Friday, March 30, 2007
Death and the Powers
I went to see Tod Machover from the MIT Media Lab speak at ITP yesterday. He talked about the opera that he is currently working on called Death and the Powers. The whole thing looks so incredibly detailed and futuristic that it might be worth the trip to Monte Carlo in November of next year to see the premiere (although it says that they are taking it worldwide afterwards). The libretto is by poet laureate Robert Pinsky and more info on this can be found at the Media Lab site http://www.media.mit.edu/hyperins/projects/deathandthepowers/.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Jay and Opera
I think the examples that Chris gave for operas that are still relevant in a 21st century context were great. These are truly multimedia, multidimensional works that supply music and visuals that push the envelope in terms of innovation and entertainment. That said, I think that opera is at the end of its rope as a fixture of mainstream culture. People like Tod Machover with Opera of the Future, whom I've mentioned in class, are working on some really interesting and innovative projects using the basic idea of opera as a vehicle for epic multimedia spectacles, but the major opera houses in the country don't appear willing to take a chance on productions that are geared toward an audience with more of a rock 'n roll sensibility, so the newer and bolder work is going to be confined to a niche market while the aging fans of conservative opera slowly die off and take the genre with it. I won't be that sad about it. I have a degree in music composition, I love classical music and I have a good understanding of all the sub-genres from plain chant through 12-tone music and I've found something in most genres that I find brilliant and captivating. Classical era opera is not one of them. I listened to The Marriage of Figaro for this week's class, and I found there was absolutely nothing in it that spoke to me, moved me, or provided anything musically that was even remotely interesting. First of all, I'm not a big fan of Mozart's music with the exception of his Requiem Mass which I really love. Classical era composers moved away from the epic and grand sound of the baroque into a highly structured and stripped down style. Mozart in particular provides a very sunny mood within a musical context of ordered perfection. To me, it's really boring. Secondly, I find the belle canto style of singing incredibly irritating. The wide vibrato and pretentious tone of voice transports me straight to the courts of 18th century aristocracy, and that's not really where I want to be. It's not that I don't like vocal music. My favorite piece of classical music is Te Deum by Arvo Part, which never fails to give em the chills. However, it's a choral work and there's no vibrato on the vocal. Listening to an opera is also difficult because there is so much lost. Unless you are sitting down with the libretto in its original language side by side with the translation there is no way to follow what's going on. Therefore, the story is lost, the characters are lost, and all that's left is the music. To my ears, the music in Figaro is stuffy and cliche. I've heard the overture a million times... in commercials. It has been transformed before I've even listened to it for the first time. I'm not now, and I doubt I ever will be, a fan of this music. The only hope that opera has is to continue expanding it's multimedia potential to keep up with a world that is increasingly tech-saavy and hungry for everything new.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
a few operas, possibly of interest
When I said that opera as a living art form is in trouble, I didn't by any means mean to suggest that it's dead, or even necessarily moribund. There are a handful of operas from the last 30 years that I feel demonstrate the aesthetic potential of opera to be vital today, in that they transcend some of what I feel have been the problems with most opera of the past (more on that as we get into the discussion). The practical potential is another question, as audiences for classical music are diminishing to the point that it is extremely risky to launch the kind of massively expensive production that a full-scale opera tends to be unless it is stylistically bland enough to satisfy the typically conservative tastes of the economic core of what audience remains. There is much debate over how and whether classical music can be economically rehabilitated.
Here, then, are a few operas I wish we could all see and talk about (although that simply isn't practical). If the rest of you have other examples you think are interesting (especially if they can be seen on DVD or in current NY performance), please comment!
Steve Reich and Beryl Korot: The Cave (1993)
This is one of the only examples I know of a truly multimedia opera, and I would put it forward as exceptionally successful both as an opera and as a multimedia work. Reich collaborated on The Cave with video artist (and wife) Beryl Korot. The video is presented in five channels on large screens above the stage, in extremely tight synchronization with the musical performance. (The conductor works from a click-track on headphones.)
