Joyce DiDonato and Time for Three on Kevin Puts's No Prisoner Be

Conceived in collaboration with Joyce DiDonato and genre-bending, GRAMMY-winning string trio Time For Three, Kevin Puts's theatrical song cycle No Prisoner Be (exploring the life and work of American poet Emily Dickinson) was premiered to great acclaim at the Bregenzer Festspiele last summer and has since toured extensively across the US and Europe as well as being recorded and released by Platoon earlier this year.

To celebrate the physical release of the recording (which was issued digitally in January), Joyce and the trio joined me via video-call from the Latvian leg of the tour to discuss how the project took shape, why the collaboration encouraged them to view Dickinson and her poetry in a new light, and the intense emotional impact which the piece has had on audiences in the course of their travels...

All photos by Lorenzo Cisi.

How did this collaboration come about?

Joyce DiDonato: It’s all thanks to Kevin Puts! The idea of composing something on verses by Emily Dickinson had been on his mind for a long time, and he knew us all from previous projects: he’d already written the GRAMMY award-winning concerto Contact for Time for Three, and I’d sung Virginia Woolf in his GRAMMY-nominated opera The Hours. Kevin sensed that bringing us together would generate a special sort of alchemy, and he was completely correct: on a musical and personal level, the whole project has been a dream.

Nick Kendall [violin]: Kevin understood his players perfectly for bringing this production to life, and it’s one of the biggest summits in our career to be on stage with Joyce doing this. When I was in high school, I knew the name 'Emily Dickinson', but I didn’t really know her. I had a mental image of her as this tiny woman in white, but this production is the polar opposite – her poetry is all about liberty, individuality, creativity, vulnerability and passion, and it’s been a privilege to bring that to life through music.

A lot of Time for Three fans know us for our vulnerability. When you see one of our live performances, the fact that we play two violins and an upright bass just disappears because it’s pure soul, energy and communication between the three of us and with our audiences. And Joyce is the same. We all know her as an opera singer, but she cuts way through that genre: the woman’s a soul singer! 

Was it conceived as a staged production?

Joyce: In a sense, it wasn’t conceived as anything - Kevin just started writing! He had no idea what form the piece was going to take, other than responding to how Emily’s words met him with the four of us in mind. The first poem he set was ‘They shut me up in Prose’, which stopped him dead in his tracks. I remember him saying ‘I can already hear it, Joyce: the guys come out and they’re just shredding on the strings! It’s not your grandmother's Emily Dickinson!’ And that’s the heart of it all, because she wasn’t this buttoned-up nineteenth-century lady: her poetry brings you into a world that’s raw, jagged, funny, harsh and true, and the longer I live with it the deeper it resonates with me.

As it evolved, we ended up with a full album, and a self-contained event in the concert-hall: No Prisoner Be is like Winterreise in that I don’t think you could bear much more in one evening! As we were working on the music, we started thinking about how we wanted to present the piece to the world…It felt like something that needed a bit of rock and roll rather than us just standing in a semi-circle! We wanted the audience to feel as if they were inside that tiny bedroom with Emily, and ultimately inside her head and heart. I think we’ve found that in a beautiful way on a presentational level.

Tell me about some of the extended techniques you use…

Ranaan Meyer [double bass]: Kevin knows us so well and he never tries to superimpose his will with the writing: it’s more about him saying ‘Oh man, you can do that?! Let’s run with it!’ We joke that you have to be careful when you make a suggestion, because he’s so open and trusting that he’s gonna lean right in and then BOOM you’re off to the races! For instance, there’s a chopping technique that’s used a lot in bluegrass and once that’s part of the music it’s hard to take it away, but Kevin's able to use it for maybe eleven measures then take it in a totally different direction. 

Charles Yang [violin]: Just to be clear, there’s no chopping at the beginning, but there’s shredding for sure. We're not a bluegrass or jazz band: we’re deeply rooted in classical music, but we borrow from many things and Kevin knows our DNA, just as he knows Joyce’s from The Hours. When he presents something to us it feels almost tailor-made. and he’s very open to adjustments. We made four or five trips to Princeton to work on the piece in no particular order, and he just kept writing around that. As a band we use so many extended techniques - playing our instruments like guitars, singing as we play - and he writes that because he knows we can do it. 

Nick: Charles didn’t come into this world thinking he would be a singer: he comes from a background where the trajectory is to become a classical solo violinist, and that was the track for me too…but I grew up just outside DC where there was one of the only bluegrass radio stations, and that changed everything. That was where I heard the violin leap with energy like I’d never encountered before, but I also fell in love with 80s and 90s hip-hop and gospel music, so that’s all part of the mix too.

All of us ended up exploring these extended techniques purely because we were curious rather than because it was part of our musical education – we just wanted to make certain sounds and energies happen, and we did that through assimilating the different musical styles that were around us. And a lot of it goes beyond anything on the page: Kevin will sometimes say ‘You know that thing you do, Nick? Do that!’. He doesn’t even have to write it out!

