, that was not the case. Trying to understand what had happened in those elections, I developed over the following years a compulsive consumption of information, accompanied by a growing personal anxiety about the future, about people, about the planet — only to conclude that the answer was too complex to bring me any comfort.
The discovery of the poetry of Terrance Hayes and Tracy K. Smith, when I was seeking a way to deal with this unease in my work, was a revelation: here were two artists who, in the eye of the storm, somehow created an admirable balance between the current and the eternal, mixing languages and scales in a dynamic universe where nothing seemed left out. Vernacular and philosophy, carnal desire and metalanguage — everything combined in a dizzying and moving spiral of words that were both meaning and music. And, pacified by discovering these unique poems, I composed in 2022, in a cathartic gesture, a song cycle for voice and percussion (now arranged for orchestra) that is a kind of imaginary folklore of America that exists in my head: a dizzying spiral of excess and transcendence that fascinates and terrifies me in equal doses. An idyll and an apocalypse with nothing in between.
In the two songs of contemplation, the voice slowly inscribes itself into the orchestral landscape, just as the narrator reveals to us the world that surrounds him — interior and abstract in Wind in a Box, the coast of Ilha das Flores in Flores Woman. In the two songs of address, the orchestra is like a second skin to the voice (rough and restrictive in the sonnet dedicated to Trump in The Umpteenth Thump), elastic and organic like the intimate tension in Semi-splendid.