SILVER THREADS Recorded by Jacob Cooper in Brooklyn, NY

Mixed by Damian Taylor at Golden Ratio, Montreal 1. Silver Threads (Text by Bash¯o) 6:52 Mastered by Emily Lazar at The Lodge, New York, NY 2. Fame (Text by Kristin Kelly) 6:47 Assisted by Rich Morales 3. Antique Windfall (Text by Zach Savich) 8:18 4. Wefted Histories (Text by Tarfia Faizullah)6:56 Design by John Gall Cover Artwork: Leonid Meteor Storm, as seen over 5. Unspun (Text by Dora Malech) 12:30 North America on the night of November 12-13, 1833; 6. Jar (Text by Greg Alan Brownderville) 7:52 Edmund Weiß, Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt Photograph of Jacob Cooper by Claudia De Palma

Music Composed by JACOB COOPER Nonesuch A&R: Andrew Wright

MELLISSA HUGHES, voice All music published by Dig You Might Publishing (AS- CAP)

Special thanks: James Moore, Laura Grey, Timothy Andres, Ted Hearne, Emily Motherwell, Corey Dargel, Ralph De Palma, Joanna Dolgin, and Claudia De Palma I. Silver Threads a home -attributed to Basho¯ (where the heart) gone. how delicately the silver threads of rain Rain doing a line sew sky to the earth on the stomach of a mountain.

II. Fame Hail fucking -Kristin Kelly a truck’s perfect complexion. Does the sky or do you The voyeur storm do it better (dirtier): at the window SILVER THREADS / JACOB COOPER a history as you practice de-storied, your soliloquy: a vista destroyed. “Whether (to wither) One day with her” darkens and strays. Mother of your daughter A her and him and your gone. a hurt and then You believed Nature destroys III. Antique Windfall the tragedy was written and beauty encores. -Zach Savich for you. No such award The windfall drags the river / its hem is a broom Put it on for human in the hen food and mud / the hill is a gameshow chainsaw edged and grew it devastation. in silver threads and never drawing blood / like a beard and gut. heaviest the hand that stills the plow / To have chosen thistle blur and vesper fruit // the gravity artist hung back And yet, to hold her shrugged off his harness carefully / he traveled one month sky was to hold your in front of the circus through equestrian squares and an antique wind gets the lead, applause. til pollen closed the streets / and I hung seashells under vagrant bells where his hands often chapped / wins the Oscar in a trellised span of the split green air / the thin blued hills turned back // for biggest player the pear boughs brace and blister in gentle scrimshaw above the shed / it has nothing to do with abundance or ruin taller teller it’s always being done above clovers in the dry creekbed seam ripper that still the plow / thistle sheen and a vespertine grimmer reaper. is any evening opening // and the earth grew tuned so a certain chord is always nearly playing Your bit part cut to punctuated dust.

With her was to weather the great storm.

But you chose a lover afraid of thunder. IV. Wefted Histories myself across you like keys -Tarfia Faizullah of weathered pianos I once knew Soft red lamina of horizon look how she telegraphs like the plush-tongued voice time across the muslin of the woman you once loved of twilight across us look place her again how bewildered is love in the wet palm another radiant throat of my unfurling hand in snow the long scythe

I will close my fingers of your spine is the sky blading

around her our washed voices the umbrage gloaming blossom of your body twining

unswathed stamen with mine suffusion why are we so many of an unharnessed world

of each other’s wefted histories I glide

V. Unspun to shake suppose one rose in love from this scene -Dora Malech the seeds head over heels to another to shake earth and sky’s trial separation the season free what’s over look to the lie hush to hear if history’s still breathing our heads of forever look hold here hard and hope to press a pulse the moon submits is a question a contract writ of weather to this scene what white lies might weather tell today in light wet to enter from an other the frost erases earth and sky a veil for the trees the eye of what lies in wait to kiss some hidden face to sign what’s over cut in shadow who will rise with the rays for the trees what we call to the mouth and who will rise with the radio to sigh let out of more who will buy lace by the bolt and sign what we call and who will buy lightning in shadow took in of moreover or try to buy lightning a stitch slants who will buy spools to stitch suppose skyward the sky the earth the end holds onto either VI. Jar the eyes of the dead were unafraid onto or -Greg Alan Brownderville a tent to weather winter were able agent a dress in which to wed could choose what’s our Time trapped me in this canyon, this dark jar— to re-ravel other answer jabbed holes in the sky to spare me light and air. wind slides notes beneath the door not tangle heads or what Only, sometimes, even without you here, wind tears the day’s last drafts to updrafts not fray never ends there’s beauty: This is night. And those are stars. wind scatters ashes like a mourning child is how we hope what tall tales what ends the field feels might wind never ends the wind run spin today what cuts its fingers through never cuts initially, and wrote my thesis in that, but I kept taking more and more music courses; the professors were really encouraging, so I wasn’t scared about becoming serious about music that late in the game. And by my senior year I realized I could double major in music. So I did that, and also started composing that last year.

