It ended with a massive standing ovation that rang on and on, through multiple curtain calls. The atmosphere in the Usher Hall was jubilant, yet sorrowful in turns. The audience simultaneously astonished, stunned, tearful, but also joyous.
It had been one of the most remarkable hours of my life, in which not a second was lost to the performance. In the days that followed, I reflected on it further and read some more.
So here’s the story of 21st August 2024 when for one night only the Philharmonia Orchestra and the female singers from the National Youth Choir of Scotland and its National Girls Choir, performed Fire in my Mouth under the baton of the world-famous conductor, Marin Alsop, at the Edinburgh International Festival.
First, the context.
When American composer Julia Wolfe was commissioned to write a piece for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, she quickly decided on a theme highly relevant to the history of downtown Manhattan. Her focus was to be a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist clothing factory in 1911, which caused the deaths of 146 workers, mainly young women and girls who had migrated from Central Europe and Southern Italy. The tragedy followed a brave labour strike from two years earlier by garment makers from across the country, in protest at their harsh and exploitative conditions.
The strike, the fire and the outrage that followed led to reforms in factory management and safety. Progress had come at great cost to those who perished, as well as the traumatised survivors. Wolfe’s oratorio was to pay homage to the people and the story. It would feature orchestra, still and moving images, choreography, and 146 young female voices, one for each person that died. It was premiered in New York in January 2019.
So much I knew before the Edinburgh concert, but not enough to prepare me for the totality of the immersive experience. The young singers dressed in aprons, just like the factory workers, some carrying large cloth cutting scissors. The orchestra using fascinating techniques to produce rhythmic, mechanical, sounds. The women and girls first appearing behind the players, then in the aisles and towards the end fully surrounding and facing inwards towards the whole orchestra. The compelling back projection elements containing archive stills and footage filmed at the scene of the fire, back in 1911. And Marin Alsop overseeing every precise element, sometimes working with singers who were behind her, in control of the dynamics and always supportive.
The narrative arc of Fire in my Mouth takes the women and girls on a journey from their impoverished homes in Europe, to New York, to aspirations for American life and with that, to encounters with unfairness and exploitation. They protest in solidarity with others in their situation but get no redress from their employers. The searing fire, when it comes, is a conflagration of terror, death and exploitation.
Immigration is the first of the four movements and sees the young women setting out on their sea journey of 10 days ‘without passports or anything’. The high strings and the repeated phrases of the older singers in the chorus capture nerves and trepidation that instantly grip the audience. As the voyage gets under way the singers build a rhythm by slapping hands on their chests. They are travelling third class on a ‘poverty stricken boat’. Now the music is more lyrical, then lively, as the girls sway to the swell of the ocean, with ‘everyone talking’. But as they look forward to ‘God knows what kind of future’ the foreboding quickly returns and our anxieties are raised in a ringing end to the movement.
The hammering of bows on strings evokes the noise of the Factory along with insistent percussion, whistles on woodwind, and strummed chords. Then out of the repetitive noise comes a mournful Yiddish folk song, overlapping with a lively Italian tarantella. Words about sewing and working, then about flirtation. But as the sound fades, the slow, ominous clack of the scissors, held aloft, brings the movement to a close.
The Protest begins with an angrily ironic exposition of the dreams of the young women. It’s a double edged assertion of wishes: ‘I want to walk like an American, I want to look like an American … I want to dream like an American, scheme like an American …’ The younger singers appear in the auditorium, in pairs down the two main aisles. Sitting in an end of row seat, I experience at close range their concentration and focus. They take up the words of Clara Lemlich, a leader in the strike action against ‘intolerable conditions’. The scissors clack again, followed by a staccato inventory of over three dozen roles that exist in the garment factory division of labour: ‘hem stitcher, sleeve setter, cuff maker, lace runner, ironer …’ The list moves into intense vocalisation before the singers conclude the movement, returning first to the American dream, and then to the words of Lemlich, with ‘fire in my mouth’ at the urgency of it all. ‘Fire, fire, fire, fire …’
This in turn is the title of the final, and longest, movement. Fire begins with the humming of a paradoxically dreamy melody, until a driving beat brings in the realisation of what has broken out in the factory: ‘I heard someone cry fire’. The atmosphere becomes ever more frantic and sirens wail. Then come some of the most harrowing passages in the whole work, as the music is again dream-like and tender, the fire takes hold, and realising there is no way out, some of the workers begin to jump from the windows, to certain death multiple floors below. All voices sing ‘I see them falling … see them falling’. The sound builds again, irrational, wild and incoherent, yet punctuated with an insistent rhythm. We hear the words of a condemnatory speech made the following month by Rose Schneiderman, the Polish born labour organiser and feminist. And then, the final enormity. What Julia Wolfe describes as a ‘gorgeously bitter ending’. Bells ring out, as in their circling, anthemic harmonies, the girls and young women deliver the names of 146 people known to have died in the fire, raising their arms in solidarity, before everything fades – to silence.
When music has such a powerful narrative, it seems to compel us towards a deeper understanding: the historical circumstances that prompted it and in which it was composed, the conceptualisation, the message, even the lessons we can draw. As Julia Wolfe puts it in a letter to the singers in the concert programme: ‘The music asks questions – gives us time, space and sound to reflect on the tragedy, on the public response, and on the change’.
It also resonates down the decades.
One hundred and one years after the Shirtwaist fire, a garment factory in Dhaka suffered the same fate, killing at least 117 people. Once again there was evidence of padlocked exits and workers being unable to leave the building. There have been several more like it. In February 2015 over 250 garment workers lost their lives in a factory fire in Karachi. In 2019 a fire broke out in a factory in Delhi making school bags and shoes, killing 43 people. In 2021 a fire in a garment factory near Cairo took the lives of 20 people. In February 2024, the Times of India reported over 800 fires in unauthorised factories in Delhi alone over the previous year.
Julia Wolfe’s Fire in my Mouth is not a requiem for a past event alone. Through the collective female voice, it is also a clarion call against the injustices that still exist today, all around the world. It was a privilege to experience one of its rare performances. One hundred and forty six female singers at the Usher Hall gave a performance that spoke to us across decades and continents, in a production I will never forget. One of them was my daughter.
Acknowledgments
Featured image from NYCOS Facebook page.
Fire in my Mouth 20 August 2024, Usher Hall, Edinburgh: Marin Alsop (conductor) Philharmonia Orchestra, National Youth Choir of Scotland and National Girls Choir, Christopher Bell (chorus director). Julia Wolfe (composer), Anne Kauffmann (director), Jeff Sugg (scenic, lighting and video designer), Marion Talan (costume designer), Kenny Savelson (executive producer), Ashley Lloyd Ehrenberg (associate director), Bang on a Can (producer).
Please go here for more information about the amazing work and opportunities afforded by the National Youth Choir of Scotland and the remarkable leadership of Artistic Director, Christopher Bell, working with a fabulous team from all across Scotland.
Quotidian 
What a moving story! Thanks for sharing, Ruthmarijke
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