a fuller look
I didn’t realize it but a large portion of our December 4th presentation at Performers Forum is steaming online. If you missed it, or if you want to see it again, here is Perfect Lives Manhattan: Just the Highlights, live from Exapno.
Courtesy of Mr Cory Bracken & Performers Forum in general (ps – go to the next one this Saturday!)
Apologia Re Frances
It’s humbling how many items of culture & media I can trace back to teasing out ideas from Perfect Lives. Entire catalogs of music by artists I wouldn’t have known about otherwise, poets & writers whose styles I didn’t take seriously beforehand, thoughts about the (lack of) dignity in working the land; in these areas and more I can pretty directly trace my line of thinking back to researching further something that is tossed off in Perfect Lives or another piece of Robert Ashley’s.
Giordano Bruno is a pretty obvious thread to be pulled in this sense. Bruno comes up a few times in Perfect Lives, particularly in the Backyard (“I think they burned him. He was too positive.”), and the opera Improvement revolves around a central metaphor involving the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and the resulting payoff in Hermetic-Cabalist magic (the culmination of which may have been Bruno). Some of my initial investigations into this area were like a diligent student looking up words he didn’t know in the homework his teacher assigned, just visiting encyclopedias or whatnot. Once I got a copy of the Perfect Lives libretto, I learned from the notes in the back that there were important connections Bob saw with Frances Yate’s work on Bruno, The Art of Memory, as well as with The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I picked both up, and think it’s fair to say I didn’t understand either in a straightforward way. What I can say about the Book of the Dead is that the gist of the repetition worked for me. I’ve been in situations with ill or dying folks (or animals for that matter) where there seems to be some need to stress that there’s no need to be afraid of the creeps that may seem to be present in/around the act of dying. I certainly got it as a metaphor. The Art of Memory I’ve had a harder time with because it seems to me that I ought to be able to get more of it. Like with a 3D image in a mall in the 90s, and I can’t make my eyes do the right thing. I know that it’s there, I think I know what I should be learning, but I haven’t gotten it yet.
I just finished rereading Yates’s other big work on Bruno, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. When I initially read this and The Art of Memory four or five years ago, I felt like I had a deeper connection with GB&tHT. TAoM felt really indecipherable to me. The former is constructed in a wonderfully slow & deliberate way so that you get a firm sense of the Hermetic tradition before Bruno even enters the picture (and she carries on the fate of the tradition after GB got all burnt up in 1600). My problem with TAoM was that I felt like I missed some critical early part where she more or less revealed what the art of memory was (this is probably not the case, I don’t think she comes close to revealing it, if that were possible). For the rest of the book, she’s talking about it, but I never had a sense of what it entailed. Something about this book wasn’t concrete enough for me, and I realize that it’s my problem (nu, it’s about obscure mental practices of the Renaissance, you expect it to be low hanging fruit?) Maybe it’s a little like someone really wanting to comprehend brend but not being able to make the leap. Or something more religious. Somewhere along the line I also read a translation of Bruno’s Lo Spaccio del Bestia Triunfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast), and I really didn’t get much from that either, seemed like a list of things in one of the few ways I don’t find lists compelling. Entertaining for a few pages here & there, but not something I could get a hold of in the deeper parts of my skull.
