Meet Vox Artist Jay Rozendaal

Q: You perform across three entirely different interpretations of La voix humaine in The Vox Project. How did you approach creating a unique musical and emotional landscape for each?

A: I feel like Poulenc provides us a musical map of the emotional landscape. And like most maps, we can find different routes to reach the destination. My contribution to creating the landscape is entirely based on the rich conversations that are happening in rehearsal between the singers and Julia (and sometimes me). The differing nuances each artist brings to the same text and the same music provides me with the cues I need to make choices about how to interpret the map. Is this moment more lyrical for this interpreter, or more jagged? Is this moment tentative, or defiant? From there I can find the nuance of dynamic or articulation, color or shape, that joins with those choices to help paint a richer picture of the character and the dramatic moment.

Q: Echo in the Crowd, The Art of the Inner Monologue, and The Name is Missing each explore voice, technology, and identity from distinct perspectives. What through-line connects them for you as the pianist?

A: The through-line for me is necessarily the map - the musical score. Over the years I've had many opportunities to come back to a familiar score multiple times. The exciting and fascinating thing about this project is to take on multiple interpretations all at once. As a collaborative pianist, I'm quite accustomed to hearing different singers approach a single piece in different ways, but this project throws into sharp relief the wondrous fluidity of the written work provided by the composer. I think one of the hallmarks of a masterpiece, whether it's music or literature or visual art or scripture, is that we can continually find new level of meaning, new colors, varied emphases, diverse ideas. The Vox project lets us, the artists, unpack that reality a bit, and present it directly to the audience.

Q: Poulenc’s writing gives the piano both structural authority and emotional sensitivity. How do you balance those roles when your “partner” on stage is undergoing such raw unraveling?

A: I think balancing these roles is what I do all the time as a collaborator. What I always hope to accomplish is to share fully in the emotional content we want to create as a team of artists - and then in the moment of performance, really lean into the structural authority part of my role, so that the singer who is actually performing that raw unraveling can feel confident that I've got their back - anything that happens, I'm right there with them.

Q: In The Name is Missing, the performance honors stories of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People. How did that context deepen your emotional or artistic responsibility as a collaborator?

A: The Name is Missing has an added personal resonance for me - especially right now. I'm just coming up to the anniversary of the death of a longtime, dear friend (and opera singer), who was a member of the Samish tribe. Her death, the memorial and the ceremonies that followed, the business of her estate... all have put my husband and I into ongoing interactions with her family and tribe. The problem of MMIW in this country was an issue that she cared about deeply, so being a part of this particular performance for me is yet another way I can honor her memory. I'm beyond grateful to collaborate with Adia on this.

Q: You’ve been part of this project from its earliest stages, performing across multiple interpretations and settings. What has been the most surprising discovery for you - musically, emotionally, or collaboratively - in bringing La voix humaine to life through so many different lenses?

A: I'm not sure it's right to say that it was actually surprising, but it has been a real delight to find myself on a journey of discovery into how truly expansive the piece itself is. The music is certainly deeply emotionally perceptive. But it is the text in particular that continues, still in every rehearsal, to reveal new nuances, new details, new possible readings. At the outset of the project I honestly don't think I fully appreciated how completely the text and music would support such widely varied interpretations. We often see directors try to shoehorn a work into saying the thing they want it to say, and somewhere it runs against the grain of what the creators actually put on the page. But in this case, what is on the page is proving to be astoundingly kaleidoscopic - that's certainly surprising because it's so rare!

Q: You’ve spent so much time inside this music, how has your own relationship to Poulenc’s score evolved through the process of repetition and reinvention?

A: I just keep loving it more and more. I've been living with it steadily for I don't know how many months now, and I'm nowhere close to being tired of it yet. Engaging with a work in a way that's really a journey of discovery makes it so much more exciting and satisfying. Continually bringing new details, uncovering more nuances... it's just a different world of art-making from just being told "do this, do that - because I said so." A lot of that simply has to do with the fact that I am actually performing it myself - I'm not just in rehearsal until there's an orchestra, with a conductor shaping all the ideas. In this case, my discoveries, my ideas, my experiences will actually be presented in performance. That in itself makes the process of discovery, and the process of falling in love with the work, just that much more gratifying. I'm so grateful to all you Rising Waters for making this possible.

Q: What do you hope audiences will hear or feel differently when they experience several of these versions side by side?

A Maybe this doesn't exactly answer this question but.... I do hope that audiences will see something they can relate to. Not that I hope that everyone has experienced this kind of trauma - but that I hope they will discover that the stories we tell in opera really aren't fossilized, stuck in time, artifacts of people who have nothing to do with our lives today. I hope they'll find that opera isn't just one thing - not just one type of story, not just one type of artist, or one type of audience. In this unique storytelling art form there is something - or a lot of somethings - for everyone. Because it's a truly deeply human art form.