Eurydice by Zvibes

Eurydice, music by Ben Zucker on text by H.D. Winner of the San Francisco Choral Artists New Voices Project, performed by the SFCA on March 25, 2017 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

"I set Hilda Doolittle’s text right before creating an evening-length suite of music for a theatrical production of Sarah Ruhl’s take on the myth of Orpheus & Eurydice in 2013. Eurydice is not a witch, a saint, or a mother, but another classic category: that of the Lover. Yet far from a passive role, as a lover here she pronounces herself not through the demarcation of emotional territory, but by weaving between it.While Orpheus’ journey to the underworld is an adventurous story charged by the energy of love, both women’s texts flip the story and show us something far more nuanced. It is sad to be dead, yes, but in the underworld there is comfort in memory, both it in itself as what it becomes when faded. Through the music there is an attempt to capture this nuance: the declaration of death is both a lament of such and a reminder: to be torn from it brings about ambiguity and an existential and sonic dissonance. If there is resolution, it comes from a fading, a fragmenting, a “forgetting-death” that underlies the surface of the world and music. I am indebted to Doolittle (and Ruhl) for the realms of emotion opened up through writing, and for the chance to imbue them into the air via music."