Interestingly, given our discussions in this class, the work is also a documentary, about the identities (and names) of the characters Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, Hagar, and Ishmael as seen from the traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and about the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac (and Adam and Eve!) are believed to be buried. It is divided into three acts, covering the perspectives of each of these religious traditions in turn. Just as in a typical documentary, there is video footage of interviews with people affected in various ways by the subject matter, from experts to ordinary people. Here, though, the speech of the interviewees is given Reich's trademark musical treatment of tight tracking in melodic form (something which has to be heard to be quite understood--see also, for instance, his work for string quartet and audio recording, Different Trains).
There was a very good production of The Cave in a Reich 70th-birthday series at Lincoln Center last November. You can read more about the work here and here. An excellent audio recording is available on CD, but I unfortunately know of no performance available in any video format.
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson: Einstein on the Beach (1975)
This was the first of a trilogy of operatic collaborations between Glass and director and theatrical designer Robert Wilson. Although it lacks a story as such, it is very loosely a portrait of Albert Einstein. The text is a collage of solfege syllables, poetry, and references to pop culture (the Beatles, David Cassidy) and current events (the Patty Hearst trial).
There are audio recordings of Einstein on the Beach. I have also seen video excerpts, but am having trouble finding where (please tell me if you find a source). A short video excerpt of the related opera Akhnaten (the close of the trilogy) can be seen in the documentary Philip Glass: Looking Glass (interesting in its own right). There is also a DVD of Akhnaten that is by all accounts to be avoided.
Philip Glass and Jean Cocteau: La Belle et la Bête (The Beauty and the Beast) (1995)
Glass designed his version of La Belle et la Bête as a live operatic accompaniment to the classic film by Cocteau (1946). The film is presented as though silent, with the singers singing in approximate synchronization to the onscreen speaking. It is something like watching a foreign-language film dubbed into English. The Criterion Edition DVD release of Cocteau's movie (available at Netflix) includes Glass's operatic version as an optional soundtrack.
There are a number of other operas that I personally feel some connection to, but which I strongly suspect to be outside most tastes in our class because they are in a musically remote atonal style that most people find difficult to listen to. Examples include Alban Berg's Wozzeck (1922) and Lulu (1929-1935, unfinished). Mark mentioned Arnold Schoenberg's Moses and Aron (1930-32, unfinished), which also falls into this category. (Berg was Schoenberg's pupil. Schoenberg, Berg, and Anton Webern together constitute what is called the Second Viennese School.) A later example is Morton Feldman's Neither (1977, with words by Samuel Beckett).
Reaching earlier, it is impossible to talk about the modern development of opera without mentioning Richard Wagner, particularly his monumental four-opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelungen (or, if you want to be cool, just "The Ring"). The Ring is of epic scale in every respect: story, size of cast and orchestra, and length--an obvious precedent in both scope and plot to J.R.R. Tolkien's and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogies. Wagner's music as a whole was pivotal in moving from the lush Romantic style of the late 19th century into the modernism of the early 20th century. It was only a short hop from a late-Romantic symphonist such as, say, Anton Bruckner to Wagner, and another short hop to Schoenberg and complete atonality. Although their operas may still seem "big" in terms of length and production scale, the stylistic minimalism of the music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass can be seen as the antithesis to what may sound to our ears today as the heavy excess of Wagner.
Certain opera composed in recent years (e.g., Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking) has struck me as striving for audience acceptance by moving subtly closer to Broadway musical theater. It may well be that opera cannot survive if it disdains popular taste to the degree of, say, Neither or the Second Viennese guys, but I would prefer to see it update itself in a way that better preserves its status as a serious art, which I think the operas of Glass and Reich do.
Finally, another area in which there have been recent attempts to revitalize opera, one that I know less about, is in contemporary productions of older operatic work. New productions of old work, in opera as in the rest of theater, always must walk a fine, highly debated line between adherence to the original author's vision and the desire to give modern audiences a new experience that is relevant and accessible. As but one example that has some connection with the rest of this commentary, I'll mention Robert Wilson's productions of the operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck. Wilson and conductor John Eliot Gardiner collaborated on productions of Orphée et Eurydice (1762) and Alceste (1776) in Paris in 1999. They are beautiful and spare to look at, and to my eye, the updated costumes and staging do not distract from the classical musical style. Both are available on DVD, both at Netflix.
Here, then, are a few operas I wish we could all see and talk about (although that simply isn't practical). If the rest of you have other examples you think are interesting (especially if they can be seen on DVD or in current NY performance), please comment!
