Sad Clowns and Blackbirds

Theory: the more complex a piece of art, the longer it takes to penetrate and the longer it takes to fade with repeat experiences. In the history of music, there seems to be a roller-coaster relationship with complexity: things start out simple and get steadily more and more complex until they get so impenetrable that there's a crash: WHEEE! The Baroque was thorny and difficult, and it was to that the Classical was a reaction. The Romantic period period seemed to have a fake crash but was instead redirected into serialism, then total serialism which then spawned a reaction in the hypersimple minimalist style that is decorating so many movie scores these days.

One theory among composers is that writing hypercomplex music means your music (and therefore your soul) will live on forever. They're think they're writing for the future. Unfortunately, there are far too many examples of artists appreciated only well after they died to give this group of misfits hope.

The same theory necessarily applies to live performances, something which I realized watching eighth blackbird's performance of Pierrot Lunaire.

I had been building up to the performance in my mind for several weeks before, listening to the score, explaining the work to my students (music appreciation), and even somehow interviewing 8bb's flutist Tim Munro. I felt ready to take the complexity of the score and make sense of it in a total-brain, dreamlike way.

To me, the music and the text are more than enough to try to make sense of. Already in Schönberg's score, there is tension between foreground and background. Clearly, the "singer" is meant to be the foreground, but the instrumental writing is so dense and ear-catching that I try to fuse the various parts together into some sort of cohesive, symbiotic whole, splitting my conscious attention evenly: 50% singing, 50% instrumental music, and 50% text. That's right, to really absorb the Gestalt requires 150% of conscious thought.

But 8bb doesn't stop there; they add yet another layer of meaning in the choreography of Mark DeChiazza. The movement itself was interesting and eye-catching, but it turned out to be too much so. One could have spent 100% of their attention watching the movement and making sense out of a series of abstract and unrelated relationships.

In talking about the work, DeChiazza seemed overwhelmed by the music, finding it impenetrable. He related stories of burying himself in Expressionist thought and art to try to find a visual language that would correlate to the score. In essence, then, he tried to create a choreography that would be on the same level as the text and music.

This was where he went wrong.

Pierrot Lunaire, for admirers of 20th century music, can stand completely on its own and, even then, merits myriad repeat listenings to penetrate its thick exterior. The goal with the staging, then, should be to make it more immediately accessible to general audiences. While I think DeChiazza succeeded in this to some extent, his success came about through visually distracting the audience from the difficulty of the work rather than highlighting elements in the music or the text.

Less is more.
Musically, 8bb have found a balance with their singer, the incomparable Lucy Shelton. Shelton is a dynamic performer and both demands and merits the audience's full attention. So while she is singing, we don't need a dancer doing twirls in the far background, musicians dramatically sweeping chairs into place, and Pierrot climbing a ladder. We don't need four layers of visuals because we already have four layers of music and an inscrutable text.

Ultimately, it's all about balance. The "volume" of the visuals was too loud for the volume of the music, which could be solved by turning down the visuals (by quieting down the least essential layers: move more slowly or not at all) or turning up the audio. I would do a little of both but making sure that the audio is loud enough to demand attention--though this may go against the birds' time-tested idea of "sound reinforcement" in lieu of "amplification".

information
Adding complexity to complexity creates a work that is both more difficult to penetrate but also one that merits more repeat listenings. The irony is that by adding a visual layer, in an effort to make the work more accessible to some, they made it more complex, therefore less accessible, to others. With repeated experiences, my opinion of the work could change. It was too much information to make sense of in one sitting but will take many, many more before it becomes remotely redundant.