The UKSUS CD is officially out today, available in all your favorite places, digital and physical. For you who still live in this world, I would encourage buying the object itself, a beautiful hardbound book with CD enclosed, designed by Karen Johnson. And the performers, they who bring the magic: Bryan Nies conducting, the vocally resplendent (Opera News) Laura Bohn and powerful Nikola Printz, the handsome and extravagantly transgressive tenor (Los Angeles Times) Timur Bekbosunov, Bob Ernst!, and the ensembles from the US and Austria.
Who can forget Richard Klammer singing the Divan Song (included on the CD), here accompanying scenes from the cast featured on the CD:
A feverish mashup of artistic and political history, commentary on vinegar and meatballs, and non sequiturs, all set to Wold’s tangy, versatile score (San Francisco Chronicle), it combines the stories of Daniil Kharms and the OBERIU with equally absurd scenes from his life in Stalin's Soviet Union.
What is amazing about the OBERIU is that, while living in abject fear and panic under Stalin, they laughed and laughed and laughed, loved wordplay and nonsense, rejoiced in absurdity, and held onto that love and joy and laughter to very end, to their ambiguous deaths in custody of The State, the secret police, the NKVD.
As a composer of the day, I'm often asked by others who are envisioning a career in composition how it is done, and I typically tell them sorry, but the consanguinity of composers is a guild with many secrets. However, here I am once again on Zug 132 heading out of Pordenone, feisty and wanting to throw some carnavalean confetti of cautions to the wind so here it is, a simple flowchart to guide your new and exciting life adventure:
American premiere! Introduced by Rattensturm composer Erling Wold.
RATTENSTURM is the latest opera by local composer Erling Wold (Certitude and Joy, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, Queer, UKSUS), commissioned by the Klagenfurter Ensemble for the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, with a libretto by Austrian writer and director Peter Wagner. This concert film was shot over the run of sold-out shows and captures the intimate, powerful performances of Nadine Zeintl and her fellow war-loving rats, screaming and singing in delight of the gut-exploding carnage.
At the beginning of June 1918 the SMS Szent István, the splendor and pride of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, sets sail on its maiden voyage to break through the defenses at the Strait of Otranto. She had had only a few practice runs, and her crew had spent its time polishing the brand-new engines, scrubbing the decks, and putting on fat. In their haste, they forget to open the submarine barricades, they fail to sail under cover of night, and the wet coal gives off a plume of smoke. Spotted by an Italian torpedo boat, the Szent István dies an ignominious death in an already pointless war, the tragic but inevitable outcome of the contemporary feelings of duty, sacrifice, honor, and a willing subjugation to the leaders.
Watch the trailer here:
Directed by Peter Wagner, music by Erling Wold, design by Manfred Bockelmann. Featuring Sebastian A. M. Brummer, Martin Ganthaler, Michaela Khom, Angie Mautz, Marilene Novak, Michael Uhlir & Nadine Zeintl. Alexei Kornienko conducting the Collegium Musicum Carinthia. 99 min. In German with English subtitles. Digital.
The masterful Robert Harris and I discussing She Who Is Alive, from last year before West Edge Opera performed a hastily-scribbled scene (The Third Degree) as part of Snapshot. With Rattensturm in between, I've only recently gotten back to the scribbling, but am planning to finish this thing and do the film or die trying. SFCCO is performing a pre-writing suite from it on October 13th, with the fabulous Nikola Printz performing, screaming in all caps:
8:00PM, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13
ST. MARK'S LUTHERAN CHURCH,
1111 O'FARRELL STREET, SAN FRANCISCO
The program notes:
She Who Is Alive (Official Teaser Trailer #1) is a suite from the in-preproduction film-opera adaptation of Robert Harris’s surreal fascist thriller, a death drive dream gliding through the residual terror of the twentieth century. We find ourselves on a tropical beach, the sun setting, April Jergen riding her horse. Meanwhile, in the National Homeland, the Polemarch Rorman sings a poem he has written to his young boyfriend. His boyfriend is full of disdain. Eventually, April has a dream and fulfills her destiny for the National Homeland.
We are in rehearsal for Rattensturm, and today was the first day - glorious day - where we had everyone in the room: actors, singers, instruments, video and triangle. It made all so happy to hear it together; I could see the light shine forth from everyone's eyes.
This piece really is Peter Wagner's. It's his libretto, his architecture, his direction, his video, his concept. I really am just the composer. But the music still does something big. The reporter from the Kleine Zeitung asked if the music was atmosphere and I said no, it really is setting the text, even the spoken text, and has a structure and impetus of its own. In the interview, Peter talked about the „suggestive Drive der Musik“ and the goosebumps it brings forth so I think he sees that.
But even the music isn't all mine, and while I listened I scribbled down what I remember of what I was thinking of during while writing the piece.
I explicitly stole a favorite chord progression from Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte for the virtual choir section at the end of Act I. I don't think anyone would notice, although there is a tickling when I listen to it that makes me thing there is something in the violin accompaniment that came from another piece through a less conscious path, but maybe not.
Ravel was a very careful composer who created very few but absolutely perfect jewels whereas, at least in this particular piece, I was scribbling as quickly as I could, the first two acts in Firenze during a week last December, and the rest in bits and pieces in my basement and here and there in hotel rooms in Europe - a process that doesn't lead to perfect jewels, but speed invites the muse. Listening to it here today I have no idea for much of the piece if I wrote it or how it was written.
