Minimalist Opera

for Jeremy Tambling Minimalist opera Arved Ashby (from The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera, ed. Mervyn Cooke) Emerging from and ultimately belonging to the stage, minimalist music is an offshoot of avant-garde New York theatre. It is more generally associated with American pop culture or African and south Asian music, or is thought a peculiarly American brand of structuralism (as exemplified by Steve Reich's phase music and Philip Glass's additive rhythms). But at least as important are the early minimalist composers' connections with the innovative theatrical figures of downtown Manhattan in the 1960s. Indeed, musical minimalism and American theatre served to define each other at critical points in both their histories. Before the 1960s, the signal innovations in American music and theatre certainly did not take place in the opera houses. Among the American works premiered at the Metropolitan Opera between 1920 and 1980, Samuel Barber's Vanessa (premiered 1958; parenthetical dates given below refer likewise to first performances) and Anthony and Cleopatra (1966) are rarities in that they eventually achieved some kind of currency. In 1929 the Met commissioned a Gershwin work to be called The Dybbuk, but the composer concentrated instead on Porgy and Bess -- which opened on Broadway and was not mounted by an opera house until 1976. Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) is better described as word-playing pageantry than opera; it opened at a Hartford art museum before enjoying a run of some 60 performances on Broadway and in Chicago. Leonard Bernstein's troubled "comic operetta" Candide premiered in 1956, reaching the New York City Opera only in 1982 after large changes to score and libretto. Rudolf Bing, spiritus rector at the Met for 22 years, made two promising commissions that he never staged: Marc Blitzstein died before he could finish Franco and Vanzetti, and Thomson's grand opera Lord Byron (completed 1968) was deemed inappropriate after a test read-through (Tommasini 1997, 485-494). For the history of Lord Byron as a Metropolitan Opera commission, see Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp.485-494. In contrast to this troubled history of opera as composed by Americans generally, minimalists have shown an extraordinary creative interest in music drama and other large-scale theatrical endeavors. As an innovative yet commercially viable enterprise, minimalist opera peaked with John Adams's Nixon in China (1987), a work with remarkable box office draw that shows no signs of slowing down. But the story of this operatic renovation really begins some three decades earlier, when Glass and fellow opera composer Meredith Monk were students. In the late 50s and 60s, the theatres of lower Manhattan were seething with revolutionary change. The pioneering non-narrative collaboration in the city at that time was the Living Theatre, founded in 1947 by anarchist free spirits Julian Beck and Judith Malina. By Glass's own description, he had grown up with the "progressive theater" of Brecht, Genet, Pinter, and Beckett rather than the traditional "narrative, commercial" theatre of O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. "The kinds of theater which spin familiar stories, moralizing, sometimes satirizing, occasionally comforting us about our lives, have never meant much to me. What has always stirred me is theater that challenges one's ideas of society, one's notions of order" (Glass 1987, 4). During his Paris years, Glass eagerly took in Beckett and Genet at the Théâtre Odéon and spent a week in East Berlin experiencing the Berliner Ensemble's Brecht productions. But the greatest impact on his "notions of order" came from the Living Theatre, which first exposed him to the style of marathon tableaux-vivantes that would later be called "the theater of images" when taken up by Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and Lee Breuer. Glass remembers a decisive 1964 encounter with the Living Theatre's Frankenstein that took place not in New York, but near Marseille while they were on a French tour. Glass declared this "the first theater work I had seen that so radically extended the accepted sense of theater time" (Glass 1987, 6-7). The Frankenstein productions ranged from three to five hours, and began with a full half hour of silence as the players tried to levitate a young girl on stage. Their failure in this attempt set in motion an evening of murderous brutality, one where the fractured, de-centered, and sometimes frantic stage actions belied the extended time-scale of the production (Biner 1972, 123). Pierre Biner, The Living Theatre (New York: Horizon Press, 1972), p.123; John Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage (New York: Grove Press, 1995), p.210. The "enormous impression" the Living Theatre made on Glass must have had a hand in his own similar changes in scale and expanse of about this same time. Less than a year after seeing Frankenstein, he penned the first music that he acknowledges: incidental music for two saxophones to accompany Beckett's Play as staged by the Mabou Mines Theatre, the progressive group Glass himself was intimately involved with from its beginnings in the mid-60s. As it began here, Glass's mature minimalist style was as radical an extension of "the accepted sense of time" as anything the Living Theatre was doing. In the composer's own estimation, his music eschews "colloquial time," which he describes as "the time that we normally live in." Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997), p.164. He continues: "one of the first things that people perceive in my music is extended time, or loss of time, or no sense of time whatever. All that narrative structure of the Beethoven concerto is gone from my music." Writings on Glass, p.171. If Glass's timing and sense of scale show the direct influence of progressive downtown theatre of the 1960s and early 70s, Meredith Monk came to opera from a rather different direction. Her music theatre pieces, especially Atlas (1991) and the earlier street epic Vessel (1971), tend to show an expansion of timescale similar to Glass's. But her roots are in the Fluxus movement and the Events and Happenings of the 1960s -- and specifically the Judson Dance Theater, a Greenwich Village fixture since 1962. Monk's Fluxus background can be seen in the playfulness, whimsy, and utopianism of much of her work, characteristics that can now seem old-fashioned. But Monk also came to reject some basic tenets of Judson's experimental theatre: as one might expect of a composer of self-declared "operas," she is a story-teller at heart, and also interested in specific characters and characterizations. Perhaps paradoxically, she's also a kind of neo-structuralist who takes great care over the dramatic shape of her presentations: either Monk retains the traditional Aristotelian idea of form as having a beginning, a middle, and an end; or she works up a schema, a dramatic shape, of her own. Steve Reich resolutely and repeatedly contrasts his aesthetic with Glass. “I am not, like Glass, a theater composer," he has said. "I don’t carry the theater around inside me.” Quoted in K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon, 1996), p.103 Reich is indeed one of today's great constructivists, caring for formal process to such an extent that the only drama to be found in his music is structure-born. Judy Lochead refers to Reich as a structure-minded modernist in her "Refiguring the Modernist Program for Hearing: Steve Reich and George Rochberg," The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology, ed. Arved Ashby (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004), pp.325-340. Or is it? Caught up in his formalist thinking, we tend to forget the performance art elements in Reich's decisive early work. It's Gonna Rain (1965) was his first example of phasing, the earliest type of "process music" for which he has become famous. In this work he manipulated a tape of a Pentecostal preacher. Playing two copies of the recording on cheap equipment, Reich heard one running slightly slower than the other. In the phasing that resulted, he suddenly discovered "an extraordinary form of musical structure... It was a seamless, uninterrupted musical process." Reich, Writings on Music 1965-2000, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.20. As if to verify the performance art aspect to the tape pieces, Reich turned immediately afterward to conceptual works showing the influence of Fluxus, Cage, and La Monte Young. Slow Motion Sound (1967) consists of the instructions "Very gradually slow down a recorded sound to many times its original length without changing its frequency or spectrum at all." Typically for Reich, this piece is outwardly technical-structural but at its basis theatrical-didactic: before digital technology, one could fulfill these instructions only in the imagination. His Pendulum Music (1967) was process music posing as performance art, or perhaps the other way around: four people released microphones suspended above speakers, letting them swing back and forth until the feedback became constant from all four sources. The process sounds mechanistic, and Reich wrote eloquently about his creation of mechanistic ("process") forms. But in the 1960s he was really aiming for a kind of performance art where an aesthetic of repetition aimed as much for psychological and emotional effect as it did for structural unity. In Reich's own words, his early tape pieces represent "a very rigid process, and it's precisely the impersonality of that process that invites this very engaged psychological reaction." Reich, Writings on Music, p.21. Also striking is the fact that Reich takes as his ultimate goal a kind of realist experience that resembles Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty. Insistent repetition of recognizable speech enables the composer to retain the emotional power of the locution "while intensifying its melody and meaning through repetition and rhythm." Reich, Writings on Music, p.20. In short, tape allows Reich a concentrated form of theater -- and much the same can be said of his later use of sampling in Different Trains (1988), The Cave (1992), and Three Tales (2002). John Adams, the youngest of these composers, is not a minimalist strictly speaking, and was not privy to the downtown theatrical innovations of the 1950s and 60s. His operas are relevant here because they show how Glass's and Monk's downtown remakings of opera were eventually brought back uptown, into the opera house proper. Adams also helped tie off the minimalist opera historical narrative by demonstrating the latterday transformation of vernacular theatre through media. Sometimes called "CNN operas," Adams's stage works show the way video and television have come to appropriate and supplant notions of theatre and theatricality: a shift in aesthetics and perception has been subsumed by a change of medium. The kind of wholesale innovation offered by the Living Theatre is no longer possible in today's monolithic situation of video-induced sensory and aesthetic saturation. Benjamin could well have been foreseeing video culture when he spoke of "the work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction." Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, transl. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), p.241. By about 1985, Glass himself had gravitated away from the Living Theatre's ideas and aesthetics and moved closer to a common-practice, 19th-century vision of opera. Minimalism, Repetition, Theatre Minimalism is distinguished by repetition, and repetition is innately poetic in that it disrupts signification and literal meaning; it moves music from a system of signs to a world of symbols. For what is each individual statement of a repeated musical figure: an authentic expression of the moment, or a simple replication of that which was just heard, hiding behind the fact of repetition? ("Because repetition differs in kind from representation," writes Gilles Deleuze, "the repeated cannot be represented: rather, it must always be signified, masked by what signifies it, itself masking what it signifies." Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, transl. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p.18.) Repetition defines minimalism and late 20th-century performance art alike, transforming both institutionalized musical idioms and everyday action into theatre: when Michael Nyman wrote In Re Don Giovanni (1977) by setting up internal repetitions within Mozart's Catalogue Aria, common practice became music about music; when Northern Irish performance artist André Stitt repeatedly and bit by bit chipped off the enamel surface of a cast iron bathtub, a plumbing renovation became theatre. In both instances, repetition served to disconnect the action from evident rationality: Deleuze refers to "an inverse relation between repetition and consciousness, repetition and remembering, repetition and recognition..." Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.14. Narrative and rationality are dissipated in both cases because, in Anthony Howell's words, "repetition suspends time by annulling progress, while inconsistency creates time by supplying it with a history of significant events. Time seems capable of shrinkage and magnification." Howell, Analysis of Performance Art (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999), p.171. Minimalism represented a kind of scorched-earth approach to aesthetics: the minimalist composers' rejection of Darmstadt modernism was the strongest generational rebuff in music history, and the most specifically contradictory. Schoenberg and Darmstadt had placed highest priority on avoiding literal repetition of pitch, motive, and phrase. Schoenberg coined the admiring term "musical prose" for works that avoid such repetition and regularity of phrase structure, and in a sense this represented his lifelong compositional ideal. See Carl Dahlhaus, "Musical Prose," Schoenberg and the New Music, transl. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp.105-119. The alliances that modernists like Boulez and Stockhausen formed with John Cage in the 1950s might seem self-contradictory, but make sense in that the two parties considered repetition a common enemy: the former because it betokened a lack of thought, and the latter because it was symptomatic of too much thinking. The minimalists, on the other hand, foregrounded repetition in an attempt to annihilate ambiguity. Repetition in psychoanalytic terms is a symptom of the failure to integrate traumatic experience -- and so repetition would seem to emblematize the anxiety of influence between minimalism and modernism. If we take the Lacanian view that all art is neurotic, we could say musical minimalism put the symptom of repetition compulsion in the foreground whereas modernism denied it. Deleuze was writing about repetition at just about the same time that Reich, Glass, and Terry Riley were writing within it. In his book Différence et Repetition (1968), Deleuze drew attention to a long-standing fault of Western philosophy: its lack of a true ontology of difference. Traditionally -- says Deleuze -- we have tried to understand difference only in terms of conceptual difference, which shows a subjugation of the idea to the notion of identity. One way that he fleshes out our conception of difference is to divide it into two types, a dichotomy that musical minimalism dares to encompass in its most provocative form: ...it is essential to break down the notion of causality in order to distinguish two types of repetition: one which concerns only the overall, abstract effect, and the other which concerns the acting cause. One is a static repetition, the other is dynamic. One results from the work, but the other is like the 'evolution' of a bodily movement. One refers back to a single concept, which leaves only an external difference between the ordinary instances of a figure; the other is the repetition of an internal difference which it incorporates in each of its moments, and carries from one distinctive point to another. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.20. This is the crux of the matter for minimalist composers. Since they practice an art where there is no "past tense," to borrow T.W. Adorno's description of music in general, they feel this dichotomy of static and dynamic repetition most keenly. They also work with the related difference-repetition problem that Deleuze describes elsewhere, namely the difficulty of grasping the exact relationship between the now, the once-now, and the soon-to-be-now: "We cannot wait, the moment must be simultaneously present and past, present and yet to come, in order for it to pass (and to pass for the sake of other moments). The present must coexist with itself as past and yet to come." Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, transl. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p.48. Confronting these dilemmas, minimalist form provocatively straddles structure and stile mecanique. A minimalist composition is like a machine, in that it compels us to ask: to what extent is its obvious structuredness a symbol of high humanism, a paean to the human mind and its ability to build, and how much of its repetition represents a kind of godless, unthinking nihilism? When is repetition a positive, organic element -- an acknowledgment of certainty and similarity -- and when does it show negativity -- imposition from outside, and resolute resistance to natural change? To phrase this duality specifically in musical terms: when Glass decides on a 20-fold repetition of a nine-note phrase in Einstein on the Beach, to what extent does this become an inspirational passage -- a fluke, a capricious "freezing" of the compositional software -- and to what extent a heavily, dogmatically pre-cogitated compositional move? With the Darmstadt modernism that Glass rejected so strongly, choosing a tone row or row-class represented a pre-compositional decision that set the agenda for the piece -- the music serving to realize the latent and inherent musical possibilities embodied in the row. This is perhaps equivalent to Deleuze's idea of static repetition. But with the modules and additive rhythms of Einstein on the Beach, say, repetition becomes a local event -- working cumulatively to give the whole work much of its distinctive character, but resulting from bar-to-bar decisions. This coincides with Deleuze's concept of dynamic repetition, at least insofar as Glass maintains the practice of additive rhythms -- thematic modules that continuously expand and contract in length. In his essay "The Automatic Message," surrealist André Breton discerned a similar duality in the practice of "automatic writing" (ecriture automatique). And the question he raised also demands to be asked of the minimalist styles of Glass, Reich, Monk, Adams, and Nyman: to what extent is this art automatic, habitual, and involuntary, and to what extent does it merely mimic the automatic and habitual? Breton, "The Automatic Message," Break of Day, transl. Mark Polizzotti and Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln, Neb. and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), pp.125-143. How much of this music is mindless and how much of it is mindful, not to use the words in a judgmental-aesthetic way? "The head is the organ of exchange," Deleuze writes, "but the heart is the amorous organ of repetition. (It is true that repetition also concerns the head, but precisely because it is its terror paradox.)" Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.2. The provocative dualities that Bréton finds in automatic writing are the same aesthetic issues that minimalism invokes: quantity vs. quality, authenticity vs. falsity, and the inspirational vs. the formulaic. When Breton discussed the practice of automatic writing, he brought up questions of intention, individual inspiration, and cognizance. Specifically, he asked if ostensibly unstructured prose was more or less premeditated than formalized writing. The "practice" of automatic writing should have resulted in endless variation, just like Schoenberg's concept of "musical prose," but in reality it could embrace literal repetition. As an example I choose, almost at random, a section of Breton's poem "Fata Morgana" (1940): In the skeins of history ibis mummy A step for nothing as the sails are taken in ibis mummy If the child's development lets him shake off the fantasm of dismembering of bodily dislocation ibis mummy It will never be too late to have done with the parceling up of the soul ibis mummy And by you alone under all its faces of ibis mummy With all that is no more or is waiting to be I rediscover unity lost ibis mummy Ibis mummy of choicelessness across what reaches me Ibis mummy requiring that all I might know contribute to me without distinction Ibis mummy making me the tributary of evil and good alike Ibis mummy of chance drop by drop where homeopathy has its big word to say Ibis mummy of quantity molting into quality in the shadows Ibis mummy of combustion leaving in every cinder a red dot Ibis mummy of perfection summoning the incessant fusion of imperfect creatures [...] Poems of André Breton: A Bilingual Anthology, transl. and ed. Jean-Pierre Cauvin and Mary Ann Caws (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), p.147. Its repetition and other factors make this writing more obviously structured at its surface than something modernist and painstaking like Mallarmé, where there are no repetitions of this kind. And so Breton arrives at a fascinating paradox: repetitive writing is at least as inspirational as writing that sponsors no recognizable repetition. Likewise, minimalism's radically new proportion between small scale detail and background event (as described in more detail below) can be heard as a wholesale rejection of modernism's distillation and concentration of local, small-scale event. Breton praises the demystifying aspect of automatic writing as it urges quantity over "quality," both within the work itself and in the way it recognizes no real difference between "professional" and public writing. The connections here with minimalism, and the minimalists' expansion of musical dimensions, are obvious. Glass, Wilson, and Einstein on the Beach Glass's new minimalist style of the mid-60s was clearly sympathetic to protracted, non-narrative conceptions of theatre -- and likely arose under their direct influence. But it was his cooperative efforts with director Robert Wilson (b.1941) that allowed him to refine and personalize his repetitive musical language. With their collaboration on the opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), they defined minimalism's music-theatrical possibilities. Wilson's hypnotic power largely stems from the new relationships he effects between clock time, Aristotelian stage time (time as the characters on stage might feel its passing), and body time (the viewer's own breathing and heart-rate). Franco Quadri described Wilson's new equation thus: Time is presented to the audience as the key to entering into Wilson's theater through physical effort, which overcomes the passivity of mere contemplation. The abnormal length of these first performances (Deafman Glance is seven hours long, and is among the shortest) introduces, through prolonged gestural exhaustion, a heightened rhythm different from the rhythm of life, a rhythm of victory by means of endurance. Quadri, "The Life and Times of Robert Wilson," Robert Wilson (New York: Rizzoli, 1998), p.12. Time and again, Robert Wilson's audiences say he gives them a "heightened perception of time." In similar fashion, Glass's compositions alter the listener's chronological sense by engineering an entirely new relationship between foreground event and background, large-scale structure. In Einstein on the Beach and his other works of that era, Glass's minimalism effects a new, disproportionate distance between quickened foreground activity and slower background motion: the fast (the figuration prolonging the harmony) becomes faster, the slow (the harmonic rhythm itself, the rate of change) slower. Both Wilson and Glass effect a quickened sense of small-scale motion (actors' hand motions in Wilson's case, and the obsessive 16th-note or 8th-note figuration in Glass's music) while change at the broadest level slows down (Sheryl Sutton became one of Wilson's favorite players for her ability to effortlessly and seamlessly execute slow, agonizingly drawn-out gestures; while in Einstein on the Beach Glass might stay with G major, say, for a half-hour at a stretch). The common-practice repertory tends to develop a different connection between figurational rhythm and harmonic rhythm: with sonata movements but in other forms as well, thematic areas are harmonically stable and generally see moderate or slow rhythmic activity, while transitional and developmental sections are driven by quicker figuration and harmonic rhythm. Wilson stages consciously and fairly precisely in time-strata. "There is an additive process," he says, "with layers and zones of activities and images and time... In Freud, the turtle takes 22 minutes to cross the stage; the runner takes 18 seconds, Freud 6 1/2 minutes. The woman sits in the chair for 31 minutes." Wilson's slowest layers of onstage action can give his work a dreamlike quality. In a now-famous description, surrealist writer Louis Aragon said of Deafman's Glance (1971): "it is at once life awake and the life of closed eyes, the confusion between everyday life and the life of each night, reality mingles with dream, all that's inexplicable in the life of [a] deaf man." Quoted in Arnold Aronson, American Avant-garde Theatre: A History (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p.48. While Wilson radically slows down rhythm at the macro level, by way of compensation he ups the amount of localized, moment-to-moment information: "by bombarding the senses," Arthur Holmberg writes of Wilson's CIVILwarS, "Wilson vouchsafes the spectator a glimpse of the sublime, an emotion the modern world has suppressed." Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.27. Wilson disorients the viewer by thus realigning foreground and background, but supplies no help with verbalization or body motion: a viewer cannot hope to read the body motions of Wilson's players in any usual or functional way, and words also fail as a basic chronometer. He eliminates any absolute chronological sense, and thereby forces the viewer to devise entirely new ways of orienting him- or herself with regard to time. As Pilinszky describes his work, "motionless drama (the 'drame immobile') for me does not mean that it's perfectly motionless... The 'drame immobile' means the kind of motionlessness, rather of time beyond time which we feel, or don't feel, while listening to a piece of music." Pilinszky, Conversations with Sheryl Sutton (Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Sheep Meadow-Carcanet, 1992), pp.80-81. Music, unfolding in real time, is the reality to Wilson's dreams. Music that has a steady tactus precludes the floating, entirely relative chronology of dreams: it supplies the sense of time that Wilson lacks. In this sense, at least, Glass's music and Wilson's drama are complementary rather than analogous worlds. Does that collusion make Einstein on the Beach any more or less "operatic"? Descriptions and evaluations of their collaboration, as well as Glass's stage works with other librettists and directors, always depend on how one defines opera — or, to state it another way, which repertory operas serve as the points of reference. Before he met Glass, even before he became involved with music, Wilson called his stage works "operas." Glass remembers their collaboration: "I think Bob had a bug up his ass about opera. He had always called his pieces operas and maybe he thought that with me he could finally do a real one. He was much more interested in Einstein being like a real opera than I was. Bob wanted as much singing on stage as possible and he was very pleased that there was a duet in the night train scene and an aria for the flying bed." Laurence Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1989), p.220. For Quadri, Einstein on the Beach is the first opera — a true and seamless Gesamtkunstwerk — produced by this director or this composer. For Quadri, Glass's music for Einstein is "a river that for almost five hours is the supporting element in the undivided whole of a composition where scenic action and musical score seem to unite so perfectly that it is impossible to tell which element comes first." Quadri, Robert Wilson, p.20. Like Gertrude Stein before him, Robert Wilson eschews story-telling for a theatre of the continuous present. The iconic imagery of Einstein on the Beach and Wilson's complete rethinking of stage blocking, scale, and motion -- these aspects recall Stein's idea of "landscape drama," where the temporal aspect of stage illusion was jettisoned in order to concentrate on spatial drama. Wilson's theatrical concept -- like Beck and Malina's Living Theatre -- is also indebted to Artaud's "theatre of cruelty" idea where words are given, to quote the French surrealist, "approximately the importance they have in dreams." Artaud, p.102. Albert Einstein never appears onstage in Einstein on the Beach, thus making that opera all the more enigmatic. Appropriately for its subject, Einstein offers a set of icons instead of a narrative -- and even these icons are fluid, capable of morphing before our very eyes into other icons. The main stage images are a train, a clock, a bed, and a (stylized) spaceship -- emblems of Einstein's discoveries, images that Wilson gives no dramatic value and which he refuses to interpret. We are left to surmise the connections on our own: Einstein explained relativity by invoking two passengers in different trains, the one's sense of the other's motion depending on the difference of speed between the trains rather than any one, absolute idea of motion. Clocks were used to explain the idea of intense gravity "bending" time, spaceships symbolize his findings in astrophysics and black holes, and Einstein claimed that he found some of his best ideas in dreams. Wilson and Glass began their collaborative work on Einstein with a list of these symbolic images -- symbolic more for the authors than for the work itself -- and Einstein follows this sequence (see Figure 1) rather than any story line. But these icons are purposefully two-dimensional as they appear on stage, underlining all the more Einstein's status as series of tableaux-vivantes rather