~~~~
Steve Reich and Beryl Korot: The Cave (1993)
This is one of the only examples I know of a truly multimedia opera, and I would put it forward as exceptionally successful both as an opera and as a multimedia work. Reich collaborated on The Cave with video artist (and wife) Beryl Korot. The video is presented in five channels on large screens above the stage, in extremely tight synchronization with the musical performance. (The conductor works from a click-track on headphones.)Interestingly, given our discussions in this class, the work is also a documentary, about the identities (and names) of the characters Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, Hagar, and Ishmael as seen from the traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and about the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac (and Adam and Eve!) are believed to be buried. It is divided into three acts, covering the perspectives of each of these religious traditions in turn. Just as in a typical documentary, there is video footage of interviews with people affected in various ways by the subject matter, from experts to ordinary people. Here, though, the speech of the interviewees is given Reich's trademark musical treatment of tight tracking in melodic form (something which has to be heard to be quite understood--see also, for instance, his work for string quartet and audio recording, Different Trains).
There was a very good production of The Cave in a Reich 70th-birthday series at Lincoln Center last November. You can read more about the work here and here. An excellent audio recording is available on CD, but I unfortunately know of no performance available in any video format.
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson: Einstein on the Beach (1975)
This was the first of a trilogy of operatic collaborations between Glass and director and theatrical designer Robert Wilson. Although it lacks a story as such, it is very loosely a portrait of Albert Einstein. The text is a collage of solfege syllables, poetry, and references to pop culture (the Beatles, David Cassidy) and current events (the Patty Hearst trial).There are audio recordings of Einstein on the Beach. I have also seen video excerpts, but am having trouble finding where (please tell me if you find a source). A short video excerpt of the related opera Akhnaten (the close of the trilogy) can be seen in the documentary Philip Glass: Looking Glass (interesting in its own right). There is also a DVD of Akhnaten that is by all accounts to be avoided.
Philip Glass and Jean Cocteau: La Belle et la Bête (The Beauty and the Beast) (1995)
Glass designed his version of La Belle et la Bête as a live operatic accompaniment to the classic film by Cocteau (1946). The film is presented as though silent, with the singers singing in approximate synchronization to the onscreen speaking. It is something like watching a foreign-language film dubbed into English. The Criterion Edition DVD release of Cocteau's movie (available at Netflix) includes Glass's operatic version as an optional soundtrack.~~~~
There are a number of other operas that I personally feel some connection to, but which I strongly suspect to be outside most tastes in our class because they are in a musically remote atonal style that most people find difficult to listen to. Examples include Alban Berg's Wozzeck (1922) and Lulu (1929-1935, unfinished). Mark mentioned Arnold Schoenberg's Moses and Aron (1930-32, unfinished), which also falls into this category. (Berg was Schoenberg's pupil. Schoenberg, Berg, and Anton Webern together constitute what is called the Second Viennese School.) A later example is Morton Feldman's Neither (1977, with words by Samuel Beckett).
Reaching earlier, it is impossible to talk about the modern development of opera without mentioning Richard Wagner, particularly his monumental four-opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelungen (or, if you want to be cool, just "The Ring"). The Ring is of epic scale in every respect: story, size of cast and orchestra, and length--an obvious precedent in both scope and plot to J.R.R. Tolkien's and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogies. Wagner's music as a whole was pivotal in moving from the lush Romantic style of the late 19th century into the modernism of the early 20th century. It was only a short hop from a late-Romantic symphonist such as, say, Anton Bruckner to Wagner, and another short hop to Schoenberg and complete atonality. Although their operas may still seem "big" in terms of length and production scale, the stylistic minimalism of the music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass can be seen as the antithesis to what may sound to our ears today as the heavy excess of Wagner.
Certain opera composed in recent years (e.g., Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking) has struck me as striving for audience acceptance by moving subtly closer to Broadway musical theater. It may well be that opera cannot survive if it disdains popular taste to the degree of, say, Neither or the Second Viennese guys, but I would prefer to see it update itself in a way that better preserves its status as a serious art, which I think the operas of Glass and Reich do.
