Madame Freedom, @DJSpooky, and App Art

Some scattered thoughts—untimely on one week’s delay—seem due for an unusually rich evening of contemporary multimedia at the Freer Gallery.  On November 4, DC native Paul D. Miller (marquee name:  DJ Spooky) performed a live music score to accompany the progressive 1956 Korean film Madame Freedom.  No less important than Paul’s legendary remixing innovation on display was the simple importance of revitalizing this cinematic relic of a country undergoing dramatic transformation.  And running parallel to that, Paul’s process raised interesting questions about audience empowerment, or for that matter, the possibility that our idea of an “audience” is evolving into another kind of freedom in the wider example of Björk Gudmundsdottir’s new Biophilia project.

The logistics were wonderfully hybrid:  two classically trained musicians played traditional string instruments, reading from passages of notation, and Paul helmed a buffet table of Macbook, sampling, effects, and—centrally—an iPad.  That last part is the virtual toolbox that invites blurred lines between stage and audience, or (if you will) the creative class and the consumer.  As Paul explained in opening remarks, his free iPad app (millions of downloads and counting) has aims that surpass pro tools for musicians, empowering the casual screen-swiper with cadres of clips to trigger and assemble into music.  The extent to which this engine was integral to the functionality of his Madame Freedom performance was unclear, but no one could suffer the mistake that all those sounds spring forth on-the-fly.  Forever, this is an artform of meticulous studio performances and synthesizer sequences, locked and loaded in a production process you’ll never know.  The subsequent stage, though, of organizing those pastiches to your ear’s pleasure is what the app revolution is all about.  Paul D. Miller has been a key innovator in “remix culture,” hence his moniker DJ Spooky.  A perfect overview of the innovators in this field can be heard in interviews with Paul and his peers from the 2010 documentary Copyright Criminals.

On fast rewind (now, an obsolete tape term!), I have a memory from the mid-’90s of visiting The Juilliard School to see an opera installation by Tod Machover from MIT’s (formerly) groundbreaking Media Lab.  This was a time when electronic music and digital sampling were genuine fresh practices and, to the general audience, a whole bunch of amazing hocus-pocus.  Machover, perceived then as a sage of what-is-to-come (while history proved otherwise, and where-is-he-now), introduced his “opera” with a demonstration of the music controllers he invented back at the Lab, to which he attached the term “virtual reality”—a sexy idea at the time evincing badass gloves and boning up with robots.  He also apologized that he’d fail to incorporate spoken phrases from the audience who earlier whispered into pre-show lobby pods, because the acquisition computer had crashed.  I remember actually seeing that iconic Blue Screen of Death on Windows 95.  Like I said, this was the mid-’90s.

One of his “virtual reality” instruments was a wizard wand thingie that frankly sounded amazing.  As he moved it around—if you need a visual image for this, think Doug Henning on a Theremin—lustrous string timbres climbed in pitch around a modally diatonic pad of accompaniment.  Partly out of jealousy, and partly because I saw myself heroically on the cutting edge of digital sampling at the time (a composer outside those Ivy Leagues), I seized his question-and-answer time with aplomb.  After someone in the audience asked, “Did you make that sound just now?” and he beamed “Yes!”, I tore into a lawyer line of questioning that would later evolve into my sellout profession.  Without now belaboring the details, my Socratic method went from asking:  whether sampled or synthesized, whether triggered or modulated, and whether wet or dry.  The end confession, on full public display, was that his magic wand was basically a start button with a volume control.  At least, that’s the way I phrased it, and he stupidly affirmed.  This would have gone better if he channeled Doug Henning after all, waving his hands and insisting, “The world is full of magic!”

Much has changed since then.  Or has it?  Enter Biophilia.  To start with, I am biased.  For a super long time, with intervening competition, I sort of madly believed that Björk was my intended, with whom I should make music and father children; half-serious or less, er something.  But to be serious now, I still maintain she is consummate as the artist of our time (forgiving even her insufferable music videos that always manage to command automatic praise).  In the spirit of an innocent soul, or a good agnostic, or a good documentary filmmaker, her music manifests receptivity.  She navigates between, say, Olivier Messiaen and Karl Stockhausen for organizing organic sounds, using machines (created by human organisms!), while sticking to our dogma of body rhythms and world cultures where we find fundamental urges.  Her diverse collaborations result in singularly personal works.  She lacks any pretension of avant garde formalism, yet finds no easy place in populism.  Simpler put, it’s no small moment when she emerges every few years, and begins to tour.

Importantly, Biophilia’s essence is no different than her preceding catalogue:  pure music.  You can forget all about her conceptual aspirations toward education and interactivity; what speaks through the music is our human experience—while science is merely the totem.  Among these songs, Virus is a good example of her lyrical meditation on scientific phenomena that speaks just as well to our mysterious emotional urge to seek infection, craving the love of those who might bring hurt but build strength—"like a virus," she sings.  The beautiful thing of this literary tradition is that it combines an infinitely complex thing (microbiologists typically have Ph.Ds) with a universal human unconsciousness.

Clearly, though, Björk was teased with the ability to involve strangers into her creative process, using an Apple app suite available to anyone (except the ana-hipster Android majority:  boo!).  But there’s something interesting about this:  It arises from a position of power.  Rather like Radiohead promising a whole new world of digital music distribution, these models are easiest to pull off by Titans of Industry.

Yet, having strayed so far from Madame Freedom, here’s how that evening went (from my seat’s perspective), as a point of comparison.  Paul’s treatment was wonderfully nuanced.  He followed the lead of the Korean film’s peculiar incorporation of South American music, while his long stretches of silence served the film where they needed to.  Some themes were motivic, and tracked the narrative emotions in a dramatic arc.  Cliches of pentatonic scales and foley cues were nowhere found.  All of this leads to a frankly simplistic conclusion that might seem Debbie Downer upon the fresh promise of empowerment from remix apps:  Always, the result is only as good as the artist.  Historically, new technologies curry that admonition almost on cue, like a lazy rhythm, but history also always proves that whenever technology introduces ability/access/empowerment, at the center you find a cool tool for the production of more art.  It is a healthy suspicion to question critics of these tools:  Are we not, as human beasts, motivated by control?  Creativity tends to threaten establishments.  So the huge irony (even in these words) is that any critique of new tools is suspect, tantamount to evaluating a Picasso canvas with harsh questions about paintbrushes.  Who gives a shit?

There are some concluding things to say about the film Madame Freedom itself.  Personally speaking, around the time when I watched it, my father was stepping off an airplane on return from Seoul.  He first left his Korean homeland in his late teens, which makes every return visit as an adult unfamiliar, with always the same observation, that he can barely recognize the place.  The opposite of that is this:  today’s Koreans, Korean-Americans, and even half-breeds like myself have no concept of what Korea was like just over one-half century ago.  Madame Freedom captured that world in transition.  It shows people hanging around the home wearing Hanboks, not “copy couture” facing West.  It shows houses along dirt roads with sliding doors and rice paper walls, not high-rises with stenciled addresses.  And at the center of the film, it shows women breaking free from domestic restraints, smoking and dancing, venturing into business, and having affairs.  From today’s perspective, the modern social conscience has a boilerplate instinct that venerates Madame Freedom on cue, if only it glorifies progressivism, and it mourns the fate of women who suffered along the way.