Joyce: During those workshops I remember someone saying: ‘This bit would be great on a viola…if only we had one!’ Nick piped up that he could play the viola, and that added a whole range of colours to the palette. Kevin creates such a wide spectrum with what could be seen as limited resources – two violins, a bit of viola and double bass – and there’s not one piece in this cycle that sounds like the next. There are so many shades and textures that evolve, especially because these guys can also sing as a chorus or soloists. There’s never a moment that doesn’t ring true to the poetry, and the variety keeps you engaged throughout the evening. It continues to take my breath away.

The final, title-track certainly occupies a very different space to the rest of the cycle…

Charles: That last track is an anthem to freedom. Kevin had this melody that just cycled over and over, and we had to find a way to make it sound like a kind of catharsis that you've earned. It doesn't sound like anything else, and that’s partly because we have the great Young People’s Chorus of New York on board for the album: there’s no better representation of that poetry than this incredible group of kids singing their hearts out. A lot of the effects were achieved on a production level rather than a compositional one: we just kept adding or subtracting layers until it felt right, and it was a really fun experiment.

Nick: He’s being too humble – he co-produced that track!

Charles: It was a blessing to create this giant work from what Kevin had written out.

Ranaan: I kept saying ‘Kevin, if you can just complete No. 26 then you’ll save us a lot of time!’ I don’t know whether Joyce had a similar experience with The Hours, but he did the same thing with our Contact concerto where he left the cadenza wide open…In the end we created something together, and I have a suspicion that he does this on purpose – he leaves just enough space for us to discover something together and put a little extra pixie-dust on this genius that he’s created.

Joyce: Kevin showed me a stack of fifteen songs he’d written while the cycle was still very much a work in progress, including this nine-word poem ‘No Prisoner Be’…he couldn’t figure out where it would fit, and I immediately said ‘At the end!’ We want people to go home singing that tune, like a Queen rock anthem at Wembley stadium, but we have to earn that catharsis. We’ve spent an hour with this tiny woman who spent so much of her life in a tiny room but found her own way of breaking free of all those constraints that were imposed upon her. In concert we invite the audience to join in – we want them to have the sensation of their voice asserting this belief in liberation with us in the moment, and then eventually take it home with them.

You provided your audiences with cards to share their response to the piece after the concerts: what sort of feedback did you get?

Nick: The engagement level has been amazing, and there are many points of entry for that - the cards were Joyce’s brilliant idea, because we wanted this project to start conversations which continue long after the production leaves town. I was very moved when I looked through the cards and online comments, because people were being so vulnerable. A lot of them start with a formal ‘Thank you for introducing/reintroducing me to Emily Dickinson’, but quite often they go on to open up about something really personal. We’re attracting a younger generation, but also older people who’ve gone through experiences that closed them up emotionally and have been reminded that it’s OK to have these feelings - they just need a chance to open that door and step through it.

Ranaan: During the US tour I remember an elderly woman in the CD-signing line who was in floods of tears because she’d lost a friend a week before, and she kept sobbing ‘Thank you thank you!’. I’m getting goosebumps even now, thinking about how this music and the production can move all kinds of different people at any point in their lives.

Joyce: I was singing at Carnegie Hall maybe two months after the Emily concert in New York, and a lady virtually rugby-tackled me! She grabbed hold of my skirt and said ‘Thank you for Emily –  I thought I was going to a concert, but it was an event! And we feel the same: it’s an experience that shifts something in people.

It’s such a thrill to present new music to people. The Time for Three guys are at the cutting edge all the time, but I spent so much of my life singing repertoire where people are listening to compare it against their favourite recordings; putting on a full evening of new music is always a risk for concert-promoters and audiences, and I understand that uncertainty. But Kevin understands how to negotiate that, and he’s never trying to prove anything.

He’s written a piece that’s absolutely based in classical form and sound: sure, there are passages that feel a bit modern, crunchy and challenging, but he doesn’t stay in that world unless the poetry demands it. He allows himself to be rhapsodic, to be folksy, to leave space for whatever the poetry is asking for. And that leaves the door wide open for the listener to feel the music rather than worry about ‘understanding’ it on an intellectual level, and I think that’s rare in modern classical music. 

Ranaan: My kids (who are 8 and 11) and my wife accompanied us on the US and European tours, and I keep reminding them that they’re free to go relax in the evening rather than coming to every single show! But they won’t miss it. My kids are into Hamilton and Michael Jackson, but the other day I heard my eight-year-old singing ‘No Prisoner Be’ in his bedroom! Kevin defies genre, and he empowers us to do the same. We’re on a mission to carry this message all over the world and keep the conversation-valve turned on, because once it closes we run into problems…

Are there any plans for publication of the sheet music?

Joyce: I need to take this conversation further with Kevin, but I would love him to do a piano/vocal score of the songs that lend themselves to that format. I want students singing these songs in their final recitals and taking them out into the world! And other songs could work beautifully with orchestra…

Charles: The three Bee Scherzos are like Bartókian miniatures: they’d be perfect for students who need to present new music in their college recitals…

Nick: I was going to say the same thing! The four of us feel so honoured to have brought this piece to life, but this isn’t the only way to do it - we’d love it to be open to other vocalists and combinations of instruments who want to dive into this world.