The inaugural season at the Walt Disney Concert Hall is not all Esa-Pekka
Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic or, for example, Alfred
Brendal and Midori giving separate Beethoven recitals. Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins get
into act. Even Arlo Guthrie and the Klezmatics made it onto the hall’s eclectic
schedule.
But for cutting-edge music, dance and multimedia performances, it’s the
programming at REDCAT (the catchy label for the Roy and Edna
Disney/Cal Arts Theater) that provides “an intersection of cultures, disciplines & viewpoints” in
the building that Frank Gehry built. And it’s REDCAT’S Musical Explorations Series that offers the kind of
counter-programming you don’t find in the main hall, such as interactive computer-based music
and electronica.
The series embraces “downtown” artists: the New Century Players,
Morton Subotnick, the California Ear Unit playing the music of Mel Powell and, coming Tuesday,
trombonist Abbie Conant in a multimedia performance featuring the music of William Osborne.
Her program, “The Wired Goddess and Her Trombone,” will
include the world premiere of a music theater piece, “Cybeline,” as well as “Pond,” another of their
collaborations, along with “Hysteria” by Cindy Cox, “Love Song Without
Words” by Nancy Kennan Dowlin, “HUM
2” by Maggi Payne, and “Impossible Animals” by David Jaffe.
A married couple, Conant and Osborne are both New Mexicans who have lived in Germany
for the last 24 years. For 13 of those years, from 1980 to 1993, Conant was solo trombonist of
the Munich Philharmonic and since 1992 has been a full tenured Professor of Trombone at the
Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Trossingen.
Earlier in his career, Osborne, who had studied with George Crumb in Philadelphia and
Franco Donatoni in Rome, wrote original music theater productions with texts taken from Samuel
Beckett’s “Endgame,” “Happy Days,” “Ohio Impromptu,” “Rockabye” and “Acts Without Words”
for The Wasteland Company, which he formed with
Conant “to explore women’s roles in music theater.” Beckett was notorious for not allowing
anyone to monkey with his plays. He not only gave permission to use the texts but upon
meeting Osborne in Paris in 1986 regarded him as a kindred spirit.
I first came across Osborne in 1997, not as a composer but as a social activist who was
instrumental in pressuring the Vienna Philharmonic to revoke its historical policy of excluding
women from its ranks. Reporting on the issue in the Los Angeles Times, I used Osborne as one of
my sources and subsequently wrote a magazine article for the National Arts Journalism
Program at Columbia University about his activism. He worked
largely via the Internet to organize protests against the Vienna Phil, posting thousands of e-mails
around the world, and he wrote scholarly articles tracing the discrimination
against women at the VPo and other orchestras.
Full disclosure: I am now a friend of both Osborne and Conant.
When I asked him to enlighten me a bit about “Cybeline,” he was in the midst of rehearsal. To
save time, he referred me to his program notes — both the
short version and the long version with extensive notes. Here’s an
excerpt:
Cybeline is about a cyborg trying to be a talk show host to prove she is
human. It is about nature, virtual reality, biotechnology, and the mass media — and about finding
the heart and poetry in technology as it also contemplates its horrors. What does a fifty-year-old
structure of silicon have to teach a five-billion-year-old structure of carbon?
Cybeline has two modes, on-line and off-line, abruptly separated by a loud buzzer. Her
producers/programmers toggle her between the two. When on-line, the pace of her talk show host
routines are relentless, emulating the frenetic character of video cuts used by commercial
television. When off-line, she enters a dream-like world where the music is partially determined by
computer programmed random operations that allude to the “music of nature.” The music is thus
different for each performance.
During the off-air random music, Cybeline hears almost imperceptible random whispers
coming from all around her that become increasingly present as the work progresses. She is not
sure what they are, but prefers to think of them as the voices of goddesses. The voices, which are
made from hundreds of sampled whispers, are collages of her memories, fragments from Native
American poems, our own poetry, the Old Testament, and other
sources.
Bill points out that “Cybeline derives her name from the Goddess Cybele who was brought to
Rome from Phrygia in 204 B.C. Her temple stood on the Vatican, where St. Peter’s Basilica
stands today, up to the 4th century A.D. when Christians took it over.” He notes that “Roman
emperors like Augustus, Claudius, and Antoninus Pius regarded her as the supreme deity of the
empire” and that “Augustus established his home facing her temple.” And he adds these
fascinating details:
In the 5th century, Christians relentlessly destroyed the religious beliefs
surrounding Cybele, especially her embodiment as the Mother Earth. St. Augustine called her a
harlot mother, “the mother, not of the gods, but of the demons.” Churchmen believed the powers
of “witches” came from the same sort of contact with the Mother Earth. Arresting officers often
carried them to prison in a large basket, so their feet would not touch the
ground.
For the last 30 years, he writes, his and Abbie’s collaborations have been
pieces for chamber music theater, a genre that “hardly exists in Western culture
because it is extremely difficult to successfully combine theater with the sparseness of chamber
music. Even efforts by composers such as Schubert and Schumann are little more than
melodramatic curiosities.”
Bill explains:
In opera, the orchestra pads the drama, epic sets and pageantry blur over the
superficiality of the plots, and the acting need only be sufficient for people looking through
binoculars. The focus is on singing and occasional orchestral fireworks. In chamber music theater,
complex scripts have to be delivered with convincing theatrical skill even if combined with utterly
precise timings and inflections dictated by the music. Cybeline compounds these problems with an
abrupt collage of styles, moods, video and twelve tone music. This leaves a burden on the
performer to develop new performance practices and techniques that hardly exist.
To create a genuine integration of the arts we write our own texts and music and produce and
perform the works ourselves. We also created the video for Cybeline. Though our orientation is
not specifically technological, we incorporate many of the most recent developments such as
surround sound, video and live electronics. Our artistic concerns are generally social, so we try to
combine our experimentation with styles that are moderately approachable to a broader
public.
But that’s as much explaining as he will do:
Beckett once said that his theater is an “enigma wrapped in a mystery.” The
beauty of theater is that its iconic meanings are left open to each individual’s interpretation, so we
generally avoid “explaining” our works. We continue to find new meanings in them even years
after their completion.
What else is there to say but “amen,” and if you’re in Los Angeles or anywhere nearby “get
thee to REDCAT” Tuesday night for their performance. Tickets are available online here: “The Wired Goddess and Her Trombone.”