But it’s not so simple.  That the film was ahead of its time and depicted broken social mores is beyond reproach.  That its first audiences (or even its filmmakers) were cheering for the women, though, is not so certain.  I am just as prepared to believe that the film channels Puccini’s scenario of Butterfly’s boy waving an American flag while she kills herself.  Two scenes in particular resonate here.  At the depth of damage in Seon-yeoung’s marriage to Professor Jang, when she finally begins to communicate her unhappiness, she sits in front of a mirror and hastily starts applying make-up, threatening her husband in some sense that this new kind of beauty (with all its Western dogma on how to paint faces) will shift the balance of power.  Another scene:  when she calls out Professor Jang for flirting and fawning over a younger woman as he teaches grammar lessons, Seon-yeoung finds the gift he got in return, and berates it for being cheap, inadequate, low-class.  These small moments of conflict were strangely prophetic in 1956.  They continue to resonate uniquely among Asians today, as nearby as those first, second, and third generation immigrants who live among us—whom we marry, whom we go to school with, whom we might see fulfilling terrible stereotypes of brand-obsessed shoppers with counterfeit handbags, and a desperation to assimilate exclusively into upwardly mobile circles and professions.  I can’t easily explain why these ungraceful transitions seem the most severe in Asian culture—around more universal truths, that consumerism, family neglect and sexual affairs are poisonous—but the way that Madame Freedom foretells it all is incredibly compelling.  Paul D. Miller’s great contribution, through his modest and nuanced score, is to reinvigorate the film for modern audiences.

The Castleton Festival

Lorin Maazel (photo by Chris Lee)

Well beyond my understanding or appreciation, classical music maintains a lasting tradition of summer festivals motivated mostly for the cultivation of emerging artists.  We think readily of examples named Tanglewood and Aspen, seeing them on the biographies of all major concert artists as rites of passage to supplement their formal conservatory educations.  The incidental fruit of this tradition is its public’s access to these talents on display for an off-season diversion away from city sprawl.  In the Washington, D.C. area, sadly Wolf Trap never quite cuts it.  Laudable as its opera program for young artists may be, the productions are flanked by a scattered season of pulpy programming (lately more than ever).  This pop pageant violates the spirit of summer sojourn—nothing new is being “tried out” in the fresh outdoors of this otherwise precious woodsy getaway; merely old standards and revivals from tried and true (and old-aged) acts.  Wolf Trap is no Spoleto, let alone Ojai or even Ravinia.

Tiresome as that complaint may be, it aims merely to stage the warm welcome for Lorin and Dietlinde Turban Maazel’s Castleton Festival—now concluding its third year in youth.  An expansion of their longer-lasting Châteauville Foundation (and literally, of their farmhouse), the Festival was founded around the time when Maestro Maazel concluded his appointment as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic.  Centered in the Piedmont region of rural Virginia, the Festival expanded this year for the first time to an outer suburb of Washington, at the new Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas.  An architectural triumph (while less successful on the inside), the Hylton Center is not just easier accessible to its nearest major market, but also…has good HVAC (compared to the Festival Tent on the farm), and credible acoustics.  Moreover, the Maazels are expanding the reach of their Festival in its critical infancy.

For three consecutive Thursdays there, the Castleton Festival has delivered, first, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, then Puccini’s Il Trittico (minus one), and concludes tomorrow with a variety show sort of thing that rounds up American music to commemorate the sesquicentennial of Bull Run.

Less interested in the bookending Americana, I was thoroughly rewarded with the Puccini one-acts.  Il Trittico is a marvel in Puccini’s opus.  Giacomo’s aficionados readily swoon at the mere mention of his operatic triptych, which moves from a love triangle to a miracle play to a riotous farce.  Sadly, it is rarely performed in whole (as intended), owing to a contemporary estimation of audiences’ attention spans.  First-to-go, usually, is Suor Angelica, though the Festival gave it (along with the others) their full due at the farm last year.  For its Manassas appearance, Il Trittico delivered Il Tabarro and Gianni Schicchi with mostly the same casts from 2010.

Thinking of Il Tabarro in particular that started the July 14 program, you have in this one-act opera arguably the pinnacle of Puccini’s mastery.  Compared to Puccini’s larger, evening-length works wherein the composer needed to contend with complex and epic literary narratives, each from Il Trittico is uncompromising musical perfection.  Il Tabarro, for all its melodrama, has some of the most wrenching passages of "pure" music that Puccini ever wrote.  Freed from set-piece villainry (that we can call, for need of a name, Franco Zeffirelli) and ambitions of scale, these melodic lines carry a primacy unlike, say, Tosca that hems and haws around its outsize characters and narratives.  Remembering especially the searing duet between Giorgetta and Michele, of a husband wondering when he lost the affection of his wife, Puccini's delicate mastery between emotional heft and restraint is absolute.  And Jessica Klein delivered these moments with expert nuance, while the particular surprise came in Andrew Stuckey’s performance that poured open affection after a preceding dammed-up countenance.  Il Tabarro certainly devolves into a rather old-world plot of murderous jealousy, and much screaming at the end, but at its center you can see and hear a certain timelessness, compact and true, about the agonies of lost dreams and points of decision in a marriage.

After all that, Gianni Schicchi is a 180-degree turn into drop-dead comedy, literally.  Based upon a situational comedy of squabbling goofs trying to defraud a freshly decedent estate, Gianni Schicchi is a total hoot.  It ranks among Falstaff, even much from Mozart, as a rare kind of laugh-until-it-hurts comedic spectacle.  Interestingly, its central show-stopper “O mio babbino caro,” so persistently excerpted in recitals for all its lush prettiness, is among the most reliably abused musical passages ever.  Out of context especially, but sometimes even inside the opera, Lauretta usually swoons with virgin ambition and teary whimpering, when the moment actually calls for farce.  “O mio babbino caro” is supposed to be sung flirty, manipulatively, and cow-towing to the back row of the auditorium.  For the Castleton Festival, Joyce El-Khoury really got it right, and for me, perhaps better than I’ve ever seen.  (Staged using modern dress for these Italian caricatures, I even dare say that the production designer was channeling Snooki.)  As Washingtonians, we had the rare opportunity to attend Gianni Schicchi at the Washington National Opera in 2007—not quite this good.

All the same, you can’t blame anyone for interpretive thriving within the sensuality of Puccini’s score.  Almost lackadaisically, the composer burns up some of the most gorgeous themes from his whole lifetime for the sake of slapstick.  Rinuccio’s paeans to Florence can easily arouse salutes to betray our faraway Yankee land, but Puccini is playing for laughs.  That effortlessness, or even cockiness, is punk rock.  At risk of committing hyperbole in saying so, Gianni Schicchi might be one of the greatest operas of all time, thereby timeless.

And this goes to the virtue of short-form opera altogether.  As I’ve crowed previously, short operas (which are usually chamber operas) deserve much more serious attention, difficult as they may be for programming into conventional subscription seasons.  Speaking personally, from the first time I heard the first notes of perpetual motion sprung from its waltzing overture, Leoš Janáček’s Osud (“Destiny”) has held the mantle for me above the whole operatic repertoire, no-matter-whose and however long.  Osud runs about an hour.  No one performs it.  Musicologists pass it by for extolling Jenůfa, and the Czech’s other evening-length works; but at least for me, Osud is unsurpassed.

As the third Castleton Festival concludes tomorrow at the Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas, with a variety concert featuring Denyce Graves, and lastly this weekend back on the farm, one hopes that Castleton, and the Châteauville Foundation, may long out-live its founders.  As ornery as it may have seemed many years ago for our brightest lights in classical music to convene at a Colorado ski resort, rural Virginia easily should lead us through centuries of rich tradition, judging by the successful launch of this wonderful new Festival.

