Wyenn recently spoke with Classical IPR about her vision for the upcoming Imagine US: Celebrating America at 250 tour and how the program is bringing together all of Interlochen's arts areas to celebrate the past, present and future of the United States.
The tour program includes the premiere of a new cello concerto, composed by Wynton Marsalis. The students are also performing the Symphony no. 4 by Charles Ives and RE|Member, a work by Reena Esmail.
All of these pieces are woven together with multidisciplinary elements, presented by students called "devisors."
In her role as creative director, Wyenn helped shape the program and worked with Interlochen Arts Academy students to create the multidisciplinary content linking the pieces of music.
Listen to the podcast of her conversation with IPR on demand, or read an edited transcript of the interview below.
On her early conversations about the tour program
I was really delighted to get the call from Interlochen's president Trey Devey about the project. We talked a lot about how to mark this moment in US history and how we could really uplift the youth voice at this moment. It was really important from the beginning that we reflect all the amazing work that's happening at Interlochen and all the creativity from these students. So we are involving the creative writers and the visual artists as well as the theater artists and dancers and interdisciplinary artists, and, of course, our musicians as the foundation .
When I listened to the Charles Ives Symphony no. 4, I was thinking about how he was writing it in the 1910s and 1920s. It felt like it was situated in the past. Then Reena Esmail's RE|Memember was situated at the moment in when we were all in quarantine during the COVID pandemic so that felt much closer to our time now.
What emerged was this idea of being able to look at the past through the Ives work, look at the present through Esmail's work and look at the future, that wonderful unknown, with the premiere of the Marsalis concerto. That idea anchored the program because in order to recognize this moment for the United States, we actually need to look at the past, look at where we are now and look forward toward what we aspire to be.
From the beginning of this country, our founders said a more perfect union was possible. I think we've been working towards that possibility over these last 250 years, and the work is not done.
On connecting the program with Interlochen's core values
Note: Interlochen Center for the Arts' core values are "Just an Idea," "Drawn Here," "Solo e Tutti" and "The Artist's Journey." Read more here.
Early on in the process, Interlochen had Dr. Jan Swafford come, who is an expert on Charles Ives. He spoke to the students, and the students wrote essays. When I read those essays, a bunch of themes about the United States and about Ives's music emerged, and those themes clearly lined up with Interlochen's core values.
That connection became our tent poles for what we were trying to uncover in the work.
The idea of being "drawn here" was reflected in the wealth that comes from our diversity of ideas and cultures and perspectives. This idea of "solo e tutti" was reflected in the strength that lies both within the individual and the community here in the United States. The core value about "the artist's journey" echoes the American dream and the idea that we have the freedom to determine our own path.
Lastly, the Interlochen core value of "just an idea" was particularly rich to me in this process because "just an idea" is how every work of art starts. We all start with "what if," and then we start creating. To me, that echoes what happened with our founding fathers at the beginning of this country. They pulled in different ideas that were around them and created this wholly new thing by just asking this question of "what if."
On the roles of the devisors and interdisciplinary interludes during the program
From the beginning, when President Trey Devey and I spoke, we knew that the music selections were our foundation and our anchor points for this program and that, inspired by these composers, the students and I would create interludes. These interludes give more context to how the students are responding to this moment in time and how they want to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States.
That's the idea of "what if" and the power of the imagination, which really anchored us in Sydney Kassekert's song "Imagine," which opens the program.
Sydney's song asks the question of, what if we did this or this? How could we improve upon this moment? And that's where we start the piece.
After Sydney's song, we go straight into the Ives and hear this beautiful cacophony of music. Following that, we go into more interludes by the students. Our creative writers at Interlochen created the text for these interludes, and then they're performed by the actors and dancers and interdisciplinary artists.
The first interlude is called "An American Original," and it tells us more about who Charles Ives was and the way in which he wrote. We can give the audience a bit of a primer, through the students' eyes of what they found most interesting about, this unique maverick of American music.
After the second movement, we hear from four figures from American history at different points in time about their struggles to be heard. We hear from a woman from 1775, a mother who is missing her son on the battlefield, and then we move towards an indigenous woman in more contemporary times. We move back to a flapper and a suffragette and forward into an ADA activist. We're hearing from people who stood up and said, "I think we can do better" and who called for moments of real advancement.