I wanted to reread GB&tHT because I felt like I couldn’t actually remember anything about Bruno after half a decade. I remembered some of the general magus-y beeswax, but I couldn’t differentiate between the various mages mentioned, and for a guy who comes up a lot I didn’t have much to say about him. The punchline of my reread is that after spending about a month reading it, I don’t think I learned anything about what Bruno thought. I’m caught up on his biography again, and I got a ton out of the early chapters on Ficino, Pico, & Cornelius Agrippa, but all the Bruno stuff just went right over my head, or outta my brain, or the never entered in the first place. I guess there’s a few possibilities:
a.) I just don’t get anything about his philosophy/religion/cultural practice
b.) Yates is actually a terrible writer
c.) I need to read someone other than Yates on the subject (ie she’s a good writer I just don’t get her)
d.) maybe I’m not properly interested/invested in the subject
I doubt it’s B. I do really recommend reading her book. All manner of things you just never knew about are in there. Like the following:
This is something that I can work with in terms of telling stories of the psyches of the past: Imagine you’re looking at the bones of the chicken you’re eating and you discover the emblem of the Jupiter (or whatever). You see it because you think holy symbols are objective! They’re in nature! And you think the same about language! You think there’s something innate in nature about, say, the Hebrew letter vav and all it represents. THIS IS CRAZY BISCUITS BUT IT’S INSPIRING THAT HUMANS THOUGHT LIKE THIS! This is why I think the Yates book is wonderful. Not sure about the idea of “operating”, but I do like the idea of Orphic songs (magical songs handed down from Orpheus & others) are magic – that acting can change the states of things.
This theme of things being innate in nature, or human-constructed ideas perfectly describing nature, brings me to another thread teased out of Perfect Lives. I can’t remember where I read something about Marie-Louise von Franz’s On Synchronization and Divination relating to Perfect Lives (maybe Kyle Gann said that?), but I picked this book up as well. There were a few memorable moments looking on the bookshelf behind the kids section in the Union Square Barnes & Noble for this one, with the half-hearted assistance of some confused salespeople. But I got it.
Anyway, this book & Jung’s writings on the Acausal Principle were interesting to me for a lot of reasons, but it seems to tangential to Perfect Lives & Bob’s work in general. Maybe not in some ways. There’s something very much of this book’s feel in Now Eleanor’s Idea – “the approach of the end of the world feeling” is something common throughout the Ashley oeuvre.
But the ideas themselves are just lovely, just like the early part of the Yates book. Here’s a choice excerpt from the von Franz.
After all this teasing, I guess I feel like I might have more tools to look at alternate forms of logic, reasoning, thinking, etc. in a broad sense. I don’t know that I have a better understanding of the piece, which was maybe the initial goal but now seems pretty moot. I guess I’ve shifted from trying to understand something like a piece of Bob’s directly, by effort & force, and gone for more of a let it wash over me and then start digesting once it’s inside of me approach. Interesting, as always, to do a little archeology on the workings of one’s brain.
-Dave
Documentation: GO!
And now, Varispeed is pleased to present to you the first public excerpt of video from Perfect Lives Manhattan! This shows the end of the 3 PM episode, THE SUPERMARKET, which was performed at Essex Street Market with Paul on lead. Please enjoy & disseminate. More to come!
Oh, so like you do funny voices?
As is want to happen in the first few weeks of a new year, I’ve found myself summarizing my recent activities to folks I know. A good deal of this summarizing has been done at the request of musicians, acquaintance musicians with whom I’m collaborating in an ensemble. Probably I’ll be there playing clarinet or guitar, playing suling, or even vocalizing, and the acquaintance musician will not realize that I do anything other than play clarinet, or guitar, or gamelan, or sing or what have you.
I’ll tell this acquaintance musician that I’ve had a ton of fun (and I’ll say success as well) performing pieces by Robert Ashley in the last few months, and that I’m finding a place in my own music and music of other folks in which I get to explore musical speech. This is usually where some brows get furrowed. What do you mean, like singing? Well, sort of, I explain. In the case of Aaron Siegel‘s Brother Brother, which I performed selections from yesterday at Le Poisson Rouge, I’ll say that there’s spoken text originally conceived of as being read by an actor, but Aaron thought it would be more appropriate to have someone read it whose primary goal was to make it sound interesting, rather than to bringing out the meaning, emotion, etc. in the text. And Aaron decided I was a good guy for that task.*
Or I’ll try to explain a piece of mine called Sit at the Basement, which is being performed on Saturday, January 28th at Exapno as part of SweaTronics, in which four speakers speak text in their own comfortable speaking voices, and I devilishly manipulate the pitch level of their voices – slowly & subtly – to transform a straightforward vocal texture into something a little off, a little eerie. Also on that concert, I’ll be musically speaking in a piece by Ellen O’Meara. Both Ellen & I are involved in Panoply Performance Lab’s upcoming Nature Fetish, which also pushes speech into territory well beyond the more traditional theatrical practice. And this is to say nothing of my ongoing collaboration with Aliza, Why Lie?, which involves little musical stories, both fixed and improvises.
