The New York Times-20080129-The Indie Singer-Harpist Who Met the Orchestra

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The Indie Singer-Harpist Who Met the Orchestra

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Violence may not be the first thing that comes to mind from the pristine sound of a harp, a woman's elfin voice and the genteel, elaborate backup of a symphony orchestra. But for Joanna Newsom, the songwriter, singer and harpist who will be performing her entire 2006 album Ys (pronounced ees) with the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra on Thursday and Friday nights at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, emotional violence and brutality are at the core of the songs, from their cataclysmic lyrics to their jumpy harmonies.

Since Ms. Newsom released her debut album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, in 2004, her music has been labeled indie-rock, singer-songwriter ballads and freak-folk. None of those categories is an exact fit for songs that are simultaneously private whimsies and grand parables, delicate and steely, childlike and sage. Ms. Newsom, who calls herself a music school dropout (she attended Mills College in Oakland, Calif.), accompanies herself on harp in a self-invented style that mingles classical arpeggios with syncopations from West Africa, where griots pluck hypnotic patterns on the harplike kora.

Ms. Newsom's Brooklyn concerts this week are an individual milestone: the last performances of a worldwide tour on which she has sung Ys with her band and, as often as possible, with symphony orchestras from London to Sydney to Milwaukee. Half of the Brooklyn concert will be Ys, while the rest will be selections from The Milk-Eyed Mender, and a new song or two, with her Ys Street Band.

In a telephone interview from her home in Northern California, Ms. Newsom said she was ready to give Ys its valedictory. The gravity of that record for me is so massive that I need to take my head out of it, or else I can't do the kind of work I want to do, to move on, she said. It kind of makes me sad to be in the world I was in when I was writing that. There's not a lot of air in there.

The concerts are a sign of 21st-century programming for the Brooklyn Philharmonic, which has made a point of working with songwriters like Suzanne Vega, Laurie Anderson and Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons). It's fun to interact with these people who are approaching music in real time, being present in the moment that it's happening, said Michael Christie, the Brooklyn Philharmonic's music director, who will be conducting.

At a moment when independent-minded musicians from the Arcade Fire to Kanye West to Sufjan Stevens (who recently brought his own mini-orchestra to the Brooklyn Academy) are savoring what orchestral arrangements can do, the Brooklyn Philharmonic is eager to meet them more than halfway. Mr. Christie said that Ms. Newsom was on a master list of artists that we're trying to link up with that also includes the Decemberists, Cat Power and Grizzly Bear.

It's very exciting for them to hear that mass of sound behind them, Mr. Christie said. We generally find that the artists are really anxious going in as to whether we're going to embrace them. And then people have been so relieved. We say: 'We're your putty. Play with us.'

Ms. Newsom's album is named after Ys, a mythical Breton city lost in a flood. It was, from the beginning, an eccentric project: a full-length album that holds just five extended songs, from 7 to 17 minutes long.

References to upheavals, betrayals and deaths float through the lyrics on Ys. The songs encompass animal fables, visions of war and poetic disquisitions on the differences among a meteorite, a meteor and a meteoroid. When Ms. Newsom wrote the music, I wanted to start with a bass line that had the same violence, that didn't seem organic or natural in the shifts that it made, she said. There's a lot of strange chromaticism. Then, to lace these weird global shifts together, she came up with concise melodies rooted in folk songs, which provide some stability atop the turbulence. And to bind the simplicity and the complexity, she decided to use an orchestra.

The arrangements on Ys are by Van Dyke Parks, whose long pop career has included roles as a lyricist for the Beach Boys (Heroes and Villains, Surf's Up), a songwriter with his own albums, a soundtrack composer and an arranger for, among others, Bruce Springsteen, Randy Newman, Fiona Apple and U2. Ms. Newsom had not heard of him until a friend sent her Mr. Parks's Song Cycle, a hugely ambitious 1968 album with verbal imagery and orchestrations that were kaleidoscopic Americana. It freaked me out, Ms. Newsom said. I already knew I wanted to work with an orchestra, and this was the first thing that I heard from someone I could imagine working with who was alive.

Mr. Parks's orchestrations for Ys respond to Ms. Newsom's voice, dart between the harp textures, peek out of shadowy interstices and allude far and wide. Mr. Christie said: It's not as if, 'O.K., here's Artist X appearing with an orchestra, and the strings are playing one whole note after another.' It's a core part of her music, and it provides a significant emotional contribution to the pieces.

For Mr. Parks and Ms. Newsom, merging orchestra and harp was a yearlong process. A lot of what we were talking about was pretty abstract, and we had to fumble at it in the dark till we totally worked it out, she said.

First she had to explain what she wanted. I was cleaning house yesterday, and I found a huge list of notes which was a draft of what I wanted to send him, she said. There was a lot of describing an image that might not be too evident in the lyrics of that particular passage. And there were a lot of adjectives that were really over the top. It was nice of him not to make fun of me.

She added, He was paying a lot of attention to lyrics, to the sound of the words and how they have a relation to the timbre of the instruments, and also the meaning of the words and the vocal melody. He's a really intuitive and a sort of wild, amazing composer.

Ms. Newsom recorded the rhapsodic songs on Ys performing alone on her harp, with a soloist's fluctuations of tempo and attack. Those subtleties had to be captured in exact notation for a studio orchestra, synchronized and blended with Ms. Newsom's harp and voice. And when she brought the score to England for its first live performances, she and her band soon realized that what she was trying to recreate onstage was not just her songs and Mr. Parks's arrangements, but also the sound of the album as mixed by its producer, Jim O'Rourke.

Her band's guitarist, Ryan Francesconi, meticulously reworked all the arrangements to reflect the album: specifying dynamics, removing material that disappeared in the mix, clarifying parts to be performed onstage, where a conductor can rely on visual cues as well as notation. There's a lot of listening to me, looking at my feet and looking at my drummer, Ms. Newsom said. Rehearsals, with a new ensemble in each city, have been limited and intense. Show days are 14, 15 hours of literally playing and singing the entire time, she said. I haven't done that since I was in the conservatory, and it's pretty crazy on the brain and the heart.

And just as in the songs themselves, there's always a chance of disaster. The arrangements are really complicated, Ms. Newsom said. We have had certain experiences where the performance felt like it was just barely holding together, with one or two almost train-wreck moments. It's obviously terrifying to have the force of all these musicians behind you, just piling up and tangling up if something goes wrong.

[Illustration]PHOTO: Joanna Newsom collaborates with the Brooklyn Philharmonic in two performances this week. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN PRYKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS)