Ellis Ludwig-Leone x San Fermin ft. Eliza Bagg, Adam Quartet
Fri 15. March 8.30pm @ Hertz
Ellis Ludwig-Leone leads a musical double life. In addition to being the leader of the New York indie band San Fermin, he is also a classical composer and songwriter. Just like composer Bryce Dessner, who is also a songwriter for The National. As the successor to Dessner, who performed at Birds of Paradise last year, it is now up to Ludwig-Leone to show his multifaceted side. ‘Classically’ in False we hope: a breathtakingly beautiful and moving song cycle, which Ludwig-Leone wrote for soprano Eliza Bagg (Lisel, Roomful of Teeth) during the pandemic. He takes place behind the piano himself, supported by the four violinists of the ADAM Quartet.
After the break, Ludwig-Leone will perform together with his band San Fermin in a special acoustic setting. Joined again by the ADAM Quartet and Eliza Bagg as special guests.
A unique line-up and world premiere with arrangements from the new San Fermin album Arms, which will be released in February. Only show in Europe!
Remy Alexander in conversation with Ellis Ludwig-Leone and soprano Eliza Bagg about their long history of collaboration. Ellis also talks about how he works as a composer for the band on the one hand and in his chamber music on the other.
To celebrate that Birds of Paradise has the honor of hosting San Fermin’s only show in Europe, their first Dutch show since 2017, our in-house designer Mees Joachim was asked to design a special T-shirt for this occasion. The design stems from the idea of making a connection between the aesthetics of classical music and grindcore: something you could perhaps call ‘BA-ROCK’ aesthetics. The T-shirt design is directly linked to Ellis Ludwig-Leone’s avatar and Artist Room, from which various items are incorporated.
In composition and content, it is based on the visual identity of San Fermin’s album and the accompanying songbook Arms. The artwork is characterized by an elliptical frame decorated with acanthus leaves containing a line-work version of the album cover. The T-shirt design follows the design of the songbook with a hand-drawn peace dove-orchid hybrid as the centerpiece and with the acanthus leaves replaced with photos of orchids in the same shape. Further decoration is freely associative, in which everything from a ‘steamboat dove’ to a Lady Gaga quote has been appropriated by Mees Joachim.
The T-shirt is for sale in a limited edition at the merch stand during the festival.
We call ourselves the Gondoliers. Four singing sisters, poling the canals of New Florida. There are other boats on the water, but only my sisters and I take passengers through Old City. According to Vi, when our mother was alive, people would count four girls seated behind her on the long skiff and reliably say, “Trying for the boy?” “As a matter of fact,” she’d snap, “God has blessed me with daughters. If I could, I’d make a hundred more.”
My sisters tell this story all the goddamn time. So often that it feels like my memory. She drowned when I was three years old, before the cameras in my mind turned on.
Our regulars suspect there’s more to our nasally singing than we let on. For sure they know it’s not Italian. “Lady, can I please pay you to shut up?” tourists have begged me. I used to think that we were very special, the best boatwomen in the world, but Viola says no, we are only vessels ourselves: something wants to be born. Perhaps there are many others like us around the bays of New Florida and elsewhere. Women who know enough to be silent about what is developing inside their bodies.
This sensitivity grew in us softly, softly. I can only compare it to seeing in the dark. We sing, and shapes tighten out of an interior darkness. Edges and densities. Objects sing back at us: Turn hard left to avoid the fallen tree. Pole southwest to miss the gluey hill of floating garbage. Pillars thin as lampposts push fuzzily into our minds; a heartbeat later they rear out of the bay, fatally real.
Our mother could not echolocate, according to my sisters. When I was a child, I found this frightening and sad. Imagine seeing a thousand colors streaking the sky and realizing that your mother saw only one unbroken gray. But Viola says our mother could hear us crying from impressive distances, and now I wonder if she had some precursor of this ability.
Our gift is not a true clairvoyance, or what
to be. There’s no time for anything like that. It’s more like a muscular intuition of what the water is going to do next. And with our poles flying, rattling the oarlocks, we move to accommodate the future of the river.
~
“You could be my age,” I tell my new last fare, “in the right lighting.”
“Yes.” He doesn’t turn, but I hear his smile. “Darkness is a real fountain of youth, isn’t it.”
We slice under the mangroves, riding high with the outgoing tide. His narrow face looks even leaner inside the slicker, like a spadeful of white clay. Nobody I know is so pale. We live on sunshine here, where the canals are inkwells of blinding light. Leaf freckles cover him and disappear again as we bob into the sun. I like knowing that my arms are the engine of this transformation. Masking and unmasking him.
But then I glimpse the real sea rolling beyond the bay, and I remember with a start: No, you really don’t know anything about him. Only surfaces and angles.
~
In this neighborhood of Bahía del Oro, pollution tints everything with phosphor. Mosses drop in shimmering clumps from the floating oar. I pole from starboard, my bare feet planted against the cypress boards. Orange plants with soft drunken voices slide around the hull, drawling a beautiful lace behind my eyelids.
