Music vs. Theater

The New Music Gathering rolled into San Francisco this past weekend. Founded by Brooklyn stalwarts Danny Felsenfeld, Matt Marks, Lainie Fefferman, and Mary Kouyoumdjian, it was equal parts symposium, festival, and gab fest for composers, performers, and devotees of that amorphous non-genre we’re calling New Music.

The festival is, necessarily, a very large tent. In a field that’s always trying to expand its audience, it’s considered a bad idea to speak ill of another composer’s work, even if it’s not remotely to your aesthetic tastes. If we’re all struggling to get our music heard, we’re better off working together rather than tearing each other down. In the panel on new music criticism, Matt Marks said he could understand a beat writer slamming a piece of his, they’re required to review things even if they don’t like them. But if a blogger goes out of their way to write a bad review, well, in the words of journalist Joelle Zigman, that blogger is, in fact, a douchebag.

I’m not so sure. As someone who’s written quite a bit about pieces that I’ve found lacking, I’d like to think I’m not simply doing so as an exercise in douchebaggery. Rather, I’m doing my best to explore and understand the space. What is it about the piece that I’m finding lacking? What could have been different? Is it a failing of the artist? Is it a matter of taste? In the end, what do I value as a consumer of the arts, and where does this piece fall in the grand spectrum of things I’ve experienced. A thoughtful, honest, well considered response to a work can be a gift, even if it’s not an enthusiastic rave.

Case in point: there was quite a bit of music performed this weekend that I did not get at all. Many performances were noise explorations, without any of the traditional musical considerations of harmony, rhythm, or pulse, that left me alternating between boredom and annoyance. Based on my knowledge of the people who created it, and the people who seemed to genuinely enjoy it, I have to believe that there is truly some intellectual and/or aesthetic pleasure to be derived from this work, but it is entirely beyond me how to find it. It’s just not my bag.

I’ve been wrestling with why this is. Why is it that I’m perfectly happy watching long stretches of theater that defy any sort of rational comprehension (e.g. Richard Foreman), but if it’s sound exploration, I clock out at around 10 minutes? This weekend, while being confronted by the protracted drone of an electronically distorted minor second, I developed a pet theory: Maybe this is a function of my (oft maligned, yet occasionally insightful) Meyers-Briggs type, specifically my place on the S-N axis.

In Meyers-Briggs speak, a senser experiences the world more with their five senses and an intuit-er experiences the world through a layer of intellectual abstraction. I am ALLLLL the way over on the N side of things. I’m looking for patterns, for larger structures, for recurring themes and connections. Screw the tree, however lovely, and show me the damn forrest! Perhaps people who are ALLLLL the way over on the S side of things are better at reveling in the aural experience of the moment. They’re less concerned about the ‘where’ and ‘why’ and fascinated by the ‘what’. While I’m annoyed by not being able to find any structure or meaning in a sustained minor second, the senser is digging the experience of a shifting, gritty dissonance just sitting there.

This may be completely reductive, but it’s all I got right now. I’d need to hear more from folks who really dig the whole noise exploration side of the new music world. I’m all for keeping a large tent, let’s leave room for the extremes, but I think it’s telling that my favorite piece of the weekend, Samuel Carl Adams’s Shade Studies, sat right in the middle of the S-N axis. Relatively conventional harmonies satisfy the intuit-ers desire for structure, while the sustained, shimmering resonances allow the senser to bask in the layers of overtones that the harmonies created. That’s the kind of work that gets me excited, interested, engaged, and, ultimately, makes me want to create work of my own.

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 →

Please. Please please please. PLEASE!

As reported a few months ago, Richard Foreman has left the building. To be precise, he’s left the performance space on the second floor of the St Marks Church in the Bowery. In his wake remains the Incubator Project, the spin off of his Ontological Hysteric theater, dedicated to fostering works from emerging experimental theater artists.

This year is the Incubator’s first full post-Foreman season and the summer kicked off with a charming, if somewhat slight exploration of the tension between religious abstinence and post-adolescent sexuality via a poppy, toe-tapping two person opera, The Little Death Vol. 1.

The tone is set as soon as the doors open, the two performers (composer Matt Marks and collaborator Mellissa Hughes) greet the audience from behind a table, bright eyed, earnest, and wholesome, offering homemade chocolate chip cookies and lemonade (and copies of the CD).

He was right THERE!

