Scott Ordway

PREMIERE

Commissioned by The Thirteen with additional support from Cheryl Naulty and Walter Hill

May 13–15, 2022
First Unitarian U.C.C., Washington D.C.
The Thirteen; Amy Broadbent and Emily Marvosh, soloists; Matthew Robertson, conductor

PRESS

“Exquisite in every way.” —Gramophone

“An expression of great power, imagination, and originality.” —Textura

“Exquisite depth of feeling…a poignant mediation on the loss of innocence.” —OperaNews

“A contemplative and thought-provoking new choral opera from the acclaimed composer, writer, and multimedia artist Scott Ordway.”—OperaWire

“A hypnotic, haunting fable…The Outer Edge of Youth has both the solemnity and wonder of an oratorio and the heightened emotion wrung from the enhanced reality in which opera specializes…the music shimmers, soars, and settles…creating an ecstatic catharsis.”—Washington Classical Review

MEDIA

NOTE

The Outer Edge of Youth is a choral opera, a genre which I conceive as work of vocal theater that can be presented in concert or semi-staged by a chamber choir, or in a fully-staged version by an opera company. It is more dramatic and character-driven than a traditional oratorio, but more poetic, contemplative, and abstract than most contemporary opera.

The story concerns two young boys, Nicholas and Sebastian, who find that they can understand the voices of the birds in the forest near their home. They wander into the woods, engaging the birds in a conversation that addresses the questions which are most urgent to them in those late years of youth when we first begin to perceive the wideness and great beauty of the world.

In the first of three central episodes, the boys question the nature of love. The birds present two competing hypotheses. In the first case, they suggest that love arises between two people as a result of the actions they take toward one another, that caring for someone causes you to love them more and better, that when you sacrifice some part of yourself for another person that the sacrifice is repaid by the love which develops in the aftermath. When the boys are dissatisfied with this response, the birds suggest alternately that love is a kind of inexplicable divine spark that manifests as a bond between humans, a phenomenon whose mystery is fundamentally impenetrable.

In the next scene, the boys are confronted by a landscape of astonishing beauty. Overwhelmed by their aesthetic response, they ask the birds how they can properly express their gratitude for what they see and feel. Both boys understand things in a basically secular way: it does not occur to them to thank God for the created world. In their instinct to gratitude, though, they experience the space that the divine might once have occupied. When they ask the birds who they can thank for all of the beauty in the world, the birds reply that they have no better insight into this question than does any other living creature, and that the boys must content themselves with the mystery.

In the fourth scene, the boys confront the tension between the intense, often immobilizing compassion that is felt by the very young and the necessary inurement to the suffering of others which one develops as an adult in order to function in a world that is rife with pain, inequality, and injustice. At the opera’s conclusion, this tension leads to the boys parting ways. Sebastian is able to develop this hardness to the suffering of others that allows him, in a way, to enter into the world of adulthood. Nicholas, on the other hand, is not. He begs the birds to transform him into one of their own and he remains in the forest, singing and flying, without suffering and without regret.

I have sought to create a work that focuses on the inner lives of boys and young men as I experienced boyhood myself: quietly, observantly, disinclined to violence, competition, and confrontation, in love with language and sound, at odds with other boys, desperately searching for beauty, and at the edge of a dark and mysterious forest (in my case, literally, the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California). The opera does not focus on deeds, actions, or accomplishments. Instead, it celebrates the imaginative world of two young boys who think, and discuss, and feel. As the narrator observes, “Neither had the gift of strength. / Neither had the gift of action. / Neither had a taste for violence. / These are the ones who listen.” This opera is my response to the monolithic depiction of masculinity in our culture, which is largely the same regardless of whether that masculinity is being celebrated or critiqued.

The questions proposed by the boys—and by the work—are not unsentimental. They are the questions of a young mind and they are those of a consciousness freshly awakened to the breadth and the richness and the complexity of the world beyond the domestic sphere which is the domain of early youth. While we ask such questions with decreasing frequency as adults, and while we lose patience with the impossibility of resolving their contradictory and unsatisfying answers, I refuse to believe that they are invalid. When I am alone, and at peace, and silent, and still, they are the questions which emerge from the deepest places of my being with the most burning and ecstatic urgency. I turn for help to the young people in my life, whether these be my own young daughters or the somewhat older imagined children in this work, to help me keep asking them aloud and in earnest.

Scott Ordway
Philadelphia, Spring 2022