Just before, in the cathedral in Ravenna, the Empress and I heard Natalia Haszler's Credo universale. It's a lovely lovely piece, and she has a way of handling speaking and chant-like text presentation, which the Empress commanded me to use, so I did. But again, no one would confuse Haszler and me.
When I was a boy, I heard somewhere - one of those idiotic rules that stick in the brain - that it was very bad to double instruments in chamber works, but I do it all the time, and in this piece, the way the strings and the piano mix together reminds me of one of the Faure piano quintets that Sara Klancke played, as well as some bits from Michael Nyman's opera of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. And I always like how Fred Frith would double the vocals with the violin. I did it just a little, but consciously so, so I mention it here for completeness.
The string writing in the aria Der Krieg bringt hohe sittliche Kräfte... is from part of Doctor Atomic that the Empress mentioned just as I got to that bit, and it was on my mind so into the pot she goes.
When I first was thinking about this piece, I was improvising at the piano and came across some chords which, after some time, I realized were thinly disguised versions of chords I have used many times before, but shortly thereafter noticed a modal similarity to the chords that begin Schubert's Der Doppelgänger, and since Peter liberally quotes lots of texts of the time I thought why shouldn't I, so I mixed in some of me with some of Mr. Schubert's song. My favorite Schubert musics are the dark musics, e.g. the above, Die liebe Farbe, etc.
And there is a direct setting of Ich hatt' einen Kameraden, as a traditional quote, originally suggested by Peter, as well as O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden from the St Matthew Passion - which was my father's favorite hymn and which still makes me cry. It suddenly came to mind as I was reading the War Speech by Peter Rosegger: Je mehr der Stahl geglutet, Je besser ist das Schwert. Je mehr ein Herz geblutet, Je größer ist sein Wert. And I had told myself to take my first impulse so again hop la!
The prayer section, Aus seelsorglichen Gründen..., is the one bit that someone looking at the score and who was familiar with L'Histoire du Soldat would say hey, what? And that's the second time I've done that with Stravinsky, but I could claim it is because L'Histoire was written right during World War I and anyway, I went to his grave on San Michele and I cried and asked for forgiveness and I feel absolved.
I steal from myself as well, but that's common among composers. Bach did it, and maybe that was because like me he had to write so much so fast. All of Act IV is based on an unrelated piano piece of mine: The obsidian blade is made of winter. And when writing fast, one falls back on tricks that worked before. You've got to put some notes down for the players or the producer will say why am I paying them to play when they aren't playing, so time to do the Wold thing, mixing in some arpeggios and some 5s against 3s and some 7/8s and the usual stuff. And that noisy sound I use throughout - sampled from a radiator in the National Gallery in Moscow, just around the corner from those incredibly beautiful marine paintings by Ivan Aivazovsky - is so much like the whistling thrumming noise I used in Sure Fire. But now that I think of it, this opera is all about the sea so maybe again this wasn't my decision at all.
I may be dead, but still I hear the roads calling, the hills of home and the restless rivers wondering where I am. Mahomet has found a simile for the moon; she hangs limply, broken like an old palm branch. Do come and visit; you may find me on the Western Front, I go out at night to watch the German rockets. They have white crests, throw flame across no-man’s land, burst into green and blue, drop down in purple rain. I gaze in awe, the last days of a beautiful world.
It is my nature to assume that I am incapable of anything.† One day this will be true, but after the anxieties of last month, I have discovered that somehow progress has been made on the Szent Istvàn opera, now about a third complete.
The Empress has asked me whether I write my operas from one end to the other and yes, typically, yes, although I build a notebook of sketches before and during, of musical thoughts that come from the gods or hastily-scribbled improvisations at the piano, from which I steal when a synchronicity occurs. I've used some of music from the before-the-fact suite, but the majority is new, and looking back I do seem to let things simply flow from the previous to the next, except when it is time to not.
I do have a sketch of a schema for the arc of the piece overall, and even thinking of it as an arc gives me a path to follow. Beginnings and endings are both critical, the beginning because it draws in the audience, slowly or suddenly, and a good beginning allows you some freedom in the middle. You do play the audience with the ending, you can't help it, big or little, but one of those, and not something in between. In the middle, it's important to make it clear that the ending is nowhere near, or they will start to think beyond the piece, and you want them with you.
Next weekend I travel to Burgenland to meet again with Peter and Gerhard. They do seem to be with me so far, and I'll need to keep them interested to the end.
Firenze-Roma, 2018 † the well-respected director Jim Cave points out in his letter dated 24 January that this should read "capable of nothing"
Back in the land of the Kaiser and the King, puffed snow falling on the tennis courts outside, xmas music drifting up through the open window cooling off the overheated room, the Empress and I basking in unfettered wifi here at the Seepark Hotel, who immediately Facebook-liked the mini Instagram video of the aforementioned snow, and basking also in a breakfast buffet with Mr Gerhard Lehner, the Impresario at the Klagenfurter Ensemble.