The walls are painted a garish yellow, the brightly lit space transformed into some rec room or middle school gymnasium. (I had never before seen the space without any scrims or curtains. It was disorienting. Ghosts of Foreman productions past seemed to haunt the room. “Last time I was here, there was a padded, one eyed green thrash-spewing demon pacing about right THERE.”)

We were all encouraged to put our names on the complementary nametags and watch for the step as we took our seats. It was all very quaint and sweet and strangely out of place, ironic, considering that the space really is a church.

What follows feels less like an opera than a somewhat staged concert presentation of a series of songs. The songs themselves are infectious concoctions, part Lemon Jelly, part Aphex Twin, part Michael W Smith with gestures to a panoply of other styles. The lyrics are minimal, songs rarely consist of more than two or three phrases, first repeated by one character, and then the other. The entire libretto consists of maybe twenty distinct sentences. The characters are drawn in the broadest of strokes, with almost no distinguishing personalities. He’s horny and a maybe a little religious. She’s religious and maybe a little horny. That dynamic remains fairly static throughout. Not much happens, no one really changes. It’s tough to get any drama or nuance out of material so slight and vague.

Yet despite the wisp of a plot involving a boy named Boy and a girl named Girl, the show is somehow still an awful lot of fun. Both Marks and Hughes are charming performers and the roles seem to have emerged from genuine aspects of themselves. Marks is affable and passively desperate. Hughes is positively aggressive in her refusal to submit to any sort of non church sanctioned pleasure. Add the never seen but often invoked Jesus, and they form their own trinity, a bizarre love triangle of repression, devotion, and lust.

But the music is the star of this show, the driving force, the thing that grabs your attention and makes you forgive the lack of… well… the lack of much of anything else. Having spent some time with the CD (I sprung for the “CD, Lemonade, and Two Cookies” package), it’s not clear that a staging really adds much. The tracks are all prerecorded, including overdubbed and altered versions of the performer’s voices for harmonies. (In the performance I saw, the live voices were too often lost in the mix.) And listening to an album doesn’t drag along the expectations of character development or narrative drive, both of which are in short supply.

So why not just leave it as an album? In retrospect a staging imposes cumbersome theatrical conventions and expectations on a perfectly good art/pop album. And if you’re looking for a wider audience, why not do what most good art/pop albums do? There’s a reason the Buggles didn’t write “Opera Killed the Radio Star”.

Ah… I see. They’re not dumb. They’ve got that angle covered too. They teamed up with the Brooklyn video collective Satan’s Pearl Horses and put together a video for their breakout single “I Don’t Have Any Fun”. And what do you know? It’s fun!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPbcoHNZ9s8

But doesn’t this sort of make a strong case that the song is not tightly melded to the staging? It’s a separate thing that can be adapted to multiple visual/theatrical contexts but not particularly rooted in any one? The songs are “formless” relative to the staging (as in the formless vs definite discussions from months ago). They can be translated from one visual realization to another.  Some will be more effective, but there is a separability. Even theatrically, this narrative feels “formless”.  With characters this broad and lyrics so sparse, the scene could be injected into just about any story that calls for a boy to want a girl who isn’t sure she wants him.

These aren’t criticisms as much as observations. It’s what the piece is. Right now. After all, it’s just volume 1. I expect that there’s more to the story.  Some gaps that will get filled. Probably some more begging, some more praying, a bit more bleeding, and a lot more toe tapping. For now we’ve got an incomplete opera rooted in a contemporary popular idiom that doesn’t suck. And in my book, that is some very Good News.

Looks like Richard Foreman was serious this time. He’s not doing anymore theater productions. I’m damn glad I caught Idiot Savant last year at Joe’s Pub. I’ve been a big fan of Foreman’s work since I went to see Lumberjack Messiah on a complete whim five years ago. Now I see whatever is playing at Ontological-Hysteric whenever I’m in NYC.

Foreman’s own pieces were surreal, lyric, highly stylized, fetishistic affairs. I had long imagined a kind of theater that was more music than narrative, using phrases, gestures and situations as motifs and melodies and his pieces were the first I had seen that realized that vision.

I’ve found his film and video work much less compelling. I’ve only seen a few pieces, but what I’ve seen is pretty damn boring: non-actors standing in a room, staring at a camera, repeating a phrase or two, making a gesture… hohum. I don’t get it. I’m sad to hear that this is where he plans to spend his effort from now on. Maybe they’ll get more interesting…