With unusual creative skill on a for-hire promotional piece, someone (unnamed!) made a moving documentary portrait that is worth every minute of your time for its quarter-hour running time:

The Tree of Life

Recent days have seen dewy praise sprinkled onto The Tree of Life, which releases today in Washington after its domestic debut last weekend in New York and Los Angeles.  People compulsively refer to the film as the singular vision of one auteur:  an opposite of prolific, and famously reclusive.  It is a film by Terrence Malick™, and stories about the film are mostly about Terrence Malick, along with his Golden Palm trophy at Cannes after that crazy guy got banned from the festival.

But what is the actual film about?

Here are the bits and pieces.  It is by nature symphonic, heaving instrumental music to accompany its spare narratives and idiomatic visual meditations.  Simply, it is some sort of wordless “classical music video” scored with narrative interludes.  So we get a persistent line-up of mostly contemporary composers, in the post-romantic and modernist styles (still tonal) to be found in François Couperin, Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms, Bedrich Smetana, Ottorino Respighi, the Gustavs Holst-and-Mahler, John Tavener, Giya Kancheli, Henryk Górecki, and some more obscure Eastern Europeans of today.  These are mostly lions of the repertoire we call “classical music,” and weekly you can see a few hundred people—regular patrons—shuffling into the Kennedy Center who crave these delights.  The headcount is so miniscule for a region five million large, that it becomes statistically insignificant to represent our cultural priorities.  Classical music, as a passion on the level of intramural sports, bridge night, must-see-TV, scrapbooking, bar-hopping, or gardening, is nearly dead among us.

But thinking again of the music itself—the very leaves on this Tree of Life—there is something else going on, and it isn’t a party.  Nearly every note of every chosen composition is sacred.  The sound world is mostly choral, then some pipe organ.  Also:  these are not timbres to evince a universal spirit of world religions.  These are basically the melodic incarnations of Christianity, through the (recent) ages.  In other words, you will find very few four-part choral harmonies and organ pipes outside that faith tradition.  (Notably, Werner Herzog similarly fills his recent Cave of Forgotten Dreams with choral and pipe organ music in the style of eastern orthodoxy, for his similar agenda to explore humanity's prehistoric yearning for the divine.)

So we have the gardener (who is the artist); the tree itself; and its leaves.  Thinking then of the roots, there is one last thing, and it is obvious:  Terrence Malick has written a prayer, to a specific God.  These are the bits and pieces of The Tree of Life.  Everything else is dressing.  It is not a complicated film.

If you can find that conclusion in any other published or blogged review worldwide, please let me know.

All this exposition may seem tedious, even needlessly Socratic, but my facetiousness really is my curiosity at political correctness.  From celebrity stud Brad Pitt’s in absentia logline about vague “spirituality,” to professional critics’ desperate avoidance of personalizing their views on organized religion, what might have been most refreshing is a response to match my sense of what really goes on in private conversations.  I would have liked to hear from, and to read from, the Nietzscheans among us who honesty say what they mean:  That God is dead, or anyway, that Terrence Malick makes pretty pictures but it’s time to grow out of the fairy tales.  And:  that a whole lot of good people—we’re all good!—get ruined by the pious moralism to be found alone in organized religion.

I should detour for a moment, and explain myself.  In my bias, Terrence Malick belongs to a sort of Holy Trinity of film auteurs, alongside Martin Scorsese and Lars von Trier.  Old Martin Luther, known for saying something similar to this, would easily observe that these are men who “work out their faith with fear and trembling.”  Their behavior coincides with an axiom in creative expression—most everyone agrees on this, while usually from a distance—that people with obsessions produce great art.  And, religion is the mother of them all.  Even if sex is the stronger one, things get especially explosive whenever artists combine the two.

If Terrence Malick is haunted by childhood, and Martin Scorsese is scarred by mean streets, then Lars von Trier is simply an egocentric provocateur.  Or so you would think, from his dumb behavior at Cannes.  But even the Dane is spending most of his life looking upward.  There is a vital shot in Antichrist that abruptly jerks our view away from the forest cabin, and into the Heavens above.  I often think of that anomalous cinematography when I ponder his obsessions.  At the climax of Dogville, a badly wronged woman's father shows up to demolish a sort of American Sodom and Gomorrah.  And now, true to form, Melancholia is his apocalyptic vision of planets colliding, from above.  Fear and trembling.  God the Father.

Martin Scorsese seems to have planted a crucifixion in every movie he’s ever made.  He is a Catholic who cannot escape its iconography, while anti-Catholic for being obsessed with elusive Protestant grace (partly owing to his Calvinist foil Paul Schrader).  When Scorsese’s realization of Silence by Shusaku Endo goes into release next year, he will be back in form.  All those preceding mobsters are rogue disciples in his world.  God the Son.

Terrence Malick seems interested, more than anything else, in grace—not just its prettiness, but our desperation for it.  God the Spirit.

And that is the key to watching The Tree of Life.  When I saw the film in New York, no less in a lowertown theater of twentysomethings-at-large, the chatter I heard tended toward one idea:  It must have been awful growing up in the 1950s.  Whether because they saw divorce happen in their own homes, or because it’s just what they think, “that woman should have just left him.”  It is, of course, the contemporary solution.  You will understand their judgment when you see the film.

Malick does something bold at the end of the film.  It doesn’t work.  The great flaw of cognitive geniuses is that they often fail at navigating clichés, because they haven’t wasted a single breath paying attention to them.  (Malick famously served as professor of philosophy at M.I.T., while his doctoral thesis was on the existentialist Martin Heidegger.)  So, when he lets loose those clichés, even if by coincidence, they may ruin a whole scene, or even the impression of the whole film.  The Tree of Life resolves its narrative on a mystical, scenic plain where all the characters from the film converge.  It is presumably Heaven, and everyone is in sharp focus, naturally lit, nicely robed, and hugging each other.  This is just the kind of material that Trey Parker and Matt Stone took to Broadway.  It looks like a fundraising commercial for admittance privileges to a tabernacle.

Still, it is a philosophically concise scene, far from cheap “spirituality.”  Whether this scene is fantasy, or real (relating to your own faith when you watch it), you do get an argument for grace.  You see that between people, tolerance—which varies through life anywhere and anytime, from the cruel to the tolerable—may find a happy end.  This is a peculiar instinct we have as animals, weirdly found the most in historically oppressed societies:  That the worse the injustice, the greater the yearning for grace—not animal justice.  This theme is easiest for an existentialist like Malick to propose, who might say that justice is a pyrrhic victory anyway because “life is but a dream” of our own.  Indeed, the heart of the reform brought by the Messiah whom Christians call their own, was to defy the expectation that pure justice is even possible in this world of warring animals, where love alone can save us...at least while we live, as mystics say, "in this period of waiting."

From even his first film Badlands, Malick regularly cuts away to several species of animals, usually one killing another, and you might find this awkward around his otherwise conventional scenes of character dialogue.  But it is clearly part of his thematic design, repeated in Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World, and now this.

To say that Malick has redefined the language of cinema is no exaggeration.  Most of his narrative exposition is wordless.  This is, simply, how we live.  We do not reveal how we feel freely, and we define ourselves by what we do much more than by what we think (and say).  Perhaps more importantly—and this is ironic, because Malick is ostracized for slow pacing—there is a liberating economy of words in Malick’s wordless visual narratives.  Conventional screenwriters may fill a whole page with dialogue meant to convey simply one revealing thing about a character—yet, one wordless action, combined with nuances of body language and movement, can make a richer case in far less time.  There is a heartbreaking scene in The Tree of Life:  Between turning pages for his father playing Bach on a pipe organ, the son gazes on his father with a richness that implies—using no words at all—a combination of sympathy, fear, admiration, awe at the music, and a melancholy awareness of the real adult possibility that dreams can die a long, slow death.