I've included a video above of the SFCCO concert where we played a suite of music intended for the piece I am working on in Austria. How it fits or where I do not know, since my work on the piece has so far been vague and unfocused. I'm told by everyone I work quickly, amazingly quickly, but the encroaching premiere is not without anxiety, actualized in my recent dreams involving 1) the assignment of insoluble problems, 2) fast-paced confusions about time and place, 3) doing bad things and worrying about getting caught, and 4) general teeth-clenching situations from xmas-themed horror movies. But I think the video at least is good, mixing some HD camera footage from Clubhouse Studios with some surprisingly beautiful 4K iPhone video and also my beloved a7S II. I added some of the bass drum that we didn't have, and I tuned a few things here and there with Melodyne, but that's just me being overly attentive, when I really should be working on the opera itself instead of fucking around with my computer.
But Peter Wagner and I did go through the text yesterday and the structure is much clearer. The ship as microcosm: from the initial euphoria of the launching and the war to be over by xmas, to the first few unexpected delays and the sodden realization of the horror, to the mortal wounding of the boat, its own machines reflecting the war's endless mechanized slaughter, to the rats escaping, the final appeals to patriotism, then the sinking and then the quiet:
Verschwinde, Mond! - Nacht will ich und Finsternis, damit, was mich umgibt, verkohlt für immer, und was in mir lebt, stirbt - keine Hoffnung, kein Kummer, Ich will das große Nichts, wo kein Wind ist, wo nichts ist.
Disappear, moon! - I want night and darkness,
so that what surrounds me is burned away forever,
and what lives in me dies - no hope, no sorrow,
I want the void, where there is no wind, where there is nothing.
Rattensturm. Angriff auf ein Sinkendes. Orchestriert.
On Guy Fawkes' eve, the fourth of November, the SFCCO will perform an instrumental suite from my soon-to-be-written opera on the sinking of the Tegetthoff-class battleship SMS Szent István, an event which, as it happened on the maiden voyage due to a series of mishaps and foolishnesses, was an embarrassment for the Austro-Hungarian empire, already in rapid decline post Franz Josef. However, in Italy, the country that provided the torpedoes that dealt the blow, it is still commemorated as Navy Day, June 10th, the day in 2018 the opera will premiere, the 100th anniversary of the awesome event.
Five sections:
1) A few years ago, a former attendant of the Empress took me to see A Winged Victory for the Sullen, and something about the calmness of their music has infected me. So when the librettist's stage directions commanded that the music starts in a calming and smooth manner, in the first section, The Strait of Otranto, where the battle eventually takes place, I said OK I will and let the infection run its course. In the opening, we hear that the Strait of Otranto, the Otrantostrasse, is for sailors what Verdun is for the foot soldiers at the front.
2) As the ship sails, the mishaps accumulate. They have set off late, so will not arrive under cover of darkness, and the coal is damp, sending dense black smoke, signaling the enemy. Those that love war love this, The Unloved War:
I have ... killed.
I am more agile and quicker than him.
More aggressive.
I'm the first to hit.
I have the feeling for reality,
I, the poet.
I have acted.
I've killed.
Killed as the one,
Who wants to live.
- Blaise Cendrars
3) I was improvising at the piano and came across some chords which, after some time, I realized were thinly disguised versions of chords I have used many times before, but shortly thereafter noticed a modal similarity to the chords that begin Schubert's Der Doppelgänger, and since the librettist is liberally quoting lots of pro and anti war poetry I thought why shouldn't I do some quoting, so in the section Blessed are the young men who hunger and thirst for glory, from Gabriele D Annuncio's beatitudinal Bergpredigt, I mixed in some of me with some of Mr. Schubert's song. My favorite Schubert musics are the dark musics, e.g. the above, Die liebe Farbe, etc, and that darkness here is featured in the contrabassoon doubling bits of the melody.
4) The librettist, Peter Wagner, said to use Ich hatt' einen Kameraden- the German equivalent of Taps - might be too heavy handed, but I arranged it anyway.
5) Which leads us attaca to How beautifully the rockets illuminate the night, a repurposing of a piano piece of mine, arranged for the small orchestra. A pulsing but slowly changing harmony, and a dropping melody in the bells. Orchestration can do many things given a piano piece as its source: in this case, providing the swell of the performer and the pedaling of the piano.
Remember, remember the 4th of November. At beautiful St Mark's Lutheran on the hill at 1111 O'Farrell, 8pm.
One of the most unsettling aspects of a life in art is the rapid change of its underlying assumptions. It can take more than a lifetime for one's artistic abilities to mature, but an artist who strives for, say, beauty may find, just as she achieves this goal, that beauty is no longer of interest, and that the world of art has moved along to some other metric of artistic goodness, such as the current favorite of preaching to the choir.
There is no end to the cranky rantings of elder composers who decry the loss of interest in whatever they think is still important, even though they were happy to kick in the teeth the motivations of those who came before them. John Adams, who complained early on that the Pulitzers were not inclusive enough, has criticized the more recent Pulitzer winners for being the product of the times, where we are between times of high art, sounding not unlike those uptowners who complained about composers like him.
I wonder - who is it who decides on these metrics of artistic goodness? Is it simply fashion, like hemlines? The standards by which art is judged seem to seem so obvious to those in the middle of it: cleverness, social justice, glorification of the almighty, prettiness, commercial success, shocking la bourgeoisie, the latest gizmos, mastery of craft. We the artists try not to pay attention, but we all crave the pat on the back and the envelope of cash that comes with timely success. And if one lives long enough, will one eventually be able to retrieve that old checkered sport coat from the downstairs closet and have everyone tell you how cool it is? Maybe, but most likely your own tastes will diverge ever more from those of the perpetually reinvented artistic community. How lost would the revivified sculptor of any culture a thousand years ago be in an art world where, as shifting phenomena become frozen through emergent and personal practice, the viewer is left with a hymn to the possibilities of our culture?
