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New Vistas for the Performing Arts A discussion of our artistic views and their development written
for the Juilliard InterArts Program. by William Osborne It
might be useful for the students of the Juilliard InterArts Program, if we
briefly discuss some of the concerns that have occupied our eighteen years of
work developing chamber music theater. It was our dissatisfaction with the
newest attempts to integrate music and theater, such as Happenings and
Performance Art, that led to our efforts.
We wanted to create a more complete integration of theater and music
than these genres seem to allow. We wanted music and theater to coexist
equally in a single work of art. We
began by spending seven years analyzing, setting, and performing the works of
Samuel Beckett. No other modern
writer has written a body of work with such musical language, and in formats
suitable for small theaters. The
latter aspect was important for us, because it allowed us to put music
theater in a test tube and explore how its constituent parts might be
combined into a unified whole. This
experimentation cannot be done with opera, because its size, expense, and
established techniques make it extremely inflexible and unwieldy. The technical characteristics of opera
also make a genuine integration of music and theater very difficult, if not
impossible. Through
Beckett’s work we developed theories and techniques for the creation of texts
suitable for music theater. Briefly
stated, these techniques draw upon rhetorical methods such as alliteration
and carefully planned syllabic cadences, coordinated into sentences with
phrase patterns that intimate a poetic symmetry while maintaining the
character of prose. These sentences
are often given a “periodic structure”, i.e. the key and most dramatic words
come as late as possible in each sentence so that its tension is held to the
very end. The same periodic structure
is applied to the paragraphs, the most dramatic point being held in suspense
to the latest possible point. This refined form of prose creates texts ideal
for the true integration of music and theater, because it creates a language
which is both theatrical and musical, while allowing for authentic characters
devoid of libretto-like poesy. This
also allows for a music theater in which all the words can be heard and
understood, and whose meaning is essential to the appreciation of the work. We
were also drawn to Beckett’s works because of his precise use of stage
directions. The gestures, images, and
objects notated in his scripts share a semiotic importance equal to the
spoken text. We learned to create
texts with the notation of gesture and movement so precisely planned that
their musical accompaniment could become an integral part of our scores. This allows the score to serve not only as
a form of musical notation, but also as a method of theatrical production. Beckett’s
works were also useful models because of their refined character portrayal. Character development is ideally suited to
the genuine integration of music and theater. When the subjective
emotionality and visceral levels of music are genuinely integrated with the
objective nature of theater, a -Gestalt- is formed that reveals a wide
spectrum of human consciousness. The
true combination of music and theater thus allows for a very intense and
in-depth form of character development that is seldom found in less
integrated genres. Due to this simultaneous focus on the mental, visceral,
and emotional levels of human identity, almost all of our works study a
single person, and our works are generally named after them. (This might follow in the tradition of
operas named after their principle figures.
Orfeo, Lenore, Tosca, Siegfried, Salome, Elektra, Madam Butterfly,
Wozzeck, Lulu, Peter Grimes and Billy Budd are but a few examples.) We
have also followed Beckett’s lead by attempting to reduce time, place and
character in our works to a single unified whole. This allows the identity of the characters to flow directly out
of the images we use to present them. This concept is clearly illustrated by
“Winnie” from Beckett’s _Happy Days_.
The nature of her being is defined by the fact that she is buried in
the earth up to her waist and is sinking.
The work presents only two days in her life. Time, place, and character are reduced to a unified whole
reflected in the single image we see on the stage. Our work _Miriam_ is also a realization of this ideal. A woman is strapped in a chair in an
insane asylum, where she is trying to write a piece she can perform for a
shortly expected visit from her children.
A forceful unity is created because the character’s identity flows directly
from the spatial and temporal context created by the single image on the
stage. From
a more pragmatic perspective, this reduction has allowed us to realize
another aspect of our aesthetic ideals.
We want to create music theater that can be integrated into the
community. Our society does not have
the penchant for building opera houses that Europeans do, and it never
will. If we are going to have music
theater as a part of our lives, it will need to be something of our own,
something more direct and less cumbersome than opera, and something that deals with themes that
are truly a part of our society. (We
have lived in Europe for the last eighteen years, and can tell you from
experience that many Germans attend Bayreuth to celebrate their national
identity with almost religious zeal through musical rituals based on
romanticized Norse myths. And we have
seen that many Italians attend Verdi or Puccini with the same kind of earthy
enthusiasm you might find at one of their soccer matches. But most cultured Americans do not have
such an immediate connection to these forms.
In addition to the standard
repertoire, Americans need music theater in their own language with
texts they can understand, and which explore themes that are a part of their
own cultural identity. And why
shouldn’t they?) The adaptability of
our productions, and the themes we treat, have allowed us to take our work to
over sixty cities in the USA during the last five years. This has also allowed us to test many of
our theories. We
structure our texts around a technique we refer to as “Anticipation, Event, and
Reflection”. (We derived this idea
from a theoretical analysis of the work of Sartre by Frederic Jameson.) Simply stated, we create a sense of
anticipation (sometimes quite vague) of something about to happen, that event
then takes place, and then the character reflects upon her action. This sounds simple, but its existential
and ontological implications are enormous.
