|
Article Excerpt
Listening, as a critical practice, fundamentally alters the interaction between audience and text from passive to participatory, but the question remains as to what enables this listening to be political. In George Elliott Clarke's jazz opera Quebecite, listening happens on and off the page, among performers, musicians, librettist, composer, director, and audiences. Premiered at the Guelph Jazz Festival in 2003, Quebecite performs a combination of texts: Clarke's libretto, published as Quebecite: A Jazz Fantasia in Three Cantos, and the musical score, composed by D.D. Jackson, whose collaboration with Clarke continues with the scoring of Clarke's subsequent libretto, Trudeau. A second production of Quebecite took place in Vancouver alongside the conference "Transcultural Improvisations: Performing Hybridity," organized by Sneja Gunew and held at the University of British Columbia in October 2003; thus, from this performance history, a dialogue has already begun between the terminology of "transcultural improvisations" (Gunew 125) and Quebecite itself, a dialogue that I continue in this paper by asking how sound offers a particular medium through which to theorize the cultural crossings of these improvisations. Set on the apple-blossomed streets of Quebec City, with the iconic Chateau Frontenac in the backdrop, Clarke's libretto Quebecite sings the story of two multicultural couples--Laxmi Bharati and Ovide Rimbaud, and Malcolm States and Colette Chan--whose loves are thwarted and recovered as they negotiate familial, personal, and cultural prejudices. Colette, a University of Laval law student, must decide whether to abide by her Chinese parents' disapproval of her love for Malcolm, an Africadian saxophonist. Laxmi, a Hindu architecture student from Montreal, questions the fidelity of her lover, Haitian-Quebecois architect Ovide, and refuses to allow him to cast her as what she calls "une lascivite proprement asiatique" (Clarke 80). Through Clarke's libretto and Jackson's score, these characters negotiate cultural identifications within visual and acoustic spaces that simultaneously reify and unfix differences. While difference need not necessarily connote dissonance, the reception of Quebecite frames the cultural differences between characters in terms of whether or not they sound alike. The female characters--Laxmi Bharati as sung by Kiran Ahluwalia and Colette Chan as sung by Yoon Choi--sparked extensive debate among critics regarding issues of dissonance, and therefore I ask how these characters, in particular, embody political action through sound. Situating this question amid current debates on performing multiculturalism (Bannerji; Kamboureli; Gunew), I argue that Quebecite exemplifies the ways in which sound offers a medium through which to redefine understandings of multicultural and multivocal improvisations.
The work of jazz and literary critic Ajay Heble (artistic director of the Guelph Jazz Festival who commissioned the production of Quebecite' for the festival's tenth anniversary) outlines the theoretical background to the approach to listening that I apply to Quebecite in this paper. Although his writing on jazz provides the most relevant connection, I argue that this writing needs to be contextualized by his essay "New Contexts for Canadian Criticism: Democracy, Counterpoint, Responsibility." Here, Heble makes the compelling claim that Glenn Gould's radio documentary The Idea of North necessitates a responsible, contrapuntal listening. Since Gould's editing techniques allow for all voices to speak simultaneously, Heble contends that this simultaneity not only democratizes the voice but also implicates audiences in the production of meaning out of this dissonance--requiring a participation that Quebecite's characters are themselves conscious of, for example when Laxmi sings to Ovide in the opening scene, "You've invited me to savour jazz" (19). Furthermore, Gould's technique of polyphonic counterpoint highlights the interstitial space of what Heble calls " cultural listening" (86), which permits cross-cultural listening to take place along the lines of Edward Said's notion of "a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and that of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts" (qtd. in Heble 87). In this argument, Heble suggests that if we learn to practise new modes of cultural listening, then there exists the potential to unsettle processes of identity formation: "If identity, as Gould's contrapuntal method invites us to see, is multiple, dialogic, and ever-evolving, then what is at issue is, in large part, an attack on forms and structures of authority, on constructions and representations which authoritatively claim to be able to have access to some pure, definitive, or whole truth about, say, the identity of Canada" (90). While Clarke's libretto is not written in contrapuntal verse, both the visual and acoustic signifiers of Quebecite produce a multi-vocal effect that enables a version of this ongoing, reciprocal cultural listening.
D.D. Jackson's score for Quebecite is composed of lush, scintillating jazz. In this hybrid performance of jazz opera, as heard in the Guelph and Vancouver performances of Jackson's score, the music balances melodic love scenes with dissonant wails of characters' voices fighting against the politics and prejudices that prevent them from musically fulfilling their desires. For instance, Colette and Malcolm fall in love amid the soft sound of their duet, in which their words sing for exquisite accompaniment:
Lushly, a dewed light falls, blushing branches. It clears what doubts had pressed down leaves and lets kissed lips-- lilacs, lilies, tulips-- flourish, lushly flourish. (28)
As if the libretto can already imagine how the piano keys press down softly like this image of pressed leaves, the characters utter the words, "it's your music that resembles / beautiful, fragrant, apple blossoms" (29). Yet the music of this couple changes dramatically at the end of Act II, when Colette tells Malcolm of her parents' disapproval. The music rages with his anger, culminating in his leaving of the jazz cafe, La Revolution Tranquille, with the statement, "We'll put our silver instruments / And our sable music away. Away! / This ain't no time for innocence" (71). Thus, while the music is often harmonious jazz, there are moments of dissonance that respond to cultural dissonances among characters themselves. (1) It is in this sense that I hear Quebecite through Heble's book Landing on the Wrong Note, in which he aims "to postulate a theory of musical dissonance as social practice" (170). While Heble's study includes musicological elements, its focus is on the discursive community that constructs our perception of sound as wrong, or rather on "sounds (and, more generally, cultural practices) that are 'out of tune' with orthodox habits of coherence and judgment" (9). He explains how this playing "out of tune" allows for a re-imagining of the self, which results in his questioning of what role "dissonant jazz played for subordinated social groups struggling to achieve control over the ways in which their identities have been constructed, framed, and interpreted" (9). It is this discursive element of dissonance that I apply to Quebecite, because it provides a model for understanding how identities--such as Laxmi's and Colette's--are politicized as improvisatory and continually in flux. Heble's "Postlude" to the libretto supports this reading of Laxmi's and Colette's identities because he hears the spaces for...
|