But still there is a desire for immortality, artistic or literal. Both are impossible to control. Several therapists ago, I mentioned how my tech colleagues seemed to be racing to develop a literal immortality for their own bodies, and he guffawed at their credulity. How much the same is this desire to that which has always been, only now clothed in the lab coat of scientific and technological singularity? A case in point: the Totentanz at Mrtvaški ples. The latest desire for immortality through technology is no different than the seeking of comfort through religion, the contentment that comes from ignoring the truth, until it can no longer be ignored.
There comes a time in a young person's life where she has seen it all, done it all. My 19-year-old cashier down at neighborhood grocery started a sentence with 'well, when you get as old as I am,' then, soon after, told me she was off to The Cheesecake Factory in Union Square in just a bit, and I wondered if she was trying to pick me up, especially after seeing how very cross she was when I came to the store with Lynne.
I have a clear memory of my Father, a sermon in which he described the numbness of a young man brought on by sleeping with a different woman every night. I assumed at the time that meant that my father thought that was bad, as he used the voice that he used when he wanted you to feel his sadness, but at the time I hadn't slept with anyone and I remember thinking that I was sure I wouldn't be numbed by that at all, and that it sounded like it might be absolutely delightful.
But as the second childhood of my senescence develops, I'm becoming almost young enough to feel such an ennuitic apathy.
A couple of recent deaths took me by surprise and have been weighing on me: our cobbler, the nicest guy, very expensive, who you couldn't drop off a shoes without having an hour-or-two-long discussion about politics and everything else, and whether he was on the right or left I was never sure, and who brought his very sweet son - with his dissonant prison-bike-gang-member look - into the business after some troubles that might have involved the law; and Al Despain, my research advisor from grad school days, whose mustache I've found myself sporting this last month, heavily enmeshed in the military-industrial complex, a member of the JASON group, always willing to skim some DARPA and Naval Research Lab money off to support my computational music projects because he liked everything that was interesting and difficult, whose family came to the Americas in the diaspora of the Huguenots.
It's hard to let them go. Death sneaks in on the quietest feet, stealing away the life, the career, the knowledge you've built, bit by bit, until nothing remains.
Somehow, through this cloud of death and depression, I'm putting together a couple of new projects. Gerhard Lehner is bringing Peter Wagner down from Klagenfurt to our Florentine palazzo this week to discuss Szent Istvàn. Herr Wagner is writing the libretto, and I've seen an early draft. The sailors, as rats, perform war poetry and other writings each for each other, building a case for and against until the torpedo arrives and sinks the ship in an ignominious way - which is the point of the piece: all the puffed fluffery surrounding war and power, all swept away, all ridiculous.
The other, which I have been hesitant to announce, is an adaptation of Robert Harris's She Who Is Alive. It's a great story, with a fascistic political aptness, a cinematic bearing, darkness and light and some dear-to-my-heart strange tangential flips. Anyone who loves me will know that a dialog that splinters off as follows will thrill me to my bones:
“Do you think there will be a war in the near future?”
“I don't know.”
“If there is a war, who do you think will win the war?”
“The National Homeland.”
“Are you afraid of death?”
“Yes.”
“Are you a coward?”
“I don't know.”
“Do you believe the end of world will occur soon?”
“No.”
“How long has our planet been inhabited by human beings?”
“About one million years.”
“Do you believe in the theory of evolution?”
“Y es.”
“Do you believe that history is an upward spiral?”
“I don't know.”
“Are acquired characteristics genetically transmitted?”
“No.”
“Do you believe that our planet is being visited by supermen from outer space?”
“No.”
“Are mutations the product of the love of alien beings?”
“No.”
“Why do we face the North Pole when we pray?”
“Because it is the Homeland of the Gods.”
But sometimes announcing something makes it real, and that's what this is. I've bought a new video camera back in August - a Sony A7SII - which works incredibly well in low light, and I'm thinking this piece will be a film, lit with only fireflies and phosphorescent algae. I took Laura out when she was staying in Berkeley for her performance in Powder Her Face, and we tried it the camera, stealing a bit of Brett Dean'sOne of a Kind for the soundtrack. Hopefully he will forgive me.
Blessed are those who died for carnal earth
Provided it was in a just war.
Blessed are those who died for a plot of ground.
Blessed are those who died a solemn death.
...
Blessed are those who died, for they have returned
Into primeval clay and primeval earth.
Blessed are those who died in a just war.
Blessed is the wheat that is ripe and the wheat that is gathered in sheaves.
-- Charles Péguy (as quoted in Peter Wagner's libretto)
We gave UKSUS a good brush up and comb out and trotted it out once again for the perusal and hoped-for edification of the Oakland Arts Audience, as well as those who happened to be caught up in the rush. This all at the end of last August and early September, but just now I begin to write, it being a production of some mean energy outlay and the recovery time long and sometimes arduous. For a while after, I was kept in a smallish white-painted room in the sanitarium at Mainz, daily cleaned by the young Eugen (or perhaps that was the name of his dog), but those in charge have now allowed me out on my own recognizance, and so I now convalesce here in our Palazzo in Firenze, listening to the bells calling us to vespers.
