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4.5
Going Home Star presents Christos Hatzis' music for a ballet on a tragic subject—the relocation of young Aboriginal Canadians into religious schools and the abuse they suffered there. They were forbidden their own heritage and tortured and terribly abused by the staffs of these schools. Hatzis is a composer whose music utilizes everything from throat singing to electro-acoustic treatments. His more complex compositions mix sounds as deep and rich as warm earth, acoustic instruments, and a unique sense of how effects such as sampling can make even the wispiest passing note indelible. The music here employs all these techniques; performers include individual and group singers and a symphony orchestra meshing to convey the emotional depths of this tragic situation, yet—as befits ballet music—there is never a feeling of mass, rather of nimble and powerful movement and constant metamorphosis.From its first minute much of this music is anxious, even frightening. The first act begins with a shuddering in the strings and a guttural groaning, a heavy sound somewhere between keening voice and rosined string. The music then begins to rise; a melody struggles to emerge only to be swept away by winds. The sounds of a train and a throat singer pass (briefly), and the groans and strings struggle against one another again. The instruments wind and bump, intent on their own paths, almost oblivious of one another. The orchestra and the throat sounds try to co-exist, and the orchestra gains in strength. There are snatches of recorded dialogue: "It's their sickness," and "This gives them a feeling of power." To highlight the seductiveness of shallow temptations Hatzis scores the skittering burr of DJ scratch and the clang of dance track percussion. Low strings push against the scratching with off-kilter rhythms, and a voice either expressing passion or pain. At times passages of Copeland-like openness chime through, but these too become just more voices in the constant conversation—the dialogue of beauty and dread, of clear paths and thorny tangles.Listing some of the elements this way might suggest segmentation, a lack of unity; on the contrary, the first five tracks here, the whole of Scene 1, are among the most unified—gripping and at times terrifying—music I know. I'm not one for big melodramatic statements, but the truth is that while I held the info booklet in my hand I never read a word of it until this astounding 23 minutes had passed; I'm not sure I even blinked. The theme is an important and a tragic one, and I'm sure the dancers add their own visual power, but the music more than holds its own as a free-standing creation.Following this opening act, the music becomes more narrative, more often linear, at times more spare. Ballet music is, of course, "program music," in the strictest sense. But the best ballets are a scoring of the emotional movements within the story, the emotions the dancers will portray as they add their own axis to the dimensions the ballet defines. To aid in this, the second act (the second CD here) introduces sustained narration—narrations electronically altered and layered with throat singing. The narrator tells us, among other things, how the white settlers were originally dependent on the Aboriginal population for survival in their new land, the implication being that they saved people who later tried to exterminate them. As with the first act, there are a few comic moments here, including out-of-place musical pomposity meant to suggest the airs of those who sought furs. As the score yields to the necessity of telling the story there are a few passages that seem slack, that suffer from not having the dancers to complete the thoughts, but not many. There are moments that clearly evoke the terrors the children must have felt at the schools: as the nuns brutally indoctrinate a young girl the percussion itself seems to shiver with fear; the music at times evokes a sere landscape, one burnt bare by cold and abuse.The last 20 minutes or so are about the Aboriginal characters trying to come to terms, individually and collectively, with what happened in these schools, and to find a way of moving into the future. The throat singing of Tanya Tagaq is supplemented by the singing of Steve Wood and the Northern Cree Singers, archival recordings of ceremonial songs and added drums. In the last scene, rain-stick-like sounds and woodwinds mingle with recorded laughter; the Cree "Morning Song" leads the score to a guardedly optimistic conclusion.While the story here is a very specific and a terrible one, this ballet is not a historical documentary, not a haranguing or a finger-wagging scold, or a simple morality play. Rather, it is a deeply affective evocation of the humanity of its characters struggling to heal and go forward; a universal.