than an opera in the Bellinian or Verdian sense. Paralleling the anomaly between foreground activity and background motion, there is an inverse relation between these images' social, historic, and conceptual depth and the thickness of stage-workers' wood they're made of. For instance the train, like the industrial-style building that it transforms into, is obviously a two-dimensional stage figure. In Wilson's view, music theatre calls for particularly shallow and artificial stage imagery: "The train, say, is more of a cut out," he says. "This is because Einstein is an opera, and there is singing. Music is about hearing." Kostelanetz, On Innovative Performance(s): Three Decades of Recollections on Alternative Theater (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co., 1994), p.94. There are basic differences between Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha (1980), Glass's next opera -- as one would expect given Robert Wilson's deep involvement in the first and his lack of connection with the second. Unlike Einstein, Satyagraha does present the central character as a figure who sings onstage: the opera portrays Gandhi's years in South Africa as he develops the concept of "satyagraha," or "truth-force," in resistance to the British. Also important to the opera-ness of Satyagraha is its narrative plot -- the piece weaves a six-part story around Gandhi, even if the six self-standing scenes are not arranged in chronological order. Musically-focused commentators, perhaps taking Bellini and bel canto as an exemplar for music theatre, find Satyagraha more operatic than Einstein because of its considered vocal style. Einstein was indeed oriented more to the chorus than to solo voices. (If Satyagraha is the work where Glass first works toward a vocal style, he arrived at a truly operatic tone shortly thereafter: in the Los Angeles section of Wilson's CIVIL WarS: a tree is best measured when it is down (1984), a work where the range and dynamics of Glass's vocal writing require a soprano voice strong enough to sing Salome and a tenor capable of undertaking Tristan.) Satyagraha is also more operatic in that it calls for a real pit orchestra. For Einstein Glass had used his own ensemble, with its basis in keyboards and amplified winds. But Satyagraha was commissioned by a bona fide opera company, the Netherlands Opera, and Glass calls more or less for a true opera orchestra with triple woodwind, strings, and organ. By the time of his third opera, Akhnaten (1984), Glass had largely normalized the foreground-background relationship that had made Einstein so revolutionary. He also eschewed additive rhythms for modular repetition, cultivating the kind of static repetition described by Deleuze. Scenes and acts are smaller in proportion, and the "landscape drama" aspect less emphasized: the longest scene of Akhnaten, the Pharaoh's coronation in Act 1, is only 17 minutes. Dramaturgically speaking, the onstage figures in Einstein were two-dimensional as one expects in Robert Wilson's work. In Akhnaten, which tells the story of the monotheistic Egyptian pharaoh and husband to Nerfertiti, Glass returned to some of that earlier iconicity. (The composer wrote his own libretto "in association with" Shalom Goldman, Robert Israel, and Richard Riddell.) The title role is given to a countertenor, thus making that character all the more distant and perhaps exotic. Adding to the sense of pageantry rather than opera strictly defined is the extensive role of the narrating Scribe, who seems both to "own" the narrative and stand outside it. Glass continued to distance himself from his own progressive theatrical roots -- specifically the influences of Artaud, the Living Theatre, and Wilson himself. His next opera, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1988), no longer gives words "the importance they have in dreams." As Tim Page observes, "marking a change from his three previous large-scale operas, Glass’s main concern in Representative was to set the text so that the words could be understood as fully as possible." Tim Page, "Making of the Representative for Planet 8," Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed 3 September 2004), <http://www.grovemusic.com> Having completed the triptych of what he calls his "portrait operas," Glass for the first time tapped a major literary figure as his librettist: the story, adapted by Doris Lessing from her novel of the same name, tells of a dying planet's inhabitants preparing for impending extinction by evolving into one collective soul, a "representative" of Planet 8. Glass showed himself even more of a romantic, less of a Wilsonian ascetic, with The Voyage (1992). None of his stage works gives quite the same impression of a composer speaking and emoting through his characters -- a ventriloquism that lies at the heart of opera as conventionally defined. Playwright David Henry Hwang worked from Glass's own story. The opera was commissioned to mark the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, but the composer typically looked for the widest possible allegories. Part of the opera presents a narrative around Columbus, but the work is less "about" him than it centers on the parallels between Columbus and other explorers (Noah, the Flying Dutchman, Ulysses, the Ancient Mariner). To cite Glass himself, in The Voyage he wanted to explore "the concept of discovery." As if to further emphasize the distance from the breakthroughs of Einstein on the Beach, musical repetition is less uniformly present -- and most often takes the form of two- and four-fold reiterations, not much that would be terribly out of place in the music of Liszt or Wagner. It's convenient to end this interim account of Glass's operatic career with La Belle et la Bête (1994), not least because there are no commercially available recordings of his later stageworks. The Nonesuch discs describe Belle as "an opera by Philip Glass as based on the film by Jean Cocteau." This is of course a self-contradiction, in that operas and films are by definition self-contained organisms, closed systems with their own sounds and visuals. What Glass has really done is sidestep George Auric's original music and produce an alternate soundtrack to Cocteau's 1946 movie. Or, to view his work from another perspective, Glass has done the reverse of filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. While they turned operas into films that go beyond simple representation of the stageworks (The Magic Flute and Parsifal), Glass took Cocteau's film and transformed it into an opera that is both parasitic to, and in a sense distinct from, the original. Glass's efforts are distinct from Cocteau's in that the composer made no effort to relate to the filmmaker's time-period and aesthetic. With Belle et la Bête, even more than with the other Glass operas, collaborations are so vital to the experience that an auteurist discussion would make no sense. In any event, Glass produced a delightfully memorable and cohesive musical work in spite, or perhaps because, of appalling compositional restrictions. His soundtrack -- one can hardly speak of a score in the usual sense -- accompanies three-fourths of the film. Early in his opera career he had experimented with Robert Wilson's reformulation of stage time as it relates to "real" time, while in Belle et la Bête Glass did the opposite and managed to overlay a narrative in "operatic" time with a narrative in "real" (or at least cinematic) time. People do not sing at the same speed they speak, and here Glass has the singers singing some statements just as quickly as his chorus had chanted numerical abstractions in Einstein. The overlay of "opera" and film also works despite infrequent diegetic "intrusions" on Glass's music: a bit of the sisters' laughter, the neighing of a horse, 12 strokes of midnight, the Beast's lion-like roar when he is loose in his own forest, Avenant shattering the pavilion's glass roof in the penultimate scene. More important are the considerable illustrative tweaks Glass made to his usual keyboard sounds, for instance the harp and pipe organ that open "Promenade in the Garden" on an appropriately gothic and fantastic tone. With Belle et la Bête, Glass rethought opera as thoroughly as he had redefined it -- partly under Robert Wilson's inspiration -- in Einstein on the Beach. Glass's appropriation of Cocteau's loving, even decadent vision of the fable seemed a logical next stage in his personal campaign to liberate opera from the "narrative, commercial" dramas that have all but monopolized its traditions. Belle et la Bête reverses the traditional roles of genre and medium. This opera combines the traditionally middle-brow genre of film with the relatively high-brow history of opera, and by force of that brilliant stroke is sure to alter permanently the course of opera as a genre. Hanns Eisler writes the following, in the book Composing for the Films: "To the extent that the motion picture in its sensationalism is the heir of the popular horror story and dime novel and remains below the established standards of middle-class art, it is in a position to shatter those standards, precisely through the use of sensation." Hanns Eisler and T.W. Adorno, Composing for the Films (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p.32. It also encourages us to go back and ponder the operatic qualities of his film soundtracks -- his score for Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1983) a particular landmark in the history of movie scoring, the darker and more immediately expressive Naqoyqaatsi (2003) not far behind -- and ask if any real, qualitative differences exist between an opera and a scored film. MEREDITH MONK Before graduating from college -- where she studied music, dance, and theatre -- Meredith Monk became involved with the Judson Theatre, which as a matter of principle worked to integrate the arts. Even among the theater and dance collectives in the Village in Manhattan, the Judson prided itself on functioning democratically as a collective. Sally Banes describes the group as "a metacommunity of sorts where the different communities revolving around single arts disciplines coalesced and where interdisciplinary imagination flourished." Banes, Greenwich