In all of these, the process of figuring out how to say what your saying is much more like music – in these particular pieces, the unifying theme is phrasing. I consider it musical speech because the natural rhythm & phrasing of speaking a sentence is frustrated. If you take a chunk of text, alter the natural stresses, and insert pauses that have little to do with linguistic syntax, you’re starting to get musical. I’m not saying it’ll be good, but there’s a borderline you’ll be toeing.
My aesthetics on all of this have changed so much recently from spending time with Bob’s music and with Bob himself in his role as a vocal coach for That Morning Thing. Going back to the acquaintance musicians, they’ll often ask me about Perfect Lives and I’ll get to a conversational point where I simply have to demonstrate what the hell I’m talking about. I’ll pick some section of The Church and begin reciting it in the particular lilt that I’ve found for it. As I do this, I’m thinking, what aspect of what I’m doing will this person think is musical? The stresses and the phrasing are only slightly different in most parts of what I do than normal speech would be. There’s a more generous range of pitched material in my speaking than there would normally be. The words have a particular music to them. I affect a bit of an accent when I do this recitation, inevitably. I think what’s ultimately exciting to me is that people could decide that they don’t have enough information to discover what’s musical about what I’m doing. Performing a small excerpt in conversation is not necessarily enough to make clear the alchemical switch that happens when one begins performing musical speech. It’s really hard to put your finger on, but there’s something just different that you know when you hear.
This was all getting into my head last night before I performed the Brother Brother excerpts. In rehearsal, I managed to keep it fresh and find something interesting about Aaron’s text every time without being overly analytical with regards to what I was doing. For some reason at the sound check yesterday I suddenly felt that I was overusing a particular melodic contour indicative of questioning (one specification Aaron gave me was that each question should really sound like a question, with the characteristic rise at the end). I tried out some much less exaggerated ways of presenting things, making them more “speech” than “musical speech”, and then I second guessed that decision. My mind went around in circles as to what was the best way to support the piece, to be musical, to be audible, etc. I have no idea how it came out in the end. But I think part of what happened had to do with being in a room full of people I know and respect and care about and wanting to show off this thing I’ve been cultivating. Whatever it is.
There’s no need to cordon off this musical talking thing I’ve been cultivating from other kind of speech and music, I think good artistic execution with this tool is based around its seamless incorporation with less elevated speech and less speech-y music. But it does, like so many other things, become more of an issue when you try to explain it to someone while killing time backstage, or in an elevator, at a bris, etc.
-Dave
*Someone else involved in Aaron’s piece assumed I was an actor. I assured him I wasn’t, or at least that wasn’t my training, but then I realized that the joke is on me because I had been cast and was essentially performing as an actor in this piece.
PS – Tom Waits in 1979 doing some of the finest musical talking around: http://video.pbs.org/video/2179574410/ (courtesy of my brother)
our hobbies
We are quietly working on past and future Varispeed projects, we swear. But we’ve got some excuses for not having substantial updates, really. Here are a few:
Gelsey and Paul will travel to Somerville, MA to present Gelsey’s piece Scaling on Thursday, 1/12. The next day, they’ll be in New Haven. More info.
Gelsey and Dave will sing Aphergis & speak Siegel (respectively) in Experiments in Opera, Monday 1/16 at Le Poisson Rouge. Gelsey will be performing in Aphergis’s Sextour February 2-4th as well.
