Music vs. Theater

This is not the morning thing you're looking for...

Composer Robert Ashley’s “opera” (experimental performance piece is a more appropriate name, although if an opera is a multifaceted convolution of music, text, and motion, I suppose this is an opera) That Morning Thing, produced for the first time in 40 years at The Kitchen as part of the Performa 11 biennial, is among the most difficult pieces I’ve experienced. It’s dark. Dark in a way that I wasn’t expecting, dark in a visceral, what the heck just happened to me, I didn’t sign up for this kinda dark. This isn’t (necessarily) a bad thing. But it is a thing that is likely to stick with me for a while. What follows is less a review as it is an effort to come to terms with what I saw and how I responded to it.

Please note, a work like this is bound to be understood in a very subjective manner (if any attempt is made to understand it at all). I make no claims at all that my thoughts are in any way informed, intelligent, or even coherent. Whether my experience with the piece has anything to do with the composers intention is difficult to know, but recording my response may be helpful to myself, or anyone else wrestling with the piece.

The piece starts out innocuously enough. Read the rest of this entry →

If you build it, will they come?

In last week’s talk about theater, Tim Crouch lamented what he saw as theater’s betrayal of its own strengths, its own theatricality. Most pieces, as well as most audience’s expectations, rely heavily on naturalism, costumes, sets, and dialogue that create the illusion that some other part of of the world was surgically cut out of the fabric of its own reality and transported to the 30’X15′ footprint of the stage. Couch’s concern was that film and television will always be able to create the more convincing reality, and that theater would do well to focus on the headier, more existential issues that it’s immediacy is suited for.

I’m torn by this assertion. On the one hand, I’m right there with him believing that naturalistic linear narrative ranks pretty high on the ho-humeter. But while a majority of the shows produced follow that aesthetic, there is a wealth of theater made for those of us who want something else, and much of it is quite good. Read the rest of this entry →

You are an actor who has just been told by her director to "stop overacting".

One of the nice perks of working at Pixar (did I mention I work at Pixar? I don’t usually bring it up, since it rarely has anything to do with my blog) is a constant stream of classes, speakers, and first run movies that are available to employees at no cost. Last week, hosted by the Emeryville Center for the Arts, writer/performer Tim Crouch gave an introduction to the driving ideas behind his work, work that I’ve been completely unfamiliar with, but, as it turns out, is very much in line with my own aesthetic.

Crouch takes issue with what is largely accepted as the craft of “acting”. The punching bag he uses for this presentation is Howard Schatz’s twee coffee table tome “In Character: Actors Acting“, or, more accurately, “Actors Mugging”. Despite the largely celebratory reviews, Crouch quite rightly believes that this is only acting in the most impoverished sense of the word. For each photo, the subject is given a brief description of a situation, and then, using only their face, “act” that scenario. Hardly a promising setup, though beautifully photographed, the results are so gratuitously on the nose that the smilie at the end of this sentence feels like a more genuine expression of feeling. 🙂

One by one, Crouch would project these schmacting heads onto the main Pixar screen and read aloud the sentence that informed this particular ‘performance’, each absurdly specific and kinda stupid, possible candidates for this year’s Bulwer-Lytton prize. But Crouch has an insight… if you read a different sentence from the one that triggered the image, boom! All of a sudden, it’s INTERESTING. There’s confusion, ambiguity, and you as an audience member are forced to wonder… why? Read the rest of this entry →

Well, perhaps not rioting, but there was some pretty spirited heckling during JHNO’s performance at last night’s Longer Burning concert at The Royce Gallery presented by Pamela Z. Details are sketchy, but apparently in the middle of a rather loudly amplified piece, two audience members started complaining about the music even more loudly. One started applauding ironically in an effort to get him to stop playing, the other was less subtle and just yelled out “stop”. One audience member in attendance claims that the hecklers went as far to shout “This is a DESECRATION! I am a REAL violist and I can tell you THIS IS NOT MUSIC!”

Apparently this very vocal and persistent minority got under JHNO’s skin and he abruptly stopped playing, threw his viola onto the stage, causing considerable damage, and stormed off. After the outburst, an angry group of audience members (including original Kronos Quartet member Joan Jeanrenaud) amassed around the hecklers, arguing about proper decorum. Apparently one of the hecklers is a well known performer and educator, but no one has named names yet. (update: George Mattingly has identified the heckler as none other than Bernard Zaslav, former violist of the relatively forward thinking Fine Arts Quartet!)