Village 1963 Its first incarnation included, among others, artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Morris, and dancers Yvonne Rainer and Lucinda Childs (future choreographer for Einstein on the Beach). Two early projects that Monk participated in were Satie's Relâche as realized at the New York Avant-Garde Festival of 1965 with Fluxus artist Dick Higgins, and Higgins's own Fluxus events Celestials and The Tarts. Deborah Jowitt, ed., Meredith Monk (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p.4. Each of Monk's works betrays her basis in dance and performance art and blurs divisions between art forms and between collaborators' roles. In 16-Millimeter Earrings (1966), her first major piece, she projected a film onto herself as she danced to the sound of three tape loops played simultaneously. "I work as a mosaicist," she says, "building my pieces out of modules of music, movement, character, light, image, text, and object..." Jowitt, Meredith Monk, p.171. Nevertheless, the mosaic originates with music: "I think [music is] where everything starts for me," she says. "I usually have the music written before I start working on the images." Jowitt, Meredith Monk, p.81. Specifically, her clear-cut textures and narratives, reading like dimly recalled fairy-tales, spin off from simple instrumental ostinatos. The second cardinal element is her exploration of the widest range of vocal possibilities -- in tone-color, nonsense syllables, yodelling, glottal effects, vibrato, and characterizations alluding to both human personalities and animals. Many of these techniques stem from folk idioms, and were hardly accepted in art music circles -- at least before the new music scene came to be influenced by Monk's very explorations in this area. Indeed, if Robert Wilson builds upon Gertrude Stein's idea of landscape drama, Monk creates a landscape (or perhaps a worldscape?) from the voice. As Bonnie Marranca describes Monk's Atlas, "Texture of the voice is more important than text in this opera that dances." Marranca, "Meredith Monk's Atlas of Sound: New Opera and the American Performance Tradition," Performing Arts Journal 40 (January 1992), p.16. Philip Glass has Brechtian views on music theatre -- views that owe more to Beck and Malina than they do Wilson, and yet which emerge most clearly in Einstein on the Beach. "Early on in my work in the theater," Glass says, "I was encouraged to leave what I call a 'space' between the image and the music. In fact, it is precisely that space which is required so that members of the audience have the necessary perspective or distance to create their own individual meanings. If you didn't have that space there, if the music were too close and therefore immediately on top of the image, there wouldn't be anywhere for the viewer to place himself. In that case, it's like what you end up with on commercials..." Writings on Glass, p.141. This resembles Brecht's concept of epic theatre and its desire to edify the audience and make them think, to be contrasted with traditional drama and its goal of empathy. Signe Hammer turns to Brecht's idea of alienation to describe Einstein, and thereby contrasts the Glass-Wilson collaboration with a more humanistic Monk: "Einstein connects only to the disconnected, alienated, passive aspects of ourselves; it perpetuates the same radical dislocation of emotions from which the century itself has suffered." Hammer, "Against Alienation: A Postlinear Theater Struggles to Connect," Meredith Monk, p.70. Of the two musicians, it is Monk who shows more obvious sympathy toward Artaud's desire for drama as it might have existed before the advent of words. "Words are a screen, a filtering device that takes us away from direct experience," Monk says. "Having to articulate something verbally removes you from the experience, and what I'm trying to offer is something that blocks out the discursive mind. Once you quiet that habitual explanatory behavior, you begin to experience the work itself." "Singing the Unsayable: Meredith Monk in Conversation with Ken Smith," Gramophone November, 2002, p.28. Mikhail Yampolsky's analysis of Artaud makes especially clear the parallels with Monk's belief in a characterization lying beyond words: "For Artaud, the mistrust of the audible word -- the word that exists prior to its utterer -- is central. Its origins are obscure, for it is as if prompted and spoken by someone else -- a predecessor -- and in it the speaker loses his identity." Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader, ed. Edward Scheer (New York: Routledge, 2004), p.170. For her the narrative is a large component of the "work itself," and in pre-verbal fashion Monk's story-lines tend toward the archetypal, even the simplistic. Though Monk owes some of her operatic affinities to an abiding interest in narrative, her experimental theatre upbringing has also made her indifferent to the idea of the proscenium stage -- and that has in turn delayed her contribution to American "opera" strictly speaking. Quarry: An Opera (1976) was her first large-scale work involving a narrative, singing, characterization, and a cast of any size. (This was the first time she worked with a chorus; the experience inspired her to found her own ensemble, which has facilitated her practice of developing works through group improvisation.) Quarry enacts the rise of a totalitarian state, yet Monk prides herself in the fact that the dramaturgy creatively traces "a circular, layered form." "Meredith Monk: Invocation/Evocation, A Dialogue with Liza Bear," Meredith Monk, p.81. A more linear story is told by Atlas (1991), co-commissioned by the venturesome Houston Opera, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia. Atlas was inspired by adventurer Alexandra David-Néel (1868-1969), a Belgian scientist, orientalist, and adventurer who disguised as a Chinese monk became the first woman to see Lhasa, the forbidden Tibetan capital, in 1912. The main character in Atlas is Alexandra Daniels, who at the start of the opera sits in her parents' suburban house daydreaming of travel to far-off lands (echoing a remarkable statement David-Néel once made, that she was "'homesick' for a land that is not mine"). Alexandra's rise to adulthood and travel to remote corners of the globe allow Monk and her collaborators enough room to explore basic themes of, as she describes them, the "loss of wonder, mystery and freshness in our contemporary life and the possibility of rediscovering our inherent clarity." Max Loppert, "An Introduction to Atlas," Atlas: An Opera in Three Parts (ECM 78118-21491-2, 1993), p.4. Because it translates that clarity directly into operatic terms, Atlas is an archaic work that begs off on Marshall McLuhan's all-important question of whether the medium isn't more important than the message it conveys. Atlas is an operatic anti-opera, offering a basic narrative but at the same time purposefully depriving the operagoer of common-practice dramatic complexities, intrigue, melodrama, and character development. Monk's wide-eyed, almost wordless view means that the malevolent agents -- a trio of Ice Demons in Part II and later on a business-suited agent of the government-military-industrial complex -- prove threatening only in a children's storybook way, and fail to imbue the storyline with any real tension. The traveling group escapes the doomsday scenario ("Possibility of Destruction") simply by "ascending to a timeless, radiant place where they come into spiritual knowledge." At the same time, there is little of Robert Wilson's rich vocabulary of dreams and allusions, or much of the media synergy that Beryl Korot helps create in her collaborations with Steve Reich. It is telling that Monk explains her use of the word "opera," and thus any reference to theatrical traditions, not in dramatic terms but as multi-sensory experience: "Early on, I called my works 'opera,' not in the sense of the European model that we usually think of, but rather as a description of the multi-perceptual, mosaic form that I was envisioning." Meredith Monk, "Process Notes," Atlas: An Opera in Three Parts, p.1. Rather, any dramatic force Atlas may have resides almost exclusively in "the grain of the voice," to use Roland Barthes's famous phrase. Or, more specifically, its vehicles are the character and personality that the actors/singers are able to put across wordlessly, with their naked and non-operatic voices. In a wordless opera from Meredith Monk -- in a way that harks back to silent movies -- drama depends all the more on the audience's basic identification with and empathy for the characters on stage. In this way, her work aligns itself more with popular music than with institutionalized opera: to borrow Simon Frith's phrase about popular music as broadly defined, Monk's art is an art of persuasion. And she has rooted that art in the most immediately persuasive instrument that exists: the ostensibly "untrained" human voice, recalling Broadway and folk song more than it makes one think of the opera house. STEVE REICH AND SPEECH-MELODIES By all accounts, Glass became more of a romantic and less process-oriented as he approached the opera stage. As he himself said, "it is surely no coincidence that it was at the moment that I was embarking upon a major shift in my music to large-scale theater works that I began to develop a new, more expressive language for myself." Music by Philip Glass, p.36. Steve Reich's The Cave, on the other hand, grew directly and seamlessly from his preceding non-operatic work: he developed the intercession between instrumental music and speech patterns that he had first affected in Different Trains for string quartet and tape. In his first tape pieces, described earlier, Reich differed from the aesthetics of the early musique concréte pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. The tape manipulations, rather than offering an impersonalized kind of "music" -- Schaeffer and Henry seemed less interested in individual people's inflections than in more objective rhythmic aspects -- serve to concentrate the humanness of the person recorded. "A human being is personified by his or her voice," Reich says. "If you record me, my cadences, the way I speak are just as much me as any