Rachel Grimes' The Way Forth and the History of the Opera
by Megan Reichel
Design by Noah Pottebaum
2019’s annual Witching Hour kicked off on October 30th with its first pre-festival event the Creative Matters lecture series with composer and pianist Rachel Grimes’ where she presented her folk opera album and film, “The Way Forth.” The project follows generations of her family and their deep roots in Kentucky and sheds light on those who were forgotten or written out of time and history, especially women and people of color.
Grimes began by talking about how the whole project started: the history of her family. With the passing of a loved family member and the transitional phase afterwards, she explained how findings in their home— pictures, postcards, letters, artifacts spanning centuries and generations— sent her diving into research beginning in 2016 to find the answers to an infinity of questions about the lives that came before her, including all of the mysteriously empty spaces within that history. “I’m looking at stories through time,” she expressed fondly.
This research sent her all over Kentucky with filmmaker Catherine Axley, who cataloged the project. As the audience is shown stills from the film, Grimes informs us of the backstory of each: historical monuments, ancient and beautiful trees, buildings that could be knocked down by a stiff wind. “It was right in front of me. The more I stare at it, the more I’ve seen it.” And we could see it, too – the history she unraveled on-screen was entangled in roots of familial trees with ones that grew from the earth through the film stills and pictures of what she had found from her family.
The themes, Grimes told us, of the project were trees, decrepitude, monuments, maps, fire, the American flag – Americana in general – and slavery. She made a point to explain her sense of inherited memory, that while she had never been to these places before, she felt as though she lived these landmarks, people, and artifacts. As though the experience and knowledge had been passed down to her.
Some of her findings were, she said, a bit too enlightening with her family’s history as white colonizers of the not-yet-Kentucky and slave owners. “There are a lot of things not to be proud about, as I discovered. It’s a complicated feeling when you want to be interested in the stories. I want to know who settled the states… but there was a lot of violence and greed and dishonesty… this is so revealing, maybe, about how the whole country might have been set up… we all came over here and it’s brand new land for us.”
The results of her journey through time and history naturally led her, as a musician, to compose an opera. “It was right in front of me, and other times, it wasn’t, so I made the story for me… whether I intended to or not.” The musical components of the opera came from improvisation and brief excerpts from pre-existing songs, such as “St. Louis Blues.” Though the process was time-consuming and required lots of repetition, she said, it made the outcome truly organic. “What do [these pictures and pieces] sound like?” she had asked herself throughout the process of creating the music, saying this gift came through the inheritance of a creative family.
The Way Forth by Rachel Grimes
During her lecture, Grimes moved naturally from the podium to the piano, the stand of which held sheets of music she never once looked up at and played her opera for us. Where we could see the history on screen before, we could now hear it flying from her fingers across the keys. The music, as rich as the soil that grounds its inspirations, flooded through the glowing red hall and was filled with mourning and sorrow of the women and people of color lost to history those whose names never made it onto the monuments. The nostalgia for times passed, and the joy and excitement coming with each new discovery she made. Each piece of the puzzle she picked up, turned into a note, and fit onto a sheet of music.
The full performance of “The Way Forth” is held on November 1st at 8:30 p.m.. in the Englert Theatre, and the film is soon to be released.