Truth

Duncan and Nikola as Pushkin and Stalin.
Photo by Lynne Rutter.

The truer version of the hoary quote of Camus is that fiction is a lie through which we tell a lie, and the world loves fiction for exactly that. The illusion of artistic truth, that somehow the artist has a special insight into life, that her characters and settings and narratives are somehow more real than real, and are clear and cogent keys that she manipulates to elucidate the real world, is simply baloney. In truth, her characters and settings are false, her plots calculated, and the best and most successful fiction, by design, bears only the most superficial resemblance to reality.

Audiences want to believe that the world and their lives are something like the artistic version of truth, i.e. a book or movie or play or opera featuring a compelling and compressed narrative. A clear line is by its nature unlike real life, which has no plot and which offers no cathartic tears nor laughter. People prefer the shined-up shit, the perfect take, the tuned vocals, the edited scene, the crafted page and the polished bronze, and in a modern age where something close to perfection is possible, those arts that can best make use of it - the phono-recordings and the talking pictures - have risen in stature, and those arts which do not allow such a glossy overcoating to adhere have found themselves both troubled and troublesome.

John Cage once said: "In the immediate present we don't love; life is too much with us. We lust, wilt, snort, swallow, gobble, hustle, nuzzle, etc. Later, memory flashes images swathed in nostalgia and yearning. We call that Love." This is the heart of the problem. If two people fall in love in front of you, do you feel their love? If someone kills another in front of you, do you feel the anguish? No, it is only in the lie, the untrue version of the experience assembled by me the artist after, the fiction, using all my craft and charm and artifice, that the average audience finds the connection.

When an artist desires to assemble a truly live performance, a performance happening in a real space with real actors in real time, pressuring real sound waves formed in space by real sounding bodies, not unduly amplified, diffusing real light reflecting off real objects in motion, unmediated by projections of prepared imagery, and not allowing for cuts and retakes and careful reconstruction, she finds herself facing a fork in the road.

To the left, she sees fiction and its seductive clarity of narrative, a lie that lies about its connection to reality, but, even though that way lies easy success and an easily beguilement of the audience, she will find herself able to achieve something only less than perfect, an illusion never complete, the spit of the actors brushing past one's cheek and the sound of the ropes changing the backdrops allowing too much real reality to seep in past the barriers erected around her created world. It is an uncomfortable place, a step too close to the truth to be truly believed. She can try, as many do, to build up the barricades, to caulk the seams, to add more lights and brighter costumes, or to fall off the path of true performance completely, to reduce actors and dancers to automatons in a carefully constructed world of computer-controlled photons and phonons.

However, if she follows the less-traveled road, she will find there a bright welcoming light. Here the performance is simply a real experience, performers and audience experiencing a world together as it happens, with some showing off their abilities to sound and move with grace.

When the Empress and I were in Barcelona a number of years back, and we stumbled out of a Greek restaurant after the second complimentary ouzo handed to us by the laughing and singing waiter, and I started drunk-dialing my female friends back in the States to flirt and confess my love, Lynne wandered off to find one more thing to drink, and was waved in by a flamenco bar which was closed but not completely closed, and found herself with an overfull glass, in a circle of men passing the guitar one to another, an example of true performance, no fiction, real and present.

But is such immediacy the only possibility? Can one not use any of one's skills to organize or to compose if one wants to provide a true experience? I think so. Like the Pushkin / Kharms character of UKSUS (as played by Duncan Wold above), I am interested in nonsense. The best parts of UKSUS, like the best parts of A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, are those moments where the audience is at a loss, understanding nothing, but allowing themselves to be carried along. The skill of the creator comes in seducing the audience into a place where their normal requirements and expectations - spoon-fed a narrative and slathered with the fake truths of art - have been set aside. Some watchers find it easier. Some really don't care at all. My son's friends, who come from the comedy world, had no issue with the never-ending non sequiturs, whereas some who loved my previous works, most noticeably Certitude and Joy, had the most trouble letting go. But maybe I was lacking in my ability to seduce them, assuming that my love of incomprehension is shared by all. Or maybe I should have processed through the air vents a mild psychedelic, to give them the softest shove towards the euphoria I know they craved.

Notes on Prototype / New Works Forum: New York 2014

I came to the New Works Forum conference as a composer, as a producer of my own works, and as someone who is just beginning to help others get their works done. I didn’t know what to expect, but was very pleasantly surprised. I suppose it makes sense that those that come to a New Works Forum are those who are interested in new works, but the level of excitement, the feeling that this is the future, the search for new solutions to funding and production and presentation and development of new opera was striking, as well as everyone’s interest in the wide range of what is going on.

The conference was held at the same time as the Prototype festival, which was great.  I had time to see a few things: Paul's Case, which was quite delicate and sublime, Thumbprint, which captured the culture in which it took place and had some very nice chamber writing, and my favorite piece of the festival, Angel's Bone, which is one of those few pieces where the text is so strong that it can stand on its own but where the text and the intensely gorgeous music combined with it to produce something incredible. Let me quote a bit from Royce Vavrek's libretto:

Brick J. can't get enough;

Mounts me, holding me

by my empty wings.