The gloriousness of Kharms' writings came through even better this time, for two reasons: one because it had all sat with us for a while, and things that had seemed obscure originally now were transparent as a pool of clearest water, and two because of the wind which was just then beginning to blow: a wind of authoritarianism carrying a scent of those old bad days of Stalin and the gang. The OBERIU's joyful silliness in the face of that continues to impress given the despair that has settled over the art scene here in the US of A, collectively wishing that we would all wake up from our odious dream;
"And so we hope that we, now, living in our own time of horror, among those who impose their piggish and tinpot will on others, can find our own place of exultation, our own reason for continuing in this life, and finally our own triumph over all that works to contain us." -- from the marketing material for UKSUS
The video came out quite well. It is above and I suggest you watch it. We put on the show at the Oakland Metro Operahouse, a space that let us spread out onto a multiplicity of stages, and that had a feel very different from the little theaters in which we usually perform. The Metro has a surprising amount of death metal and wrestling for an opera house, and the stink of beer is ever-present, and all this beer-metal-ness just freed us up. In one big change from before, we hired three soviet soldiers - the bouffon performer Sabrina Wenske and the actors Nathanael Card and Peter Overstreet - to bully the audience from the moment they arrived. Those who came early had to queue up outside, waiting and waiting, after which their passports were stamped and they were sent from one department to another, and only then were they allowed in to where the late Pushkin lay in state, felt up and whispered to by Fefjulka and some of the members of the audience, at least one of whom tried the French Kiss.
Several of my favorite moments: One) when a woman in a motorized wheelchair arrived and the soldiers jumped up and questioned her - where is your permit for this? - and checked for bombs and contraband underneath by means of a mirror and Two) when at the end of the show, before the audience was done clapping, how the soldiers pushed and cajoled them to leave - entertainment done, time to go, out, all done now.
Of course there was also the piece itself - the actual opera - and the performers, who were fantastic. Nikola came to Stalin and Our Mama with a great and renewed intensity, plowing into the part. She seemed really angry, maybe in fact because of the aforementioned foul wind, and who since has been advocating for me to write operas full of "violent biker chicks beheading awful men."
Laura, of course, as Fefjulka - she's my angel, how much I owe her - was spot on, singing beautifully: you are a god of nine legs still brings the chills - a perfect example of music that's maybe more-or-less OK before but is brought to life by the performer, that becomes something else. I loved every night watching her and Nikola do the clockwork bit in the OBERIU costumes, and the two of them together have such soprano power in their duets - it knocks you off your feet.
Then there's the entrancing Timur, who had to jump into the Kharms / Pushkin role when Duncan was called away. He's a boy of the old empire, born in Almaty KZ before the fall of the wall, when they were still doing October Revolution Parades in Red Square instead of the hot dog stands and Stalin bobbleheads. He took on some of Duncan's bits but transformed them into his own deal and added a cavalier freakiness, and then, at the end, into a bit of geometry.
I was just now remembering how long I've known Bob Ernst, who was Michelangelo and the notebook of Michelangelo, as we go back to Jon Jost's Sure Fire, back to before that first time at the Sundance Festival, and then when Jim hired him to choreograph The Knife for Mary Forcade and Chris Brophy in the first performance of A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. As Duncan once said, Bob can't help but be funny, but he also rips you up in his death, the cardiac arrest, after he bids farewell to the sea, farewell to the sand, and how high you are, o mountain land.
I love love lists: the authors who have written about whales in Moby Dick's Cetology chapter, the f*cked-up misogynist's library in Darconville's Cat. Joyce is chock full of them, and there is Joan Didion's packing list from the White Album. But for absolute richness of tongue-loving collisional beauty, it's hard to beat those in Kharms. I loved setting them, I love hearing them song or recited, and the phrases connect to so much of my life: the Song of the Sirens, small smooth-haired canines, artworks without theoretical foundations, the lack of persuasiveness of mathematical proofs, a perfect sound.
Directed by Jim Cave • Conductor Bryan Nies Design Lynne Rutter
Starring Timur Bekbosunov • Laura Bohn • Nikola Printz Bob Ernst • Roham Sheikhani accompanied by the orchestra Beth Custer • Rob Wilkins • Joel Davel • Diana Strong John Schott • Ela Polak • Lisa Mezzacappa.
A phantasmagoria of delights, the music jazzy, racous, but bitterly sweet,UKSUS is the latest by Erling Wold, composer of Certitude and Joy,A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, Queer, and Mordake.
UKSUS is an autobiography of Daniil Kharms and the OBERIU in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, a narrative told through their stories and brief lives, as the OBERIU - The Association for Real Art - maintained their love of words and nonsensical art to their deaths in Stalin’s Great Purge, Kharms starving to death in a psychiatric hospital in 1942 after his arrest at the hands of the NKVD.
Kharms was known for decades in Russia as a writer of books for children, even though he hated children and imagined their painful deaths, until his adult works, secreted away by a friend, were rediscovered and reclaimed by a new generation of troublemaker artists who have run afoul of the authorities. Pussy Riot claimed the OBERIU poets, saying they "remained artists until the end, inexplicable and incomprehensible, and the librettists, artistic descendents of the group, met working in the Moscow theater of Kirill Ganin, who himself was arrested for artistic hooliganism.