Excerpt from Karen Russell – The Gondoliers
This gorgeous short story by Karen Russell was written during the same period that she and I were working on another project: the dance-opera The Night Falls, which premiered in the US last year. In The Night Falls, three Siren sisters harmonize in a grotto in central Florida, luring lost souls to an abandoned tourist trap. Karen and I had so much fun writing for these three ghostly voices that their harmonies later became the musical inspiration for False We Hope, presented here at Birds of Paradise.
The Gondoliers features a group of singing sisters who share a telepathic musical
connection. Their voices, winding in and out of harmony with each other, become echolocation devices that allow the sisters to navigate their water taxis through the
flooded remains of a dystopian landscape called New Florida.
It was fascinating to read a draft of this story when Karen sent it to me in 2018, as we were in the thick of working on The Night Falls. I had been so busy channeling her words into music, that it was surprising and wonderful to see the process go the other way: music channeled into prose.
In the case of The Gondoliers, music is both a blessing and a curse. The sisters’ shared song is an adaptation that allows them to survive: to navigate through a harsh world, to make a living, to stay connected to each other. But the price of this connection is an unrelenting awareness of each other at all times— an inability to ever leave, to never have a moment alone.
One of the most rewarding things about a special artistic collaboration is that both sides are forever changed by the experience. To truly collaborate is to live in someone else’s mind, to learn the contours of their imagination, like The Gondoliers’ song, and to learn to harmonize with it. It made me very happy and proud to read this story, and to see the ways in which our shared collaboration seem to have woven its way into Karen’s own work.
Ellis Ludwig-Leone
This transcription is a measure of the distances between sounds and their captors. My earliest memory: silence, a waterbird’s insistence, hovering. There are some currents that take up anything when that falls. I took up the yarn, wound it repeatedly around the hands. I said my earliest memory is of rabbits darkening warrants. A swarm of hornets is articulate. There is no difference between sound and communication; I am satisfied if the strong consonants trigger memory. It is quiet here. Let speech be heron.
Carrey McHugh
I don’t often set poetry as lyrics, because poems have their own delicate music, and to overwrite that with mine feels like trampling on a carefully tended garden. But as soon as I read this poem by Carey McHugh, I knew I wanted to try to translate the feeling it gave me into music. There’s a buzzing energy to the words, so much auditory imagery packed into six and a half lines. Every word is alive but slightly electrified, supernatural. It’s warm and organic but also thorny, shaded and a bit dangerous. Semantic meaning dances away maddeningly, just out of reach. I decided to organize my piece around four lines in the poem that evoked, to me, the sounds of a human voice, without the clarifying logic of speech.
The first movement, “Strong Consonants,” evokes stuttering and chattering teeth, punctuated by violent shivers. I allowed this stuttering texture to evolve into a quieter, more ruminative place by the end of the movement (“It is quiet here”).
For the second movement, I took her first instruction at its word: “This is a transcription of the distances between sounds and their captors.” I imagined aggressive moments of overpressure tremolo as the bars of a prison, keeping the sounds of the instruments separate from their true selves.
The third movement, “Currents,” took its inspiration from the third sentence: “There are some currents that take up anything that falls.” I imagined a current of air moving in and out of the lungs. The beginning of this movement maps a “breathing” pattern of short cadences that resolve in unexpected ways. Eventually these short little breaths turn into longer, more Romantic lines that weave into and out of each other, flowing around little bumpy interruptions like rocks in a river. The fourth movement, “Silence,” comes from the second sentence: “My earliest memory: silence, a waterbird’s insistence, hovering.” I tried to set this programmatically, with little insistent bird cries and wingbeats that give way to a hovering swarm (“A swarm of hornets is articulate”).
As I wrote this piece, the meaning of her poem drifted in and out of focus for me, becoming both clearer and further away. I have lived for hours with these lines, yet I am still excitingly frustrated by it and unable to articulate what any of it means. But I suppose the answer has been in there all along, generously supplied by Carey near the end: “I am satisfied if the strong consonants trigger memory.” If the experience of hearing my piece knocks loose a memory, or takes you to a dream world both familiar and strange, I am happy.
Ellis Ludwig-Leone
This music video for “How to Resurrect a Loved One’s Voice,” is directed by Katrina Peterson. It was inspired by the lyrics of the song, written by Karen Russell, which describe hearing the voice of a lost loved one, séance-like, through old plumbing pipes. I knew I wanted the video to evoke the feeling of an empty house at night, with its strange mixture of domestic comfort and haunted history.
The music begins with just a low synth pulse, suggesting a beating heart under the floorboards. As the video crackles to life, it incorporates live footage of Eliza Bagg and Attacca Quartet performing the piece in my studio, distorted through the static of an old TV set in a spooky attic.