Sucks every drop

Of my inner-most marrow

Moans as he rolls

My tissue on his tongue:

A carnivorous act. 

I was somewhat aware of the pain felt by the larger opera companies, but it was illuminating to hear it directly from them. One can see how they worked themselves into a situation that is very difficult to get out of – a funding structure that is based on very large productions of traditional repertoire – where it is hard to make a move in any direction without losing something. When David Devan talked about the costs of producing, even in his small hall, it’s clear that nimbleness for him is difficult to achieve. 

I did see that some of the aesthetic choices of the big companies (although not all) were towards more conservative works. And maybe saying they are “conservative” is a lazy choice of words – more that some of the works presented in the forum were very play-like, or even musical-theater-like, with lots of dialog, with even a certain cuteness of the dialog. I wondered if this was because it is believed that this is what will align with the tastes of their current audience. I shared a long taxi ride with Ben Krywosz (Nautilus Music Theater) and he stated my concern very succinctly: why are we singing?  It’s a really good question and worth looking at for new works. I do think opera is a very different medium than plays or musical theater, that there’s a certain depth that is possible because of the richness and development of the music over a single work – that it can be an equal partner in the drama, adding another line of emotion and character and narrative development, not just as underscoring or underlining the text. I liked when someone at the conference said that singing is unnatural, so why try to be natural? Yes, right.

There were also some very good discussions about a growing awareness of the audience’s tastes and about developing pieces that do make a connection, and statements that younger composers seemed aware that we have to do things that connect to an audience for the art form to survive. But I do worry that this seems to be taken by some to imply a retrenchment or a – dare I say it again – conservatism.  I believe that there do have to be some uncompromising artists that push the form forward. Those don’t necessarily have to have 1.8 million dollar productions, but a piece that was mentioned a few times at the conference – Einstein on the Beach – is way outside of the style – or even the meta-style – the approach – of pieces people were talking about producing. It’s a perfect example of something I talked about above – a piece that could not be a play or a movie – a piece that relied on the power of its music. I know many composers and artists and directors who were inspired and brought into the then dusty world of opera because of that work, which was so striking and so different and so compelling. I’m one of those people. We tend to forget that Opera itself was a product of the Florentine renaissance, that the concept of a richly sung line over an rich accompaniment was an artistic revolution that displaced the sung monody of the church. It’s good to be reminded that one should not be afraid.

More on Teddy

Since some have asked, here's what I know about reverse engineering the original Teddy Ruxpin®. The original bear used normal compact audio cassettes, but with an opening along the top, where the metal tape indicator tab was later located. This way it could detect the difference between its own cassettes and commercial audio tapes, which would play out the speaker but not control the servos. The Ruxpin cassettes were recorded with a cloyingly mawkish story and music on one of the stereo tracks, the kind of music you can never get out of your head no matter how many emetics you ingest, and a control track comprised of a series of audio-level pulses on the other.

Pictured at the top is a detail of two quasi-periods of the control track, consisting of a set of nine positive-going pulses. Each pulse is about .25 msec wide, actually .27 for the 'blue box' I built so many years ago, and the time between pulses is what controls the servos. That is, the time between pulse 0 and pulse 1 in each group of nine controls one servo, and the distance between pulse 1 and pulse 2 controls the next, and so on. The time between pulses from a fully open to a fully closed servo varies from about 1.25 msec to 2 msec, measuring from leading edge to leading edge. The leading edge of pulse 0 of next group of nine is about 6.5 seconds from the leading edge of the last pulse of the previous group of nine. The total period of the groups is not fixed - you can hear the overall pitch change as they move. My main bear is one of the two servo variety, and for that animal the interval from pulse 1 to pulse 2 controls the eyes and from pulse 2 to pulse 3 controls the mouth. Later bears had a separate control for upper and lower jaw, and if you hook Teddy to Teddy's friend Grubby®, a pleasantly disgusting and seemingly out of scale and of a different cartoon aesthetic big grub-like creature, you will find that the other pulse to pulse modulations come into play to control him as well.

Originally I sent the control signal in using a CD to cassette adaptor and then recorded actual cassettes, but as I've resurrected the project in more recent days I decided to do some surgery (note crime-scene-like photo above) and bypass the heads on the crappy built-in cassette player. I attached a mini phone jack directly past the play heads and it seems to work to send the signal in from a dime-a-dozen mp3 player. One has to be a bit careful of the levels - too high or too low on the control track and the bear becomes subject to a variety of muscle spasms or alternately is sent into a catatonic state. Also, running the low-level wires out of the bear makes it subject to radio interference, and cell phones held close to the bear can also elicit the abovementioned palsies. I went a little further and hooked up battery powered amp/speaker combination inside since the built in speaker is also pretty bad. It's meant to be heard by a small child sitting in a quiet room alone with the somewhat scary bear toy and is not quite up to entertaining a packed opera house.