unfolding the drama

In a recent discussion, I found myself defending Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle to accusations that it was predictable. In the opera, there are seven doors behind which seven horrible/astonishing mysteries await the Duke's new bride. An easy story to follow: door #1, music, door #2, music, etc etc. It sounds a lot like Let's Make a Deal, but the effect is exactly the opposite: the drama in Let's Make a Deal is in the opening of the doors; the drama in Duke Bluebeard is in the music. If you watch Let's Make a Deal expecting great music, you'll be disappointed; likewise if you go to Duke Bluebeard expecting her to open doors out of order--or maybe she should simply quit after opening the door with all the blood-soaked jewels.



The issue, then, is not a lack of drama but a different type of drama. I started by thinking that the problem with opera is that they are composed by musicians, not playwrights, who may or may not understand theater as well as they understand music. But the problem is probably even larger: music is not narrative (no matter how much people try) and so unfolds in a different way and at a different rate than theatrical drama.

The music underlying 19th century opera is an effort to speak the language of emotions, which seem to take longer to stimulate, foster, and bring to climax. Intellectually, we can understand the intricacies of a dramatic situation without our emotions getting initiated. And so there are redundancies in the plot so that it makes sense musically.

Also, music and language function in a fundamentally different way. Music, especially of the 19th century, thrives on repetition and variation; since there is no concrete information, repetition is not abhorred (except by those who use information theory to understand music, starting with Schoenberg.) Language is generally full of information and so can be much more linear, eschewing repetition.

This conflict of parallel languages telling the same story is the reason behind this parody:


Why is opera so boring?
It's a common concern among those of you who are not opera fans. There are a lot of answers to this question. I would bet that, for most people, they expect a compelling plot, one that rivals what we've seen in movies for the last 50 years. The plots in operas are ridiculous, redundant, and over-the-top. Fortunately, the plot is mostly a vehicle for the music, a guide for our emotions that, hopefully, get stirred by the composer's craft.

Maybe someone should write a mash-up of Let's Make a Deal with Duke Bluebeard. Maybe with some audience participation.


Wait, wait, there's more.
While writing the post, I discovered the following. Synchronicity.

The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c We Are at War - Philip Glass www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

A musing on recording and pornography

Humanity has had a libidinous fascination with mirrors since we first set eyes on ourselves in reflective pools of water. The pools allowed us to observe ourselves from the outside, leading to or furthering self-consciousness. But the pools weren't portable, so early humans invented a copy of the pool—the mirror. The mirror, then, is a copy of an object producing a facsimile.

Art
But we didn't stop with simply making the mirror; soon we were creating the images ourselves—all sorts of metaphorical mirrors. We invented artificial forms of representations of our reality (including aspects of our selves), shortening the word “artifice” to make art. Art, then, is a tool: a reflection of facets of the human experience in our never-ending quest to achieve self-awareness. We'll never achieve a reflection the entirety of what it means to be human, so each piece of art is a representation of a more-or-less manageable chunk, with which we can build, over a lifetime, a mental picture of who we are and where we fit in the universe.

Music
Two of the many competing theories surrounding music's origins are that it came either from humans imitating bird sounds or from imitating natural rhythms—heartbeats, footsteps, etc. Or maybe it grew out of speech as song. But somehow these various origins came together to form what we have today: a system that seems to imitate the various forms of human communication through artificially organizing sounds in time. [Or, thinking of Cage, artificially creating an environment in which a mass of people attentively listens to sounds in time.]

And, in the beginning and for many thousands of years after, all that we knew of this art of sound was through live performance. There must have been something communal and magical about the experience, judging by how much music gets entangled with religion. But those days have been going away for the last 100 years. These days, the primary way we interact with music is through recording.

Recording
In the mid-19th century, there were technological developments that allowed people to transmit and record sound waves. When Marcel Proust could no longer go to the opera, they set up a sort of telephone system by which he could listen over the wires—just one step removed from the performance. As the technology increased, we got more and more removed from the original. Soon we had the phonograph, which allowed people to reproduce live performances in their homes. Then, they were no longer “live” performances but done in the studio, allowing for multiple takes. Then, the advent of tape allowed performers to splice together parts of performances to create a more “perfect” recording—one that never existed in reality. At first, this meant that performers could simply polish their performances, but in the 1960s, this grew to mean that the recording could be something that never did or could exist in the real world—a simulacrum. (I'm thinking specifically of Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper's and such.) Perhaps it was the impossibility of living up to their unachievable perfection that led the Beatles to stop performing. Even if not, there is something symbolic in their retreat into the recording studio.

Recordings went from being a substitute to the definitive document. Somehow, the copy has trumped the original. This leads to performers feeling pressure to recreate their albums as perfectly in live performance, the pressure leading to lip-syncing and other such atrocities.

Pornography
In these days of the internet, there seems to be a parallel between recorded music and pornography. Humanity has long created images of a sexual nature, and those images, with technological advances, became so “realistic” that they were able to replace the original. It is easier to see the evil in pornography; the act starts as a sacred act of communion and becomes solitary act of debasement and objectification. I see the same problem in recording. With the majority of internet traffic being porn and recordings, the users of the internet are apparently addicted to the copies several generations removed from reality.

Performance
The issue that I have is with how these copies interfere with our “real” experiences. When I am at a concert, I don't want to compare what's happening live to the more “perfect” version I have on CD. I don't find value in automaton performers or, worse, fakery like lip-syncing. I want to see an authentic performance and experience it as such. I want it to be a unique experience, a communion between performer and audience. When the French go to a concert, they use the word “assister.” The experience exists because of the give and take to and from the stage. The audience is just as important as the performer. Otherwise, there would be no performance.

Maybe the Zen masters need to ask us: “If a performer performs to an empty hall, is it still a performance?” At least it's real.