From the accounts I’ve heard, it was a shocking and disturbing occurrence for everyone there. We mythologize stories of extreme audience reaction to the new, (the famous ‘riots’ after Sacre, the woman screaming ‘I Confess!” during Reich’s Four Organs) but with the general sanitization of the concert experience, actual displays of emotion are exceedingly rare (outside the opera house at least).

(ed. Please see the comments for responses from the heckler, hecklee, and concert presenter.)

Tony Kushner is not and has never been a member of the serialist party.

Tony Kushner’s epic play The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures (currently playing at the Public Theater) is a hyper intellectualized allegory disguised as a family drama about a clan of hyper-intellectuals. The action centers around the patriarch, Gus, a lifetime communist who has lived long enough to see his very ideology, the key tenets of his existence, the very fiber of his being fall squarely on the wrong side of history. What does one do when the system you’ve dedicated your life’s work to has been utterly repudiated? For Gus, unwilling to concede his beliefs as flawed, and uninterested in continuing a futile struggle, the answer appears to be an honorable suicide.

At first blush, this is a scenario that few audience members are likely to find applicable to their lives. In this post cold war era, the notion of a staunch communist is a quaint anachronism. For the modern audience, it’s just too easy to dismiss Gus’s ideals as wrongheaded. But what if it wasn’t so clear? What if Gus’s passions weren’t for an idea that was unpopular but not (yet) universally disregarded. Something like… contemporary chamber music? Read the rest of this entry →

Early on in the week, based upon a few tweets from chambermusiciantoday and Sequenza21, I checked out Elodie Lauten’s ‘new’ opera The Death of Don Juan (apparently it originated in the 80s, but this is the first staging and it was radically overhauled). The timing was right, I was going to be in the neighborhood, and at only $15, it seemed worth taking a chance on.

The performance was, in short, underwhelming. It was scrappy and independent with rough edges and some questionable Read the rest of this entry →

Can I come out yet?

Now that the smoke has cleared after last weekend’s ginormous recital/premiere extravaganza, it’s time to pop out of the foxhole and see what the past five months of preparation has wrought.

It was a big project. Self produce an evening long concert of new music, all written by myself. It seemed like the entrepreneurial thing for a fledgling composer to do.

For those of you that don’t know, self-production is a lot of work. Assembling the artists, coordinating schedules, finding venues… not to mention marketing and publicity, with a few grant applications on the side (all skills that have very little to do with composition). And then there’s the nitty gritty bits like laying out a program, distributing flyers around town, and buying the right amount of crackers for the post concert reception. And, of course, there’s the small matter of getting the music to sound right.

So how did it go?

Read the rest of this entry →

Happy monkey is happy (and NOT a hypocrite)

Fantastic news here in Music vs Theater world! The San Francisco chapter of the American Composer’s Forum has seen fit to award me a Subito grant to help produce this weekend’s premiere of my song cycle (and other works)!

This is a huge deal, not only will it make it much more likely that we’ll be able to cover all the expenses (as well as pay the musicians closer to what they deserve), but with any luck, it will pave the way for future grants.

But, looking for the grey cloud behind this silver lining in this particular horse’s mouth, it looks like it’s time for me to revisit my post whining about how hard it is for new-ish composers to get arts grants. After all, can I still maintain that arts funding does more harm than good in the face of this new award?

Unfortunately, I kinda think so. Read the rest of this entry →

This link is just too good to stay hidden in the comment section of my last post. My friend Natalie has great advice for young artists hoping for a career in the capricious lotto game of artistic endeavors. Her points are specific, useful, insightful, and should be required reading for those folks who, in fact, can’t imagine themselves doing anything else than pursuing their muse. Share widely.

http://birthofaplaywright.blogspot.com/2010/04/day-87-lessons-no-one-could-teach-me.html

There comes a time in one’s life (usually around junior year of high school) when you have to answer the question, “What do you want to do with your life?” More often, this question comes in the form of “What colleges are you looking into?” and “Have you picked a major yet?”. But the underlying issue remains “Now that you’re 16, what activity do you plan on pursuing for the next 50 years?”

For me the answer was obvious. I had been studying music intensely since second grade. I had been performing in musicals since third grade (including a professional regional production). My listening habits, which had started with Bernstein and Sondheim in elementary school, had progressed through Gershwin, Stravinsky, and Bartok in high school. Simple. I was going to be a composer of orchestral and musical theater works.

That is, until my piano teacher talked some sense into me.

Read the rest of this entry →