Postcard from Matthew Welch and Sean San José
In SFGC’s Postcard series, our guest artists, collaborators, and faculty take us behind the scenes and share an intimate look into their thoughts about music, life, and art-making.
This postcard features Stage Director Sean San José and composer Matthew Welch.
SFGC, with Artistic Director and conductor Valérie Sainte-Agathe, will premiere Tomorrow's Memories: A Little Manila Diary, composed by Matthew and stage directed by Sean, on June 16th-18th.
A collaborative project three years in the making, this semi-staged work, featuring SFGC's award-winning Premier Ensemble, is based on the 1924-1928 diary writings of Filipina immigrant Angeles Monrayo and highlights the importance of the Filipino diaspora’s cultural impact throughout the United States, particularly in the Bay Area. Featured guest artists for this program include Florante Aguilar and percussionist Haruka Fujii.
Below, Matthew and Sean share behind-the-scenes insights into the making of Tomorrow's Memories.
Matthew Welch, Composer
What drew you to Angeles’s story? Do you have a personal connection to it?
The integrity, intimacy and revelation of Angeles’s private writings captured me immediately. Her story as a Filipina immigrant was a near polar opposite of my family’s, who were from the Bay Area, but had been in the Philippines for three generations.
How does writing a choral opera compare to other forms you work with?
I really enjoy the chorus’s role in Greek drama through to conventional opera, and wanted to experiment with how the role could become the focus, as a way to represent both the intimacy and universality of Angeles’s writings.
How did working with SFGC shape this piece?
Writing this for SFGC was integral to choosing the story, and how Angeles Monrayo became a clear role model to represent other young women and Filipinos.
Your work often features dialogues between traditional music of various cultures that you’ve studied, including Scottish, Balinese, and music of the Philippine Cordillera. What is your approach to that dialogue? How is that dialogue present in Tomorrow’s Memories?
This opera is perhaps my biggest mash-up to date, featuring just about every music I have researched and performed into one giant package. What I have enjoyed about bringing Angeles to life musically, is that she is herself very musically inclined. I try to combine musical ideas both from her own varied tastes in international music, and my own that represent the larger context of the drama.
You have many operas in your list of works, most of which are in some ways an experimental take on the traditional opera. What keeps you coming back to opera?
I love story-telling through music! I am also an avid reader, and I love what experiences can be had when we bring a text into the music. Like adding text to the music, bringing direction, staging and movement can transform the music into a more ideal and wholistic experience that goes back to our ancient human rituals that bring us together and heal us.
Did anything surprise you throughout the process of writing the opera or seeing it brought to life?
I was very moved by how close I could get to the family around Angeles’s writings. The Filipino-American National Historical Society and their museum staff in Stockton were so warm and enthusiastic about my research. I was connected with Angeles’s granddaughter and her community. Additionally the preview in Hawaii connected with decedents of people in her diary. I have been honored to extend my research in Philippine music by collaborating with experts in the traditions.
What inspires you about working with SFGC?
It is wonderful that SFGC can go big on something entirely new, and the Chorus’s resilience in light of recent global events is inspiring.
Sean San Jose, Stage Director
Tomorrow’s Memories was initially scheduled to receive its live premiere last year, which was unfortunately canceled. What feels different this time around? What has stayed the same?
I work on all new works, so it’s pretty rare to get to revisit something. And what is really cool this time is that we’re able to look at what we did last year and sort of hold on to ideas and shapes that we like, and also look at it and go, “where are the ideas that we didn’t feel like had their impact?” With a new theater piece, the way we work, you build it, build it, build it for years, and then you do it, and while you’re doing it you’re trying to let it stand on its feet. It’s only when it’s finished that you can look at it and go “wow, that felt special,” or “I never understood that one moment,” or “I wish we could’ve re-looked at this idea.” So, now the three of us [myself, associate stage director Melvign Badiola and choreographer Patricia Ong] are really reframing it.
I think the most exciting and inspirational part of reapproaching it is being able to look at the story of the diary as artifact. In this new production we want to find framework that gives the audience and the performers the cultural and historical context of Filipino life. We’re approaching it almost like all of us found this young girl’s diary, not originally intended for other eyes or ears, and we’re asking, “What country are you coming from and what was happening here? What are the cycles of colonization there?” Or even, “What does it mean to move and not be aware of the consequences and aftereffects of forced migration?” For this story specifically, we ask, “what does it mean now in historical California contexts for someone to land in Stockton at the gateway to the Central Valley, something that has such an impact on our state in terms of agricultural life, human life, community life, and our economy?”
How does your approach to stage directing change working with opera compared to other forms of theater? What was your approach to Tomorrow’s Memories specifically?
One of the cool things that I’ve got to experience in my career has been new performance works, and even in that theater context I’ve always had the gift of getting to work with other artists like dancers, musicians, and poets, so breaking the so-called standards of theater storytelling and asking what is this story telling us rhythmically, visually, physically, has always been step number one. However, the task is not only to do that storytelling, but for all of us to do our human work and ask, “who am I, and what distance do I have to travel to get close to the story?” It’s not the same as reading sheet music, which is its own tough task. It’s a different sort of human traversing - in this case cultural and historical, which sounds really daunting. I don’t think it has to be daunting, but it does need to be addressed.