The response to The Tree of Life has been unanimously positive, you would think.  That’s not necessarily what I picked up on, in that lowertown twentysomething-at-large theater I mentioned, where the end credits rolled to a collective groan.  Importantly, too, if Malick’s aesthetic universe held in such momentary high esteem should really remain the walled-in province of formal concert halls and churches, I need to remain skeptical of these “spiritual” plaudits—because I really go to those places, and I’m not seeing their faces.  For the moment, though, I’ll see wisdom in the value to underestimate.  As The Tree of Life opens theatrically, and reaches an expanding audience of receptive minds, something might take root.

Terrence Malick always selects one repertoire piece to serve as a central motif in each of his films, from Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question in The Thin Red Line, to the second movement of Mozart's 23rd Piano Concerto in The New World. Central to The Tree of Life is a piano adaptation from Les barricades mystérieuses by François Couperin.

Urban Arias: Glory Denied

Last year during the opening weekend festivities of Artisphere, I wrote about the surprise arrival of a new opera company in Washington called Urban Arias.  “Surprise” is a relative term, because we imagine ourselves to live in a city that ranks among the world’s richest in terms of access to culture, and even pools of talent.  But we cannot underestimate the scarcity of accomplished opera here, moreso chamber opera which arguably never existed.  Much bemoaned at this blog, the Washington National Opera is just about the only game in town, a fine company that -- while utterly conservative -- also delivers reliably competent runs through the core repertory of safe standard fare on a revolving basis, occasionally risking offense to its overwhelmingly classical audience with contemporary works by living composers.  But the heart of this dilemma always has been scale, more than substance; large institutions simply never can be counted upon for taking risks (well within their rights, and little to weigh upon their consciences).  The saving grace for any chamber opera by a living composer is some abundance of small companies that might not, even taken together, outsize the major institution(s).  For example, some so-called “opera aficionados” here crave more than just the now-abbreviated five productions per year at the Kennedy Center.  Consider, too, that the smaller scale of chamber opera (and the likely more immediate relevance of contemporary works to a younger audience) holds the most promise for bringing new “aficionados” into a love for the medium.  In some sense too, the law of averages can do much good -- abundant opportunities to experience diverse works of art is a much better situation than…well, monopoly power.  As an interesting counterpoint, last Tuesday the Czech Embassy screened a filmed performance of the chamber opera Tomorrow There Will Be... about their martyred national hero Milada Horáková, and when I discussed the work afterward with composer Ales Brezina, he conveyed the idea that even back home, audiences were tentative approaching the chamber opera format -- this, even in the Old Country where opera on the whole thrives better than for Yanks.  But Brezina testified to the unique intimacy afforded from chamber opera, and in fact has declined offers to stage his opera in larger houses.

As an interlude to those thoughts, I’m writing these next words (the day after the overall point of this piece) into a netbook from the balcony of a Washington Chorus concert dedicated completely to new works by Elena Ruehr, and I’m waiting for the music to start.  The music director has arrived about five minutes late to an awkwardly silent room, only to launch into a long discourse about new music that begins with something to the effect of, “wow, a whole concert of new music, poor you!”  And having said that -- framing the tired idea that new music always defaults to its audience’s tolerant generosity -- he goes into an opposite, winded lecture about how new music is important (mostly talking about himself).  About twenty minutes later, the music actually starts.  And it’s pretty schmaltzy stuff, easier to hear than the mean average of new works that strain for atonality, but lacking musically narrative structure and sounding ponderous, rather like a line-up of fanfares.  The point of these comments is not to bag on the concert -- it was, after all, a competent performance of a talented composer’s work -- but here you have an example familiar to Washingtonians, even embraced by them, of inflating the broadest of categories (whether race, sexuality, gender or artistic style) in a way designed to promote it, but ultimately subverting it:  the masses, for all their legendary skimming, know better than to confuse generality with quality.  Audiences do not merely donate good will to a work of art in the sense of tolerating the newness because it is new.  Rather, they like something if it’s likeable, and that’s that.  No one likes, or likes to admit that they like, a creative act because of its category.  Imagine, if you will:  a hardcore punk act bombs at the 9:30 Club, but a tweedy intellectual steps out to lecture the liquored up audience about how they should support the creation of new music anyway.  That’s inconceivable.  Why not elsewhere?

Thinking of all that as a palate-cleanser, the point of the moment is to extol Tom Cipullo’s deeply personal opera Glory Denied, featured in the inaugural festival of Urban Arias.  Glory Denied happens to be a work of our time; of special meaning to where we live at the seat of Federal government which dispatches soldiers to war.  It engages its audience in tonal melodies, intellectual substance, emotional drama, and a concise narrative arc.  It holds its own against the greatest of the classical repertoire, while helping to redefine it at the rarer scale of chamber opera.

Playing for three more performances through April 10 in Artisphere’s Black Box Theatre, Cipullo’s compositional style is chromatically complex only to the extent of its design to intensify a fundamentally lyrical score.  Simpler put, he alternates his singers between beautiful and despairing lines that make complete sense in the dramatic whole.  As a composer, he must be gratified that Urban Arias gives his score loving attention, beginning with Robert Wood’s nuanced conducting.  The four-singer cast is top-rate, headlined by the extraordinary talent of Michael Chioldi, who will sing the role of Lucia's Enrico next season with the Washington National Opera.  (It is an interesting coincidence that Chioldi also recently sang the title role in Long Beach Opera's production of John Adams' Nixon in China, another similarly fearless work for tackling a politicized subject, in this medium better known for tavern drinking scenes and hilariously prolonged death sequences.)  No less impressive in this production is the assembled chamber ensemble, especially the virtuosic piano backbone of Sophia Kim Cook.  The scenic design, too, is expertly devised using appropriately minimal set pieces, complemented with video projections of archival footage largely meant to evoke the artifice of family photographs that serve a sentimental, not documentary, function.  As often happens in the attempt to incorporate video with theatre craft, though, these diverse source materials line up onscreen in discontinuity, a mostly stylistic problem (that could have been cured by careful color-grading, or more simply just tamping the entire timeline to black-and-white).  As a supplement to the main front screen, projection designer Kevin Frech also creates a video floor from a ceiling projection that sparingly but effectively adds a less representational atmosphere, at key moments in the narrative.

