Earlier I
said that Tomorrow, in a Year isn’t
really about Darwin and Evolution, and is instead about grief and time and
brilliance and change, and it’s fair to ask why, exactly, I think that. It’s time to get some close reading done, and
that means examining what, exactly, is being sung. Strictly speaking, the words “time”, “sea”,
and “age” occur frequently, though “time” refers both to a duration and an
incidence, and thanks solely to “Mountains” the most frequently used word in
the libretto is “white”. This isn’t terribly helpful.
I mentioned
earlier that Tomorrow, in a Year is both about and not about Darwin and Evolution
– you can tell because neither word is ever spoken (this is, admittedly, a
cop-out, since “Charles” is mentioned twice, but when the time comes, I’ll
argue that there’s an important distinction between the use of a given name and
surname.) Also conspicuously absent:
God, nature, creation, and all the other words a North American audience would
expect from a work dealing with Evolution, since that word is still an issue
over here.
So what we
can establish is that if Tomorrow, in a Year wanted to be about Evolution and
Darwin in a proximate sense, it may have done well to actually mention either
of those things, but it actually seems to go out of its way not to. What it chooses to talk about instead is
time, from it’s title on down, and much of the time it doesn’t speak about
anything explicitly. So what are we
talking about when we talk about time?
We examine fossils and strata of rock: “layer on layer, life embedded in
stone” is the line used elsewhere. What
we’re looking at, then, is the way living things change over time, and not the
growth exhibited by a single organism, but the glacial, relentless change shown
over generations and eons.
“Letter to
Henslow” and “Shoal Swarm Orchestra” are instrumental pieces, depending on how
you define an instrument. “Letter to
Henslow” is a fantastic mashup of human voices mimicking bird songs and
bullfrog roars. In the artists’ roundtable discussion, they mention how much
fun this track was to make. There are probably entirely convincing ways to
imitate animal noises, if you really need to, so let’s assume that the artifice
is part of the art.
There’s a
rhetorical path we could tread down here that would invoke the simulacrum, but since
I’m really tired can we just agree that a simulacrum is an imitation of
something that didn’t really exist to begin with? Our formulation of nature operates almost
exclusively in this mode.
“Shoal Swarm
Orchestra” evokes a storm, and the story behind it involves Olaf Dreier
spending some time in the Amazon rainforest with a tape recorder. It’s a lush digestion of an environment’s
sound, and if you wanted to you could probably argue that this may have been something
that Darwin heard while travelling to wherever it was that he went, but that
may be a hard rhetorical row to hoe because it sure as shit wasn’t the Amazon.
Since this work is all about growth and
development, “Shoal swarm orchestra” doesn’t remain static. Something like a
distorted string instrument picks up recurring tones and hunts for a
melody. Maybe “hunts” isn’t the right
verb, maybe it is; anyways, a storm obliterates it before it manages anything
too sophisticated. Other synthetic
noises emerge from the storm but before long they too vanish, and that’s about
the time when I realize that this is exactly the same trick that “intro”
played, only with a more sophisticated seed.
So what we
have then, are two songs: the first is are human voices mimicking bird calls
and bullfrog roars, and the second is a digesting (present tense, ongoing)
recording of an exotic wilderness – in the industry we call this a dialogue,
and the order is really, really important, because this is where that order
changes.