Then after the third movement, we move into a beautiful poem written by Fiona Yates for the last interlude that happens during the Ives. That piece is performed by Tuolumne Bunter, and it's a beautiful reflection of trying to make our way up the mountaintop. We might all move at different paces, we might all move in different ways and arrive at different times, but we're all going to get there. Then, we think about what can happen once we reach that place and are able to look out at the expansiveness of the sky and look back at our journey toward reaching that moment.
On connecting the past to the present
When I spoke to Reena Esmail about her piece RE|Member, she shared with me that she was most interested in how we were coming back together after the COVID pandemic, that we had spent so much time apart, and on Zoom in these boxes, and what it felt like to once again be in the room to together.
The piece centers on hearing from a recording of an oboist that's projected, and then it moves into the orchestra taking over, and at the end you hear the oboist come back on screen, but she's joined by herself playing the piece live. The oboist is a wonderful student named Julianne Cho, who is joined by Reese Martin, a fantastic dancer. We started to imagine that the beginning of the piece is like rehearsing, and then that brings us into the full range of living in that performance on stage.
In this idea that we're going from rehearsing to standing on stage and delivering this performance, we actually built this whole documentary, capturing this idea of what is happening today while these students are actively creating, co-creating this performance together. Emma Niu and Sadie Schoenfelder created this fantastic documentary. They've actually been filming all of our rehearsals and our conversations, and they've really captured the joy and the rigor of the students actively working together.
So that's how we move into today and how it fits into the program. It's a reflection of what is actually happening in this moment for these these students. It's a really beautiful reminder that, while there is a lot going on in the country at this moment, there is also a lot of creation happening and joyful connections being built between artists, between people, between neighbors.
On the new Marsalis cello concerto
In this concerto, Wynton Marsalis is inviting us to look at where we are at. The piece goes through five different sections, and the first one is "The Journey to Freedom." There are references to slavery, but he's also very interested to the journey to freedom for all of us because there's something that we're all trying to escape, that we're all trying to move through at this time. Things are difficult, and we need to find our path forward.
The second movement is "Spiritual." And in that moment, we're actively trying to move towards freedom. "Spiritual" is this beautiful section that us trying to mentally find our way out of the dark space and towards the light.
So then comes "March Caribe," which is this fantastic, jubilant movement. This New Orleans flair comes out, and Marsalis is playing with these beautiful rhythms and all the derivations of the rhythms. This whole movement is about how, the deeper your pathos, the deeper your humor, the deeper your joy, depending on what you've gone through in your life. Often times, the things that are the darkest and the hardest on us reveal these moments of light that come to us. It really represents the freedom that can evolve out of the struggles in our lives, which I think is really apropos right now when we think about joy as an act of resistance.
The fourth movement is "Ballad and Blues." This one is powerful because it speaks to how sometimes you don't have the money and you don't have the power, but you have love, and love is one of the greatest offerings we can make to one another. I really appreciate that he is sharing that there's so much power in loving one another.
The final movement, "Cakewalk," is a fantastic one. Marsalis told me that it's a bit of a circus and that certain parts are related to ragtime, which makes it quite special for everyone. He said that if you can cakewalk, you've really transcended.
You can see that we're going from a story of being enslaved by whatever is enslaving you and then moving your way towards transcendence.
On the student piece "A Promise"
Right before we go into the Marsalis work, the students have crafted this piece called "A Promise." Creative writing student Addison Hill wrote this phenomenal poem that had such a powerful ending that I said, "Take that one sentence and make an entire piece out of it for all of the devising students to be part of."
In that movement, they say, we were promised this country and we have these ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but the country doesn't always feel like it's living up to those ideals. But when the country does, the student actually really cherish that. They share all these reflections about what they cherish and what they hope for.
Since we're moving towards the future, they're asking about how we stand in this moment and look forward and co-create a better future for all of us. They work their way through sharing all that they cherish and all that they hope for in tomorrow, and they make their way back to offering us a promise.
And that is the line that Addison had written that I found so powerful. The last thing that we hear from them is their promise that the America that they leave behind will be better than the America they were born into. It's our work to pick up things where they are and carry them forward. We don't have to do all the work ourselves on our own, but we need to pick up our piece and move forward towards a more equitable and just society.
Interlochen Arts Academy's Imagine US: Celebrating America at 250 tour begins Saturday, March 7 in Interlochen with additional stops in Detroit, Philadelphia and Boston.
