The New County Choruses is the new opera by Ethan T. Parcell—a composer, songwriter and performer (and sometimes visual artist) based in Chicago—along with his experimental opera ensemble, now operating under the slightly updated name Focus Group Solutions. If you’re not already familiar with it, Parcell’s music (under his own name, the moniker The World Without Parking Lots, and the operas with Focus Group) is quiet in volume but large in scope, what we’ve described previously as “far-reaching but incredibly personal, an accumulation of life’s modest details that works, paradoxically, to distil what it means to be alive.”
As operas, the work produced by Ethan T. Parcell and Focus Group is evidently narrative-based, but the stories it tells are singular and surprising, and the manner in which it tells them is continually ambitious. World Record explored performance and culture through a treatise on the past and future of world record attempts, complete with phone conversations with a renowned world record holder. While Wasted Light used a lecture on a broken LED billboard to talk about themes as grand as making meaning in one’s surroundings and the inherent sadness in the passing of time and space.
If the descriptions of these pieces don’t square with the idea of “opera” in Western culture at large, well it’s not supposed to. “There’s some oppositional energy at play on my part,” Parcell said of the opera tag when we spoke to him last year. “That I know and love all the images and sounds that come to mind that when one hears the word ‘opera’—and which of those we play into and which we transgress.”
No exception to this style, The New County Choruses creates a rich narrative through unexpected means. The songs come in two forms—the songs alone (i.e. just music and Parcell’s singing) and a second version that features “equivalent commentary,” a stream of observations, remarks and general narration voiced by Errol McLendon. “Songs with running commentary that says too much about songs that say too little,” as Parcell puts it.
Which is an apt description, because while the album’s sincere gentlenesss sounds relatively modest, there is far more at work than first impressions suggest. These are efforts in world building, conjuring not only place but an entire mythology, coming to represent what Parcell describes as “a fictional document and record of a fully-formed county materializing and disappearing.” For the titular New County is a new location, complete with its own geography and culture, that appeared out of nothing yet lacked not even the smallest detail, complete with its own histories and contradictions and flaws.
The county did contain families, education, kissing,
fatigue, weather, and what we might call culture.
And, at least eight songs and their related materials.
We now have named them the New County Choruses
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The commentary tracks are therefore a document of the document. McLendon’s narration investigates the songs it overlays as if they were primary sources, ruminating on vague lines as Parcell sings them, contemplating their wider meaning and philosophical connotations in the manner of an historian or literary scholar. The result is a peculiar replication the strange, preternatural event of the narrative. A historiography of a town manifest from thin air, now serving to bring the place to something like life through study and speculation.
And the phenomenon continues. The narrator, like every historian, is himself always slipping into the past, allowing the personal to bleed into his interpretation. In doing so, he invites us, the listener, to do the same. So perhaps the most important layer of meaning in The New County Choruses lays in the relationship between the choruses and their narration, a kind of meta-context that explores very intimate themes of observation and interpretation, the importance of memory in a world of constant flux and loss. “None of this is about permanence,” the narrator notes on ‘The Seventh County Chorus’, but permanence is not everything. “It visited, and sharpened our senses—mine at least,” he continues on The Eighth. “As if it were built for this exact purpose—and to sharpen our senses, and leave us with a memory that convinces us that our memory is stronger than it is in every other situation.”
These are my new pros and cons
How can I help you?
Parcell says his work intends to “explore ideas of smallness, hospitality, and union,” and this is true not just in content but form too. With every new listener comes the possibility for fresh interpretation, new versions and new meanings of the New County brought into the present. “Well, what I can tell you is that it wasn’t built by nothing or nobody,” the narration continues on ‘The Eighth,’ “but it also didn’t appear by the hand of one person.” This is not Parcell’s creation, nor that of the narrator, but a shared conception. One still growing and fading, evolving and changing, but destined to continue as long as there is someone to listen.
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The New County Choruses is out now and available from the Ethan T. Parcell Bandcamp page. You can also get the opera as a paperback book.