Felix Jarrar: Road to Somewhere
Photo Credit: Irina Hage
A Pride Month interview with Felix Jarrar, written by Yutong Yang.
Ghosting is one of my biggest pet peeves. And let’s admit it: I’m not solitary in my hurt and insecurity. A quick Google search yields dozens of unanswered questions:
“Why do I get ghosted?” Is this my fault?
“How many days of no contact is ghosting?” Where do I even draw the line?
“Is ghosting emotional abuse?” Am I blowing it out of proportion again?
“Do ghosters come back? How do you respond to a ghoster who comes back?”
… The list goes on. And From “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?” by Prince to “Games” by Demi Lovato, pop culture’s never run out of relevant heartbreak anthems or power ballads. We may not be surprised to find few equivalents in the classical world, but I for one have always wanted poignant art songs that deal with these visceral topics. So I looked to composer and pianist Felix Jarrar, and was astonished to find that he’d written not one, but two, emotionally intense song cycles to help himself—and potentially others—make sense of it all and heal.
Before his Pride concert on June 18, we sat down to chat about loneliness, baroque music, and The Ulster County Songbook Volume II.
1. Tell us about the context for this song cycle: when did you write it? What does Ulster County mean to you?
I wrote The Ulster County Songbook Volume II between October and December of 2021. I started writing the song cycle about a month after one of my best friends ghosted me when I was going through a rough patch. I kept trying to understand his side of the story at the cost of my emotional and artistic well-being. My empathy towards others allows me to emotionally connect with music, but at the same time, it can also lead me to mental health crises. I’d sorted out these thoughts before by going to Ulster County in upstate New York. In fact, I wrote Volume I of the series under very similar circumstances. The Ulster County Songbook is a safe space for me to process my feelings as a queer artist within a particular model that serves as a safe expression for my musical and literary thoughts.
2. It’s amazing how you’ve created this safe space for personal and artistic exploration. What did you hope to accomplish by writing this song cycle?
The goal of The Ulster County Songbook Volume II is to take myself out of my head and my misery, where I was left with more questions than answers and assumed the blame was on me. It’s a song cycle about learning to say goodbye to someone you cared about without having the opportunity to do so in person.
3. How have you evolved between Volumes I & II? How are they different?
What’s new in this volume is that I give myself permission to be sad about the whole thing. This makes the work one of my most depressing, but also one of my most musically honest pieces.
4. Thank you so much for giving me a sneak peek of the Songbook—to our audience, you’re in for an emotional roller-coaster ride. Wow I’m so in love with your not-so-musical musical directions! Tell us about them. What are some of your proudest—and boldest—plays throughout the years?
I’ve always loved tempo marks that directly express my emotional state at the time of the music’s composition. I think my favorite tempo marking of my career thus far is “Britney 2007” for “The Poppers Song,” pop star Ugly Duckling’s mad scene from my comic drag chamber opera Mother Goose.
Photo Credit: Irina Hage
5. Okay let’s do a deeper dive into some of these songs. In “The Lonely Waltz,” you used “queer” to rhyme with “here.” Why did you choose to emphasize your and the relationship’s queerness?
“The Lonely Waltz” is one of my favorite moments that the tenor part has in Volume II. I wrote the text while visiting my best friend Allison in Ulster County. I was in the guest room looking out the window while it was raining as the text “[t]he raindrops keep beating on my windowsill” came to my head. The rainstorm was accompanied by wind that circled around all of the fallen leaves and tree branches. The image of circling around made me think of the waltz and its signature twirling choreography. I wrote a song in Volume I called “Lonely,” and in Volume II, I chose to explore these same feelings in this different situation with the songs “The Lonely Heart’s Leaves” and “The Lonely Waltz”. The concept of loneliness is a major one in my output. I chose the word “queer” for the lyrics because my desire to circle around the hopes of reconnecting with this guy is a trope that is familiar in gay heartbreak. In this song, I personalize the pain in the context of my observations as a lonely man in the situation. I write these songs about my personal experiences, so that’s why I do not adjust the gendered pronouns when describing the situations I deal with. My hope is that the lyrics carry universal themes that can apply to many situations in one’s life.
6. These songs are sung by either a baritone, or a tenor. What does each voice part embody? Who’s going to be the baritone? What about the tenor?
The two voice parts that alternate amongst the songs represent two sides of my personality. In Volume I, the tenor represents my introverted side, while the baritone represents my more extroverted, independent-minded thoughts. In Volume II, the two voices start off in this mindset, but gradually as the cycle goes on, the tenor becomes the more fearless one, while the baritone resigns himself to the heartbreaking farewell of the final song. The tenor for the workshop will be my frequent collaborator Gabriel Hernandez, and the baritone for the concert will be Jose Cuartas, a new collaborator and colleague of mine!
7. “The Day My Heart Cracked” is the only time the baritone and tenor appear together. Why is this song and only this song a duet?
Throughout my career I have devised a nine-song form for two singers and piano. The two singers reflect different sides of my personality that I choose to express differently in each song. Each singer alternates singing four solo songs. In the middle of the first four songs, I create a duet that serves as the centerpiece for the song cycle. This centerpiece is always the emotional heart of the story. This duet was the last thing I composed for The Ulster County Songbook Volume II. Here, the two singers come together to express all of my emotions that I feel about whatever crisis I am dealing with in my personal life. In this duet, I wrote it after attending a friend’s concert. We all went out after, and on my way back to the subway, I happened to pass by the church where the guy the song cycle is about sings. That’s how I came up with the opening lyric of “I walked by your church where you go to sing.” The whole situation felt less like heartbreak, and more like this person emotionally took a baseball and swung it at my heart. At that moment, my heart felt like glass that was cracked by his emotional blows.
8. The intro of “Rameau in the Mountains” sounds so much like that of “Dream Song,” plus the trills. And then “Our Future Went to Die” and “The Lonely Heart’s Leaves” are a pair too. Tell us about this arrangement!
“Rameau in the Mountains” reprises the music of “Dream Song” for the tenor in a manner very similar to how “Our Future Went to Die” reprises the music of ”The Lonely Heart’s Leaves” for the baritone. This cycle, unlike Volume I, is musically cyclical, which means music and motifs return to correspond with emotionally relatable turning points in the story. For the tenor, “Rameau in the Mountains” is in a similar place of calm verisimilitude, while the baritone sings of how this guy never said why he ghosted me to the same music of “The Lonely Heart’s Leaves” since that’s the song where I first mention the ghosting. It creates a parallel musical moment that the listener can trace through the work as they listen to it.
9. There’s simply too much to unpack in “Rameau in the Mountains.” How has Rameau and baroque music in general inspired you?
I wrote “Rameau in the Mountains” during the same trip to Ulster County visiting my best friend Allison. We listened to some Rameau in the car while driving through the Catskill mountains. That, among other things I write about that I won’t get into here because I don’t want to give away too much before the show, provide a moment of musical and lyrical relief from the overbearing sadness that overlays much of this work. Baroque music is a huge inspiration to me because I love counterpoint. In fact, in Volume I, I have a song called “Burnout” which features a fugue in the middle section. In Volume II, there are embellishments and contrapuntal moments that hearken back to baroque music, and specifically, some French baroque music. I directly wrote about Rameau in the lyrics because that is what Allison and I listened to in the car. We listened to music from Rameau’s Naïs.
10. As someone with synesthesia, it’s delightful to see you always owning the experience in your works!
Synesthesia has influenced my work, because I always associate color with sound. That’s why I have many songs and arias that revolve around descriptions of emotions for various colors.
11. The text reads like confessional poetry with lots of relevant topics—from self-love to panic attacks—but you chose media like the waltz and added your own twists. I remember you saying “this song is like Classical Composer A + Pop Diva B” on Facebook. How did you fuse these influences to create something so fresh and interesting?
I’ve always taken inspiration from the great masterworks of the standard repertoire, and paired it with inspiration from the immediate influences in my life. These influences include popular music, jazz, the natural imagery of New England where I grew up and went to school, and my life as a queer man in a world that leans heavily on heteronormativity. There are two songs in the cycle where I do just this: “Road to Nowhere” and “Goodbye Forever.” These are the two bookend songs for Volume II that the baritone sings. “Road to Nowhere” is an art song that is inspired by Finzi just as much as it is inspired by a mid-2000s Kelly Clarkson record. A survival anthem for going your own way, this song was my mantra for a long time while I was recovering from the trauma of this whole part of my life. The last song, “Goodbye Forever,” uses the same classical inspiration of Finzi, but in this song, I pair it with alternative rock/soft pop ballad vibes. This song is the final farewell I had to give the guy, because he never gave me the opportunity to say that. I have to learn to process my own emotions by myself in this song, and learning to self-soothe through this time was one of the greatest challenges in my personal life during the past 12 months.
12. Have you always intended to actually mount the show? What does openly sharing this deeply personal story mean to you? What do you think the audience might get from this experience?
I first and foremost wrote both volumes of The Ulster County Songbook for myself so that I could process my emotions. However, in order to effectively communicate and process what I felt about these situations as an artist, I had to frame and validate my feelings in terms that could be relatable to other people if they were to listen to this music. Sharing this incredibly personal series with an audience means I get to carry out my goal of creating music that comes from a very autobiographical place, but frames it in ways that can be universally related to by other people, even if they have not lived those same experiences. The experiences I write about in this work are based on being queer, and by framing it in terms so that other people can understand the feelings I write about, I make the queer experience a normal one.
Photo Credit: Irina Hage
It’s been almost a year since my first interview at 360° of Opera®, which features Felix in a Pride Month Spotlight. And yes, he’s not only on a Road to Somewhere, but also bringing the whole village with him on this journey of self-discovery, self-care, and self-growth.
We’d like to invite you to join Felix for his Pride concert at Rockwood Music Hall Stage 3 on Saturday, June 18th at 4:30PM. Soprano Marina Harris, tenor Gabriel Hernandez, and baritone Jose Cuartas will present several works of Jarrar’s that feature LGBTQIA+ themes. The program includes the workshop of The Ulster County Songbook Volume II and selections from Jarrar’s opera The Tell Tale Heart. The code for $5 off the ticket is PRIDE 🌈🕊💜✨
-written by Yutong Yang