is a wild, enthralling 6-hour musical event — a folk revival, a rock concert, a communal feast, and a meditation on all that has lived and all that has died in this world. Following Stranger Love, a six-hour opera commissioned by the LA Phil and praised by both The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the best classical music performances of 2023, Dylan Mattingly and Thomas Bartscherer have created a new epic, History of Life, featuring the renowned Irish vocalist Iarla Ó Lionáird (The Gloaming) in the role of a modern-day Homeric bard. More than just a performance, History of Life is a celebration — like a wedding or a wake — that bears witness to the vast, beautiful, violent, many-voiced history of life on Earth. Through music and words, in story and song, History of Life offers the rare opportunity to abide in wonder and to look upon the world as though seeing it for the first time.
As both singer and storyteller, Ó Lionáird embodies an imagined tradition of oral epic, as if it had evolved continuously over 2700 years, incorporating new stories and new sounds with every retelling. Beginning with the Odyssey and exploding out in all directions, History of Life weaves together three central stories — Odysseus’s long journey home as an older man; Charles Darwin setting out as a young naturalist on the HMS Beagle; and the coming of age of Luzia, a girl born on the Cabo Verdean island of Santiago in the first half of the 19th century — into an enormous musical tapestry that comes to encompass the whole bewildering narrative of organic life on Earth. Ó Lionáird, himself the bearer of the long tradition of Irish sean-nós singing, is joined by a band of twelve musicians, playing an array of instruments that includes two hurdy-gurdies, two re-tuned upright pianos, two guitars, re-tuned harp, toy piano, harmonium, mandolin, strings, and percussion. A group of six fellow-travelers, like the regulars in a pub, host the evening, sharing the space with the audience, humming along or breaking into dance, taking in the music as though they’ve known it all their lives: they create the world in which History of Life is received. Over the course of three acts and two intermissions, the Regulars, the audience, and all the performers share a meal.
Sung and spoken in over a dozen languages, including English, ancient Greek, Occitan, Dante’s Tuscan, Cape Verdean Creole, and Irish, History of Life draws on folk traditions both real and imagined to create a sound that is altogether new and yet strangely and deeply familiar. It offers a vision of what is beyond our capacity to imagine: the vastness of history, seen not only as a succession of dates and names, of monarchs and empires and extinctions, but as the superabundant multitude of singular moments of experience — the near-infinite seconds of yearning and hunger and love and anger and wonder, the sheer vitality of every person and animal and plant that has ever lived. Minimalist in form and maximalist in content, by turns exuberant and meditative, majestic and tender, History of Life feels like both an age-old ritual and something entirely unlike anything else.
Music by Dylan Mattingly
Words by Thomas Bartscherer
Concept by Dylan Mattingly and Thomas Bartscherer
Featuring
Iarla Ó Lionáird
Commissioned by Spoleto Festival USA