She decided to “let go of the reins of the tyrannical storyteller,” and allow the ending to be “co-devised by the people who are actually in the room bringing the story through their bodies” in real time instead. That’s not inherently bad, but I just thought, wow, wouldn’t it be fun, when you finally have the baton, to be like, forget batons, you know?” she said in a panel discussion after the debut. “There was something about being a writer collaborating with a very important figure, where I was feeling this kind of creepy power of telling this story and getting to put my spin on it. spalding did not write a pre-defined ending. In act three, the “open tense” takes over, to the extent that no one in the company on or off stage knows precisely what will happen. The “open tense” of spalding’s Iphigenia is improvisational as well, as she uses wordless vocal improvisation to break out of the myth, its notation, and its orchestration. The group plays onstage during acts two and three, with no musical notation to follow besides the “windows” Shorter wrote into the score, during which they’re invited to improvise. Some of this “real magic”-and the most obvious jazz element in the opera-is Shorter’s jazz trio (Danilo Pérez on piano, John Patitucci on bass, and Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums). Photograph by Jeff Tang courtesy of Real Magic Shorter, pictured here in his office, composed the entire score painstakingly by hand. He was integral in many of jazz’s greatest groups and moments-first as the primary composer of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, then as the “intellectual musical catalyst” of the Miles Davis Quintet (according to Davis)-but he brought jazz into new territory with his group, Weather Report, that pioneered jazz fusion. Her latest album, Songwrights Apothecary Lab, was designed with neuroscientists and music therapists to have healing effects on the listener, and she’s currently developing the Sonic Healing Lab at Harvard with a similar aim. Since then, her work has spanned genres like funk and pop, but what seems to interest her most is sound itself. Thirty-seven-year-old spalding, named “The 21 st Century’s Jazz Genius” by National Public Radio, made a name for herself in as an upright bassist, composer, and singer with a talent for improvisation, but she entered the popular music consciousness when her classical-jazz fusion album, Chamber Music Society, won her the 2011 Grammy Award for Best New Artist (and beat out the favored-to-win Justin Bieber). Writing an opera about a Greek tragedy may seem a bit unexpected from Shorter and spalding, whose names are basically synonymous with two-generations-worth of jazz.
Finally, in act three, Iphigenia of the Open Tense is forced back into the story and, as Ganglani wrote, “offered the opportunity to let go of the myth and show us all how to make something else.” However, in act two, the myth pauses for a moment and the previously sacrificed Iphigenias share their stories with the not-yet-sacrificed sixth Iphigenia (“Iphigenia of the Open Tense,” played by spalding), in the hopes that she can write a new ending. In act one, the Greek soldiers sacrifice five separate Iphigenias, symbolizing both the ubiquity of the virgin sacrifice in myth and the “cyclical time of trauma,” according to the opera’s dramaturg Sunder Ganglani. But in this reimagination-with set design by Frank Gehry, a cappella arrangements by Pulitzer-prize-winner Caroline Shaw, and direction by Lileana Blain-Cruz-Shorter and spalding “de-script” the tragedy, allowing a “multiplicity” of Iphigenias to imagine a new sequence of events. In the original myth, the goddess Artemis demands that Agamemnon, commander of the Greeks, sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, in exchange for favorable winds on their voyage to Troy. Shorter’s score and spalding’s libretto reimagines Euripides’s last tragedy, Iphigenia in Aulis. Wayne Shorter, the 88-year-old, 11-time Grammy-winning saxophonist “generally acknowledged to be jazz’s greatest living composer” ( New York Times), once said, “For me, the word ‘jazz,’ means, ‘I dare you.’” Last Friday, November 12, at the Cutler Majestic Theater in Boston, Shorter and Harvard professor of the practice of music esperanza spalding (who does not capitalize her name) brought that spirit to the opera world with the debut of …(Iphigenia), presented by ArtsEmerson and the New England Conservatory.