How did you get on this project?
The Pacific Symphony Orchestra came to me. They’re from Orange County in California, which has the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam in America or anywhere else in the world. They also have a very strong community of ex-Vietnamese American veterans. What they wanted to do was to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the end of the hostilities. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s the twentieth anniversary of the end of the agony. They wanted me to come up with something that was very personal, but not completely unpopularist.
It took about six months to come up with a concept for the piece. The concept deals with a woman, Nhat Chi Mai, who was a social worker and a student in Vietnam; 1967, I believe. Vietnamese is half-Catholic and half-Buddhist, so Nhat Chi Mai went to a very open public place with a piece of oak tag, a picture of the Virgin Mary on one side of her, and a picture of Quan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, on the other. She had written on the piece of oak tag, “I wish to use my body as a torch, to dissipate the darkness, to bring love among men, to bring peace to Vietnam.” Then she committed suicide by pouring petrol on herself and burning herself to death. That was the key into it. In read that, I was very touched by it. I felt at that point the feeling of the female presence in war. I thought about the mothers in America watching their children going off to war and on the six o’clock news seeing pictures of carnage and death going into the televisions, and how the women must have felt, the mothers, the wives, the grandmothers; that war is not just about men.
In having compassion, this strong feeling for this woman who made this ultimate sacrifice, I certainly thought about the Catholic side, the Virgin Mary she was holding up, and it got me into Latin, Catholic, mystical writing. There’s one piece of writing called Stabat Meter. I’m paraphrasing it – basically the idea is to feel the pain that Mary must have felt seeing her son being tortured. That was the key-in for me, to where I could combine the writings of Nhat Chi Mai and the Stabat Meter Latin liturgical material together to create at least the first twenty minutes of the piece, which was entirely female and for the most part just string orchestra.
Then all of a sudden after twenty or thirty minutes of hearing just female voices, a male voice gets introduced. There was an Afro-American writer who served in Vietnam, was homeless in the United States, and now he’s a poet laureate. This is Yusef Komunyakaa, who described the burning, presumably a napalm burning, of a young girl he witnessed in Vietnam. So we go from Nhat Chi Mai’s self-sacrifice to the Catholic churches, the Stabat Meter, to now the first male input into the piece, which is a contemporary Afro-American’s observation of the war.
Even before that, I have in ancient Vietnamese ghostly voices backstage saying, “If you put jade into the fire, it will remain beautiful and green. If you put the lotus into the fire, it will retain its beautiful scent.” I thought of that as a homage to the Vietnamese people, with all that’s happened to them, that they still have their own culture, poetry, and music; that they’ve come through this with a tremendous amount of dignity. That was the key into it, and then I could use elements of various languages which related to the subject. It took me six months to really come up with the text before I started a note of composition. I couldn’t compose until I had a text.
This composition was more dynamic than a lot of your film scores. Is this achieved because the dynamics of a non-film composition can be highlighted more?
In a non-film composition, you can have twenty straight minutes of any gradation between loud and soft. You can have twenty minutes of extremely quiet music on a concert stage. It’s impossible – I don’t even remember one film cue that I was ever responsible for doing where you would have twenty minutes of quiet music or twenty minutes of developed madness. You can’t do this in a film. Film is based on the editor’s and the director’s cut. Quite often it’s in five-, six-, or seven-minute durations. In non-film composition you have freedom with dynamics as well as development of the theme. People are there to hear it and they’re focused in.
The sound of ‘Fire Water Paper’ is very operatic. Was the main intention to create the feeling of an opera from this extended musical drama that’s based on religious subject matter?
It’s choral and it’s an oratorio, which is basically an opera without staging. This is more of a choral work that has to do with a religious subject. In this particular case, it is and it isn’t. Some of the text is religious and some of the text is not. The singing does become operatic in feel because of the very almost Verdiesque emotional peaks that it has. The text took me into that area. The text invites me into what the music should be.
What are your final impressions about this project?
It’s an incredibly powerful experience to hear the work in a concert hall, to sit there for about an hour and twenty minutes, and experience its huge emotional and, at times, intellectual resonance. There have been a lot of emotional situations in the theater where people didn’t want to leave; it changed people’s lives. They’ve written me many letters saying they were Vietnam vets and heroin addicts living in the streets and since they heard this work it took the demons out of them, and things like that. So you start hearing things like that, you’ve definitely done your job because you’ve healed a few.