Laura Kaminsky on her New Opera, Lucidity, and the Power of Music in Combatting Cognitive Decline
On November 14, On Site Opera will present the world premiere of Lucidity, a new opera that addresses the widespread issue of cognitive decline. Almost seven million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s and that number is expected to rise to 13 million by 2050. Performed during Alzheimer’s Awareness Month, Lucidity explores the power of music in bringing humans a sense of cohesion and clarity when dealing with memory loss. The story unfolds through the complex relationships of four individuals brought together in a music therapy trial designed to treat dementia: Lili is a retired singer facing cognitive decline while her son, Dante, has put his own music career on hold to care for her; a young clarinetist, Sunny, is trying to find her path in music school; and, Dr. Claire Klugman is a former singer who has become a neuroscientist.
David Cote (Photo: Jody Christopherson)
With music by renowned composer Laura Kaminsky and a libretto by acclaimed librettist and arts journalist David Cote, this work is co-produced by On Site Opera and Seattle Opera and will be performed first in New York City from November 14 through 16 at Abrons Arts Center, located on 466 Grand Street at Pitt Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The composer of Lucidity, Laura Kaminsky, tells us about this special, innovative opera that holds such universal relevance.
How did “Lucidity” come into being?
David Cote, my wonderful, incredible librettist had reached out to me to talk about maybe doing a project together. We liked each other’s work, so we started meeting, and as we met, various themes emerged. I also have a friend and colleague in the soprano Lucy Shelton. I have known her as a fan from my time as a student, and I saw her perform. Over the years we became friendly and began having a kind of regular get-together where we would play Scrabble and talk. One day, I went to her house, and we were about to play Scrabble when she asked me what I was working on. I said: Well, I’m writing my second opera; I have it with me. She said: “May I take a look?” I opened up the score and she sang through almost the whole piece, pointing out various vocal and musical aspects and possibilities. We never played Scrabble. And so, I started to bring her my works as I was developing them and ask for guidance. She became a mentor.
When Lucy was about to turn 75, I helped convince her to do a celebratory concert of her favorite songs and vocal chamber music, and it was one of the most delightful, beautiful experiences ever. It was a full house, and the audience was singing with her at the end, and everybody was just having a great time. I said: Lucy, you can’t quit, you sound great, and she asked: “Well, when are you going to write me something?” During this time, I was dealing with my dad who was suffering from dementia, and David Cote had spent a while caring for his wife who passed away from cancer. So, David and I started talking about our own struggles with caregiving and loss, and suddenly, I said: What if we made an opera that comes from some of these emotions that are so real for us, but it’s not our story, and Lucy was in it? He liked the idea.
We started to develop a story about an older singer who was in the early stages of dementia. Her adopted son, who is Black, gives up his career as a pianist because he is fed up with the music business, and he becomes his mother’s caregiver. She doesn’t want him to sacrifice for her so there are all of these tensions between them, and all the pain of watching someone you love start to not be who they are, with them aware of that. Then, we created the character of the neuroscientist who is conducting a memory study using music as a way to help patients with dementia; there’s a lot of work around that. My father was actually in a chorus for people with dementia, and he could sing every lyric of every song. It brought him peace and it helped him focus. It’s amazing!
Having been a psychology major in college, not a music major, I was fascinated by the brain and so this thread of music and memory became a leitmotif when David and I started making up the characters. Then, lo and behold, we created a treatment for a four-person chamber opera that dealt with music and memory, and there are secret discoveries among the four characters that touch on all of these issues. Now we’re so blessed because not only does the opera open in New York City, but it immediately goes to Seattle, then Houston, later Ithaca, and Tri-Cities Opera in upstate New York. There’s interest from several other places around the country and in Europe.
Lucidity image by Bowie Dunwoody
So many people have some connection in their lives to someone suffering from dementia that there’s a kind of universal humanity in the piece. What is amazing is that Lucy Shelton just turned 80 and we’re honoring that. The depth of maturity and the craftsmanship, the brilliance of her musicianship and her worldliness will bring such gravitas and beauty to the character of Lili. She’s such a great actor, so sensitive and so smart. The woman who’s playing the neuroscientist, Blythe Gaissert, is somebody who has been on my opera journey. I came to this field kind of late. I composed my first opera, As One, in my late 50s. I had never thought about writing opera in my life, and even though she did not premiere the role because it was already for Sasha Cooke, Blythe did all the developmental workshops of the piece, so she was the first person to sing any of my operatic work. I have now written the fifth opera that she has been involved in as lead role. Lucidity is absolutely an ensemble piece about these interweaving stories of four people and there isn’t really one role that’s the star; they’re all the stars. It’s very much chamber music.
From your research, what struck you the most about the impact that music can have on our brains?
