“In classical music, humor just isn’t treated with the seriousness it deserves.”
The composer Michael Abels laughed when he said this, but he meant it. As the creator of the memorable scores for all three films by the director Jordan Peele — including the horror-thriller-satire “Get Out” (2017), which The Times recently named one of the 10 best films of the 21st century — Abels has mastered the art of writing music whose emotional heft is layered, sometimes with conflicting sensations.
At times, though, there’s nothing ambiguous or veiled in his work. On Friday and Saturday, the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, led by Jane Glover, will perform Abels’s orchestral piece “More Seasons” (1999). It’s a shot of pure whimsy: “Vivaldi in a Mixmaster,” as Abels put it in a recent video interview from his home in Los Angeles.
Abels pointed out that many composers — from Bach to Astor Piazzolla — have pulled Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” off the shelf to give it new twists. It’s just so much fun to play with, he said, and its familiarity gives license to joke around.
“In classical music, we have lots of pathos and tragedy and big subjects,” Abels said. “But humor is a really crucial, human, emotional connection that we don’t treat with, ironically, the seriousness it deserves.”
The conductor Jonathon Heyward, the music director for the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, said this was one reason he was excited to include Abel’s music.
“‘More Seasons,’” Heyward said in a recent video interview, “really fits into the natural ethos of how we like to program — this concept of how the past informs both the present and the future.” Heyward said this kind of cross-era conversation was echoed elsewhere on that program, which also includes the cellist Sterling Elliott playing Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme,” a Romantic-era take on an earlier compositional style.
Abels, 62, who was born in Phoenix, Ariz., trained as a pianist and studied composition at the University of Southern California. He wanted a career writing for film, but couldn’t find a successful entry point. Instead, he established himself in the classical world, teaching and writing concert music.
His big film break came in 2017, when Peele was searching for a Black composer to work with him on “Get Out.” Abels has frequently told this Cinderella story: Peele turned to YouTube, where he stumbled upon a performance of Abels’s “Urban Legends” — a concerto for string quartet and orchestra commissioned by the Sphinx Organization, a nonprofit that nurtures the careers of young Black and Latino classical musicians. From there, a partnership was born.
Now, programmers and audiences are discovering many of his works for the concert hall written before his mainstream success, like “More Seasons,” with its callback to Vivaldi.
“Vivaldi’s music is very minimalist,” he said. “I’ve always heard it that way.” From that starting point, he drove it as far as he could, nearly to its breaking point. “It’s a journey that begins very Baroquely,” Abels said, “in a way that might be purely traditional except for an occasional meter shift that I try to hide, that’s distinguishable only to those who are following along very acutely.”
“But then,” he continued, “I gradually twist the knob to the left, so you go, ‘Wait a minute!’ And then it goes a little bit more to the left, and a little more to the left. I wanted to see how far I could twist that knob and still have it sound Baroque. By the end of the work, it’s really fractured and deconstructed. I wanted the listener to hear the pointillistic parts of it that are still Baroque riffs, a kind of impressionistic collage of Baroque gestures.”
That kind of wit and kinetic energy will be familiar to fans of Abels’s work with Peele: the disquieting “gospel horror,” sung in Swahili, in “Get Out”; the creepy, not-at-all angelic children’s choir of “Us” (2019); and the bright, cornfed Americana of a scene in “Nope” (2022), which Abels sets up with folksy, Copland-esque harmonies just before space aliens attack an amusement park. (It’s no accident that both Abels and Peele know how to inject comedic beats into otherwise bone-chilling work.)
Film work remains central to Abels’s output; his coming projects include a score for a movie by the South Korean director Na Hong-Jin. He also founded the Composers Diversity Collective, an organization that seeks to help boost the screen industry careers of composers, sound engineers and musicians of diverse cultural backgrounds — the sort of professional scaffolding he had yearned for earlier in his career, when he was first trying to break into film.
Cinematic sweep and breadth are also hallmarks of the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera “Omar” (2022), which Abels wrote with Rhiannon Giddens. (The opera, which had its premiere at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C., is the somber retelling of the true story of Omar Ibn Said. Said was an enslaved man taken from his home in what is now Senegal and trafficked to South Carolina, and was the author of the only known surviving slave narrative written in Arabic.)
One thing Abels loves about working in opera, he said, is having an expansive canvas to let emotional moments fully breathe, without being beholden to a director’s sense of narrative tempo. “There’s so many more chances to not follow the pacing of filmed media,” he said, “to just allow a big musical, emotional, theatrical moment that could only happen in opera. It’s wonderful.”
But Abels said all of his work exists on an artistic continuum and that, for him, there is no divide between what he writes for the screen and what he writes for concert stages.
“I believe that all music is narrative, even concerti and symphonies and oratorios,” he said. “They’re all narrative. The canvas of music is time. We are all on a journey in our lives, and it takes place in time. An audience listening to music goes on a journey — your expectations may be completely confounded within that time, but you want to feel like that journey had value, and that it was worth your time.”
That includes making time for sheer play.
The post He Put Vivaldi ‘in a Mixmaster’ and Is Serious About Classical Humor appeared first on New York Times.