Based upon the same-named book by Tom Philpott, Glory Denied is a morally complex opera that ultimately dignifies its subject, of suffering military men and women, by avoiding easy outcomes.  (Compare that, for example, to the cheap rage of The Tillman Story.)  Cipullo cleverly devises the two-person drama into four characters, who represent the younger and older versions of Thompson and Alice.  We see the longing and the optimism of the young couple unfolding just as surely as we watch the later unraveling of their relationship.  (Notably, film director Terrence Malick masterfully explored this dichotomy between idealized memory, and heartbreaking truth, using his idiomatic visual poeticism in The Thin Red Line.)  One effect of this antiphony is that our sympathies are equally drawn to the before and the after -- an important device for clarifying (ironically) the moral ambiguity of the Vietnam War era.  Cipullo’s execution in this way is deft:  after a challenging first half of the opera that begs for clean songwork, an aria finally arrives that is probably the most lush and beautiful of the evening, when Alice sings something to the effect of, “After I’ve had my say…”  She is warning her husband, when he has returned after nearly a decade away, that things have changed -- that she has betrayed him.  The outrage that Thompson feels is so much larger than that betrayal; in the opera’s most powerfully terse passage, Chioldi sings with his thundering baritone of the way that the world has changed since he left.  It is a litany of complaints that seems at first like a script of Conservative talking points; and yet, it might only sound that way to this majority society so slowly desensitized to the erosion of one thing and another over a decade of American life.  The opera poses this question, of who has the better insight into truth (past a poisonous relativism that defines our hyper-democratized culture), between the one who slowly tolerates this erosion, and the one whose view of society suspends for nearly a decade, expecting that nothing really changes.  And thus, in this way, Glory Denied goes to the heart of one timeless dilemma for veterans, who return from war to a different country than the one they left, in sacrifice to it.  There is a moment in the opera when the wrenching sadness of this dilemma seems to be headed for a clean reconciliation, when Thompson tenderly offers forgiveness to Alyce for leaving him while away.  In a pitch-perfect twist, she stands him down with bitter cruelty.  Wisely, Cipullo (presumably following Philpott’s lead) ends the opera without redemption for anyone, a crisis amplified by the religious tenor of the final scenes.  (Earlier in the opera, a cerebral setting of the 23rd Psalm anticipates this unresolved yearning for the divine.)  Structurally, there is an unexpected and powerfully serene denouement in the form of a musical interlude, a duet between the pianist and cellist Drew Owen.  After that, we are merely left with the vision of Thompson as a man forever haunted by the past, of falling in love, losing her, and losing himself.  As an interpretive possibility for myself, I like the way that the mystery of the divine might be the one thing left for Thompson.  It intensifies the drama and invites something more than the visceral pointlessness of war.  But we are left to ourselves for that thought, and what we cannot ever escape is the fact that we remain a warring species.  Recently I came across a video via acquaintance in the local filmmaker community that elegantly (if not melodramatically) depicts the solemn dignity of official ceremonies for our lost Marines at Arlington National Cemetery.  Embedded below, it is in service to the daily opportunity we have as Americans to honor the men and women who put their lives on the line, and lose them for our sake.

Olivier Messiaen: Magnum Opuses

On Opening Night of the National Symphony Orchestra's 2010-2011 season, I wrote that the largely stale programming eventually would include one masterwork "worthy of international pilgrimage" for which I would "sit rapt at all three performances."  As of tonight:  one down, one to go, and an excuse for that one in the middle:  I need to hear the composer's other magnum opus somewhere else.  Thankfully, none of this requires international travel; a cab ride will do.

The object of this over-the-top affection is Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie.  It has been something of an obsession for me over the past two years, because of a relatively minor magnum opus of my own called Financial Capital that aims to set the entire 75-minute musical composition to landscape/time-lapse cinematography.  I'm about 30 minutes in, so at this rate I'll be rolling credits in nearly a decade.

People are fond of saying that the work polarizes audiences.  Well, a few things about that.  It runs 80 minutes (or about 75 if anyone follows the score's tempi, ahem), so it tests your patience.  Its lyrical expanse is so ambitious that it either sweeps you away or gets you stuck in the sap.  It uses an early synthesizer called the ondes Martenot, rather like a theremin, that sounds timbre-rich to some and sci-fi-campy to others ("Greetings, Earthlings, we come in peace!").  And for those who require genre categories, this work defies them all.  It is at once lyrical poetry and chromatic mayhem.

Under Christoph Eschenbach's baton, things go a bit slow and studied; yet the interpretive trick to this work (I believe) has always been to temper its dramatic heft with the spirit that always belied the piece:  love of nature.  A well known part of Messiaen's biography is that he daily cherished walks in the forest, for listening to bird song as his muse for the day's composing.  (Björk has mentioned Messiaen as her archetype; I quite agree, thinking of Selma in Lars von Trier's brilliant Dancer in the Dark; or, that Messiaen's birds are Björk's cracking icebergs.)  These nature rhythms need to inform any performance of the Turangalîla-Symphonie, with open tempi even nearing syncopation, especially during the bird calls that occur between piano and orchestra that are structured as loose antiphony.  Similarly, there are critical accelerando passages in the second movement that Eschenbach seemed to overlook.

Backtracking just a little, the evening begins with a pre-intermission presentation by music scholar Joseph Horowitz.  He is joined by the evening's pianist, Cédric Tiberghien, who starts off playing a lovely solo work by Messiaen called La colombe (The Dove).  After Horowitz discusses more of the well-known particulars in the piece, ondes Martenot virtuoso Tristan Murail demonstrates the odd vintage instrument that is his life's passion.  As he explains to some extent, electronic music machines preceding its invention, like the aforementioned theremin, could hit notes but never precisely, and without expressive nuance.  The ondes Martenot adds clavier keys along with a sort of ribbon controller that the player vibrates rapidly, creating the same intuitive tremolo effect that makes the violin sing so intimately human.  Murail joined with Tiberghien to play part of an early sextet that became the beloved pinnacle movement of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, in a fresh arrangement giving economy to the well-known passages.  (Thrash-punk-chamber-music-game-theory maven John Zorn once gave his own interpretation with his band Naked City, throwing electric guitar into the mix.)

All of this goes well, and Horowitz's presenting temperament finely matches the intellectual breadth of the forthcoming work (he resists promising roses), but this is naturally a perceived necessity of compromise:  that audiences need to be coddled before going under the knife.  Leonard Slatkin did it too (speaking from the podium for which he was so well known), and I do have the memory from that first NSO performance -- and others I've seen elsewhere -- of seeing the audience trickle away as the running time grows unbearable.  I saw some of that tonight, but not much, which may or may not be a good thing depending upon the baseline question whether averse patrons lately process this stuff for real, or wait it out loathesome.

Because the Turangalîla-Symphonie is basically a duo concerto for piano, ondes Martenot and orchestra, it requires virtuosic performances, and both soloists deliver.  As an afterthought, though, something really quite horrible happens -- and I'm loathe to mention it because the mere opportunity to hear one competent performance of this work is almost above reproach.  But the man in charge bears all responsibility; and what happens is this:  the damn organ is too loud.  Which is to say, the conductor has balanced volume from his position at the podium, but the speakers for the ondes Martenot (pictured above) send out unfiltered, unenveloped, pure sine waves straight into the audience's ears.  Although this is not something that Eschenbach could have heard from behind the speakers, it is an obvious concern and he should have known better.  I can only imagine how much worse this would have been for the NSO's older demographic, who could be seen variously lurching for their hearing aids to turn down the pain.  In the definitive recording of this work, by contrast, Kent Nagano turns down the ondes Martenot to its proper volume, where its scored role to largely double other instruments simply finds its place.

So I mentioned taking a break from the Turangalîla-Symphonie's three-evening run.  That will be for the whole Quartet for the End of Time that was excerpted at the NSO before intermission, and it will be played Friday, March 11 at 8:00 p.m. in the Library of Congress' Coolidge Auditorium by the Antares chamber music ensemble.  According to the usual routine there, ticketed seats by now are gone, however if you line up an hour or so before "curtain" on a standby basis, you are almost sure to get in.  And if you miss this performance, you can hear the 21st Century Consort play it on April 16.  The Quartet is Messiaen's other magnum opus, at the chamber music scale and written whilst Messiaen was imprisoned by the Nazis.  In this work, Messiaen depicts the New Testament apocalyptic vision of Saint John -- a specific religious reference, quite like everything else Messiaen wrote.  Rather persistently, I find, people try to secularize Messiaen.  By now, it's just something to chuckle at.  (Although not quite on that level, I note that Eschenbach contends in his program notes that "Messiaen's Catholicism is not spiritual in any dogmatic sense.  He seeks possibilities of belief and possibilities of love."  Well, Messiaen believed in all the dogma too, not merely in the possibility, and he famously was organist at Église de la Sainte-Trinité -- a wonderful destination to honor the composer if you should visit Paris -- as he held that post from the age of 23 until his death at age 84.)

