New Songs about Old Birds: An Interview with Baritone Randall Scarlata

By Nicky Swett

Baritone Randall Scarlata on singing contemporary music and premiering Perry Goldstein’s Birding by Ear for Voice, Violin, Cello, and Piano

Nicky Swett: I’m always curious to ask singers what instruments they find most analogous to the human voice. Is there one that you find particularly easy to blend with or that you feel a strong connection to?

Randall Scarlata: We singers are wind instruments, and I do work with wind players quite a bit. But I feel very much at home working with strings. Maybe this relates to my own history, because I’m a recovering violist, so I’m used to sitting in the middle of a string quartet. As a baritone, an inner voice, I feel very much at home working with strings. There are a lot of interesting singers who were violists! Lorraine Hunt Lieberson was a violist. Sarah Walker, a great English mezzo-soprano, was a violist. There must be some sort of connection there: I think it’s the timbre and how we fit into the harmony.

NS: Most song cycles are written for piano and voice. How do you think differently about a set that includes other instruments, like the cello and violin parts in Birding by Ear?

RS: Working with a chamber ensemble, we have more pitch options. If I’m singing with just piano, the piano plays as it’s tuned and isn’t going to be able to shift anything with pitch. With instruments, particularly strings, we have the opportunity to slide into pitch, add vibrato, take vibrato out, sit on the lower side of a tone, sing quarter tones—things that are not necessarily written in the score but are ways to create color.

NS: Are there any marked differences in how you get ready for a contemporary concert compared to performances involving more standard repertoire?

RS: It’s actually not all that different. I always want to spend time with the text first. Whether it’s sung or Sprechstimme or just plain spoken, I need to be an actor and connect with the text. Then I spend time working through any thorny intervals, things like that. I don’t think there’s anything more difficult to sing than Bach! The thorny things that I sing occasionally in new music are certainly all to be found a couple hundred years ago in Bach’s music. So I work on text, rhythm if there’s anything difficult, then add the melodic line, and then from there put everything together.

NS: What are some of your strategies for learning a piece when there are no recordings to refer to?

RS: Even if I’m doing something more traditional, like a Schubert cycle, or a Berlioz piece that I’ve never done, I like to spend a lot of time making my own decisions with my collaborators. Then maybe checking recordings and saying, “Oh, I see they’re doing some other interesting things there,” or “that’s a very different tempo”: forming opinions later by listening to other versions. But not having that, and bringing a piece to life for the first time, is really exciting because there’s nothing to be compared to. You can take all kinds of risks, knowing that for most everyone in this audience, they will be hearing it for the first time.

NS: I know you worked on the premiere of this piece with the librettist Richard Powers and the composer Perry Goldstein. How did your interpretation shift in that initial rehearsal process?

RS: Everyone’s discovering things at the same time. For us, it’s the first time we’re hearing how our parts fit with all the other parts and figuring out just where we need to line up. For the composer, it’s the first time he’s hearing how those things fit together. Coming into early rehearsals, it’s not unusual to make some changes. Even incredibly experienced composers like Perry might say, “You know what? It might be interesting if we tried something. Why don’t we invert this?” Or “Why don't you sing that an octave higher?”

We changed a few small things rhythmically. One of the things that we changed was adding a little vocal tremolo to an owl sound to make it sound more like an owl. Getting to work with Richard and Perry before a performance made us feel more like authorities, like we were all part of the creation of a new work. It doesn’t feel like it’s something set in stone. There’s room for everyone to bring inspiration to it, which is one of the best things about working on new music.

NS: For this piece, Powers wrote a bespoke set of poems about specific birds for Goldstein to set. How do the different sounds of the birds come out over the course of the cycle?

RS: Richard Powers is interested in our connection with the world around us, whether it’s the birds or the trees or the ocean. In a way, he anthropomorphizes these birds. We’re trying to imagine a text that they would sing so that we can identify with them, which makes them more human and closer to us.

Perry and Richard have given us opportunities to bring this bird song to life in ways that are very obvious and also ways that are more subtle. There’s a song about the mockingbird, who doesn’t have his own song but steals everyone else’s, and we wonder what his own song would be like. There is the lyrebird, which is this remarkable bird that imitates the sound of its environment. In one of the most haunting moments, the bird imitates the sound of a chainsaw. You can find videos on YouTube of this bird recreating that sound. What it’s doing, of course, is imitating a thing that’s destroying its home. We were listening and laughing at the way it makes this the sound, and then little by little, we realized that this is all he hears all day long and that what he's communicating with is taking away his environment. It’s a wonderful cycle. It has great interaction between the instruments, and Perry really brings Richard’s texts to life in a way that is incredibly colorful and evocative.