Finally, another area in which there have been recent attempts to revitalize opera, one that I know less about, is in contemporary productions of older operatic work. New productions of old work, in opera as in the rest of theater, always must walk a fine, highly debated line between adherence to the original author's vision and the desire to give modern audiences a new experience that is relevant and accessible. As but one example that has some connection with the rest of this commentary, I'll mention Robert Wilson's productions of the operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck. Wilson and conductor John Eliot Gardiner collaborated on productions of Orphée et Eurydice (1762) and Alceste (1776) in Paris in 1999. They are beautiful and spare to look at, and to my eye, the updated costumes and staging do not distract from the classical musical style. Both are available on DVD, both at Netflix.
opera
The email discussion on opera isn't exactly taking off, so I thought I'd try to get us talking about it here.
I suspect part of the reason for the silence is that not many of us in today's world have a relationship with opera at all. Despite isolated new works over the last 50 years, opera, as a living art form, is in trouble. What I would hope is that we could talk about some reasons that might be the case. If you disagree, please weigh in with that opinion, too!
What is it about opera, in general, that works for you?
What doesn't?
Is the problem just a matter of cultural distance, that it is a kind of music too far from current popular culture for most of us to feel connected to it? Is it, in other words, the same set of problems facing classical music in general?
Or is there some other, deeper problem that is particular to opera itself?
Is there some essence to the idea of opera that you think could work if it were just "done properly"? If you were to create an opera of your own, what would you do differently? (Olivia, for one, must have something to say about this...)
Do you know of examples of opera produced, say, in the last 50 years that you regard as being successful as contemporary dramatic works? How about older works that you enjoy hearing or seeing?
If there are operas that you like, is it important to you that you see as well as hear them?
What can we learn from opera about the presentation of a narrative?
I suspect part of the reason for the silence is that not many of us in today's world have a relationship with opera at all. Despite isolated new works over the last 50 years, opera, as a living art form, is in trouble. What I would hope is that we could talk about some reasons that might be the case. If you disagree, please weigh in with that opinion, too!
What is it about opera, in general, that works for you?
What doesn't?
Is the problem just a matter of cultural distance, that it is a kind of music too far from current popular culture for most of us to feel connected to it? Is it, in other words, the same set of problems facing classical music in general?
Or is there some other, deeper problem that is particular to opera itself?
Is there some essence to the idea of opera that you think could work if it were just "done properly"? If you were to create an opera of your own, what would you do differently? (Olivia, for one, must have something to say about this...)
Do you know of examples of opera produced, say, in the last 50 years that you regard as being successful as contemporary dramatic works? How about older works that you enjoy hearing or seeing?
If there are operas that you like, is it important to you that you see as well as hear them?
What can we learn from opera about the presentation of a narrative?
changing a name
I see that Prianka is already blogging about the class, so we should occasionally check in there as well.
Speaking (as we did last week) of names, I notice that Prianka would like to be called "Ank," but that it isn't catching on. Isn't it interesting that the successful changing of one's name requires the permission and cooperation of one's community? As Mark pointed out, we generally don't get to pick our own names. This crucial aspect of our identity is beyond our direct control, barring drastic measures like abandoning one's community along with the old identity, as David Locke did, or as in a witness protection program. People in the end will call us whatever they like, although they're thankfully usually pretty respectful about it.
Speaking (as we did last week) of names, I notice that Prianka would like to be called "Ank," but that it isn't catching on. Isn't it interesting that the successful changing of one's name requires the permission and cooperation of one's community? As Mark pointed out, we generally don't get to pick our own names. This crucial aspect of our identity is beyond our direct control, barring drastic measures like abandoning one's community along with the old identity, as David Locke did, or as in a witness protection program. People in the end will call us whatever they like, although they're thankfully usually pretty respectful about it.
Narrative Strategies kickoff
Hi, this is Chris. Mark and I thought a blog might work well as a forum for additional dialogue on topics we've been talking about in class. There is never enough time in class for everyone to say everything they might like, and we all think of more things we might have or should have said after we go home and think more. We hope some of those missed comments can come out here. So if you wake up in the wee hours with an inspiration regarding narrative strategies, post it here!
At this point, I only have a few of your email addresses. I need all of them so I can invite everyone as authors of the blog. Please prod your classmates (as I'll be doing tomorrow in class) so we can all participate.
At this point, I only have a few of your email addresses. I need all of them so I can invite everyone as authors of the blog. Please prod your classmates (as I'll be doing tomorrow in class) so we can all participate.
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