Oakland Metro Operahouse is about a 20 minute walk from the 12th Street BART station, and there's a lovely parking garage just across the street.
One of my pet annoyances is announcements by friends of things just found, which they hope to be first to show you: posts of clickbait articles and RIPs to just-dead celebrities being two of the most grating.
But I am here to confess I am the worst offender. And my likes and dislikes aren't simply joined to the ephemera ebbing and detriting on the waves of the social networks, easily posted and as easily ignored. No, mine are crafted into Great Works of Art - Operas for God's sake - that take years of toil and untold piles of euros and dollars and scribbling, writing and rewriting and marketing and pushing and asking for money and then berating singers for not getting it right and reducing them to tears, and after that the premiere and the lights and the hushed silence of those who have paid for the experience to listen to What I Have to Say about this Thing I Found.
So, at the beginning of last year, after the English language production of UKSUS, I decided I just wasn't going to do it anymore. The silliness of it all became frighteningly apparent, as when the clouds open and the rays of the sun come a'shining through. Stop showing off, I said to myself, stop seducing people, stop ruining other people's perfectly good novels and stories with your tepid attempt to adapt the unadaptable. Does one really need approbation and its associated sycophants? Isn't it enough, I asked myself, to simply read a book one loves and to bathe in its language, and maybe to put it on a special golden shelf with a bit of glitter, and to dust it carefully from time to time?
And so this I did, for many months. And I became everything I had never been before: a layabout and a slugabed, one who spends her days watching videos on p-adic numbers, who whiles away the night on the meaningless drivels of the day job, and in between the jack off and then the jack off again. And in between I would read and read about Donald Trump and any else I could find that would deepen my depression, and it was during one of those wallowings that I came across this interview with Mark Leyner, whose books are in fact on that special golden shelf. He interviews like he writes, which is to say brilliantly. My favorite quote:
Now I feel like a completely alienated and marginalized person who traffics in some form of discredited esoterica.
Yes, this is me as well, although Leyner's esoterica is much in the pop world, whereas mine is modern opera and a never-ending fascination with the intricacies of the Christian Religion, cf. Synodus Horrenda.
But now a year has gone by and I've forgotten almost all the resolutions I made. Except for the seducing part. And I'm doing another production of UKSUS in August at the Oakland Metro Opera House, and I seem to be starting another project as well, an Umbrellas of Cherbourg for the modern fascist age.
The years have taken their toll and it is with great sadness that I announce my impending death. In dying, I will release myself from all connection to the Earth and its peoples and problems, and take the long Sleepe / during the one Everlasting Night / after our Short Light / contrariwise / to the Sunne / who may set and rise†. I guarantee that this will be a most Theatrical Death, the favorite action of actors, full of gravitas and chest pounding and tearing of the hair, sure to inspire pathos in even the most jaded viewer.
But, before this long-awaited decease, I wanted to get my affairs in order and cross a few things off the Todo list, and the first is to write of the glorious performance of UKSUS seen here above and below. First, I simply loved it. Fuck, just look at the photo above. What a delight! My son and great wit Duncan to the left, next my nemesis and alter ego Bob Ernst, and Roham Sheikhani, and my ofttimes partner-in-art Laura Bohn, and then Nikola Printz, an old woman so against type, all dancing among The Empress's magnificent constructivist scenics.
Now, if you put your ear just to the left of the photo and listen very closely, you can hear our leader and narrator Jim Cave. And that loud and somewhat jazzy music played so ferociously? That's the band, and the whole mess led by Bryan Nies, and me and my lovely wife dancing to it all night by night.
So - many favorite bits, in no particular order: the dialog between a corseted Stalin and Pushkin/Kharms, the bed scene between Kharms and Marina, the so pretty Requiem Mass for Michelangelo, Beth Custer's Divan Song, the slapstick beating, when Nikola sings that really pretty part, the Pussy Riot moment...
I have been worried about that Pussy Riot moment. I mean, who is really going to know, but I am supposed to attend Lynne to Saint Petersburg aka Leningrad next year and things are a little funny over there. Putin has said "Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain." - but it's pretty clear that he does want some version of it back. Not the old Atheistic Communist Stalinist version but rather the Russian Orthodox Theocratic version, both of which do the topsy-turvy dance of Lysenko-ist reality warping, both of which hold one by the throat where, if one doesn't simply croak, one can find oneself in a Very Bad Place indeed. Kharms and his friends found themselves there, Pussy Riot found themselves there. So many ways to transgress. It's wonderfully telling how the official communist newspaper was titled Pravda, and like all good autocrats they still have their truth which is the truth. There is no other truth.
I have my own truth by the way. Some of it I try to tell through my works - partly hidden truths that tell lies that tell the truth - but some I state here baldly and with simple words.
As a composer, I must become inured to criticism, but it's not always easy, and I must remember that those who criticize know so little of the work, having spent so little time immersed in it, and maybe not wanting to put the effort into understanding, and coming to it sometimes from a different world where the assumptions about what is good and what is bad are so different than mine. And maybe it's a bit whingy to focus on a few bad reviews but, seriously, how can those who loved Certitude and Joy or - especially - the surrealistic delights of A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, not be able to let themselves experience the unbridled joyous flow of brilliance of the performers channeling the fantastic texts of the OBERIU and Kharms, masterfully knitted by Yulia and Felix into a subtly-threaded Wunderwerk? Each time I saw the piece, first in the original German-language production, and then again in my native tongue, I was taken by how well it worked together. I've written the big monstrosities of operas, sprawling and unwieldy, but this one was a tight and lovely piece, flowing from one moment to the next, filled with tears and surprises and joy.