Remaining performances of the Turangalîla-Symphonie are Friday and Saturday, March 11 and 12.  Using this special link, you can receive $20.11 tickets to seats in the Orchestra Premium and Orchestra Prime sections that are otherwise as much as $78.  You can also mention Promo Code 58728 over the phone or at the box office to this same effect.

Madama Butterfly

Original poster from 1914 by Adolfo Hohenstein (1854-1928)

We've just returned from Intermission.  Butterfly spots the Abraham Lincoln coming into port.  She has faithfully waited three years for Pinkerton to return, and now believing that he will (for her), she scatters her house with cherry blossoms and high hopes.  The stagehands send up the ship's arrival with a simple silhouette projection, and Puccini's music heads into fanfare mode -- colored as for much of the opera with leitmotivic flair no less persistent than Valhalla's ghosts.  Then, faced with all that irony -- from "O say can you see by the dawn's early light," to Butterfly's ignorant son waving the American flag -- the audience bursts into Pavlovian applause.  It's another night at the opera in Washington, D.C.

Of course, we know that Pinkerton is kind of an asshole, and his arrival is no cause for celebration.  We know that Pinkerton brings along his new wife to demand sole custody of the child he earlier fathered with Butterfly.  And we know that there's a knife, and someone will die, and it ain't no Yankee.

Or do we?  And with that healthy question guiding my thoughts, I go back to the time in my late teens when first I experienced this dramatic work, not only the musical experience but also the high drama, which opera-tes on a different scale than literary or even cinematic fiction.  The dramatic arc of Madama Butterfly builds upon operatic conventions of aria and exposition, ascending into its tight, shocking narrative plateau that goes to blackout before the running time leaves room for wandering.  To remember this impact, without the baggage of having attended a dozen repeats, is the surest way to survey this opera's place as a repertoire masterpiece -- and thus, all the above harrumphing about audience reaction is not so simple.  If Butterfly's original dramatic impact should blanch upon one dozenth showing, what might emerge is this epiphany:  Puccini's masterpiece is highly manipulative, and it still works after all these years.

So yes, the audience cheers.  (During this extended run at the Kennedy Center Opera House, the Washington National Opera is packing seats with new blood, a winning strategy during this stormy time for the company and the economy.)  And having been manipulated that way, the audience willingly joins an artist's architecture designed to arouse an emotional climax.  (I might still maintain that the weird applause especially owes to the fact that The Washingtonian -- not least its pertaining genus of early evening arts patrons -- is programmed to applaud flags and fanfare...)  I make this rather drawn-out case about manipulation in order to propose that the work awkwardly mingles with our contemporary values, and now we only hope that the narrative simply appalls civilized society once her audience reaches the end.  (I've heard on good authority that Washington audiences earlier than mine had affectionately booed Pinkerton for his curtain call, rather like hissing at a vaudeville villain all-in-good-fun.)  This expectation for revulsion comes from several directions.  The Asian community (of which I am half-a-part) struggles with Butterfly's perpetuation of the classical "Oriental" archetype of a devoted wife who disproportionately subjugates.  Indeed, the opera inspired playwright David Henry Hwang in M. Butterfly to subvert the narrative into a gender-bending Broadway play that took Puccini's original snarkiness against Western repression to a whole new level of comeuppance.  Asians on the other hand cannot avoid the tragic admission that Butterfly's extreme devotion-unto-death, which seems insane, actually represents something of a crown jewel in the surviving Asian society aesthetic; from outside that culture, you might perceive it from watching a recent abundance of romantic comedy imports (one niche that Korea in particular has owned in recent years).  Ron Daniels' expert stage direction here expertly depicts Butterfly's obscene modesty as she stands behind a screen, unlatching just a panel or two for peeking into her moment of deliverance, just enough to preserve the heroism of Pinkerton's imagined homecoming.

From another direction, Butterfly strikes the American audience as suspiciously disparaging against Yanks.  Again, our national anthem functions here as an inglorious leitmotif, coming from a climate of Italian nationalism at a time when I cannot say they were on the right track either (fascism had almost arrived).  Indeed, if you should focus on the original 1914 poster at the top of this page, you may notice that Butterfly's son is waving a U.S. flag as his own mother kills herself.  (Many subsequent productions, and several I have seen, used this archetype.)  The ironic message cannot be lost on anyone, and is likely to be Puccini's contemporaneous vision as his society confronted all the wondrous fussing about a New World's greatness from within Italy's old world of richer history.

The Washington National Opera has inherited this production from San Francisco, and it ranks among the more conservative stagings we have seen (alongside cinematic adaptations like the Martin Scorsese production at left).  As recently as a couple of seasons ago, we were given a rather weird production, itself a repeat of the same production just a few seasons prior.  If memory serves, there was a surrealist wall of numerous dismembered hands reaching into urns and sprinkling cherry blossom petals onto a minimalist stage.  Something like that.  (And, rather derivative of Cocteau's visions in La Belle et la Bête.)  I also recall imaginary reflecting pools around which stage movement got blocked, until at some point the careful suspension of disbelief turned into "aw screw it," and unintended miracles of walking on water ensued.  Again, something like that.

Here, you get period costuming, and much use of sliding screen doors all across the set, and a peculiar burka-like hiding of Butterfly's butlers.  Of course, the big payoff in Butterfly -- the pinnacle moment so endemic to Puccini and so raptly anticipated (rather like The Three Tenors hauling through their third consecutive damn encore of "Nessun Dorma") -- is the sunset that leads into the Intermezzo between Acts II and III.  It might be the most gorgeous orchestral passage of Puccini's whole opus, and this production serves it best at its end:  The stagehands send up a silhouette of Japan's rising sun flag.  It is the emblem of Japan's imperial military, and it adds nuance to this complicated mix of nationalistic irony and old-meets-new.  Most of all, it heads off a finely tuned third act that diverts the audience into wrenching empathy -- bolstered no less by the preceding romance, and prettiness, and ironic fanfare.

In the Washington National Opera's longest run ever, and probably the longest run of any opera locally, this production continues through March 19.

The company has generously donated a pair of free tickets to DC Arts Beat as a gift to one reader and his/her guest.  The prize is a voucher that can be redeemed for either the March 14 or March 17 performance.  To enter:  (1) post a link to this page on Twitter, Facebook, or any other blog; and (2) send a simple email to contest@dcartsbeat.com with your name, phone number, and reference to where you posted.  At 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 10, the entrants will be run through this random picker and the winner contacted immediately with the voucher.  Good luck!
 

Nixon in China

Indulgent as this blog may be with solitary insights, its informal aim has been to stick to the Washington scene, to match the implication of this increasingly comical title “DC Arts Beat” (nowadays manifesting the tempo of a dirge).  Yet I’m anxious to break ranks here by invitation of this wonderful rhymed couplet that typifies the masterful poetry of Alice Goodman’s libretto for Nixon in China:

This air agrees with me
Wish we could send some to D.C.

The text, which coincides with the feeling I get every time (these days almost monthly) I visit New York City, is for Richard Nixon after he steps off a staircase that descends from a campy setpiece drop depicting Air Force One.  He has landed in China for his historic visit of 1972, but for the past couple of weeks at the Metropolitan Opera House, he actually has been tenor James Maddalena reprising a role he created almost a quarter century ago.