photograph of me. When other people listen to that they feel a persona present. When that persona begins to spread and multiply and come apart, as it does in It's Gonna Rain, there's a very strong identification of a human being going through this uncommon magic." Reich, Writings on Music, 1965-2000, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.21. This strong identification of the human persona with his or her speech character is carried further in Reich's later theater-tape pieces, namely Different Trains (1988) and The Cave (1992), the second of these discussed in more detail below. Reich was directly inspired by Janacek's practice of notating speech-melodies, which the Moravian composer called "windows to people's souls." Reich takes even more care than Janacek over these intonations, such that Different Trains and The Cave almost become reliquaries. He makes faithful observance of the speakers' tonal qualities, rhythmic makeup, and timbre, and the best his purely musical-formal instinct can hope for is a symbiotic relationship with the demands of the taped voices. In reality, composing the work involved a give-and-take between the desired dramaturgical order of the taped voices and the ideal musical sequence. Reich writes, What I've found is that if you're very sensitive to the documentary material, it can suggest many things. We've had an idea in western art about objets trouvés, which implies an abstaining of bringing your rational intellect to work; basically, just finding something and presenting it. There's an aspect of that here, but it interacts with one's ability as a composer to choose or reject speech melodies and then to put them in one's own musical context. That tension runs throughout this piece. Quoted in K. Robert Schwarz, "From Antiquity to the Future: The Cave Brings Music Theater into the 21st Century," in The Cave, Conceived and Developed by Steve Reich and Beryl Korot (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1993), p.17. The Cave is a hundred-minute opus that defies categorization. Reich describes the work as “a new kind of documentary music video theater." Quoted in K. Robert Schwarz, "From Antiquity to the Future," p.16. There is no action per se, no staged movement, and all characterization takes place -- "live" and unscripted -- on five large video screens surrounding the 18 musicians on stage. The video feeds present people -- both knowledgeable and ignorant of scripture and history -- as they are confronted by four questions: who is Abraham? Sarah? Hagar? Ishmael? Like Glass, Reich seems to have become reconciled to the notion that The Cave and his other marriages of music, imagery, and storytelling all comment on and are in some sense rooted in opera history. Reich has always felt a strong need to speak to the present, and he now describes The Cave and Three Tales as necessary updates on opera. "I'm not saying other composers shouldn't write bel canto operas, but I've pursued something that interests me now, here in America in the 1990s, which naturally doesn't sound like something from 18th- or 19th-century Italy or Germany." "Jonathan Cott Interviews Beryl Korot and Steve Reich on The Cave," Steve Reich: The Cave (Nonesuch Records 79327-2, 1995), p.12. His speaking to the present entails not only topics that are relevant now, but also current technologies: "I think the use of sampling and video in opera and music theater is clearly growing. It's simply an honest expression of the life we are living now. 'Timeless' music theater has in fact always reflected its time and place." "A Theater of Ideas: Steve Reich and Beryl Korot on Three Tales," Steve Reich / Beryl Korot: Three Tales (Nonesuch 79662-2, 2003), p.11. The Cave can also be heard as a subversive work -- in Kyle Gann's words, it is "an anti-opera, written inside out,” a piece that shows its composer "wisely scorning romantic-opera conventions." Gann, "Inside-Out Opera," Village Voice November 2, 1993, p.99. Reich certainly took some time getting around to setting texts for the pitched human voice. Works for his ensemble involved several wordless women's voices by the early 1970s, for instance in parts 2 and 4 of the pivotal work Drumming (1970-71), and in Music for 18 Musicians (1974-76). But he didn't bring words and voices together until Tehillim (1981). Even there, he preceded the project with Jewish cantillation studies and elected psalms as the material to be sung -- scriptures designed for chanting, and not dramatic song in any operatic sense. In The Desert Music (1984), Reich set William Carlos Williams for a chorus, but largely uses the voices as instruments like he did in Drumming. In his liner notes for the first Desert Music recording, the composer doubted a singer's ability to convey pure drama: "You know, a voice can sing words -- but does one hear the voice or the words? At certain points in The Desert Music there's no more to be said -- there are things that can only be said musically. So the voices continue, without words, as part of the orchestra." "Steve Reich in Conversation with Jonathan Cott," Steve Reich: The Desert Music (Nonesuch 79101-2, 1985), p.3. The Cave and Different Trains, as well as the later Three Tales, do serve to show that the performance-art aspect of using video footage -- and the isolation and repetition of short instants -- need not conflict with the works' more obvious documentary purpose. Performance-art aspects of the original monologues likely came up missing in the final, edited "talking heads" video clips. But Korot did focus on the personality of each speaker in The Cave, devoting screens not only to the speakers' faces but also to such cognitively "noisy" marginalia as tapping pencils and hands propped against jaws. Perhaps the most unusual, or at least "non-operatic," aspect of The Cave as it appears on stage is the projection of handwritten phrases on to the TV screens. These are extracts from the interviewees' statements, written on screen with commendable penmanship. The process represents a literal enactment of scripture (a word descended from the Latin scriptum, "to write"), the Biblical Hebraic tradition of God's word as a mystical trace transmitted from on high. The written phrases also drive home the point that the authorities filmed by Korot are engaged in hermeneutics, the science of interpreting scripture. But confronting the viewer/listener with literal transcriptions of the words delivered is out of keeping with documentary and opera traditions. It only seems to squelch action, and thus drama, all the more in favor of the word; or, conversely in the case of a documentary, to belie the true-to-life, "live" aspect of the production with suggestions of scripted-ness. For Reich and Korot, the visible written word would seem an attempt to stitch together all the more firmly the speakers' speech-melodies and the musicians' doublings of them: the composer's and players' ability to capture the ever-changing meters, rhythms, and intonations of the speakers is nothing short of astonishing. There is something deeply McLuhanesque about the The Cave's array of sights and sounds as delivered by several media simultaneously: television-video, the handwritten word, text scripted out on computer screens, and electrified or amplified musical instruments. In such a situation, the written word is presented as the key that opened the mind to the idea of Euclidean space -- the linchpin that made possible all visual (and thus video) representations. Reich and Korot would almost seem to demonstrate McLuhan's statement that "phonetic writing translated tribal man into a visual world and invited him to undertake the visual organization of space." McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p.96. Reich and Korot position the word-processing computer typist amidst the musicians, bringing to mind McLuhan's description of the typewriter as a kind of declarative musical instrument: "Seated at the typewriter, the poet, much in the manner of the jazz musician, has the experience of performance as composition. In the nonliterate world, this had been the situation of the bard or minstrel… At the typewriter, the poet commands the resources of the printing press. The machine is like a public-address system immediately at hand." McLuhan, Understanding Media, p.260. If Reich and Korot recognize McLuhan, they also seem to acknowledge another seminal 20th-century thinker on media: Walter Benjamin. The Cave obeys Jeremy Tambling's statement that "opera must take its place amongst other late-twentieth-century media events as a distraction." Tambling, "Introduction: Opera in the Distraction Culture," A Night in at the Opera: Media Representations of Opera, ed. Jeremy Tambling (London: John Libby, 1994), p.15. Here Tambling refers to Walter Benjamin's definition of distraction as a state where "the distracted mass absorbs the work of art," in contradistinction to the situation where "a man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he views his finished painting." Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, p.241. Architecture is commonly cited as the prime example of distractionist art: a building is lived in, much less thinkingly attended to than it is intuitively inhabited. By comparison, Louis Andriessen's highly dramatic Rosa (1994) offers a picture of late 20th-century opera as it might exist without Artaud or McLuhan. Andriessen's style -- with its nagging cross-rhythms and confrontational big-band sound as based on saxophones, brass, and piano -- bases itself in repetition. But the repetitions are much less processual than they are improvisatory, and the general style is less obviously minimalist than it is Stravinskyan. As such, its particular sense of time and motion harks back to drama as practiced before Artaud, Gertrude Stein, Robert Wilson, and other figures of progressive theatre. The libretto was adapted by Andriessen from a book expressly written by British writer and film director Peter Greenaway. As in Greenaway's films (among them The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover; Prospero's Books; and Drowning by Numbers), the focus is on minutiae and detail, death and decay, sex and nudity, love and scatology. The opening chords unify Rosa through recurrences between scenes -- giving the score a unified, even symphonic quality. This symphonic aspect is underlined by the vibrant, often heavy sound of the instrumental ensemble. The absence of theme and thematic return in the other operas described here give those works a more localized feel. In short, Rosa often has the kind of dramatic, gestural sweep heard in symphonies of Mahler and Beethoven. Resolutely non-dramatic, The Cave reduces opera to a kind of architectural design, isolating component parts from the experience and fastidiously balancing them against each other. Except for sections devoted to scripture and prayer, the work consists entirely of commentary: eschewing drama, The Cave incorporates spoken statements that do the thinking for us. Its wealth and variety of information -- conceptual, historical, visual, musical, auditory, alphanumeric -- are so constant and so present that they become like the walls and floors of a building. The work is also architectural in its overall plan: the three acts of the opera (Jews answer the four questions in Act 1; Muslims are asked in Act 2; and Americans struggle to respond in Act 3) contrast texturally and musically, offering a layout that functions more along the lines of a cantilevered weight and counterweight than a common-practice opera structure. A distractionist opera for the 21st century, The Cave invites inhabitation more than it does thought or empathetic exercise. ADAMS AND TELEVISUALITY John Adams is a post-minimalist, perhaps the first widely-known composer who felt free to take Reich's and Glass's process music concepts as a fait accompli. He has long appropriated the rhythms and modular repetitions of process music as a decorative facade without actually basing his forms in musical process. (And without showing himself versed in those process techniques, as did Berg when he recreated Schoenberg's twelve-tone system in his own image -- an ostensibly appropriational and "free" effort that in fact mandated even more binding precompositional strictures than Schoenberg's own "strict" serial techniques.) The listener will have to decide for him- or herself whether Adams's post-minimalism represents opportunistic hypocrisy -- an Adorno would accuse Adams of commodified minimalist "phantasmagoria" -- or a loosening up of the objectivity that could prove suffocating in earlier minimalist styles. Compared to Glass and Reich, Adams's post-minimalism means that the repetitive and tonal aspects are free to underline the dynamics and surface emotions experienced onstage. In the first scene of Nixon in China (1987), when Nixon feels overwhelmed by his history-making arrival in Beijing and handshake with Chou En-lai, he is able to enthuse verbally in a way that would be unthinkable in a Glass or Reich work: News news news news news news news news news news news news Has a kind of mystery: When I shook hands with Chou En-lai On this bare field outside Peking Just now, the world was listening. And though we spoke quietly, The eyes and ears of history Caught every gesture, And every word, transforming us As we, transfixed, Made history. There are important ramifications of Adams's text-setting here. In the early music of Reich and Glass, "minimalist" repetition had built forms, created manners of transformation unique until then in art music, and worked (perhaps subconsciously) to exorcise the militant variation techniques of the Darmstadt modernists. Now, repetition in Nixon in China had become a kind of pratfall, serving the relatively banal function of helping a stage character stutter in excitement. Michael Nyman makes rather smarter diegetic use of "minimalist" repetition in his chamber opera The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1986). The repetitions in Nyman's minimalist language are less DeLeuzian explorations of identity, difference, and the passage of time, than they are wry, pop-art allusions to the repetitiveness of doo-wop, Classical, and Baroque styles. Nyman's stylistic references reflect his eclectic musical interests and his wide music-historical knowledge: in his student years he read musicology under Thurston Dart at King's College, London, and went on to write the standard 20th-century text Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Schirmer, 1974). Nyman's harmonies tend to move faster than Adams's: the harmonic rhythm is similar to Mozart's, and his repetitions are late 20th-century updates on alberti bass patterns in that they sustain chords rather than supplying rhythmic detail. (With a different rhythmic overlay in the accompaniment, The Man Who Mistook would sound much like Benjamin Britten.) The historical reference is spelled out unmistakably in Nyman's second scene when Dr. P, a singer suffering from visual agnosia, is asked to sing Schumann's "Ich grolle nicht." Nyman chose to include this particular song, and the reason becomes clear in the opening bars: the reiterated chords in Schumann's accompaniment are identical to Nyman's basic texture, and so the composer reveals repeated eighth-notes in groups of four as a kind of music-historical pun. Nyman himself writes, "For the opera I chose 'Ich grolle nicht' partly for the appropriateness of its text but largely for its musical resources: unbroken sequences of repeated quavers are meat and drink to me..." Nyman, introductory note to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: A Chamber Opera by Michael Nyman (New York: Columbia Masterworks, 1986), p.11. In comparison with Nyman, at least, Adams's repetitions offer clear and obvious obeisance to surface and stage effect -- without rhythmic-stylistic inside jokes. And that orientation is a probable reason for Nixon in China's rare popularity with operagoers. The Houston premiere was followed by performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Kennedy Center in Washington, and the Netherlands Opera. The 1988 Nonesuch recording is a bestseller. But American operagoers have had to wait some years to hear the score again, despite some concert performances, including a 2000 hearing in Denver: the St. Louis Opera mounted a high-profile production in summer 2004 just as it began planning a 20th-anniversary version for 2007. Boston Opera had its own run only some months earlier, and the Minnesota Opera did likewise shortly after. Companies on other continents have been more willing, with stagings in London, at the Adelaide Festival, and elsewhere. In one respect, the what-you-see-is-what-you-get aspect helps make Nixon in China an up-to-date reflection of American culture. Nixon is not historically important because of its musical language or its dramaturgy per se, but because it is the first opera to recognize the operatic significance of television and video -- or, more specifically, what mediologist John Thornton Caldwell calls the far-reaching cultural significance of "televisuality," with its emphasis on public spectacle and idiosyncratic constructions of "reality" and "liveness." As he describes the revolution of videotape, "videotaped liveness has become a charged apparatus by which personal behaviors converge in public spectacle. ....Tape, masquerading as liveness, is now the recurrent mode by which the public intervenes in the private." Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), p.223. Working from film scholar Christian Metz's thoughts, Caldwell distinguishes between a cinematic "fiction effect" which denies the artifice of video and the singular gaze, and a "reality effect," which gives itself over to artifice and physicality: "[T]he picture effect packaged in the televisual documentary is out front, on the surface. Televisual spectatorship does not necessarily produce a subconscious or unconscious state. There is instead an explicit performance of style that directly addresses the viewer's presence in some way." Caldwell, Televisuality, p.241-242. In a brilliant essay on televisuality and its importance for Nixon in China, Peggy Kamuf advances as the archetypal media event the President's handshake with Premiere Chou on the airport tarmac: With that term is understood an event staged totally or in part for the media, especially television. As such, it is not identical to or coincident with the event it would appear to be, but at once more and less... By 'media event' we have come to understand this sort of empty image in which the camera records its own intervention at the center of an action that is thereby thrown off-center in an endless divergence from itself. In this sense, media events do not ever happen; they only recur. Kamuf, "The Replay's the Thing," Opera through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp.88-89. Televisuality having arrived in Beijing already in February 1972, the flesh-and-blood Nixon and Chou paused in a kind of freeze-frame as they allowed the photos to be taken, the video feeds to be made, the media event to happen. Actual life was disrupted, altered by the media event that spun off it, and the latter became more natural and "real" than the former. As Kamuf writes, in allusion both to Beijing and Walter Benjamin: "The production of this first-time event, in other words, is not the condition but the effect of its reproduction." With Nixon in China, John Adams, librettist Alice Goodman, and director Peter Sellars reinvented opera for the age of mass communication. The cohesion and urgency of their group effort gives some sign that the reinvention was inevitable. In Kamuf's words, "What falls due in the age of television, of teleopera, and of teleoperations in general is the long-deferred necessity to take into account the irreducible interval or deviation within the same event and the event of the same." Kamuf, "The Replay's the Thing," p.99. Verdi took 67 years to catch up with the assassination of the Swedish king Gustav III and record the event operatically in Un Ballo in Maschera. John Adams and his colleagues took only some 15 years to do likewise in Klinghoffer -- but they are in effect right there, plunging straight into the newsworthy moments. Evidence of that can be found in the opera's almost omnipresent kitsch-element. Whatever their historical significance, media events become mundane by the very fact of televisuality's