With residency ending, Missy Mazzoli looks ahead to future collaborations

For lovers of music’s classical cutting edge, that is, for aficionados of new sounds created by young and innovative artists, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s recent efforts to forge ahead during COVID-related hard times has brought forth some extraordinary bounty.

Much of this newfound sound from composers of the next generation was curated by Missy Mazzoli, the CSO’s Mead Composer-in-Residence, an artist on an international roll. And still more is coming. But Mazzoli will have to stand by, like everyone else, until next season, for her larger project. Only then can CSO Music Director Riccardo Muti safely tackle her big, new work Orpheus Undone, written for the CSO and intended for a full orchestra in front of a live audience. As a result, the world premiere will happen sometime next season, well after Mazzoli’s CSO residency ends in June. (Before then, her Volume will be heard on Episode 20 of the virtual concert series CSO Sessions premiering May 27.)

"We haven’t talked about it yet," said Mazzoli, 40, via phone from her studio in Brooklyn, when asked what Muti thought of her new CSO work. Because of COVID-19, Mazzoli hasn’t been able to be in Chicago until recently, and Muti wasn’t in the Windy City, anyway. "I’ve been stuck in New York for more than a year," she said. "He has been stuck in Italy. I think when the time comes, we’ll have a lot to talk about."

Yet Mazzoli has had nothing but raves in her enthusiasm for Muti’s extraordinary orchestra, which at this point includes many players added during the seasons under his leadership. “The CSO has some of the best players in the world,” she said. "So it’s a tremendous luxury to be able to program really difficult, challenging new pieces, and to see everyone very excited about doing this contemporary work and just holding the threshold to the very highest standard. I’m extremely grateful and happy I was able to be a part of it."

Orpheus Undone deals with the famous myth at a critical point when Orpheus resolves to go down into the underworld to rescue Eurydice, a heroic attempt that will prove disastrous. “It has moments of incredible lightness and determination,” said Mazzoli of her piece. “And then at the end, a sort of resolve, and pain.”

Another of Mazzoli’s new works-in-progress, for the Metropolitan Opera in 2025, also deals with a dark and mysterious transitory experience. Based on the novel Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, it finds President Lincoln in 1862, and in a surreal state of mind, as the bloody Civil War rages while his son succumbs to typhoid, and ghosts linger.

Mazzoli explains the morbid nature of this subject matter with a touch of self-deprecating humor. “I have an ex-boyfriend who described me as a sex-and-death artist, but I am unapologetic that this is what I find myself writing about,” she said. "There is so much mystery around death, particularly in Western culture, which does not have a tradition of talking about it in a direct way. Yet music in general, and opera in particular, is so surreal. And this surreal nature of music provides an opportunity to look at death more directly and creatively, in an inspiring and uplifting way. I’ve been upfront about wanting to do that. 

“After all, a big orchestra piece takes up to a year to write, and an opera four years, so I need to deal with subjects that fascinate me. My music is about a lot of things, but there is that through line of darkness that is always right there with the light.”

In recent months, Mazzoli has worked with the CSO to salvage elements of the orchestra’s MusicNOW contemporary music series, which was canceled along with other live concerts of the 2020-21 season. These MusicNOW events, presented at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, are popular with a younger crowd that likes to linger with the artists afterward at beer and pizza parties. Due to the pandemic, MusicNOW subsequently has gone digital in a big way. Adding that she has enjoyed her role as series curator, she said. "I’m grateful that anything is happening at all."

This spring, Mazzoli and CSO musicians were able to record the pieces that had been commissioned for this season’s MusicNOW programs. "So we’re offering videos of these performances," she said. “I am so glad that happened at least.”

Mazzoli is a musician’s musician in the sense that she is active as a pianist, she writes all kinds of music, and she counts other composers, instrumentalists and singers among her close friends. Like Muti, Mazzoli is also a person of the theater. She writes beautifully for the voice. Already she’s an award-winning opera composer, with three ambitious works completed and the new Met commission still ahead. 

Back in 2016, audiences at the Chicago Fringe Opera heard a mesmerizing version of Mazzoli’s Song from the Uproar, a pocket opera about the late 19th-century Swiss explorer and free spirit Isabelle Eberhardt. She traveled throughout North Africa, wrote under the protection of a male pseudonym, espoused the anti-colonial cause and died at 27. Next season, Lyric Opera of Chicago will present Mazzoli’s hardscrabble frontier opera Proving Up.

But the rare opportunity to sink her chops into a major work for Muti and the CSO is clearly something Mazzoli relishes. Meanwhile, more of Mazzoli’s curated projects will be presented as part of CSO Sessions via CSOtv, with each concert available for 30 days. Starting June 10, one can watch CSO Principal Bass Alexander Hanna in Mazzoii’s Dark with Excessive Bright — the enigmatic title is taken from Milton’s description of the robes of God in Paradise Lost. Also on that program is music of trumpeter-composer Wadada Leo Smith, who was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Best known as a jazz and Delta blues artist, Smith has created a work for a classical ensemble of violin, flute, bass clarinet and piano. 

Mazzoli’s MusicNOW programs reflect her wide-ranging musical exploration of America’s cultural mix. Another CSO Sessions program, available beginning June 24, features Requiem by Columbia University graduate and Rome Prize winner Courtney Bryan, whose roots figure in her blend of elements from New Orleans jazz funerals and the Latin mass. (Bryan’s Requiem originally had been scheduled for MusicNOW.)

“These are fantastic artists who have never worked with the CSO before,” Mazzoli said. "Between the [2019] strike and the pandemic, it has been a tough time for the orchestra, but I do feel we were able to accomplish a lot, and to do important things. Meanwhile my new Orpheus work for the full orchestra is finished, sitting and waiting. It’s the longest and largest work that I have created outside of opera, and it will be heard eventually." 

Despite such projects being on hold, Mazzoli sees other gains: "I do feel that through working with so many individual players in small groups, even if it was a bit piecemeal, the orchestra and I have managed to establish something of a relationship.

"That is important because there is some risk involved in the sonic palette I am using for the CSO work I’ve written," Mazzoli said. "My Orpheus Undone is a massive orchestral piece, but I am treating the materials in a new way. It’s very exciting in terms of the extended techniques I’m using — strings producing a scratchy tone, percussion used in vibrant expressive ways. Plus, I’m experimenting with form. The first part is very long, followed by a short section. So I have taken risks formally with the piece as well.

“But I also have great respect for professional performers and for the tradition,” she said. "I perform as a pianist, and I know that it’s really something else to put yourself out there like that, approaching all this experimentation with a great deal of humility and respect. My asking them to do new things can be a little scary, and I have to trust that we can get to the [last] rehearsal in successful ways. You can be respecting the tradition and be embracing something new — the one doesn’t have to cancel the other out."