Librettist and Composer

Creative Vision Statement by Zhang Er, the librettist, for a new opera Tacoma Method

We seek to tell the regrettable story of Chinese expulsion from the young American Northwest city of Tacoma in Washington Territory (now Washington State) in 1885, 3 years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only Federal Law legalizing discrimination by race after the end of the American Civil War. Using archival materials including photographs, newspaper articles, interviews, and court statements, we reconstruct scenes from the past in order to understand the events and forces at play leading to the final tragedy. “Tacoma Method” was the phrase coined in the aftermath of the expulsion.

Beyond the historical facts, we attempt to explore the insiders of that long-ago Chinese community to find out who these strivers were, why they came to Tacoma, what their life in their newly found country was like, and how they dealt with the animosity from white settlers who wanted to drive them away. We attempt to recreate the frontier town with its dynamic power struggle among different constituencies of the white settlers, each with distinct political ideology, social class, inspirations and ambitions. The cry for “justice”, either by Chinese residents or white settlers, brings out the complexity of the concept. The political encampment of Left and Right of today doesn’t apply to this moment in history. The audience will be surprised.

The libretto consists of two acts. Act I is carried out at the waterfront of Tacoma along the train tracks where the Chinese community is located. It starts with the Chinese New Year celebration among families and friends; it continues into the evening banquet hosted for the Westerners of Tacoma by Mr. May, a Chinese merchant and his wife, Mrs. May. Among the guests is Tacoma’s new Mayor, Mr. Weisbach. Act I ends in increasingly uneasy and tense discords. Act II starts with a chorus filled heated debate among Tacoma white residents about the town’s “Chinese problem”, with the Mayor as the ringleader to expel the Chinese in the name of justice. It ends with Mrs. May crying out for justice before she is driven from the town, together with the rest of her community.

The violence towards new immigrants and the presumed “whiteness” of America, alas, remain relevant in the 21^st century, as witnessed by the current immigration debate, the resurfaced intolerance towards Asian Americans and the indignities suffered daily by so many immigrants and other racial minorities. The fear that drives humans to exclude by culture, ethnicity, religion, social constructions of race or by other means, is tangible and amongst us, requiring constant vigilance and resistance from thoughtful citizens of this nation of immigrants. It’s our hope that Tacoma Method will strike a chord on the nation’s heart strings, and shed light on this all-too-human fear toward “others” and will perhaps lessen it by offering an opportunity for reflection upon our humanity, and common, if seldom told history.

Zhang Er, poet, librettist, born in Beijing, has written opera libretti in English for American composers including Moon in the Mirror (with Stephen Dembski, performed in 2015), Fiery Jade: Cai Yan (with Gregory Youtz, performed in 2016), and Tacoma Method with Gregory Youtz (premiered by Tacoma Opera on March 31, 2023).  She is the author of seven collections of poetry in Chinese, most recently Sea Volts and Bullets Twirl (Showwe). Her selected poems in English translation are collected in three volumes, First Mountain, So Translating Rivers and Cities and Verses on Bird (Zephyr Press). She co-edited and participated in the translation of the bilingual volume Another Kind of Nation: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Talisman House Publishers) and The Art of Women in Contemporary China: Both Sides Now, (Cambridge Scholars Publisher). She teaches at The Evergreen State College-Tacoma. 

Composer Vision Statement regarding Tacoma Method.

Tacoma Method is an opera in two acts and a prelude comprising about 120 minutes of music. It is my second opera with librettist Zhang Er and is one of many pieces I have written that explore the use of western instruments to emulate the sounds and gestures of traditional Chinese instruments. In Tacoma Method I have the challenge of giving aesthetic voice to two communities in conflict- the Euro-Americans and the Chinese in the city of Tacoma in 1885 and using the same chamber orchestra to accomplish this.  The orchestration thus includes folk instruments such as banjo, guitar, hammered dulcimer and reed organ as these all substitute well for their Chinese equivalents- the sanxian, ruan, yangqin and sheng. Rounding out the chamber orchestra are four woodwinds, three brass and 3-4 percussionists that similarly create the possibility of a frontier American town band as well as various Chinese ensembles such as Lion/Dragon dancers and more intimate chamber music.

The musical language too is a hybrid- three ever-evolving pitch collections which always include the possibility of a pentatonic or Chinese heptatonic (Beijing opera) scale allow me to evoke the sounds and structures of Chinese melodies, harmonies and textures when required while remaining very much my own, personal, western technique.

Dramatically, the characters from the two communities bring to their words and actions their own cultural training and expectations- the Euro-Americans direct and forceful, the Chinese polite and according to ritual. These call for different musical rhetoric and this is one of the most intriguing parts of the project for me.

We hope this opera provides a moving and thought-provoking experience for the audience that combines beauty and passionate optimism with the darker, more violent themes recorded by history. It faithfully presents the historical events of a former time that are, sadly, still very relevant today.

Finally, we hope that this opera provides four or five powerful roles for opera singers of Chinese or East Asian heritage that bring to life their own experience or that of their ancestors.

Gregory Youtz was awarded a Charles Ives Award in 1984 from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and has received annual awards from ASCAP since 1990.  His Scherzo for a Bitter Moon for band won the 1984 National Bandmasters Association contest and in 1990 his Fire Works for wind ensemble won the American Bandmasters Association Ostwald Award.  A choral work  If We Sell You Our Land based on the famous speech by Chief Seattle was the subject of a story on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition show in 1987 and his subsequent opera Songs from the Cedar House, based on the history and legends of Indian and White cultural interaction in the Pacific Northwest, premiered in February of 1991 at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington and received national notices in opera journals.

In 2008, The Five Changes: Concerto for Percussion and Winds was performed at Carnegie hall by the Oregon State University Wind Ensemble, and in 2010 The Monkey King for wind ensemble was performed by the Shanghai Wind Orchestra at the 2010 Shanghai World Exposition.  In 2012 his oratorio Drum Taps: Nine Poems on Themes of War was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music.

He composed music for the original musical theater production of The Blooming Season, which premiered at The Evergreen State College in 2014.

His second opera, Fiery Jade-Cai Yan, composed to a libretto by Chinese poet Zhang Er, as was his third, Tacoma Method.  He was selected as the Washington State Music teachers National Association “Composer of the Year” in both 2001 and 2016.