Sunset with Pink Pastoral - Presentation

Summary/Synopsis

Christian Asplund, Composer (American);
Lara Candland, Librettist (American)
Conductor: Stuart Stratford

Listen to music from this piece...

The setting is the highways of the Arizona and Southern Utah desert. We observe several characters and their interaction with this starkly beautiful environment through their automobiles, their knees, a Greyhound bus, their sheep, an Amtrak, the Circle K. The travellers' lives intersect but never quite connect. They pass over the land but never really touch it, and the opera continues through a series of near interactions until the characters finally realize that they need to connect to the land and to a community in order to truly find home.

We begin in media res with Milk and Karen on the road when their car breaks down. They are on the way to Karen's mother in Utah where they will to introduce her to their baby Violet.

Their paths intersect with Juliet, who travels from Denver to Los Angeles on the Sunset Limited, having just attended her mother's funeral. Karen and Victoria sing Juliet's story as we see Juliet projected behind the two singers. After Milk and Karen get back on the road, we learn more about Milk's obsession with cars and with the Native American lifestyle.

Their paths intersect with Caitlin and her baby Bella, who are riding the Greyhound bus away from Caitlin's abusive husband in Tucson. Along the road, Milk and Karen pick up the hitchhiker Knee Patch, a Vietnam vet whose legs are amputated at the knee, and who wears leather patches in lieu of shoes. Their paths intersect with Victoria and Cliff, who are on their honeymoon and are about to discover that she is pregnant. Their paths intersect with Johnson, a man who grew up in Phoenix, but who now lives in New York City, and who is depressed about leaving the West to go back to his job in New York.

Their paths intersect with Earth Knower, a painting by Maynard Dixon that comes to life, and then shows up again in a photograph by Dixon's then-wife Dorothea Lange.

Their paths also intersect with Earth Fred and Earth Dude, apparitions of Earth Knower. Earth Dude is on a journey to find his true home, like the rest of the travellers, except he is returning to the reservation on the desert while they are moving away from it.

Dixon, Lange, and Sister Wendy all make cameo appearances. They further the commentary on the nature of objectification in art and the connection between the layers of distance created between the subject and the viewer in art, the same way Milk and Karen and Cliff and Victoria are discovering the distance that is placed between themselves and a true centre or home by the automobile.

The Narrator also provides ironic commentary on each traveller's journey throughout the opera. He shows the audience an omniscient view of the paths, both literally and figuratively, that the various characters are following.

In the final scene, all of the characters' paths intersect and they sing the sheep song, "I Was Not Afraid," about the safety and security that Earth Fred felt when he was a small child walking in the middle of his parents' herd of sheep. In the end, the herd comes to represent community and human connection. The other singers realize that being connected to others and to the land is the only way to be "not afraid."

The Composition of Sunset with Pink Pastoral
by Christian Asplund, Composer

We began with the finale because it is somewhat of a summation of what has come before.

The paths of the travellers converge, both spatially and musically in this scene. In the penultimate song we hear juxtaposed snippets from the travelling songs of each character or pair of characters, united by a shared groove that represents the stationary surface (road, rails, sand) over which the vehicles (car, bus, train, knee-patches) move. One by one they enter the musical world of Earth Dude. Finally they all join in singing the words of Old-Man-Hat together.

This scene is necessarily fairly dense. I envision the previous sections as being much more spacious and expansive, involving more silence and more speech. Each character or couple will have its own musical characteristics, derived, in part, from the music of the final scene. The narrator will play a subtle but distinctive role as some kind of professor, docent, corporate power-point presenter, Greek chorus hybrid.

All in all, the final scene provides somewhat of a microcosm or template of the entire work and of the world.

The Creative Development Process of Sunset with Pink Pastoral
by Lara Candland, Librettist

Libretto

Sunset with Pink Pastoral grew from a movie that has played in my head again and again, been edited and revised, expanded and cut, from the first time I made the twelve-hour car trip from my childhood home in Mesa, Arizona., to my grandmother's house in Provo, Utah. The red, purple and pink landscape of the desert that stretched between these two destinations left a canyon of images and emotions inside me. The rocks, mesas, and cliffs, in their prehistoric formations, as foreign and intriguing as a lunar landscape, seemed to grow legs and walk around in my imagination.

I have made numerous attempts at setting a work in this location, in both poetry and short stories, but have always felt a need to create something for the stage in order to do a modicum of justice to this staggeringly beautiful, mysterious, and frightening landscape. Terry Tempest Williams writes, in her ode to this part of the country, ". . . this landscape of minimalism will take on greater significance, reminding us through its blood red grandeur just how essential wild country is to our psychology, how precious the desert is to the soul of America."

When the opportunity to write a proposal for Genesis came up, I knew I had finally found the right project in which to grow this seed that I had saved for so long. I started the project with two toys to be explored in a rather intuitive and primitive way, two colliding images: the ancient landscape of the desert and the contemporary phenomenon of the car and highway.

As I began to write and research more deeply, I thought about the different layers of distance we contemporary, western "civilized" people put between our selves and the land.

The paved highway is the first layer, and the glass, steel, and tires of the automobile the second, and not only do these layers come between human beings and the landscape, they also separate human beings from other human beings.

When sheep and horses were introduced to the Navajo, or Dina people, in the sixteenth century by the Spaniards, a slow and inexorable change came over the community, for both good and for ill. On one hand, the people were able to have a plentiful and steady food supply from their sheep. On the other hand, in order to have adequate grazing land for their herds, families had to spread out and move away from each other, by changing their traditional religious ceremonies and lifestyles.

Lynn R. Bailey, in his book on Navajo shepherds, writes: "Pastoral societies are by nature aggressive and expansionistic, and whether in the African Sudan or on the Eurasian Steppes, they will set their eyes upon the horizon and will - if not stopped by force of man or the whims of nature - expand to the limits of the environment."

On one level, the sheep are to the Navajo as the cars are to the urban and suburban American, a tool for hitherto unforeseen prosperity, but also a phenomenon that has the potential to destroy traditional lifestyles, values, and ultimately the land itself and the human being's ability to sustain life. This is the essential drama and conflict that I see unfolding in Sunset with Pink Pastoral: the contemporary American phenomena of the nomadic middle-class, and the longing for a centre, a home, for which both Native and non-Native Americans yearn.

Casting at the Workshop

Karen Natalie Raybould Soprano
Victoria Tara Harrison Soprano
Milk Hal Cazalet Tenor
Narrator Henry Moss Tenor
Knee Patch Damian Thantrey Baritone
Cliff Richard Jackson Baritone
Earth Knower/Earth Fred/Earth Dude Keel Watson Bass-Baritone

Repititeur: Stephen de Pledge

Instrumentation

Alto Flute, Violin, 2 Harps, 2 Cellos, 2 Double Basses (1 of which needs a C extension), Electric Guitar, Electric Bass Guitar, Percussion.

Technical Requirements

Slide, video and/or film projections