Among other questions we ask of contemporary opera – quite often, “where is the damned melody?” – there is a prescient one after the test of time, to ask whether a work deserves a place in the so-called operatic canon of company repertoires.  Mind you, most premieres never get a subsequent run, especially after decades of wide neglect.  The reasons for this range from artistic leadership (lately reversed in Peter Gelb’s commitment to operas by living composers, not-so-much-here), to outright rejection.  Much of the latter has been deserved, against the pens of “boomers” who had graduated from the Second Viennese School of tone-row terrorists dominating conservatories for decades and only recently begun to be outdated by tonal successors.  If you care to think about how punk rock gave the middle finger to flower children, imagine that Minimalism as an artistic movement similarly flamed against the structural fraud of its forebears with punishing simplicity.  Two founders from that movement have earned permanence:  Philip Glass and John Adams.  Both are being revived at America’s opera mecca, the Met, some decades after their emergences:  respectively, in Satyagraha and Nixon in China.

As we know from his recent Washington residency, John Adams falls into that great tradition of master composers doubling as maestro conductors.  Saturday evening, I took pilgrimage to New York for this premiere of Nixon in China upon the Met stage, with Adams at the podium.  I had experienced the birth of this work over two decades ago as a relative kid in Los Angeles, hearing fellow surf punk Kent Nagano conduct the original production in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  It left an immediate and overwhelming impression back then:  it dared to be a work of intellectual tableaux on recent events, within an art form that typically finds us suppressing giggles during, say, Rigoletto when that almost-dead daughter revives from her bodybag for one last aria and sings to the back row of the rafters.  Nixon in China also mashed up the patent repetitive style of Philip Glass’ familiar Minimalism/Maximalism with a kind of nostalgic nod to mid-century Big Band, a recurrent style in Adams that he has called his “trickster persona.”  Between those poles, though, the opera is solidly classical in creds:  Adams, surpassing the skills of his Minimalist contemporaries who thrived best in self-serving chamber ensembles, always possessed the Western skill of a master orchestrator, on the level that we know well of, say, Rimsky-Korsakov to Mussorgsky.  (One fine example is Adams' orchestration of American folk songs by Charles Ives.)  Indeed, a pinnacle musical moment arises from Nixon's ballet-within-the-opera, after a passing thunderstorm, that anyone familiar with the score anticipates for its epic beauty.  Around all the surrounding trickster Minimalism, one swears that Wagner’s spirit is haunting the score.  While I'm guilty here of hyperbole, it is absolutely defensible to suggest that this moment is among the greatest in 20th Century opera – yet, at the same time, it is played for laughs.  Despite being a political meditation injected with such smart debate, Nixon is at heart a hoot of an opera.  Saturday, it seemed that some of the humor was lost on the audience, but when Chou En-lai proposes a toast with eloquent poetic ruminations – only to be met with Tricky Dick saying in turn, “Never have I so enjoyed a dinner…outside America!” – we are brought to the same embarrassed laughter as recently we found in our 41st President.

Indeed, there is a masterful scene early in the opera that for me had always stood above the rest, exemplifying the way that Nixon manages to arouse good comedy and drama out of a physically static philosophical debate.  Seated in front of a not ironically minimalist bookshelf setpiece, Nixon and Mao Tse-tung debate Capitalism against Communism to the musical accompaniment of faux-clumsy, persistent syncopation, and a sort of Greek/Communist chorus in Mao’s trio of assistants.

Founders come first
Then the profiteers.

It is during this scene that anyone experiencing this quarter-century revival begins to think about the China we thought we knew, and now the presumed dominance of Capitalist China that awaits us.

All said, for its surprising success as a work of theatre, Nixon always suffered a bit during its latter half.  There is a ballet-within-the-opera, brilliantly choreographed by Mark Morris, that nears incomprehensibility when a horny Henry Kissinger camps it up, inciting soldiers to whip a peasant girl to death.  Literally (I believe), audiences reach a point when they are forced to ask, “What the hell is going on?”  (I had pondered a few months ago that the film Mao's Last Dancer smartly depicted this agit-prop art form in an ironically beautiful fulfillment of Madame Mao's perverse vision.)  And then there is the final Act III, which contrasts heavily against the preceding political theatre with its intimate and theatricalistic juxtaposition of the principals settling into bed and ruminating what’s-the-point-of-it-all.  Much of this is Peter Sellars’ doing, an offstage eccentric evangelist for the arts and, less successfully on the job, a scenarist who has a reputation for quite honestly ruining good pieces.  Adams’ subsequent opera The Death of Klinghoffer is a fine example, where the score and narrative were ever more brilliant, but Sellars staged it using puzzlingly dense scaffolding that was more Hollywood Squares than ambitious experimental theatre.  Indeed, documentary filmmaker Penny Woolcock transformed Klinghoffer through her masterful film version; and for Adams’ next opera Doctor Atomic, she was called upon to get it right for the Met debut after Sellars did his thing for the world premiere in San Francisco.

The larger fact, though, is that Nixon in China represents the apex of the operatic repertory from the latter half of the 20th Century.  Rather like the surprising irony of Nixon’s legacy itself, the opera has aged well.  Importantly, too, Nixon functions as an artfully historical record of two countries meeting, believed now to be vying for dominance through ever-increasing battles of political, financial and intellectual capital.  And musically, Nixon represents a precious moment in the development of Adams' idiomatic style, when he was a deliberate Minimalist composer pushing that form's infant boundaries with distinctly American assimilation less obvious than the workings of forebears like Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein.  There was a moment that I'll never forget, at the end of Act II's raucous wail, "I Am the Wife of Mao Tse-tung," when Adams led the orchestra into his thunderous cadence and confronted the ensuing aural decay with an expression of sheer awe at what he had created.  Upon this, the lights faded into darkness – and that is an image, of this great artist humbled by his art, burned into my memory forever.

"I Am Old and Cannot Sleep" (Russell Braun as Chou En-lai), that concludes the opera
 

Experimental media: Of kisses, ants, bulls, miniatures and waterfalls

“Experimental media” owns a category of art that might simply be miscellaneous, easily outnumbered by the so-called “plastic arts” of painting, sculpture or crafts that do not incorporate literary or musical media, and that fill the majority of our museums.  Similarly, it might be a qualitative term to describe any art evincing experimentation at its core.  The latter idea seems problematic since any in-the-moment creativity bespeaks the principle anyway:  ius naturale could hold that the barest threshold for new (really, “fine”) art is a navigation around clichés, and an ethic to say something new.  Moreover, “experimental media” poses the same quandary as the term “classical music” so often used here:  it references tentative or tested creation unto a moment in time, even if the common aim is timelessness.

These debates become immediate when major works from the medium get revived.  But their roads to revival can be vastly and even needlessly divergent.  This blog essay, as it turns out, begins in New York City and ends back home in Washington, D.C.

The top floor of MOMA currently is filled with a generous helping of films “by” Andy Warhol.  (Those quotation marks are all at once facetious and necessary.)  As you enter the exhibition, the facing wall reflects his milestone film Sleep, which is as simple as that:  a single 16mm movie camera fixed upon a single person who gets a fair night’s sleep (which is to say, the film runs almost six hours, and nothing but its audience happens – a visual equivalent to John Cage’s 4’33” of silence).  What we might call an experiment has lasted for over three decades, and has made its way into introductory academic surveys of art history.  Similarly we do not call Le sacre du printemps an experiment of Igor Stravinsky, but rather a staple in the “classical” music repertory.