During one of our many wars post Vietnam, my first wife Lynn Murdock said that when she was young, she thought that people were really beginning to understand that war was actually a bad thing, but she had come to realize since that, no, the antiwar movement of the 60s was just a fad, like hairdos and hemlines. She was prescient, and now that simple and obvious sentiment - that war is brutality beyond imagination, that it destroys lives and culture, that it does not solve problems but only creates new ones, that it is avoidable and should therefore be avoided - seems naïve and sentimental. After the clamor for war begins, it simply becomes louder and louder, and those who speak against it are silenced, even when those wars are pointless, and when the objections raised are proven true. Bertrand Russell was famously imprisoned for saying that Germans were members of mankind, a humanization which could not be tolerated at the time.
We are now in the middle of the 100th anniversary of one of the most pointless of the modern wars - the First World War, the Great War - whose social and political seeds grew into the Second, which begat the Cold War and its proxies, and on and on. Although these wars have each in their turn taken the scientific mechanization of slaughter to new levels, the Great War seems the bleakest, a line of trenches drawn through the bucolic northern European countryside as a machine through which many millions of young men were made into meat, a process taking on average six weeks from the time they arrived. Let us stop and imagine the horror experienced by a schoolboy of 14 or 15, encouraged by his family and his teachers and betters to take up the call, to leave his home and enter a Hell of death, corpses packed into lintels and thresholds, screaming death brought by machine gun fire across a lifeless desert of mud, constant shelling, no sleep, and terrifying slaughter blowing in on the wind, melting your lungs, blistering your face, blinding your eyes.
We are faced with a simple and clear and banal truth. War is hell, we've heard it before. And, as is it so obvious, we are forced to wonder - why does it happen? Why does it appeal so? Why do the soldiers, for the rest of their lives, speak of those horrors as the greatest moments of their lives? And why do we hold ideals of honor and duty to country and service? Is it merely a scam by war profiteers and those who seek power and riches and care little for the deaths of others? Yes. But maybe it's also because we love it so very much, we cannot wait to mix it up, to witness the slaughter, to fight and die and kill and maim. Truffaut is often credited with saying there's no such thing as an anti-war film, meaning that war movies raise our pulse, entertain us with pyrotechnic explosions and the splatter of blood and brains, ply us with the excitement and the camaraderie of war and, as such, serve as recruitment vehicles for the armed forces, no matter what horrors they include.† This is something we must understand.
Next month, Heidi Moss is singing the song I wrote for her, a setting of Rudolf Binding's Schlacht - das Maß. The poem was written in 1918, the same year post-WWI when Eugene V. Debs was arrested for claiming that peace was good, and the aforementioned Russell was serving the prison sentence for his crime. After our recent first rehearsal, in which I realized that she is singing it beautifully - to be expected as she has a drippingly beautiful voice - she wrote a blog entry about the song and about the way the poem explicates the savagery and also the appeal of war. It is a strange work, and the first time I read it I thought oh it's just another of the endless stream of war poems, maybe a little more purple than most, I mean, the burning crucified corpses drifting to heaven and all, but then I saw it was much stranger, a glorification of masochism so much more than anything presented by the tour guide at Kink.com, even when she locked you in that little cage in the floor said you are a fucking little bitch right there in front of everyone.
Binding studied law and medicine, but in his forties, after the outbreak of the Great War, became a cavalry commander fighting on the Western Front, and his experiences there found expression in much of his later writings. However, like so many artists of his time, his legacy was tainted by his association with the exceeding horrors of the Nazis. As one of the 88 signers of the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft - the "vow of the faithful followers," published on the 26th of October 1933, he sinned a sin that brooks no absolution. Dates are important in assigning blame, and yes, even though 1933 was early, and the war and Kristallnacht and much worse were in the future, the thuggery had begun, the Reichstag fire had been set, the legislature dissolved, non-Aryan removed from positions of power, and, anyway, Hitler had made his plans clear enough in Mein Kampf in the 20s. We can understand Binding, of course, and I am quick to say I too am a scared little boy. If The President or one of his three-letter agencies said sign this thing or we'll shoot you dead I'd say yessiree here we go and I'd maybe even whisper something about whether my friends and lovers who didn't sign were, well, a little bit suspicious. Richard Strauss, who we think of as one who worked to protect his Jewish family members and in his own small way pursue peace, and who is also represented in this concert, himself signed the Aufruf der Kulturschaffenden - the "call to the culture-workers" - expressing his loyalty to Hitler just a few months after Binding's vow.
The way things turned out, Binding's poem's idea that war, however awful, is the measure of a man was used as a recruiting tool for the Nazis, and Binding's ambiguous feelings towards the Nazis - he was engaged to marry a Jewish woman - was not enough to save him from the guilt of that association. But the poem must be read and remembered as part of this important work we must do in our understanding war and the love we have for it.
Battle - our measure
The trembling earth presses close up against us.
The field rises like men from camp.
Crops of soldiers sprout
from invisible seeds
in the trenches.