invasion. Nixon in China is a brilliant and volatile mixture of history and kitsch, and owes its success to that juxtaposition -- anomalous and bizarre in opera history, but television's daily bread. The daringly bourgeois foxtrot in Act III; the bumbling, politically partisan comedy of Henry Kissinger; Pat Nixon's crooked lipstick in Act III and her declaration that "every day is Christmas" -- these all serve to remove us from the historical immediacy of the President's visit and plunge us into the mundane details of its mass-mediated simulacrum. As with the media event, though, the absurdity doesn't quite spill out onto the surface: despite Alice Goodman's pretentious libretto (her overbearing poetics appropriate only to Mao's heavier Act I locutions), it never really becomes clear if the kitsch is intended. As Kamuf writes regarding the performance of Madame Mao's socialist realist play in Act 2, Scene II: "Nixon in China is no longer simply quoting (or pretending to quote) this other work, The Red Detachment of Women. Or, rather, the quoting function is still operating, but it is now unclear both where the quotation marks are exactly and which work is quoting the other." Kamuf, "The Replay's the Thing," p.104. Adams has said in an interview, "I don't view this as a satirical opera at all," and he believes Goodman described the story as "heroic" in an attempt to distance it from satire. Andrew Porter, "'Nixon in China': John Adams in Conversation," Tempo 167 (December 1988), p.27. Undirected but focused on effect, Nixon in China reads and sounds like a piece of 21st-century socialist realism. Adams has said repeatedly that opera must be made relevant to the present day, that it is the great modern political figures that are "the mythological characters of our time." Adams quoted by Jonathan Lieberson, "Nixon in Brooklyn," New York Review of Books, January 21, 1988, p.35. His willingness to cut close to home, along with the corroborative daring of Goodman and Sellars, is seen acutely in The Death of Klinghoffer (1991). The work began with a conversation Peter Sellars had with director Jean-Luc Godard on terrorism as a form of theater. Porter, "'Nixon in China': John Adams in Conversation," p.30. The story centers around the 1985 hijacking of the Greek cruise ship Achille Lauro, and the murder of Jewish American passenger Leon Klinghoffer by the Palestinian terrorists. It was perhaps inevitable that Adams and company, given their interest in current events and televisuality, would focus at some point on terrorism, which is at its basis a media event. As N.C. Livingstone has written, "Terrorism, as an extreme form of violence, is particularly newsworthy and well suited to the needs of television, which is a highly visual and compact medium with little time for exposition. [...] It has been said, speciously but with some truth, that terrorism is so ideally suited to television that the medium would have invented the phenomenon if it had not already existed." N.C. Livingstone, The War Against Terrorism (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1982), p.62; cited by Weimann and Winn, The Theater of Terror: Mass Media and International Terrorism (New York and London: Longmann, 1994), p.95. Given the painful sensationalism of its subject, audiences are surprised to find The Death of Klinghoffer so slow, even ritualistic, on stage. The composer has said the opera resembles a passion play, and much ink has been spilled on the "Gymnopèdie" and ballet that allegorize the descent of Klinghoffer's body when the attackers throw him overboard. Klinghoffer is frequently compared to an oratorio, partly because of the lack of immediate drama, and partly on account of the chorus's important role. Adams relies less on buoyant repetition and layered textures than he did in many earlier works, perhaps in reaction to the grim storyline. The singing, too, tends toward a gray arioso style. It's telling that the closest thing to an aria, or even a self-contained set piece, is also the closest that Adams comes to comedy. This is a short rumination in Sprechstimme by an Austrian passenger hiding in her stateroom -- a number analogous to, and clearly influenced by, Klaus-Narr's narration in Schoenberg's Gurrelieder. One accusation that has dogged Adams, Goodman, and Sellars is that they have chosen volatile, pushbutton subjects that continue to bait and rankle -- and then, painting with too fine a brush for their material, failed to come down on any side of the chosen issues. Some have gone on to question their ethics, but it would be fairer simply to call them non-operatic. By its theatrical history and birthright, opera takes sides and courts absurdity by drawing the world in black and white: Don Giovanni is dragged down to hell with no second chances, Alfredo Germont's father repents for his callousness by evening's end, and the Borough -- drunk on its own vendetta -- hunts down Peter Grimes like an animal. Given such a tradition, some operagoers are upset by the facts that Adams and his colleagues present Nixon as neither a criminal nor a buffoon, and are unwilling to portray a terrorist group as bloodthirsty animals before leading them off to their just desserts in the form of a climactic auto-da-fé. It's somewhat reassuring, then, that their next collaboration will focus on a rather more distant, if still knotty, subject: nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atom bomb. The opera was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera, and its premiere is scheduled for the 2005-06 season. CODA: OPERA AND REFORM To the difficult question "what is an opera?," Hans Keller replied that he had no answer: "It all depends on the next one, not the last one." Keller, Essays on Music, ed. Christopher Wintle (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 89. The history of opera is a forward-directed history of reform, which serves to contrast this genre with, say, the symphony -- where composition has always had a curatorial, retrospective aspect. As Herbert Lindenberger notes, those reforms have habitually tried "to rid opera of those elements most offensive to anybody holding an antitheatrical bias." Lindenberger, Opera: The Extravagant Art (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), p.207. Over the centuries, from Jacopo Peri and Gluck to Puccini and Carlisle Floyd, there has been general and fairly constant agreement on just what realism -- or, in other words, antitheatricality -- might mean in operatic terms. And, just as consistently, realism has been invoked in the name of modernity. Against such a history, minimalist opera composers, librettists, and directors of the 1970s and 80s remade conceptions of reality itself. One couldn't have expected anything less ambitious, given the New York theatre revolutions of the 1960s and the new music-cognitive challenges of minimalism -- its repetitiveness contravening basic ideas of narrative and refuting breath-based conceptions of the musical phrase. The minimalist opera "reformers" turned opera into something that might seem more, rather than less, theatrical -- and did so in the name of up-to-date-ness. With Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, realism became a matter of faithfulness toward dreams as the true, perhaps post-Freudian reality. According to Franco Bertoni, Wilson "purifies in his illusory but authentic world the crudeness of matter, sees everything once again with the innocence of children and mad people, and gives us back -- free of convention and restrictions -- a vision of our everyday experience." Bertoni, "Robert Wilson: Themes and Symbols of the Modern," Robert Wilson, p.180. (One need only add that Wilson's vision of innocence is auteurist, and in that sense paradoxical.) With John Adams, Peter Sellars, Alice Goodman, Philip Glass after about 1990, Steve Reich, and Beryl Korot, questions about realism became intertwined with questions of necessity. As these artists understood it, opera must serve a televisual reality, a world transformed by Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard -- in short, a reality of simulacra. Meredith Monk's new reality is sound-based: minimalism's focus on the individual moment and its minutiae freed her to explore the voice as a new kind of theatrical landscape. And this marked an imminent vocal emancipation: Monk has told the story several times of sudden realization during her dance training that the voice, like the body, could be given entirely new kinds of dexterity. It is difficult to find a decade in opera history as decisive and portentous as that demarcated by the premiere of Einstein on the Beach and the first hearing of Nixon in China. In the final analysis, the minimalist composers were able to take an art-form that has historically been resistant to musical avant-gardism -- in the 1950s, Pierre Boulez famously suggested blowing up all the opera houses -- and remake it in their own image. One sign of their success is Robert Wilson's increasing acceptance and influence as a director of European, and to an increasing degree American, opera productions. It's a crude equation, but has some truth to it: with Wilson's acclaimed minimalist stagings of Alceste (Stuttgart, 1986) and Parsifal (Hamburg, 1991) -- the director working with the slow motion, abstract shapes, and ravishing light effects already familiar from his Philip Glass collaborations -- opera has become reconciled to Einstein on the Beach rather than the other way around. One only wonders how the minimalist opera "reforms" will themselves someday be reformed upon: in short, what the next-next operas will be. Knee Play Act I, Scene 1: TRAIN Act I, Scene 2: TRIAL Knee Play 2 Act II, Scene 1: DANCE Act II, Scene 2: NIGHT TRAIN Knee Play 3 Act III, Scene 1: TRIAL/PRISON Act III, Scene 2: DANCE 2 Knee Play 4 Act IV, Scene 1: BUILDING/TRAIN Act IV, Scene 2: BED Act IV, Scene 3: SPACESHIP Knee Play 5 Figure 1: Four-act structure of Einstein on the Beach Bibliography Glass, Philip, 1987. Music by Philip Glass, New York: Harper and Row. Kostelanetz, Richard, ed., 1997. Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism, New York: Schirmer. Biner, Pierre, 1972. The Living Theatre, New York: Horizon Press. PAGE 1