EXPANDING HORIZONS
EXPANDING HORIZONS
[ FIELD TRIPS ] A TOUGH LINE WEDNESDAY, MAY 18, 2005
A one-evening trip to Manhattan found eight Philadelphia-area music professionals, as well as PMP’s staff, in the lobby of the Altria building adjacent to Grand Central Station, where Vision Into Art, an interdisciplinary performance ensemble, presented A Tough Line. Based on a 2002 incident in which a group of Chechen separatists held a theater audience hostage for over three days, the piece takes its name from the ambiguous moment when the terrorists entered the theater and were mistaken by the audience for actors. However, that blur seemed less vehemently expressed by the substance of A Tough Line than by its structure—the script reiterated the suspense of life or death, not reality or illusion. Staged bravely across the unwieldy space of the lobby, the work incorporated movement, narrative theater, video, spoke word, and a score of chamber compositions, all of which staked a claim to occupying some foreground of the audience’s attention. The multi-genre production was, in effect, its own chamber composition, carefully paced and coordinated. Vision Into Art’s
[ FIELD TRIPS ] HARRY PARTCH’S OEDIPUS SATURDAY, APRIL 2 2005
Actor Credits: Top left: Daniel Harnett (Creon) Top right: Beth Griffiith (Jocasta) Mark Peters (Oedipus Double) Bottom left: the Hysteria Girls, Left to right Emily Hall, Rachel Bell (leaning to her left), Megan Wyler, Joy Harrell (leaning to her left), Kristen Mahon, Brittany Palmer. Performance Photos: Mike Peters Bottom right: Harry Partch
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Eight Philadelphiaarea music leaders traveled with PMP’s staff to Montclair State University’s Alexander Kasser Theater for a performance of Harry Partch’s Oedipus, produced by the Ridge Theater. Montclair State has a special relationship with Partch, a “maverick composer” and cultural outlier who rejected the Western twelve-tone scale in favor of a forty-three-tone microtonal scale he developed using Pythagorean theory. Alex Ross contributed an excellent and helpful review to the April New Yorker on Partch, explaining, “Since the early nineteenth century, Western music has been tuned according to the equal-temperament system, which adjusts the neat Greek ratios [of elemental harmony] in order to create a standardized scale. Partch wanted to restore the eerie ‘rightness’ of the old tunings.” In order to make music based on this new scale, Partch invented a number of instruments, including both adaptations of traditional instruments and more poetic constructions such as the Cloud-Chamber Bowls and the Marimba Eroica. Montclair State now houses this “Instru-
mentarium,” as it is collectively known, under the auspices of composer Dean Drummond and his Newband, who also performed the work (while wearing hospital scrubs). While the instruments are their own delight, the complexity and strangeness of the music, as well as the oblique staging and video projections of the work of the Ridge Theater team (Bob McGrath, director; Laurie Olinder, visual design; Bill Morrison, film), pile one referential layer upon another, an overwhelming interpretive task for a first hearing. Appropriately enough, Sigmund Freud, played by David Ronis, appears as “Spokesman” to narrate this drama. The other performers, played by Robert Osborne in the title role, Beth Griffith as Jocasta, Daniel Keeling as Tiresias, and a smattering of gratuitously tartish chorus girls, offered a darkly passionate rendering of the age-old woe. Like Ross, I wondered about the characters’ incessant recitative. He discovers, “In fact, [Partch] invented his forty-three-tone scale not to inflict another system on the world but to allow a new style of vocal setting that followed the contours of the speaking voice.” Specifically, Partch modeled his work on William Butler Yeats’ adaptation of the play, and his vocal lines on the poet’s lyrical reading voice, tuned to the melody of musical speech.
co-founders, Paola Balsamo Prestini and Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, are after all both composers. With a team of promising artists, Prestini and Kroll-Rosenbaum fashioned a passionate statement on terrorism, a negative image of their cooperative creativity.
CHAPLINOPERAS TUESDAY, MAY 24, 2005
In the Rose Theater of Jazz at Lincoln Center, PMP staff and a group of area music professionals attended a performance of Benedict Mason’s ChaplinOperas, performed by the Ensemble Intercontemporain with Jonathan Nott conducting and Della Jones, mezzo-soprano, and Richard Stuart, bass-baritone, as soloists. Mason’s work accompanies three of Charlie Chaplin’s brilliant silent films, Easy Street, The Immigrant, and The Adventurer, all of which were filmed in 1917. Much of the audience on this Tuesday evening seemed familiar with the Chaplin films, laughter rising frequently in the hall. Mason’s compositions are equally playful and funny, choosing an “anti-realist” approach that treats the music as an additional character, rather than as background. He seems to be channeling James Joyce in the libretto, part onomatopoetic nonsense, part surrealist stream of consciousness, a kind of aural slapstick that alternately props up and pulls the rug out from under the visual narrative. It invents its own subplots and incorporates references to contemporary Britain. The libretto is visually compelling, as well, set in two columns down the page, volleying between verse and prose. The
Adventurer’s “Maltreated Samba” goes: comb tongue click wap wap wapwapwap wap wapwap Wa bup pop ba wah wap wap wapwap (thirties dancing mistress): very good my dear now flap hop shuffle two there’s a good girl. (drunken, crooning, out of time) (Chicago again): One notorious madam would tease small men with pistacchio and blueberry ice cream dispensers hidden in her cleavage. The members of Ensemble Intercontemporain seemed to be having a good time, reveling in the noise of megaphone and kazoos, credit cards and sirens, vocal soloists trying their hand at conducting. However, things never got out of hand, never overwhelmed or superceded the accompanying film. Chaplin, in his way, remained the star of the show, his cat and mouse games still fresh with foolish cunning. PMP 43