The Outer Edge of Youth (2020)
An inquisitive, dreamlike choral opera commissioned and recorded by The Thirteen (Washington, DC). Based on Ordway’s original libretto, The Outer Edge of Youth explores and critiques the relationships between childhood, landscape, aesthetics, and contemporary ideals of masculinity.
Choral opera in two acts
Music, libretto, and video projections by Scott Ordway
sop. mezzo. SATB choir. 3 vlc. cb.
82 minutes
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 that explores the emotional and imaginative interiority of two boys standing at the threshold of adolescence. It is not a work of action, but of attention — a quiet opera that listens more than it speaks, and that uses ritualized musical form to hold questions that resist resolution.
Nicholas and Sebastian, the opera’s protagonists, enter a coastal redwood forest and discover they can understand the language of the birds living there. What follows is a series of speculative dialogues in which the boys ask urgent, unanswerable questions: What is love? How can one express gratitude for beauty in a secular world? How does one live ethically in the presence of suffering without becoming paralyzed by it? Each scene is a study in refusal and replacement: the refusal of adult hardness in favor of lingering sensitivity, the replacement of narrative arc with contemplative episode, of declarative voice with choral interiority. The structure resists conventional drama in favor of something more ancient and ritualistic: an ecstatic dissolution into feeling, mystery, and non-knowing.
The opera’s final scene stages a kind of metamorphosis. One boy returns to the world, changed. The other relinquishes human life entirely, transformed into a bird — not as a punishment or escape, but as a fulfillment of a deep spiritual hunger: the desire for erasure, the wish to dissolve into beauty and cease to suffer.
I wrote this opera to preserve the strangeness of boyhood as I experienced it—quiet, observant, disinclined to violence or competition, in love with language and sound, at odds with other boys, searching for beauty, and immersed in the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. The boys in this work are not heroes and they are not prone to action; they are listeners. In their own quiet way, they (and I) forcefully reject the narrow script of masculinity our culture offers—whether that script is being celebrated or condemned.
The questions they ask—and that I still ask—are not naïve. They are the questions of a mind newly awake to the complexity of the world beyond childhood. Though we often lose patience with these questions as we grow older, I believe they remain valid. When I am alone, and silent, and still, they rise from the deepest part of me with the same burning, ecstatic urgency. I turn to the young people in my life, and to the imagined children in this work, to remind me to keep asking them aloud.
Scott Ordway
Philadelphia, Spring 2022