Libretto and Cartoons by Abbie Conant

Music, Video and Sound Design by William Osborne

General description

Program Notes

Score

Video Excerpts

Stills from the Video

Premiered March 16, 2004

in

The Roy and Edna Disney Cal Arts Theater

 (in downtown Los Angeles) 

Schubert Lieder, the Egyptian Goddess Maat, Native American poetry, dismemberment, trombone playing, a cyborg talkshow host, a talking hand, sacred cartoons, a vengeful opera singer, a martyred math geek, Hildegard von Bingen, fighter jets, commercials for synthetic flesh, cyborgian attack dogs, and personality-enhancement chips, psalms, a country western song, Mother Nature, and a tribute to Joni Mitchell…

....all integrated into a 45 minute surround sound mini opera with computer-generated accompaniment, video and live electronics.  And yes, this is classical music about a cyborg trying to prove she is human by being a 

talk show host.

Program Notes for Cybeline 

For close to thirty years, the focus of our work has been chamber music theater. Most of our productions are large, one-woman shows for Abbie. Many of our works portray alienated, creative individuals in society. 
 
Cybeline is a music theater work about a cyborg trying to be a talk show host to prove she is human. It is about nature, virtual reality, biotechnology, and the mass media – and about finding the heart and poetry in technology as it also contemplates its horrors. We explore our notion that the creation of a cyborg does not depend on the metalization of the body, but on the programmability of the mind. We live in a wired together, prosthetic world of global “cyberbia“ where our minds are programmed by the mass media. Since our minds are programmed, we are all cyborgs. Cybeline can project her thoughts, both conscious and unconscious, directly onto a screen that is an extension of her body. She uses this ability to create her show. A loud buzzer switches her on and off the air. 
 
Cybeline was influenced by our interest in Jungian psychology. Jung felt that humans are by nature image-makers, and that those images shape our dream-like identity and perception of the world. Humanity creates art, and art creates humanity. The mass media shapes Cybeline’s world, but she in turn, creates her own media universe. 

When off the air, Cybeline's music is created through computer operations that randomly select and mix whispered phrases of words and soft music. She adds sounds with her cyborgian hand -- in this case a glove controller which uses a small program to convert its movements to MIDI signals. The strong contrast between Cybeline’s consciously created show-biz routines and the unconscious, random, dream-like world that evolves when she is off-air gradually merge as the work progresses. Her subconscious mind and cultural conditioning unify to create her dream-like reality. 

To use the words of Samuel Beckett, Cybeline is something like an “enigma wrapped in a mystery.” Even though we create our music theater works, many of their symbolic meanings only reveal themselves to us over long periods of time. In a similar way, we feel it is important for the audience to contemplate and discover their own interpretations of our work. 

Cybeline addresses three historical characters, however, that it might be helpful to identify. Hildegard von Bingen was a 12th century nun, wise-woman, composer, and healer. Hypatia was a rennowned 5th century Alexandrian mathematician who was murdered by Christians who thought she was a witch. Maat, seen only in images at the end of the work, is an Egyptian goddess. Upon death, Maat places a person’s heart in a balance. If it is as light as a feather, he or she will go to heaven. The “True Crimes” scene is about a dismembered woman who has been reassembled as a cyborg and who questions how the masculinist nature of technology has affected her feminine and cultural identity

Click here for much more extensive program notes about Cybeline.

Click here to download the score of Cybeline as a PDF file.  (3.6 megs)

(The score is on European A4 paper.  To print, Americans should select 

"Page Scaling" and then "Fit to Page" when Adobe's printer window opens.  

The PDF file is almost illegible on a computer screen, but prints beautifully.)

Drawings from Cybeline

Click on the pictures to enlarge them.