With Tomorrow’s Memories specifically, we’re in this hybrid project, where it’s part chamber opera, part choral recital, and part theater piece. They're singing,and that to me is the same function as talking serves in a play. The singing is the main story channel. So we’re trying to place the storytelling as readers.
What’s cool about this project is having this trio of people, Patricia, Melvign, and myself, we’re getting to layer it even within our approach to it. Patricia’s looking at it one way, and Mel’s pulling up something else, and I’m trying to get an overview, so that helps give us a sense of the story. We’re always asking each other, “what is the scene about? And I think you can do that whether it’s an opera or a jazz song or a dance.”
SFGC is dedicated to the music of living composers, much like your performance ensemble Campo Santo is dedicated to developing and producing new works for theater and performance. What is important to you about nurturing new and living theater?
This question is at the core of what I do. New work is so exciting to me, first of all, but it also feels so very necessary for me. I need it as a place of reflection, to see the world in which I live, in which I come from, reflected back to me. I wasn’t introduced to the world of performing arts until I was a seventeen year old kid, even though I grew up in San Francisco, so the idea that there are spaces for stories of our worlds that can be told in a concurrent way to our lives is really thrilling to me.
I find that especially as a person of color, as a child of immigrants, as a citizen of a city that is fighting to keep its existence for its citizens still, the platform of live performance is such a vital outlet for us to express, to see, to share. Art is really to share experiences of things that we don’t have the answers to, so that’s what I find so exciting about doing new work. If one were to do some of the many many great plays, I find the inspiration isn’t there for me, not because I don’t think A Raisin in the Sun is a great piece of art - I do - but it’s been solved. If you’ve seen Ruby Dee perform it, if you’ve seen Sydney Poitier do it. If you’ve seen Vivienne Leigh and Marlon Brando perform Streetcar named Desire, you go “I think I know what that is.” The idea of doing something new not only feels more present, but also because the space between audience and performer is tighter. When I watch something like a Shakespeare play, I feel very far from the stage - not just physically, I mean from the story. I have to jump a lot of hurdles in my head to find myself inside of that. With new work, we get this opportunity, this gift: the starting point is so much closer between these two components.
Has anything surprised you in the process of bringing Tomorrow’s Memories to life?
I was hesitant at first when Valérie presented this project to me and told me Matthew Welch was the composer. I thought, “woah this is really weird, a white guy is gonna musically tell the story of this young brown girl’s journey?” That surprised me, but if you’re asking questions with integrity and imagination, I think we can tell stories. And equally surprising is to find that there are all these beautiful trails of filipino music history and sounds and aesthetics within the score, and it was really thrilling when I heard Florante [Aguilar, guitarist] and everyone playing the music.
In the truest sense of the word, it’s so awesome to hear the music and to be confronted by this body of thirty, forty voices singing together like that. I mean every time Patricia and Mel and I look at each other, it takes us a couple minutes before we start “directing.” We just go, “hold on: you guys need to know that that was really beautiful.” And the chorus, as you can imagine, they just say, “yeah, well, we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing,” and Vaérie’s saying, “well they’re getting there, they’re getting there.” So that is such a beautiful surprise, to be blown away by the sound every time.
What do you find compelling about Angeles’s story?
The fact that it’s a culturally and historically Filipino story means a lot to me creatively and certainly personally. I think one of the ideas that we approached in the first production was to think of the commonality of younger women and nonbinary folks creating community through different circumstances. In the story of Angeles’s life we find that forced migration, immigration, indentured servitude, continued migration, agricultural life, city life - all this stuff in these situations where people, even or maybe especially younger folks, found these little communities, whether it was in Hawai’i, in the plantation finding this life and literally creating a language together (pidgin), or whether it’s in Stockton creating a community like Little Manila. So that idea was really exciting.
And I think one of the cool things about SFGC doing this project is that it’s a piece of writing by a young woman, and SFGC a creative center for young women and nonbinary people to tell their stories through song. That alignment has always been really exciting and inspirational to me.
What inspires you about working with SFGC?
Valérie is such a great leader, and creative visionary, and also a really supportive visionary insofar as allowing this process to be so collaborative and also to morph between what the girls chorus does so well and letting it evolve into something between girls chorus performance, chamber opera, and a theater piece, and that’s been really exciting.
When Valérie first told me about Tomorrow’s Memories, her vision and her body of work at the chorus about singing voices and bringing different cultures and experiences into the room - One of the things that I admire about Valérie is that she’s pushing and expanding the viewfinders of the singers in the chorus, the whole staff of the chorus, and then in turn, the families and the audiences that witness it.
What are you excited to work on in the future? Give us a sneak peek!
This collaboration came about organically: Valérie and I had decided to work on this together, and then, in the middle of the project I started at the Magic Theater. It was at the same time that she and I had been thinking about where we see Tomorrow’s Memories being staged. The farther we got into it, the more chamber-like it felt to us, so we were looking for something that was less the big music hall and something that was more chamber-like. What’s been cool about that for me is that we have all these great collaborations at Magic Theater, whether it’s our resident theater companies or the San Francisco poet laureates-in-residence or these visual artists, or this collaboration with SFGC, so there’s always something happening at Magic! I’d like people to know that this is part of an ongoing series of events and programs, and come check us out.