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Interviews

Hope and Poetry On Mars: An Interview with Composer Joel Thompson

January 22, 2025
Rachel Summer Cheong

Composer Joel Thompson describes his creative process and his vision for his new work, On Mars for Soprano, Viola, and Piano, ahead of its premiere performances.

Nicky Swett: In your program note for On Mars, you describe reading Ariana Benson’s poetry book Black Pastoral and finding that “there are many poems in this collection that I dare not bother with my music as they are perfect just as they are.” What makes a poem too perfect to set to music for you?

Joel Thompson: Now I’m quibbling with my own phrasing: it’s not necessarily that it‘s too perfect. Some poems have a musicality all their own that my music would interfere with. That might not be the case for another interpreter of the poem. I have a radar set up in my brain for what my music might help to illuminate. There are a few poems in there that I just love as poems. She plays with space on the page. I love the way my eyes are moving from one corner of the page to another. I don’t know how I would translate that experience to a concert hall, so why would I mess with that?

NS: What are some of the ways that setting a text to music fundamentally changes its meaning or potentially alters what it does for a listener or reader?

JT: Music is another medium that’s interacting with the text. Looking at the way Stravinsky sets text very idiosyncratically, playing with stress and going against prosody sometimes, I wonder if the poets that he set were against the way that he set it. It obfuscates the meaning that the poet might intend, but it yields an idiosyncratically Stravinskyan entity. His artistic imagination overpowers whoever he’s interacting with.

The way I approach text, especially poetry, is there’s an initial love of my interaction with it. And then I want to dig deeper into my own experience of that text and help illuminate it for someone else to have their own journey with it. That was particularly the case with On Mars. In the process of setting the text, I came into a deeper understanding of it that I hope will help illuminate it for those who listen to the premiere. In a decade, if I were to set it again, I hope that the person I am in 10 years would set it differently because of a deeper understanding. It’s one of those texts that is so layered, so dense, that it could only ripen with age.

NS: The poem is written in three sections, and you chose to set each of those sections as separate movements. Could you tell me about what motivated that decision?

JT: I perceive her poem as a triptych, almost in a Christopher Nolan Inception way, in that each layer gets deeper and deeper into the same concept. It’s an Afrofuturistic concept that for the African diaspora—those who are perceived as Black through the social construct of race—there is nowhere on earth that we can escape anti-Black prejudice and discrimination. What if there was another place where we could just start over, where we could just exist and be? Each part of the triptych goes into this deeper. It’s like a dream within a dream within a dream. By the last one, she states the hope of a world in which Black people can just be in its most concise and true form. Rather than having it be one large thing, I wanted to feel those layers.

NS: How do you create a sense of continuation across the three parts?

JT: The opening is actually borrowing from Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet. There’s this cello flurry at the very beginning of the fourth movement, and I took those notes and that became the sound world of the first movement [of my piece]. Rather than going into a more post-tonal place, I go to E-flat major, and the viola actually quotes the soprano in Schoenberg’s quartet, who is dreaming of another world. But the next thing the viola plays after that quote is the hope theme: five notes that are present all the way through. It’s very simple. I wanted it to represent something distinct, like hope: something to aspire to. That becomes the material connecting all three movements. In all the instruments it’s present; on key words, it’s present. I like to work with little building blocks and see how I can play with them over the course of the piece to reflect my understanding of the poem.

NS:  Most song cycles are written for voice and piano. How did the inclusion of the viola impact your composing in this piece?

JT: It starts with simply voice and piano. It’s only when we move to the new world, where she’s describing Mars, that the viola comes in and is the sonic embodiment of that hope. This poem starts off in an almost dismissive way, wrestling with the fatigue of being Black in America: “I was never much one for astronomy: my basic grasp of the universe and it’s terrifying / contents satisfied me most of my life.” She’s so dismissive: she says, “I think I / didn’t go outside to witness the eclipse because I’ve spent too many moons waiting / for obstacles to pass between my world and its light.” It’s fatigue that she expresses, waiting for everyone to come to their senses and realize that collective liberation is within our grasp if we just recognize each other’s humanity. But then she moves to “I see that water has been found on Mars and I feel a knot that my heart urges my tongue / to curl into hope.” It’s a struggle to get to that place of hope, but that one little spark, that one little possibility of water on Mars, means that there can be some escape from this quandary that we find ourselves in. The viola becomes the embodiment of that spark and allows a vulnerability to occur.