Green-black cauldrons bloom
smoke and poison gases
up into the air everywhere.
Angrily startled
fountains spring from the scorched earth.
Burning and crucified,
bodies go to heaven,
their faces frozen in a grimace,
a black charred star:
dust and bones.
Waves of smoke roll over us.
A storm of iron rains down.
Lightning slithers towards us.
Thunder strangles us.
A howling abyss rears up
everywhere, and the sun draws
dark manes of our exhaled breath.
Heaven holds us inescapably
spellbound under its gaze:
Like the evil eye of the basilisk
turning small animals into stone.
We lay desolate in the hell of battle;
we knew that everyone was utterly alone.
But we also knew this:
Once you stand before the remorseless enemy,
where prayers go unanswered, where pleading to God
is ridiculous,
where no mother watches over us,
no woman crosses our path,
where everything is without love,
where only reality rules,
with cruelty and grandeur,
such an experience makes us hardened and proud.
Unforgettable,
it touches the hearts of men
more deeply than all the love in the world.
And we felt: this was our measure.
† One possible exception: the amazing Come and See.
For many years, I was happy enough that I had an Erdős number of 5. It seemed appropriate given my tangential connection to mathematics, using and sometimes developing, around the edges anyway, but not working on any deep mathematical truths, like how to cut a birthday cake in an ultra-fair way given that your friends are remarkably suspicious and back-biting. But recently, as I’ve gone back to doing a little more math in my day-to-day life, I found myself clicking about in the Erdős graph and, oh joy of joys, discovered a new lower bound, a fellow integer with the previous on that smallest integral right triangle.
Now, some of my friends might say, Erling, if 5 was good enough, if you were happy in that life, why search for more? Why risk the coconuts that might fall from the shaken tree? Ah, I would say, there is nothing to fear, as when one searches for a shorter path, that search is defined by the shortest path found so far, and a bound that has been discovered can be made better but never worse. 3 and even 2 are now possible, if unlikely, but 5 will never be again.
As it happens, this new shorter path wends through the same author and colleague as the last, the late Oscar Rothaus, mostly of Cornell University, best known for work on the very useful Hidden Markov Models - you know, that every speech recognition system uses. The paper was Fast Fourier transform processors using Gaussian residue arithmetic by Alvin M. Despain, Allen M. Peterson, Oscar S. Rothaus, and Erling H. Wold [Ed: note the order of names was suggested by Al, one might think in a spirit of bonhomie and all-for-one, but an order most often suggested by those who spend their life in the glow of the beginning of the alphabet, knee to knee with the camp counselor and first across the street holding the teacher’s hand]. Although it was already well known that some computational problems would lend themselves to attack using a residue number system, our technique was a clever combination of Al’s beloved CORDIC rotations along with residue arithmetic using not the regular old primes, but some small complex - aka Gaussian - primes, breaking the problem into very small pieces that could then be computed with tables.
The paper was supported, like so much work on computation then and now, by the Department of Defense. Oscar and Allen and Al were all up in it, all part of the JASON Defense Advisory Group, a group of people who were tasked with searching through every bit of technology and science to see if there was something in it that speed up the process of killing or of being killed, and who have been favorites of the conspiracy theorists, controlling the weather and magnetizing the children. At the time, the reason that was given for faster and faster transforms was that, in a dogfight, one needs to decode and block the other fellow’s frequency-hopping radar while at the same time hopping your own and detecting the other fellow's attempts to block you and hopefully blowing him out of the sky during that moment of arbitrage when you’ve hopped and he yet hasn’t. But, unlike the other paper I wrote with Al, Pipeline and Parallel-Pipeline FFT Processors for VLSI Implementations, I don’t believe our clever Gaussian residue approach was ever used in an instrument of death. I don’t know for sure, as I didn’t have the clearances to know, but it never came up again, while I was questioned in some detail about the parallel-pipeline stuff by engineers from Westinghouse, that same Westinghouse who built the radar that detected the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but which wasn’t believed by anyone, a seemingly unbelievable suggestion on a beautifully crisp Hawaiian winter day.
But, getting back to my happier graph traversal, from there, the next node on the new path is to Further results on p-automorphic p-groups by James R. Boen, Oscar S. Rothaus and John G. Thompson, a paper which tightened some constraints on counterexamples to a conjecture by Boen as to whether certain p-automorphic p-groups are Abelian. Boen, whose conjecture was later proved by Shult, is interesting in a number of ways: very active in mathematics and science, but also an activist quadriplegic for the last fifty or so years of his life. But even more interesting to us here is that, in 2012, Hugh L. Montgomery and the same John G. Thompson above published an article in Acta Arithmetica onGeometric properties of the zeta function. In it, they summarize the state of topographical knowledge of Herr Riemann's delight, and by so doing, laid the extra edge that allowed my number to drop, as Hugh Montgomery had, many years before, published Sums of Numbers with Many Divisors, which looks at representing large integers as sum of highly divisible … oh let’s just quote their abstract in all its poetry:
Let k be a fixed integer, k⩾2, and suppose that ε>0. We show that every sufficiently large integer n can be expressed in the form n=m1+m2+…+mk where d(mi)>n(log 2−ε)(1−1/k)/log log n for all i. This is best possible, since there are infinitely many exceptional n if the factor log 2−ε is replaced by log 2+ε.
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