Recluse in translation

POP MUSIC Friedman’s piece emulates the painting’s two explosive panels.

Thirty-five years ago on a sleepy tree-lined street in Lincoln Park, two landlords discovered that their recently deceased tenant had been harboring hundreds of troubling-but-brilliant paintings and a violent sci-fi novel (The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion) that, at about 15,000 pages, even dwarfed Proust. Janitor, dishwasher, loner, hospital bandage–roller—Henry Darger (1892–1973) enjoys a posthumous “outsider” celebrity that continues to grow with a recent upsurge in documentary films, plays, books and art exhibits. But until recently, no one had brought the prolific artist into the “unreal realm” of symphonic music, or our downtown Orchestra Hall for that matter.

“Darger’s paintings and novels have a huge, epic feel, so I can’t imagine doing justice to his work without the grandiosity of the orchestra,” says composer Jefferson Friedman of his tone poem Sacred Heart: Explosion, which receives multiple performances this weekend from the CSO. The 33-year-old New York–based composer’s introduction to Darger came in the late ’90s when his sister, who had been attending the Art Institute of Chicago, brought him to a retrospective at the MCA. He instantly fell in love with the artist’s fantasy realm, where an army of frolicsome young Vivian Girls perpetually clash with the ruling Glandelinian reprobates.

Through August, the Folk Art Museum in New York exhibits a vast Darger collection with a piped-in loop of Friedman’s aural homage. In addition, the gallery displays the young composer’s illustrative blueprints for the work. “These are etchings and abstract graphic representations of the energy and the flow of the piece,” he says, “but without the actual notes.”

When he did set pen to ledger for the score, the Juilliard grad found inspiration in the two disparate panels (pictured) from one of Darger’s hundreds of giant scroll paintings that accompanied the discovered tome. After extensive revisions of the 2000 work, Friedman calls the completed music a “one-on-one translation of the painting and Darger’s story” that channels the recluse’s obsession with detail. In the movement’s first half, children’s tunes animate the “courtly and mannered” Vivians. Intense, percussive throbbing announces the martial second half, eventually bursting into explosions. The darker side of the 14-minute piece features squealing violins that cut through the girls’ curls and skirts, while abnormally disgruntled brass spits back billows of black ash.

Unlike a film scorer, Friedman feels no compulsion to weave a complete story locked to a narrative. But when he finishes his tripartite ode to American outsider artists (the first entry found inspiration in the ornate junk-sculpture throne of D.C. janitor James Hampton), he just might have one.

Darger’s old digs of 40 years at 851 West Webster Avenue now sit among the city’s priciest real estate, where North Face–clad yuppies Bluetooth and pub-crawl. It’s the last rock in town one would expect to overturn and discover eerie genius. Discussing life on the fringe, Friedman confesses the only real outsider cred he has is punk-band youth. He’s too humble to admit it’s equally alien to be so young and have one of the world’s great ensembles, like the CSO, play his music.

Thanks to a letter of recommendation from Friedman’s famous mentor, John Corigliano, primo maestro Leonard Slatkin regularly commissions the young composer, and will conduct Explosion this week. Are the lofty expectations weighing on the precocious composer? “There was a point in my career when I was literally getting sick with pneumonia because I was so stressed,” Friedman admits. “Thank God I’ve managed to cultivate my defense mechanisms. Now I’m a little more blasé.”

Sacred Heart: Explosion makes its local premiere at Orchestra Hall Thursday 5.