We use these three elements to create a series of units, or
“theatrical beats”, which connect together to from the larger structure of
the work. Each “theatrical beat” is usually consists of five to eight
sentences reflecting the rhetorical principles and “periodic structure” I
have discussed. The
larger overall structure of our works are also based on three sections
corresponding to “Anticipation, Event, and Reflection.” For example, the “Mad Soprano” you will
see tonight is anticipating an audition she has at the Met, she prepares for
it, then reflects on what the whole process means. The techniques of anticipation, event, and reflection allow us
to maintain a consistent pattern of tension and release that holds the
attention of the audience, even when we are dealing with relatively complex
music materials and abstract textual meanings. It
has also been necessary for us to develop many new performance practices in
order to realize the aesthetic ideals reflected in our multi-disciplinary
works. To Abbie’s abilities as a
highly advanced instrumentalist, we have added skills as a singer and actress,
as well as skills in mask work, movement, and pantomime. She has raised the -combination and
integration- of these disciplines to levels rarely found among performers.
This wider spectrum of training allows artists to more fully realize their
talents, and to more completely explore and express their identity as
humans. Such training also provides
enormous insights even for those who wish to focus on single fields, such as
music or theater, because no art really stands alone. Theater and music always walk hand in
hand, and the more we understand about one, the more we understand about the
other. I
will mention only one salient point regarding the composition of our
works. All of our works are based on
three note “cells” which can form combinatorial hexachords, i.e. six notes
which when transposed at a certain interval produce all twelve notes of the
octave. We discovered that there are
four basic cells of three notes which can form combinatorial hexachords, and
that each basic cells has eighteen permutations which are also
“combinatorial”. Each of our
characters is based on only one of the basic cells and its eighteen
permutations. The basic cell thus
functions almost like the genetic DNA of the character, and unifies all of
the musical manifestations of her being (or the “theatrical beats”),
something like an individual’s DNA unifies all the organs of his or her
body. Regardless of what form the
character’s music takes, these cells unify the material and create a
continuity being. Our
inter-disciplinary work has also allowed us to take advantage of recent
technological developments in the performing arts. One example is the use of
scores involving electronic music and surround sound. This led to interesting questions about
human perception. How do you resolve
the visual focus of the proscenium arch with sounds implying
theater-in-the-round? We began to
study the subtle ways the eyes, with their limited field of vision, tend to
imply a proscenium arch, while the ears always hear in all directions at
once. We found that the brain
organizes this conflicting spatial information in very specific ways, and
that our works had to be based on the same principles in order to be
comprehensible. This
example might illustrate that an intimate and -comprehensive- understanding
of new technological methods are essential to young artists working to create
the forms toward which music theater is evolving. These are no longer disciplines which can simply be referred to
stage technicians. Young people, for
example, must be taught the art of what Stockhausen refers to as “Klangregie”
(Sound Directing), which is the precise use of sound systems to create
magical sonic environments. They must
learn how to use video as a genre in itself, or as an element of live
performance (to say nothing of how it is used to create demos of their
work). They must learn how to use
light so precisely and economically that it can come close to serving as
their set. These disciplines require a knowledge of new technologies, and
more importantly, the development of an aesthetic understanding that allows
them to think of sound and light in terms of semiotic meaning even from the
initial conceptualization of their works.
It
is essential that the skills reviewed here (and numerous others) be designed
into a curriculum for composers, actors, dancers, singers and
instrumentalists. We have inherited a
historical trend toward stage works as a form of -Gesamtkunst- in which a
single voice is responsible for a work’s major elements, particularly in
regard to the text, music and concepts of production. This trend has been established by
composers such as Wagner, Berg, and Menotti, and even more in the newer forms
of stage works such as “happenings” and “performance art”. And yet it is notable that there is not a
single school in the world where one can obtain a well thought out and
complete plan of studies designed to train one in the literary, musical, and
theatrical skills necessary to create serious music theater, or other forms
of inter-disciplinary art works. The
desire to integrate music and theater represents a long tradition in western
music, and even though this has never been fully achieved, the attempts have
often led to some of the most important advances in western music. The
techniques and aesthetic philosophies developed by the music theater of the
Florentine Camerata, Montiverdi, Gluck, Mozart, Weber, Wagner, and Berg
almost outline the evolution of our musical heritage, and this historical
trend continues to this day. The
mastery of the new skills of music theater, both interdisciplinary and
technological, are essential to the future of the performing arts. It is no
secret that the digitalization of music has decimated the ranks of commercial
musicians, because so much of the work done earlier by groups of performers
can now be accomplished by a single artist using a computer and various
peripheral devices. Similar
tendencies are evolving in “classical” music as well. If live performance is
to maintain its position in our culture, it will depend on artists developing
composite skills which more completely reveal the inimitable aspects of a
human presence on the stage. Seen
from this perspective, the new possibilities of inter-disciplinary
performance and technology, which allow us a greater freedom, mobility and
economy, are the doorway to many new vistas, and the continuation of a long
tradition in which the integration of music and theater has led to discovery
and innovation. |