While There's Light: Origins of the Collaboration

About the Collaboration

Origins of the Collaboration

by Vincent Katz

Sarah Sarhandi and I first met at The Edinburgh International Festival in 1994, where she was involved in a collaborative piece, and I was visiting to see about possibly bringing something I had written to a future iteration of the festival. We had a great time going around Edinburgh. I remember eating haggis off a sheet of paper in a parking lot! We probably met after that in London through mutual friends, especially Celia Lyttleton. In 2005, I did a reading with Tim Atkins in London at the Parasol Unit art space. I read some of my Propertius translations at that reading. According to my notes, I read Propertius’s poems 1.1, 2.1, 3.5, and 4.7. I also read my own poems ‘Headshot’ (dedicated to Celia), ‘London, Again,’ ‘The Times,’ ‘My Night with Grace,’ and ‘Cornwall Crescent,’ among others.

Sarah that night would have heard me read:

Cynthia was the first. She caught me with her eyes, a fool

Who had never before been touched by desires.

Love cast down my look of constant pride,

And he pressed on my head with his feet,

Until he taught me to despise chaste girls,

Perversely, and to live without plan.

Already, it’s been a whole year that the frenzy hasn’t stopped,

When, for all that, the gods are against me.

(Propertius 1.1.1-8)

As well as:

Don’t spurn the dreams that come through the portals of truth:

When true dreams come, they have weight.

By night, uncertain, we are borne. Night frees the shut-in shades,

And Cerberus himself, the bar thrown aside, wanders loose.

By daylight, the laws decree our return to the Lethean pools:

We are conveyed, the pilot counts his load of passage.

For now, let other girls possess you: I alone will hold you soon:

You’ll be with me, and I’ll rub my bones against yours, enmeshed.

(Propertius 4.7.87-94)

After the reading, a group of us went out to dinner, and Sarah proposed, then and there, that we do a collaboration, her music and my translations of Propertius. Something about the idea of this person, this poetry, being brought back, thousands of years later, into contemporary language, intrigued her. I didn’t really know it at the time, but it corresponded very closely to the conception and practice of Sarah’s own music, which is steeped in her study of classical music but breaks from that to embrace many kinds of contemporary sounds — from dance music and programmed music to found sound and electronics. Also, Sarah’s Pakistani heritage informs what she does as an artist, mixing with Western traditions in compelling ways.

When Sarah started sending me settings of various bits of text – from Propertius, and also my own poetry – I became enamored of what she was doing sonically, melodically, as through her compositions she provided the perfect settings for this ancient yet modern poetry. I set to work forming this vast corpus into a libretto per se. It involved another leap of the imagination to see what had originally been actor-less poems as dramatic pivots.

Through the years, we have kept working when possible. It was not always easy. We didn’t know where to turn for support, and other demands were being made on our attention. But we always kept the desire to complete this opera. In 2011, an aria from the opera in the character of Propertius’ love interest, Cynthia, was performed, first at Great Western Studios, with Lauren Kinsella as Cynthia, then at King’s Place, with Sarah Buechi doing the honors. Jamie McDermott sang Propertius’ ‘Roman Callimachus’ aria at King’s Place. In 2016, we collaborated again, this time as part of Sarah’s Both Universe piece at Southbank. I read my poem ‘Species’ as part of an evening of music, dance, and film.

Fast forward to 2021. We were invited to partake in weekly discussions with Bill Bankes-Jones, Anna Gregg, and Leo Doulton of Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival and ultimately were invited to participate in the 2021 festival. We have decided to do a 40-minute presentation of three arias from the opera, plus a solo viola piece for Sarah. Happily, mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg and percussionist Mark Sanders, who performed in Both Universe, are joining us again at Tête-à-Tête, along with mezzo-soprano Rosie Middleton, who will be singing the role of Cynthia.

Vincent Katz poetry reading, with sculpture by Alain Kirili, May 21, 2009. Photo by Ariane Lopez-Huici.

Statement by the Composer

Sarah Sarhandi

I met Vincent at the top of a steep road in Edinburgh at the festival, when he visited a collaborative project of mine, an installation I’d created music for. I liked him instantly. Later, a mutual friend lent me a slim pamphlet, a few pages stapled together that Vincent had published of some of his poems. I loved it and kept reading it. When he came to London in 2005 to give a poetry reading, I went and fell in love with some of the erotic poems Vincent read from his beautiful translation of Propertius’s poetry. I asked him if he’d allow me to set some of his work to music, and wonderfully he agreed. An adventure began, and now here we are creating an opera.

Vincent and I have been speaking with musicians we haven’t met before, talking to them about performing pieces from our opera. Together, we begin to discuss and envisage bringing it to life in ways not so far imagined. It’s a such a thrill, a pleasure and an honour that one’s work is appreciated and respected by fellow artists, and a kind of litmus test. The beauty of creating this piece is that it requires and somehow energetically draws people towards it as we go, without whom nothing would happen.