Miriam

(A music theater work for Abbie Conant with

text and music by William Osborne.)

Abbie Conant, soprano, actress, mime, trombonist

Leonore Hall, piano

William Osborne, text, music

A Demo Video of Miriam

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Click here to watch the demo-video of Miriam

Listen to the complete sound file for "The Mirror" (Miriam Part I)

(accompaniment to a pantomime for digital piano)

Notes

A woman trapped in domestic boredom moves toward a nervous breakdown.  Institutionalized, she  attempts to create a performance for a shortly expected visit from her children, but  can find no words to express her feelings.  She discovers she has no language of her own and recedes more and more into silence, finally imploding into soundless screaming.  Only her instrument can serve as an expression of her deepest emotions.  As the work ends, she is still determined to find something she can sing.  

 This work explores the relation between language, creativity, and  identity.  We develop the premise that the pursuit of creative identity is fundamental to human dignity, and that people denied that freedom develop existential, spiritual, and psychological problems.

Miriam also explores the belief that humanity has repressed its feminine side, thus losing many icons, archetypes, and forms of communication necessary for its well-being. 

Women confront these issues because society imposes roles upon them that limit their human potential.  Miriam’s domestic role forces her to wear "masks," but her buried authenticity fights back.  Women in the workplace face similar pressures since they often confront attitudes and prejudice that limit their de-velopment.  These were the experiences of Abbie Conant who fought egregious discrimination in the Munich Philharmonic for 13 years.  

Many professional women identify with Miriam.   Sylvia Alimena,  conductor of the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra in Washington, D.C. and a horn player with the National Symphony, was quoted in a feature about Abbie and Miriam in the Washington Post:

“‘You can not imagine the power of this piece unless you were there in the room, Alimena says.  “All those professional women, just shaken to their cores by this piece.  Of course it resonates particularly with other players, because -believe it- the kind of treatment Abbie went through in Munich is not, by any stretch of the imagination, unknown in the United States.’”

Miriam experiences internal crisis, but she is more than just another “mad woman of opera,” since she consciously confronts the stereo-typed roles, masks, and personas that are forced upon her as a woman.   Perhaps this passage from A Spy in the House of Love by Anais Nin best describes the conflict of Miriam:

“She was like an actress who must com-pose a face, an attitude to meet the day. . .  She must redesign the face, smooth the anxious brows, separate the crushed eye-lashes, wash off the traces of secret, interior tears, accentuate the mouth as upon a canvas, so it will hold its luxuriant smile.  Inner chaos, like those secret volcanoes which suddenly lift the neat furrows of a peacefully plowed field, awaited behind all disorders of face, hair and costume, for a fissure through which to explode."

“Unfortunately, Abbie's story reflects the rule,” notes Monique Buzzarte in the IAWM Journal, “not the exception, for women trombonists.  Her case is distinguished from so many others not by the actions she endured, but by their severity, her documentation of them, and most notably, by her eventual victory.”