Aliza and Gelsey will be presenting at Panoply Performance Lab’s Performancy Forum XIX (“Box Box Box”) on Monday 1/23 at Vaudeville Park in Bushwick. Brian co-runs PPL.
Speaking of, Brian and Dave are starting work on PPL’s Nature Fetish, to be performed in excerpts on Friday 1/27 at University Settlement. The whole shebang will be performed there in late April.
Dave and Aliza are working, as 2/3rds of the collective Cough Button, on a new musical-theatric piece involving radios, to be presented at Experiments in Opera, take 2, in May at Roulette. They’re also assembling new material as 2/2nds of the group Why Lie?
Aliza will be hosting shows in her home over the next two months. Brian’s doing some stuff for COIL Festival also. Dave plays as part of Sweat Lodge every month. The list goes on.
As you can see, we like to stay busy.
really it’s a very nice layout
This post isn’t about anything in particular. We would like to wish you a happy new year, that’s part one. Part two is that WordPress, bless their hearts, made a lovely report of the activities on this blog, and it just looks fantastic. I think you can see it here. Have a peak if you’re interested in lovely looking things or this blog.
What’s next? We’re working on a Varispeed website and seeing what the future holds. We got some leads. More Perfect Lives – there’s a feature on the piece (not just us) in a British publication out soon. Maybe some Cage. Maybe some No Collective. We’re not gonna tip our cards too much here, but stay tuned! Onwards & up (just up, not upwards) in 2012!
Our Spanish Cousins
I saw Vidas Perfectas Thursday night. I’m glad that I did, and I think you should see it too. They’re performing El Parque, La Iglesia, & the Backyard (I don’t remember how to say the Backyard en Espanol) for the next few days, all more or less in my backyard at the Irondale in Fort Greene.
I’m struck by how much they at once changed the original and how much they didn’t. I had an idea in my head of what they were doing based on their promotional materials that Vidas Perfectas aimed to present the original piece but with two really big switches – Spanish for English and the South/Southwest for the Midwest. I think I was right in some sense, but a lot of the ideas attached to Perfect Lives are stretched & remade in this production in natural ways, ways that seem to this person who’s had his nose in the libretto for months both stimulating and kind of scary, or daunting, or new.
My mind doesn’t want to believe that the linguistic shift is as big of a deal as it is. Alex Waterman (the director) asserts that you gain an additional ~30% of words in the translation (which as far as I can tell hews pretty close to the English), so you need to, for example in La Iglesia, slow down the pulse to fit all the words in at a comfortable pace (and they did this very gracefully). Or in El Parque, the feel is completely different, from having a slow, plodding stream of words to a much more articulate & rapid stream delivery. My Spanish is fairly minimal, so I can’t really tell which idioms make it and which don’t. I could easily follow Ned Sublette’s folksy way of asking about the president of the bank and talking about people soothing themselves with lemonade in the Backyard. I wondered about whether the dick jokes translate.
I can see where the decision to record new backing tracks come from, seems like a fun venture. It sparked a pretty big idea in my head. Alex is cellist, and a great cellist at that, and so on top of David Gordon’s electronic drum beats and synth sounds, all with different feels this time around, there’s often a small chorus of cellos. I wondered why he elected to not perform these live, even from off stage. Then I started thinking about the idea of Perfect Lives‘s economy of players, one of its traits that I was first taken with seven years ago. In the television opera, it seems to me that you can always map the action in the story to the four players. Sometimes it’s rough, but it’s there. The quartet in the car could be thought of with Jill as Gwyn, David as Ed, Bob as D, and Blue as Dwayne. Or in the Bank, Jill is Isolde, David is the manager, Bob is R, and Blue is Buddy. These are open to interpretation, but I used to meditate on this a lot (in fact I wrote a book of sorts inspired by the idea of players having sub-roles for National Novel Writing Month in November 2005).
