Chicago composer Alex Temple said she usually writes about “characters who are removed from society, dropped out or view the world in an askew way.”
Her new “Behind the Wallpaper” uses surreal metaphors to narrate an unexplained transformation that reflects her own journey. Singer-songwriter Julia Holter and the locally based chamber ensemble Spektral Quartet will premiere the piece next week. All of them are also outsiders in their own ways.
Holter, who lives in Los Angeles, uses an expansive palette to create unconventionally structured songs on such albums as “Loud City Sound” (Domino, 2013). She said the title comes from “feeling bombarded by the world,” and her low-key delivery is a reaction to that sense. Sonic collages, her own evocative electric keyboard tones, 1960s R&B and atmospheric chamber music textures shape the results. So do her feelings of not quite fitting in back when she studied classical composition at the University of Michigan.
“I didn’t have the background as a listener of classical music that a lot of people around me did, and I don’t think it came naturally to me to even work within any particular tradition,” Holter said. “Obviously, I do (work in one) — we don’t just make things up. But my music can be a mashup in terms of form.”
Doyle Armbrust, viola player in the Spektral Quartet, said his group also has admired her idiomatic blend. This ensemble’s approach is equally atypical. It has presented a mix of new works and familiar Baroque pieces to audiences in creative ways. Last year, the quartet commissioned Holter and other composers to write short pieces that were released as ring tones.
“It’s difficult to try to encapsulate what Julia does in a sentence or two,” Armbrust said. “Calling her an ‘avant-popist’ is kind of reductive, doesn’t really capture it, and that’s the same with us.”
Temple’s music also eludes simple categorization and avoids much of the assumptions about contemporary classical composition. She was a graduate student at Michigan, where she met Holter and Spektral violinist Austin Wulliman. Temple now lives in Chicago and is completing her doctorate of musical arts at Northwestern University. She infuses this training with a deep knowledge of popular idioms, just like her conversation, which veers from Antonin Dvorak and Claude Debussy to Dolly Parton and the Beach Boys.
“You can look at (pop music) in more depth and find emotionally serious, conceptually serious, musically serious things in it,” Temple said. “I don’t feel like I’m somebody who lives in contemporary-classical-music land who is borrowing things from this outside thing called pop music. I listen to it, and it’s part of my mental landscape.”
For “Behind the Wallpaper,” Temple preferred a sympathetic vocalist with a subtle delivery, which is why she wanted Holter’s unadorned mezzo-soprano rather than a dramatic opera-trained singer. The score seems sparse, but there are unusual twists to its underlying harmonic language. Different meanings can also be read into the imaginative story, which connects to Temple’s own transgender experience.
“Being a trans person and going through reconfiguring aspects of my social presentation, appearance and (the) way I conceive of myself has made me very aware of the artifice involved in how people represent themselves visually and bodily,” Temple said. “A lot of queer art is too heavy-handed or self-aggrandizing. I wanted to deal with it more obliquely.”
Armbrust added that as a nonconformist classical musician, he can identify with some of that perspective.
“What Alex is trying to get at is (that) going through something so transformational may put you outside of society,” Armbrust said. “But you don’t end up just by yourself.”
When: 7 and 9:30 p.m. Thursday
Where: Constellation, 3111 N. Western Ave.
Tickets: $12 (18+); constellation-chicago.com
Twitter @chitribent
