Ovid in Tomis

Ovid in Tomis is a setting of Derek Mahon's poem for voice and chamber ensemble, to be premiered by BlackBox Ensemble in NY in Fall 2025, with further performances in North Carolina and Washington DC in 2025.  Written for soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, percussion, and guitar) the work will combine Mahon's poem linking Ovid's banishment with the isolating fragmentation of the present with my frequent transformation of ancient historical music and technics into the Modern.  Mahon engages with received forms and technicity, like rhyme, iambic pentameter, and the figures from Antiquity with my own engagement with music's ancient models, of the Ars Nova polyphony, and the Renaissance's architectures of temporal form.   Both approaches lead to meditations on isolation and collapse, and reflection on the anomie of the present which isolates us all, as we face the collapse of republics, icons, and the world itself.

on the poem and poet

The tale of Ovid's isolation has remained a touchstone for political, social, and artistic isolation for centuries; for the great poet of Rome in the land where no one speaks Latin can be used to speak to many ignominies, those of the misunderstood artist, the social misfit, the victim. And, intentionally or not, the subject of such indignities themselves becomes the heroic figure of later poems and narratives; consider Adrian Radulescu's biographical and historical exploration of the banishment and its historical uptake within Romanian history. Ovid's banishment pushes him from Rome and so from the center of his culture, but, unknown to him at the moment, makes him a central figure in the local and national narrative, neighborhoods, and statues; it will also make a frequent subject for painters and poets considering the isolation of themselves, of traditions, and of art itself. Ovid's portrayal of his naufragium is elegiac and (perhaps) overly self-involved; in Tristia we found numerous complaints in his cultural and artistic isolation, framed again and again as messages to Augustus, the 'first citizen' whose displeasure led to his exile.  

I who lie here, sweet Ovid, poet of tender passions,
fell victim to my own sharp wit.
Passer-by, if you've ever been in love, don't grudge me
the traditional prayer: 'May Ovid's bones lie soft!'

We seem here to remain at a loss as to the 'poem and mistake' that led him here, as all before, apart from Ovid himself. 

Though two charges, carmen et error, a poem, and an error,
ruined me, I must be silent about the second fault:
I’m not important enough to re-open your wound, Caesar,
it’s more than sufficient you should be troubled once.

Did the hedonic implications of his poetry at last rattle too greatly the moralistic Augustus? Did Livinia put this shunning into motion, as a plot to seal secrets Ovid 'mistakingly' saw? Whatever the cause, he begs for forgiveness, and for permission to return, to home, family, and to his community of poets, and the elites that supported it.

Should you, the Empire’s prince, leave your post
and read poetry I’ve set going on limping feet?
The weight of Rome’s name is not so light,
pressing its burden on your shoulders,
that you can turn your power to foolish games,
examining my idle things with your own eyes.

Mahon's Ovid in Tomis takes this narrative to something more than simple mourning, perhaps precisely because of the poet's great historical consciousness; Mahon came from the Protestant suburbs of Belfast, painfully aware of the personal, social, and cultural impact of centuries of enclosure. Such forced distanciation can be found in many of his poems, such as in ‘Courtyards in Delft’, in which scrupulous attention to the Pieter de Hooch painting connects to the alienation and unease of his childhood.

Similarly, throughout the poem, Mahon renders the isolation of Ovid in terms of the modern.

What coarse god / Was the gearbox in the rain / Beside the road? //
What nereid the unsinkable / Coca-Cola / Knocking the icy rocks? //
They stare me out / With the chaste gravity / And feral Pride //
Of noble savages / Set down / On an alien shore.//

Mahon takes the particulars of Ovid's exile from a tale of the banishment of the artist to a consideration of a greater fall, with the current threat of collapse of political, social, ecospheric, and nöospheric structures as an ontological naufragium, the shipwreck of the Now, a moment more squarely in the anthropocene, in which the end of the world and the end of art are deeply entwined.

The Muse is somewhere / Else, not here / By this frozen lake- //
Or, if here, then I am / Not poet enough / To make the connection. //
Are we truly alone / With our physics and myths, / The stars no more //
Than glittering dust, / With no one there / To hear our choral odes? //

Ovid's isolation is from his life (familial and social), as a poet cleaved from the community of poets by the poisonous corruption of the new Empire; Mayhon's rich historicity brings this poet's fate the Zerrissenheit of our Modern, with its trash and fragmentation, where Zerrissenheit and anomie is no longer only the complaint of wealthy exiles, but all of us, and the Modern's deep tradition of isolating its artists.

Imagine Byron banished / To Botany Bay / Or Wilde to Dawson City //
And you have some idea / How it is for me / On the shores of the Black Sea. //
I who once strode / Head-high in the forum, / A living legend, //
Fasten my sheepskin / By greasy waters / In a Scythian wind.  //

With his evocation of poets from centuries yet to come, Mahon's Ovid is situated in the aorist, the eternal present that takes the moment of imperial formation and moves it through eras, and in doing so pushes us to consider distanciation, isolation, and awayness in both the everyday and the politics of the Now, as republics again collapse, making the elevated tale of Ovid's isolation both more generally perceivable and viscerally relevant.

this project within the context of my work

Mahon's revisioning of the historical narrative of Ovid within life in the modern is very much in alignment with my work. Mahon engages with received forms and technicity, from rhyme to iambic pentameter and the ekphrasis of figures from Antiquity, while discussing poets from Ovid's future and the disastrous fragmentation of the present; like Mahon my own engagement with music's ancient models a never revanchist or pastiche, but transformative: in Floruit Egregiis, the work of Franco-Flemish polyphonists are linked to a soggetto cavatto for the teacher who introduced their music to me; in Etude on "Pymalion qui moult subtilz estoit" energy and structure are derived from a work from the Ars Nova; in Quintet l'homme armé, medieval technicity is throughly obscured, yet permeates through the almost Perecian processes of the work's creation. In addition, Ovid in Tomis will continue my recent collections of poetic settings and framings, found in A Book of Songs, Scriptorium, and Ars Poetica, all found on The Bird is an Alphabet, my forthcoming third portrait album on New Focus Recordings in December 2023. And in the scale of its instrumentation and the primacy of the vocal line, itself isolated from the textless instrument surrounding it, and the imagistic connection to the sea, this piece connects with the concerto-like character of Tethys, in which a soloist resists, couples, and commands the large ensemble surrounding them.

This thread in my poesis emerges from those with whom I studied; George Crumb, Jennifer Bloxam, Robert Suderburg, Andy Jaffe, Christopher Hasty, and Norman Smith, a varied collection of artists and scholars each articulating a deep engagement with the pastness of the present. Kosselleck describes the mood more elegantly than most: "The conjunction of ruins and rebuilt sites can be recalled, noting the obvious shift in style that lends architectural outlines their deep temporal dimension; or one might contemplate the coexistence, connectedness, and hierarchy of variously modernized forms of transport, through which, from sleigh to airplane, entire eras meet." We must remember, though, that performance (enacted or observed) positions us like Klee's Angelus Novus, experiencing a violent departure from a war-torn heaven. The Angel of History moves forward, but faces backward, reconstructing a world from the staff of the past; the fragments of tradition pass us as they move toward an unknown future.