Volume 29 Issue 4 | February & March 2024

PERIOD PERFORMANCE
Musicometaphorical
journeys in
Alison Mackay’s
Staircases
STEPHANIE CONN
Alison
Mackay
KEVIN KING
Whether they are physical or metaphorical,
staircases take us from one place to another
through a liminal space. But far from being
“non-places”’ that we should take for granted, stairways
are also entities unto themselves: they can effect a change
in place or fortune, and themselves stand as symbols of
class or power. In Staircases, her new production for
Tafelmusik, Alison Mackay explores music with direct
or inferred links to staircases and, as she puts it herself,
builds a case about complex connections between the arts
and economic issues.
Some of the links are straightforward: Handel’s serenata Parnasso
in festa draws a parallel to the physical steps carved into Mount
Parnassus; Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum uses the same location as
a metaphor for the steps taken to master the technique of fugue.
Lully’s comédie-ballet Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme was premiered
on the Grand Escalier of the Chateau of Versailles, known as the
Ambassadors’ Staircase. But the program delves deeper in its meditation
on the associations that stairways can evoke. As Mackay explains,
“Most of the staircases in the show are known to have had performances
of music on them, and most of them were built by monarchs
or merchants who owed much of their wealth to the profits from the
trade in human cargo.”
Mackay has often brought in collaborators from beyond the
Tafelmusik family for her past projects. This time it is American
composer/bass-baritone Jonathan Woody. “He is such a wonderful
singer who has performed with Tafelmusik in the past and I also
knew him as a composer from other contexts.” Mackay said. “His
artistic practice is entwined with his deep understanding of historical
issues and his concern for social equity and justice… He also created
the spoken narrative which puts his new piece in context, and he has
guided me about terminology and choice of language for my own part
of the script.”
As Mackay explains, “Both Safe Haven, our concert about the
contributions of refugee populations to their new cities, and The
Indigo Project, exploring the role of indigo dye in the economy and
culture of Baroque Europe, touched on the transatlantic slave trade. I
had wanted to go deeper in examining the debt which some of our
most beloved works of art and music owed to the proceeds from
slavery. This seems so shocking to us now until we consider the extent
to which our own bank accounts might be profiting from companies
engaged in unethical practices.”
One of Woody’s compositions is a setting of poetry by 18th-century
African-American poet Phillis Wheatley. Wheatley was kidnapped as
a child in Africa and made a slave in the household of John Wheatley,
a Boston businessman. She was, however, excused from servant’s
duties and tutored from a young age, attaining a level of education
that would have been unusual at the time for a woman of any race.
She read Greek and Latin classics by the age of 12; at 20 her collection,
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was published
in London, after which the Wheatleys freed her. Her reputation and
achievements spurred on the growing antislavery movement.
From Wheatley’s poem “Imagination,” Woody sets the fourth
stanza, “Imagination! Who can sing thy force?”, which celebrates
Jonathan Woody
10 | February & March 2024 thewholenote.com