On repeating Penelope
By Emily Pillinger
As a Latinist who works on Roman literature, which is often seen as nothing but a pale imitation of Greek ‘originals’, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about repetition. In fact I’ve spent a fair bit of time writing about it too, including its sonic dimension. While Cheryl and Jeanne were starting to write an opera, I spent the first months of the Covid-19 lockdown mulling over some reflections that became the essay ‘Echoes of Eurydice’.
Today I sat listening to Cheryl and Jeanne once again introduce Penelope’s Web to a roomful of people, this time in Keble College, Oxford, at an event called ‘Penelope's Song: Beginning to write an Odyssey Opera’. Cheryl is starting a residency at Keble and will be spending some time there working on this project.
The discussion then moved around to last year’s production at St Hilda’s college, ‘The Alternative Queen’s Speech’, in which the single Penelope was multiplied several times over. It struck me that Penelope’s Web, in a way that any Latinist should be proud of, makes a virtue of repetition. It’s not just that Penelope changes, but that the project itself changes as it moves from one space to another, as it’s performed by and shared with one group of people and then another. Even Penelope’s weaving and unweaving seems particularly appropriate for a project that is repeatedly reconstructing her character, both the same again and again but also always slightly different. (We should come back to weaving in another blogpost. Check out Dora Wheeler’s beautiful piece of needlework on this theme here.)
Only a couple of weeks ago we saw at King’s how Penelope’s plaintive ‘waiting... and waiting…’ becomes increasingly charged musically, while the words stay the same. Cheryl has mentioned before how much she enjoys it when music does something a little different from the words: how music can ramp things up emotionally by building on what the words suggest even as the words stay the same. She has also talked about how music can go further, and not just emphasise but also create acoustic tensions with the words it sets.
What struck me today is how this plays out in the specific moments when singers have sections where they suddenly sing in unison - that is, where the notes are the same from one singer to another, although the words may be changing. Musical tensions, once delivered by the different voices and instrumentation working in counterpoint, continue to resound when the two singing Penelopes briefly come together to double their lines. Even though we technically have a perfect ‘repetition’ in these moments, in the sense that more than one person is producing the same notes at the same time, we have been primed to listen for difference, for individuality. We don’t have a sense of choral unity - for good or ill. (Choral unity - that’s another subject for a future blogpost, too!)
Cheryl and Jeanne have both reflected on how unusual this mode of creation feels to them. As individual creative artists, there is a real novelty - excitement, and trepidation too - about the level of teamwork required by holding repeated workshops at such an early stage in the composition process. It is a challenge to get the right balance between the cacophony of collective visions and voices from one workshop to another, and the individual creative decisions needed to make sense of them all. It will be really interesting to see what happens when Jeanne and Cheryl start writing for collective voices, for the enslaved girls, or the suitors, and for different choral groups. Watch this space!