Sorrel Hays grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but moved to NY in 1969 and now divides her time between Manhattan and Tallapoosa, Georgia. West German Broadcasting commissioned her for 8 works for their Experimental Drama Department between 1984-1998. Show more
She created Dream in Her Mind, a collage opera about human consciousness featured in the Copenhagen Festival 1996; and Liebe im All/Love in Space, with actresses Jeannie Tripplehorn and Punk Mary, which won the 1986 Westdeutscher Rundfunk Acoustica Competition and was WDR's nomination for the Prix Futura Berlin.
The Chattanooga Opera commissioned Hays to write The Glass Woman about Annie Safley Houston, a rags-to-riches-to-rags antique collector, which was produced in New York in 1989 and 1993 as one of Opera America’s Opera for the Nineties and Beyond. Her comic pocket opera The Bee Opera was premiered at Medicine Show Theater in New York in 2003, with Beth Griffith as Countersue Bee and Queen Elizabeth I. Hays’s spoof on American busyness Something (To Do) Doing, for 15 actors and scat singer Janet Lawson, was installed at the Whitney Museum’s first audio art show in 1990.
Sorrel Hays has received grants and awards from the Cary Trust, The New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Council on the Arts, the American Music Center, and Arts International. Her work is published by Henmar Press/ C. F. Peters, Hildegard Press and Tallapoosa Music, and recorded on New World, Finnadar Atlantic, Folkways, Tellus, Opus One, Townhall, Centaur and Wergo labels. Show less
Charles Flowers is the award-winning author or co-author of a novel and 69 non-fiction books, including the widely translated Instability Rules, as well as hundreds of reviews, articles, op-ed columns, travel pieces and other occasional writing. Show more
To support the vice of freelance writing, he has occasionally worked as a newspaper reporter, high school teacher and university professor, TV talking head, book doctor, advertising copywriter, print model, ghostwriter, reader of slush piles, newsletter editor and TV scriptwriter. He can type, too.
A native Tennessean and 1964 graduate of Harvard, he has lived for the last four decades in various parts of southern California (Catalina Island the strangest) and New York, currently in the bucolic northern Westchester hamlet of Purdys. His article, “How Wagner Birthed a Musical Ungulate,” gives the background story of writing this first libretto at New Music Box, the online zine of the American Music Center website. The demo CD for Our Giraffe can be heard at www.CharlesFlowers.com. Certain arias, when played backwards, reveal to the seasonably attentive ear the runic message, “Go, Yankees!” His new play about publishing, Books, is tentatively scheduled for a regional production in 2009. Show less
I find that in the 21st Century, it is helpful to have laughter in music. Even though Our Giraffe has many comic moments, it also involves human dilemma. How do we reconcile our quest for knowledge with the demands of the natural world of creatures such as Zarafa? How do we reconcile our fascination with the exotic, unkown – the “Other” – with our drive to have power over those things we do not understand and fear? Do giraffes, who long for endless plains to stretch their legs, belong in zoos? How do we save the world without making it miserable?
In 1826, political intrigue between Europe and the Middle East resulted in the curious gift of a giraffe from Ottoman Egypt to the royalist Charles X of France. The 2-year-old, 6-foot-tall female calf Zarafa was kidnapped in Nubia from her mother, who was slaughtered and eaten in front of her, then escorted on foot up the Nile to the Mediterranean by her handsome and devoted keeper, Ahmed. Show more
The pair sailed to Marseilles and then walked to Paris, by which time Zarafa was the toast of the nation, inspiring hundreds of different souvenirs as well as serious works of art and antiroyalist political satire. Ahmed became the exotic delight of French womankind. In the three acts of the opera, the giraffe is a kind of tabula rasa, upon which everyone imagines what he or she wants to believe: a victory for French science and rationalism, an opportunity for political exploitation, a commercial enterprise, a symbol of mystical love or of the ineffable cosmos. After Zarafa's unexpected, violent death in the last act, her human companions and observers reflect upon the implications of her life as a captive of civilization.
The five excerpts chosen here suggest the opera's most important thematic and narrative movements: “Dr. Monteur’s Lecture” shows how the academic establishment intellectually dissected the gentle creature, now grown shyly to a height of 12 feet. In “Rose Petals,” the King views her as a triumph of Empire, while his Queen sees Ahmed in quite a different way. In “Runaway Duo,” Zarafa and the beautiful, independent Minette, the favorite Ahmed’s many lovers, wryly catalogue the traditional misunderstandings between women and men in more than one part of the animal world. “This Night” is Minette's ecstatic reaction to Ahmed's apparent commitment to her alone, a subtle recognition that their love transcends their different backgrounds of Catholicism and Islam. “Zarafa’s Lullaby,” repeated throughout the opera, is Ahmed's effort to comfort the giraffe, who suffers from nightmares of her mother's death and nostalgia for her desert home, while confirming a shared isolation with the displaced animal. Show less