Simonini: And how did this piece come about?

Cooper: When I was in graduate school [at Yale] I came across this haiku attributed to [17th century Japanese poet Matsuo] Basho¯ in a journal article, and it struck me in a way that haikus hadn’t before. So I tucked it away in my mind, and then a year or two later, [vocalist] Mellissa Hughes asked me to write something for a recital she was having. I wrote the song “Silver Threads” for that recital in March of 2011, and I liked where the piece had taken me compositionally, so later I decided I wanted to create a larger work from it. I ended up finishing the last piece in the cycle about two years later.

Simonini: You commissioned five poets to write poems in response to that haiku. So, in a way, the text is the conceptual glue of this cycle. INTERVIEW Cooper: Right—just as it would be in a traditional song cycle. I worked with each of the Ross Simonini: Could you talk a little about your musical background and how you came to poets separately, in increments. Each responded to the Basho¯ō haiku, and also to the other po- composing? ems that had been written. Eventually there was a web of interactions between the different poems and songs, with “Silver Threads” and “Unspun” acting as poles—not polar opposites, Jacob Cooper: I started playing trumpet when I was in fourth grade. I wasn’t too serious I mean, but points on either end of an axis. And then “Jar” is the coda, looking back on about it, though—I was just a diligent kid, and I played trumpet the same way that I played what’s happened before. on the soccer team and did my homework. When I was in my teens I started to recognize I had an intense passion for music, but I was just listening to it—not creating it myself—and I Simonini: What other interactions exist between the songs? still never thought that I would have a career in it. Then I went to a liberal arts college, Amherst College, and I found myself taking theory Cooper: Dora Malech, who wrote “Unspun,” was the first person I worked with, so she was classes and feeling at home in the music department. I was actually just a geology major only responding to the Basho¯ . The original haiku is essentially just about nature, and Dora’s poem certainly revolves around that theme, but she also introduces an element of love, of Cooper: Yeah—although, in a way, this is how it’s always worked. The “high art” song actu- human relationships. I worked with Kristin Kelly on “Fame” next, and she solidified what ally grew out of more popular folk songs. People would sit around the piano and sing these Dora had insinuated: Kelly’s poem is fundamentally about a romantic relationship, but uses ballads that German poets had written, and eventually Schubert came along and brought it the metaphor of nature as a means of expression. So that’s one example. to the high-art level, but the music never fully abandoned the element of folkiness. The Ger- man lied was associated with the piano because it’d just had a huge surge of popularity, and Simonini: How did you set the texts to music? there was one in every middle-class home—it was essentially a folk instrument at that time. And I feel that, in a way, the laptop is so prevalent now that it’s a sort of contemporary folk Cooper: In general, when I set text, I try to create an atmosphere in which the text as a whole instrument. The sounds it can create, which we hear all the time on the radio and elsewhere, can breathe and express itself, rather than prescribe sounds based on what’s happening at any are the folk sounds of today. So it seemed like the natural accompaniment for a song cycle. given moment in the text. In “Silver Threads,” for example, I wasn’t going to set the word “rain” differently from “earth”; I just wanted a pure, liquid voice throughout. Simonini: But the piano is a limited acoustic instrument while the laptop is a tool for access- ing any sound imaginable. Simonini: Was the text created before the music? Cooper: Definitely. In creating the accompaniment, it’s like you’re an orchestrator, with an Cooper: The music and text were developed in tandem. In this sense, the process was more endless number of instruments at your disposal. And that’s really what draws me to electron- like a lyricist–songwriter collaboration than that of a composer setting pre-written text. I’d ic music—this focus on timbre. The way you can turn a bland major triad into send the poet an initial idea for the music, and then as I developed that, he or she would something entirely fragile and beautiful—or, if you’d prefer, grotesque and dreadful. come up with various ideas for text, and we’d move forward by sharing our material and seeing which parts were worth developing. The text of Silver