Vidas Perfectas maintained this very clearly. From isolating the choral parts to be spoken by a single chorus member in the Church to the placement on stage of Elisa (as Isolde) in the Backyard to the way they’re credited in the program, it’s clear that showing the mapping of the four players on to the various characters is important in this production. This made me think about how we abandoned that in Perfect Lives Manhattan. It seemed to me that without the video, these connections were much more tenuous. We didn’t want to stage the action so literally (nor has anyone in the productions I know of [Gelsey & I in the Supermarket are perhaps an exception, but even then we were singing instead of just pantomiming old people shopping]), and we didn’t want to use another visual medium to indicate that someone could be both a player and a character at the same time. Moreover we tended to make use of our bodies in other ways – as instrumentalists, back up singers, dancers, etc. I think our decision here was to let the text & the music create the characters and throw economy to the wind. We sprawled at times. I think that might make the episodes more disjointed, but I also think we compensated by bringing the stories into appropriate spaces and doing things like mapping each character’s route through the locations of the day. If you’re only seeing episodes 1, 6, & 7, you don’t have a larger sense of who the eloping quartet are or who Isolde & R are, but it is cemented together in the bodies of the people put in front of you in those roles. It’s about the players as much as the characters in the TV version of Perfect Lives as well as Vidas Perfectas. If you can see the whole story, or at least enough episodes to catch the threads, then you probably stand a better shot of getting the effects of the plot. But then again, that may be beside the point, and the performance they’ve staged doesn’t depend on you getting the plot. There’s larger things at stake. This is all fairly secondary stuff.
A couple other things I wanted to say:
This production goes very maximal on the chorus, which to me is delightful. Maybe it was the EQ, but I could hear them much more clearly than Ned, and I found it was an easier way for me to follow along. If I could figure out what the chorus said, I could figure out what Ned was saying, particularly in The Church where I have so much of it memorized. It’s also interesting to hear the Backyard with all the numbers, I mean all the numbers in it. Very different feel, very cool.
The chorus parts are done in an impressive rhythmic unison which spoke volumes for both the arranging & the rehearsal of the these parts. There was such a wealth of musical material in these little two word phrases, and it was very compelling to watch Elisa in particular, looking at her score for one beat, looking up the next beat, and delivering her line on the next beat(s) in La Iglesia, there was a lovely theater to that. There were also some really interesting registral shifts between Abraham, Elisa, & Ned – their voices come together very beautifully. Again, very cleverly & carefully arranged.
It’s all pretty overwhelming to be watching this again – this is the first time I’ve ever be an audience member for a live staging of Perfect Lives in any form. I’m very grateful for it. I’m sure all of our (Varispeed & VP) different decisions have given each other a lot to think about in terms of what the piece is and how you make it happen, and I’m sure next time we take on Perfect Lives, it’ll be affected by and filtered through this production of Vidas Perfectas. So go have yourself some thoughts and let us know what you think.
No muy bien dicho, Dave, pero eso es algo.
- Dave
aren’t we pretty?
We Won!
Courtesy of Mr Ian Munro, here are a couple photographs from our presentation at Performers Forum the other day.
Gelsey speaking at Performers Forum
Varispeed & Bob
DON’T INTERRUPT US! WE’RE TALKING INTO THIS MACHINE!
If you missed Sunday’s Performers Forum, you missed a bunch. We explained, described, picked at stuff, called each other out, performed chunks of the Bar, the Church, the Backyard, and the Bank. We broke new ground on merging parts of the seven episodes into a slurry of informative stuff. We sang, we responded to questions, we had some beers. You get the idea.