I’m not a scientist, but of course David and I both have read a lot. The research that’s being done now about the music impact on the brain is very fertile and rich. There’s a recent book called Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness that was edited by Renée Fleming. It’s an encyclopedia of essays by scientists, artists, creative arts therapists, educators, and healthcare providers. We did a panel discussion on this topic with Renée Fleming and a neuroscientist a few weeks ago. Dr. Oliver Sacks was a primary researcher in this area and he was a music lover. He wrote a book called Musicophilia. He had a colleague he worked with, Dr Concetta Tomaino; she was actually David’s resource to make sure all the science and all the metaphors we were using as poetic artistry held up scientifically. This is not a science, but we didn’t want to have any wrong information, so Dr. Tomaino was our guide. She did a panel discussion with us earlier in the process. What is most interesting is that music engages more parts of the brain than any other human activity. There is this awareness that, even if some part of your brain is suffering any kind of decay or breakdown, all of these other channels are activated in music, which actually propels positive function, more synapses firing, and more connections. Let me read you the opening lines of the opera in David’s beautiful libretto; they say it all:
“There is a place in the brain where music lives, where music plays, time cannot touch it, through music we reach into that place and open the hidden door to bring out memory, sound is with us from the beginning to the end in the womb at 18 weeks of life before our body has fully formed, we hear the beat of our mother’s heart keeping time with our own; as we pass, the last thing we sense no matter how faint and weak we feel, we hear the voice of those by our side speaking, crying, praying. Sound, miraculous sound.”
That’s fascinating! Learning a new language is also a way to combat cognitive decline, and music is a language on multiple levels—or a combination of languages—because you also have the lyrics. Do people tend to remember lyrics easier than anything else? Is there something about words being set to music that keeps that memory of them alive longer?
My dad who, despite his dementia, knew every member of the family, was confused about reality and fantasy, which was really painful, and he really suffered. The day before he passed away, I had lunch with him, my mother, and one of my sisters, and I went out with my mom to give her a little respite. My sister stayed with my dad who was really weak, and she put on the Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett recording. Apparently, my dad sat up and sang the entire thing; he knew all the songs. The high point of his week, every week, had been going to sing in a chorus for people with memory loss.
To answer your questions: I think it’s the music that helps memory, because music moves around in your body, activates more parts of your brain, and stimulates your heart. An interesting study was done several years ago: during a Broadway show, there was an agreement that everybody in the theater that day would have a monitor put on their heart and they would record everybody’s heart rates throughout the show. There was every kind of heart in that theatre, from the performers and crew feeling the adrenaline to different kinds of people in the audience. At the end, they discovered that people’s heart rates all started to come together and beat almost as one. When we talk about the universality of music, there’s something about those sound waves bouncing around that stimulates intellectually and emotionally. It’s a place where mind and body and soul all become joined.
Lucidity image by Bowie Dunwoody
What was important for you to convey musically in this piece?
First of all, there is a piece of music by Schubert, a song for clarinet, soprano, and piano called “The Shepherd on the Rock” that is a theme that runs through the opera. Lili, the character that Lucy plays, is an older soprano and music teacher who had a very distinguished career. This song was one of the pieces deeply embedded in her memory because she sang it on her recital when she was launching her career, and she made a famous recording of it. Actually, Lucy herself did make an important recording of it, and we’re using fragments of that. The metaphors in that poetry are about being alone, hearing an echo, and finding your way in the dark. It makes you imagine someone lonely, suffering from the sense of losing themselves.
But this is really an ensemble piece so while it’s about Lili who has dementia, it’s also about her adopted son Dante who really doesn’t know where he belongs; the music world didn’t give him great opportunities because of all the prejudices that exist. He’s using his mom’s sickness as an excuse to give everything up, so there’s that struggle between parent and child, and questions of what family is, and what your career is, what you sacrifice and what you don’t. So many people sacrifice in their prime to care for people with dementia, and while the person with dementia is starting to lose themselves, there can be questions like: Who am I doing this for, and how do I do it? On both sides, there is pain and anger, but there is also gratitude, so that dynamic was important.
I understand that the staging will unsettle tradition by having the audience sit on the stage as the story takes place in the theater, so the performers are seeing the witnesses to their stories onstage. What do you think that does to the audience and the story?
David and I are really curious about this because we didn’t conceive that when we wrote the piece. The Artistic Director of On Site Opera, Sarah Meyers, our brilliant stage director, came up with this concept. She said that by placing much of the action in and around the theater with the audience onstage, the story also becomes a memory piece of Lili’s life when she was a performer, but now the audience is where she would have been as a performer. There are going to be spotlights in places where different parts of the action take place. Most of the story unfolds in Lili and Dante’s apartment and a bit in Dr. Klugman’s office, but these are just random spaces with a few set pieces in a theater that’s filled with memories. From the design drawings that David and I have seen, it’s incredibly beautiful and poetic.
What do you hope that the audience will take away with them after seeing this opera?
David and I want to tell a story that anybody in that audience can relate to in some aspect, because it’s about shared human truth. We made up this story but the message of these characters’ journeys in all of their interactions, hopes, fears, joys, and anger is what we all experience. I hope that people will walk away loving the words, the music, the singers, and feeling like they’ve been seen and heard. I hope the opera also helps them process, understand, and be more sympathetic to themselves and to each other.
David and I, along with our whole company, believe in these characters and in this story. It will touch everybody because it’s so universally true. Opera gets a bad rap sometimes as an elitist art form. Let me just say that going to the opera is a lot cheaper than going to a baseball game! It’s not elitist, and it was never meant to be that way. It’s about the most non-elitist art form because it’s about storytelling. The contemporary opera world is so rich and so alive; there’s so much new work being made that tells stories of our time about the issues that are confronting us in the world today. These are stories people want to hear, and the fact that they have music, movement, lighting, and sets also make them fun, theatrical experiences. Opera, from grand to chamber opera, is for all the people. Our opera doesn’t sound necessarily operatic in a traditional grand opera way. It’s very intimate; you will be close to the action, right there with it, so it will feel very real.
Top: Laura Kaminsky (Photo: Rebecca Allan)