Threads is really integral in Simonini: What attracted you to working with Mellissa Hughes? making the songs effective, and I’m so thrilled with the work these poets did. Cooper: We’ve been collaborating for almost a decade now, and I love working with her Simonini: How much were you responding to the history of the song cycle? because she can bend and shift her voice to create these totally different and amazing sounds while still carrying an incredible warmth in her tone. She can also retain that warmth when Cooper: I think the influences are two-fold: first there’s the traditional song cycle as it singing without vibrato—something really not many singers can do. And I felt like the developed in 19th century Germany with Schubert and Schumann—I was definitely very music called for a pure, radiant, mostly vibrato-less voice. conscious of what they had done. And then there’s the influence of popular electronic music. Simonini: You mixed this music with Damian Taylor, who primarily works with pop or Simonini: And these songs exist somewhere between the two. non-classical musicians. Cooper: I was into the idea of working with Damian because I knew he’d worked with from Winterreise—in English; and he chops up the sample and stretches it out in a process- Björk a lot—she was one of the many influences looking over my shoulder as I was writing, oriented way. and I wanted a mixing engineer who understood that kind of music, who could work fluidly with electronic timbres but also had a knowledge of more classical ideas and could think Simonini: Would you say your sonic vocabulary comes more out of so-called electronica or outside of the box. And I think Damian—he really developed my ear, and he did a fantastic academic, electroacoustic music? Or do you not distinguish? job of giving the music a certain pop immediacy without sacrificing any of its subtlety or slow development. Cooper: There seems to be a gray area between these categories now more than ever before. When electronic music first bloomed in the post–World War II era, it was primarily an Simonini: You wrote an opera about Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, Timberbrit, that academic thing in the US, because only a university could afford such expensive equipment. also borrowed from pop music. And as it has become more and more affordable, it’s been steadily popularized. I guess I’m a product of my times—these electronic sounds are everywhere, and I’ve embraced them. Cooper: Yeah, that’s one of my earlier collaborations with Mellissa—the other large project I’ve worked on in my career. In Timberbrit, I slowed songs by Britney Spears and Justin Ross Simonini is an artist, writer, and musician living in New York. He is the interviews editor at The Timberlake way down, and created new songs out of them. Drawn out, the songs became Believer magazine and the executive producer at The Organist, a radio show on KCRW. He contributes to Interview magazine, The New York Times, Frieze, and a slew of arts publications. much darker and dramatic—essentially more operatic. Though the music also had an eerie experimental character to it, and Mellissa [playing the role of Britney] was great at develop- ing a “slowed-down” vocal sound, like turning slurs into crazy-long glissandos. I didn’t so much consciously use these techniques in Silver Threads, but some of the long-glissando sound does creep in, especially on the title track.

Simonini: There is a history of the pop musician bringing in elements from the classical world, but there’s less of a tradition of the reverse. Soprano Mellissa Hughes enjoys a busy international career in both contemporary and early music. She has worked closely Cooper: Well, I think there might be more of a tradition than a lot of people think. The com- with Julie Wolfe, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Steve Reich, poser Carl Stone, for example, was someone I realized was influential as I was working on and Neil Rolnick, and has premiered works by David T. Little, this piece. He does a lot of sampling, and has been for a long time, before it was so prevalent. Missy Mazzoli, Ted Hearne, Caleb Burhans, Christopher He takes music from the pop world and turns it into a classical piece, or vice-versa, in a really Cerrone, and Frederick Rzewski, among others. Based in interesting way. Shing Kee, this one piece of his, is gorgeous, and it dates back to the ’80s. He Brooklyn, she holds degrees from Westminster Choir College records a Japanese pop singer performing a German song—Schubert’s “Der Lindenbaum”

Photo by Mark Hughes and Yale University. www.nonesuch.com www.jacobcoopermusic.com www.mellissahughes.com

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