This was done in Exapno, an arts space in a peculiar office building, founded by Ms Lainie Fefferman. Sundays are usually pretty quiet unless there’s an Exapno event (although there were folks on the floor preparing large portions of food for OWS folks while we were presenting). It’s not a terrifically big space. As one of the six people who run Performers Forum, I can tell you that thus far in the five programs we’ve presented, no one’s used a microphone until Varispeed. No one’s needed to? No one’s wanted to? Hard to say. But we were trying to mush together the performing and presenting aspects of our forum, and we realized for intelligibility’s sake, it was a good decision. It’s more than that, it’s not a neutral decision, and discussing that decision is something that could have warranted its own sub-heading in the forum. So here’s MICROPHONE IN WHAT WE’VE DONE SO FAR:
The author of this post, hard at work in his apartment
There’s a lovely metaphor Robert Ashley makes in the notes in the back of the Perfect Lives libretto (the Burning Books one, still haven’t seen the new one) between performing the piece and reciting the Tibetan Book of the Dead – the latter text was to be applied to the deceased body that was gradually losing its hearing, so the reading of the text had to get louder and louder. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, in my recollection, encourages the listener not to be afraid of the various demons s/he is no doubt encountering, how to get past them, and Bob makes an analogy with the content his opera as well – to perform it is to warn people about shady characters at a loud volume.
In June, we had no mics. You could say we didn’t do the piece since we didn’t do our warning at the correct volume. Everything was at a more conversational volume, nothing overwhelming. We were there for ourselves & friends, and our audiences (& ensembles) never got so large that the text was in danger of being lost. This allowed us do things like gather on the street or in a park, a definite no-no once you’ve introduced amplification here in NYC. But it also is contra the idea of the original opera in a fairly significant way. There’s a lot that changes when you amplify a voice – the throw away sounds you normally would ignore become huge, and your authority is instantly amplified.
The throw away sounds are more interesting to me, having recently performed Bob’s 2010 piece World War III: Just the Highlights, which is all about the seemingly mundane vocal sounds (a variety of plosive sounds in this case) and the lives they take on when you amplify & spatially distribute them. Between this and She Was a Visitor in That Morning Thing, I feel pretty sharp in my ability to produce odd sounds with my mouth that become compelling when amplified (electronically or by amassing a lot of people doing it at once). I dunno if I would have said that in June. I have new microphone confidence, I know how to use them better. That was definitely something I practiced leading up to November 6th, how to read my part and the amplification an asset. Also, I think in the June run, we were paying much more attention to the text & the interaction rather than the sound, the form, the possibilities of the application of the voice in this work (lots to recap from Sunday if you missed it).
I’m sure we can all agree that we didn’t want the authority of the mic in June, it was easier to connect with everyone (and hence this is maybe it feels like we didn’t inspire the same connections in November). The idea of following along is much easier when you don’t need a tool/instrument to compete. We knew as soon as we started scaling things up for November that we would need mics… or knew isn’t correct. We decided. We could have decided to keep it quiet & unamplified, essentially saying tough shit to people who didn’t get there early, or perhaps tough shit to being able to understand the words. But I think the bigger point is that we felt like we had a kind of authority that we didn’t have in June, having studied the text as we did, having made special musical arrangements of the whole darn thing. We wanted people to hear what we had to say about it rather than to simply come along with us. We succeeded in that goal, but there’s something a little bittersweet about it. The addition of the microphone is the clearest marker of this change to me. This is coming from someone who can’t help but undermine his own authority in performance contexts.
It was also interesting when we did or didn’t use a mic on Sunday, who did or didn’t use a mic. Ideally, a forum is about give & take, and some sections were more give & take then others. If someone’s speaking into a mic, you’re less likely to interrupt, for better or for worse. But then, if you can hear what someone’s saying, you might have more occasion to interrupt. There may go my whole theory. Well, it was something.
-Dave
Perfect Lives Manhattan Redux: TODAY
Come on out to Performer’s Forum today for an informal discussion of Perfect Lives Manhattan complete with performed excerpts, jokes, and (did we mention?) snacks. And beer. What else could your heart desire on a Sunday afternoon?
3 PM / 33 FLATBUSH / BROOKLYN / LINK
Hope to see all of you this afternoon.
