At first I thought I'd talk about new kinds of music theater. This is an
opera column, we know, but then what is "opera"? On one hand, it's what you see
in an opera house. But, more abstractly considered, it's a theatrical form in which drama
is shaped by music. Music and theater have evolved, and in an age when John Cage and
Samuel Beckett both are classics, we've got works that don't look or sound anything like
the traditional operatic repertory but by my broader definition are operas all the same,
though they might call themselves anything from musical comedy to performance art.
"Music theater" is a common name for fusions of the two arts that don't fall
into any traditional genre; my plan here was to review music theater events performed in
New York in the spring. But it wasn't
so easy. Some -- like so many new operas -- just weren't very good. Others would be hard
to explain. What would Keynote readers think, for instance, of Christian Marclay's Dead
Stories, performed by six vocal performers (some of whom included singing
among their accomplishments), and by Marclay himself, who plays records, sometimes several
at once? Sometimes he leans on his turntables' tonearms, grinding needles into his
records' grooves. Downtown at the Performing Garage, where Marclay appeared, such things
are routine. If I were discussing Dead Stories in the new music column I wrote for
five years in the Village Voice, I might wish that a work already gripping in its
darkness -- dark performance space, dark mutterings, the dark subject of death -- could
have been darker still, with stranger, more varied behavior from the six sound-makers, and
fewer bumps into unambiguous ideas. (They stuck out blatantly from the intuitive flow of
the piece as a whole.) But in Keynote I might first have to explain that of course
there's no narrative, And before that I'd surely need to say more about the sound of the
piece. A guy grinding needles into records? Forget what opera might be; the first question
here -- or in any publication that doesn't routinely cover the left wing of contemporary
art -- has to be "What is music?" |
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I'm left with one artist to discuss: Meredith Monk. She's famous, for one thing, so I can ironically insist that we're dealing at least with a substantial cultural phenomenon. And though she, too, doesn't bother with narrative -- and though she's so comprehensive a theater artist that we'd have trouble classifying her merely as a composer, singer, dancer, actress, director, or choreographer -- at least her music, taken by itself, isn't enigmatic, Most often she sits at a piano, noodling in a repetitive midnight style reminiscent both of minimalism and a Laura Nyro kind of pop, while in a rich (sometimes keening) voice she wails scraps of melody that might be folk tunes of a culture she invented herself. A limited style, you might say
(symphonies echoing, no doubt, in your ears). But let's be precise. Monk’s emotional
range, from somber to silly, is surely less limited than the emotional range of some of
our stodgier classical composers, people like Brahms, Vaughan Williams, or Hindemith. What
is limited is her rhetoric, though with Brahms, Broadway, and Elliott Carter echoing in my
own ears I'd say that's a relief. Besides, in her recent Acts from Under and Above (which
she wrote in collaboration with actress Lanny Harrison, and which I saw April 10 in the
East Village at La Mama E.T.C.), Monk seems to be moving down paths first mapped by
Schoenberg, no less. The piano music tends to be more dissonant than usual, and the vocal
phrases more irregular -- asymmetrical, nonrepetitive, full of "glitches," as my
companion said. |
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Is Acts from Under and Above opera? Why not? At the start we hear the comforting sound of water, then (in darkness) the drone of Monk's piano. Lights then flash on and off; finally, in normal stage lighting, Monk comes forward like a waif, making sounds that, if memory serves, were like a folksinger crossed with a baby bird. Music is just one element in all of this, but would anyone say that the flow of the whole wasn't musical? Monk varies elements in the show as if each were a musical theme. How many ways can she approach a piano? She can approach it directly, then sit down and play. She can approach it cautiously (then, as she sits down, the lights wink out, and the audience laughs). She can sit down, take off her jacket, and stretch before she plays. Sometimes she walks about the stage in silence; the lights go out, and in darkness her walking itself becomes a sound effect. Things in her work rearrange themselves and acquire new meaning, just as purely musical details do -- strange association -- in serial music, where the note A flat, let's say, might first draw attention because it was repeatedly the top note of a descending minor sixth, and later stand out again as repeatedly the highest note of a phrase, or because it was repeatedly played by a clarinet. Or maybe the association isn't as
strange as it seems; Monk tells me she always starts by planning the structure of her
works. Acts from Under and Above is in two parts, one with Monk alone, the other
with Monk and Harrison. The two parts had different colors -- the first dark, the second
bright and cheerful, accompanied by piano rags silkily played by Nurit Tilles -- but in
many ways the same shape: Part One had three musical numbers played by Monk, Part Two had
three played by Tilles. But at the same time the second part seemed to evolve from the
first. We saw a film in Part One, and three films in Part Two; Monk played the same piano
three times in Part One, while in Part Two Tilles moved from her own grand piano to Monk's
upright and then back again (and at the upright introduced her own variant of the
"How many ways can we approach a piano?" game from Part One). Who was it who
said, "All art aspires to the condition of music"? Music doesn't shape the
whole, and yet the whole is shaped like music; more precisely, music, movement, film, and
speech combine to create a flow more like music than anything else. |
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What does it mean? I might quote my colleague Linda Sanders from the Voice, who, though she didn't like the piece as much as I did, described it neatly as a "collection of vignettes, each suggesting some recognizable byte of experience and arranged in an archaic psychic hierarchy: the subterranean (Monk alone in an underground cave singing about fear), the earthly (Monk and Harrison in the everyday world of the street, work, companionship, and fun), and the celestial (an epilogue in which Monk and Harrison, wrapped in the blue of the heavens, look down upon a tiny twinkling New York)." (That last, I might add, was pure magic.) But what it means is
-- especially for readers who’ve never seen anything like it -- far less crucial than
how you find out what it means. You've seen Wagner's Lohengrin, perhaps, and you
didn't know what it meant either, why Elsa had to die when she dared to ask who her hero
husband was. But you were smart enough not to probe for an answer; you let the images wash
over you and added them up at the end. That's what you do with Monk, though with no story
to hang on to -- the kind of story George Bernard Shaw called "police
intelligence," which tells us who did what to whom -- you might feel lost at first,
assaulted by dramaturgical moths, or, more precisely, by unexplainable metaphors, images
that demand explanation because in the absence of a story they're the only landscape the
piece presents.What saves
you, perhaps, is the structure, which, just as purely musical structure does (whether you
notice it or not) in the opera house, defines both the
tone and importance of everything that happens. As Donald Tovey wrote about Wagner's Das
Rheingold: "The jealous Fricka did hope (in F major) that the domestic comforts
of Valhalla would induce Wotan to settle down. Wotan, gently taking up her theme in E
flat, dashes her hopes by this modulation more effectively than by any use of his
artillery of tubas and trombones." In a similar way the twinkling city at the end of Acts
from Under and Above wrapped up everything that went before, though I couldn't quite
say why.In fact, Monk
has a commission from the Houston Grand Opera, which might prove she belongs in this
column. Until someone shows me a new opera in traditional style that speaks for our time
as Wagner and Berg spoke for theirs, I'd say the future of the form belongs to artists
like her.Keynote magazine, 1986 [Keynote was the publication of New York's defunct classical music radio station, WNCN. Meredith did write an opera, Atlas, for the Houston company. I haven't seen it, but I doubt it made her any more traditionally operatic. There's a recording of the work on the ECM label.]
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