In the second movement, there’s a more joyous feeling. It’s more buoyant, like, “if this is possible, let’s really imagine what joy we could feel on Mars.” There’s this line that I just love: “sipping tea / sweetened with spoonfuls of stardust.” I just have to repeat it because of the sibilance of it, the alliteration, the bounciness of it. I feel it just thinking about it: my chest opens just a little bit. I can relax. I don’t have to worry about being perceived in a way that I am not. No one policing my expression. It’s a pipe dream, but it’s nice to allow one’s imagination to go there. And that second movement is revelling in the joy of that possibility.

Then the last movement contemplates what that peace would feel like beyond the joy, beyond the initial, frenzied passion of escape. What does that contentment feel like where you can put your soul down and rest? The third part of the poem explores that, and I hope my music does it justice.

NS: You provide instructions and indications for players that add a personal dimension to what’s in the score. In a passage on the text “they’ll breathe,” you write that it should be played “imagining Eric [Garner] and George [Floyd] alive.” In light-hearted sections you instruct them to play with “not a care in the universe.” An increase in speed indicated by a change in metronome marking is accompanied by “The ache… becomes hope.” How do you decide when the players might need this verbal emphasis?

JT: This is a habit of mine, especially when I’m dealing with instrumental music that doesn’t have any text. I do have a little penchant for drama. My last orchestral work, To See the Sky, which was premiered last March with the New York Philharmonic, was also performed this past summer at the Aspen Music Festival, and one of the violists in that orchestra posted a video on Instagram with all of the captions, my wild and wacky tempo markings. I put all of my inner world in those tempo markings. They reveal what the composition process is for me. It is a journal practice. It is a way for me to document my interiority. It allows me to observe it and in many ways, move on from it. I struggle with chronic depression, and To See the Sky was a way for me to write myself out of it.

In the context of this piece, a line in the second part of the triptych is “Astral amphibians, they’ll breathe / purified pink sky through their skin.” That’s where the climax of the piece is. I think to those who don’t have the lived experience of being Black in America, one would wonder, why would you put the climax on that line? To me, Ariana Benson is being her most subversive at this point. Amphibians breathe through their skin, and so she is imagining a world in which we could breathe through the very thing that would cause us to be shot. “I can’t breathe” were the last words of Eric Garner and George Floyd, years apart. I have the singer hold “breathe” for as long as she possibly can, because it’s this statement of radical hope: that it could be possible in our present universe that we could “breathe purified pink sky through [our] skin.” She says it best. I just had to communicate the joy of that possibility.

Of course, we are on this planet, we’re here for a while. So the third movement starts with a little quote of [15th-century song] L’homme armé (“The Armed Man Must Be Feared”), asking what do we do here on Earth? The answer is in the third part [of Benson’s poem]. On Mars, there are no guns. I’m hoping that the subtext will be that one day on earth, there will be no guns. How nice would that be? Can we take this dream that we have of another world, Mars, and bring that dream here to Earth? “What good are bullets that can be batted down like balloons / bleeding air?” Ariana says. Trying to make that Afrofuturistic, impossible dream more real and more intimate and more true is the goal of my setting of the third part of this poem.

NS: What are you looking forward to hearing in the performance of the piece that’s coming up at CMS in January?

JT: I’m just excited. I haven’t heard this in a human voice yet. I haven’t heard the way it will feel with a piano and a viola. It’s just living in my imagination right now. That period between crafting the DNA for a new piece and its actual birth comes with all of the weight of a pregnancy. Will it be healthy? Will it find a life beyond its initial birth? Those questions are weighing on me right now.

This piece that is so rooted in Black experience is being performed by players who don’t have access to that lived experience. My hope is that it will still do its job. Ariana Benson didn’t write poetry only to be read by Black people. I don’t write music only to be heard by Black people. The composers that we laud in the canon tapped into their unique experience, whether it’s Dvořák and his Czech roots, or Brahms and Beethoven, the big giants, or Mahler with his Ländler and Jewish heritage. I’m hoping that in exploring this specific identity, we can reach some sort of universal truth. I think music is an art form that does that so well. I’m hoping that this piece can allow us to see each other a little bit more clearly and give honor to Ariana’s craft and the African diaspora as a whole. Hope is something that is sustaining. Everyone who is alive at this moment is alive because someone had hope, regardless of the color of their skin. To give voice to that in this piece: I took that job seriously, and I hope it pays off.