The rest of the Warhol exhibition is two stunning spaces:  first, a grand hall of sorts lined all-around with projections of motion portraits, for which the subjects – Allen Ginsberg among them – were asked to stare into a 16mm movie camera for a bracingly awkward and yet powerfully intimate long stretch of time.  After that hall, the exhibition takes you to a black box that screens Kiss in a loop:  simply a tight shot of a couple deep-kissing, whose effect is to make patrons feel so voyeuristic that their inevitable public guard feels creepily asexual in the face of such privately sticky passion.  (A relative genius of our time, R. Luke DuBois, built upon this concept in a work just last year also called Kiss.)  But enough about Andy and his progeny of sorts; what I really mean to write about is a few floors down.

Just as I arrived at MOMA last weekend, the international press had reported that David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly became part of MOMA's permanent collection, in northern exile from the political nightmare of our mid-Atlantic swampland.  After a few hours making my way down to MOMA’s lower floors, the piece showed up adjacent to Laurie Anderson’s legendary old O Superman hand-gesture silhouettes.  As seen in my pictures here, it plays from a modest cathode-ray tube monitor sitting on the ground, paired with another AIDS passion play.

Much has been written about this incident, much of it hysteria.  The temptation is to write and write and write about it (which starts the clock ticking on my musings here), but the most refreshing things to read or hear are sage reactions from veterans in the field (c.f. political activists), who have seen this sort of thing happen before and who understand, as artists, that curators and their kings are not inherently beneficent merely because they work in the poppy fields of art.  The fact that the Smithsonian Institution (note to journalists:  please stop writing “Institute”) is a quasi-public entity certainly complicates this fact, but not much.  It is both a talking point and a truth that quasi-public museums live or die from private subsidy, to such an extent that public subsidy is nearly symbolic.  The fine arts forever navigate this reality in a free market system of supply and demand, which begins with the principle that artists need to make a living.  Therefore the rules of engagement remain, as ever, this rich possibility that a museum or gallery might secure an artist’s work without encumbrance of institutional weeding, since curators of every scale have a better and more localized sense of patrons wanting to see (and buy) the things that they want to show.  As such, autonomy is part of this market that liberates curators and their kings to be responsive – and this might from time to time result in pulling a piece just as surely as their happy decision to exhibit.  Notably, too, controversy-averse curators regularly rejected A Fire in My Belly, who only now express opportunistic outrage.  I reel at two opposing thoughts:  first, this hypocrisy; and second, our post-Yankee perception that arts exhibition is somehow democratic and governmental, inside our false and mounting assumption that public institutions properly act as gatekeepers, rather than fighters-in-case-of-fire.

And to indulge for a moment about the merits of the Wojnarowicz controversy:  The fact that conservative opposition merely drew more attention to the work is an obvious predestination.  Yet, for every hundred eurekas about that, there was something rather opposite to say that never got said.  You might know that the work incorporates Wojnarowicz’s deliberately self-produced impersonation of Christ, crown of thorns and all.  And of course, there is the famous army of ants crawling across a cross that tends to be the work’s excerpted still.  For the niche group who happens to be the majority in America (i.e., Christians), these are uncommon appearances in contemporary art.  At the same moment that it is exploitative, it is explorative.  Even the most careful theological ruminations can easily dignify the searchings of a suffering man who finds resonance in the passion story.  And it cannot be lost on Christians that Christ found no friendship in the organized church during His life.  Importantly, these are severable issues from any Christian’s professed line-in-the-sand for moral clarity, and for moral justice, that can remain solidly and unapologetically orthodox in the exercise of free religion.  Enforcing that upon society is a whole other matter.

I had never seen the complete work.  As I stood watching its imagery unravel, inevitably I winced for most of the time at its gore, homoeroticism, and BDSM.  (It might be abundantly clear from this blog that I am utterly conventional.)  But I started seeing things that bespoke an alignment with my own work, even where each artist has vastly divergent points of view.  Mixed with the foregoing shock imagery, some footage of Spanish bullfighting began to recur.  (The structure of Wojnarowicz’s video work is raw repetition.)  This blood sport, which is a sacramental element of ancient rituals, mystically complements the surrounding religious metaphors of crucifixion – no less, the army of ants crawling across the cross that could equate to ecumenical corruption.  I had gone into much the same thinking space, well before seeing any of this, through a film called El Toro that was to screen in a few days at The Phillips Collection.  After a generous Best of Show award at the Rosebud Film and Video Festival last year, El Toro proceeded to win the 2011 Experimental Media Prize from Washington Project for the Arts this past Thursday.  The whole surprising episode has proven, in me, a testament to the possibility for art to stimulate ruminations on suffering, ritual, faith, and brutality.  But most importantly – and this is really the point – I drew from this convergence at MOMA a vivid understanding (in this visual art world rather new to me) that no good can come from second-guessing an artist’s intentions.  Wojnarowicz was vilified by conservatives for assaulting religious institutions.  Not so fast.  He might very well have had explicit designs to frontally assault every corner of Christendom.  But the curator didn’t say so, and as far as we know, neither did he.  I propose that if he did, perhaps his work would have failed to survive the test of time, to become this thing we call:  a work of art.  What sadly gets lost amidst arts controversies and the pertaining rage is this general truth:  no matter how shocking the result, an artist’s behavior is tenderness, subtlety, humility.  An artist bears witness to deeply personal searching, and invites us to the catharsis of that suffering.  You might on the other hand run into utterly cynical, profiteering, shock-jock artists from time to time.  Or so you think.  And anywise, if that anomaly should cloud our instincts hence when we confront any new work of art, we become the blind following the blind.  Meanwhile, Artists worthy of that name – whether you call them experimental or classical – walk into the light.

And that light, after all the searching, can no less manifest innocent joy.  Such is the case back home in Washington, at her one reliable institution for the presentation of so-called “experimental media”:   the Black Box on the lower floor of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.  Now that Superflex’s McDonald’s restaurant has continuously flooded and drained a thousand times over, in its wake we have Hans Op de Beeck’s Staging Silence.  Set to a perky minimalist music score by Serge Lacroix, the looping 22-minute black-and-white film is a playful pageant of miniature set pieces constantly entering and exiting from one setting to the next, from street scenes to offices to landscapes.  After a Friday Gallery Talk presented by Manuel de Santaren – an enthusiastic collector of the artist who calls him a true Renaissance man – I saw something rare and beautiful happening in the Black Box, a trace of which you can see in this mobile phone photo.  While the older, dare I say monied and educated, patrons spilled into the Black Box after the Gallery Talk, a busload of school children arrived into the same space and sat in front of the screen.  While the council of elders engaged Staging Silence with their cultivated instincts, the children vocally “oohed” and “aahed” at the playful imagery and the percolating music.  For them, this was not a loathsome visit to a contemporary art museum; rather, it was a helluva time.

This medium of moving images can be an elegant bridge across generations, and it need not be merely the province of broadcaster-fed instant gratification.  Peter Greenaway’s recent Last Supper installation at the Park Avenue Armory, stunning but sadly vilified by most of the New York art establishment, is among the latest entries to his passionate (if not pointlessly academic) argument that cinema is dead.  If nothing else, Greenaway’s evangelism is a healthy shot in the arm for advocating arts literacy:  he envisions a world where the same temperament that finds art lovers able to gaze at paintings for long stretches might match a restlessness against narrative cinema that prefers formalistic films in gallery spaces.  At this juncture, the possibilities seem at once endless and young.  Fiona Tan’s exhibition at the Sackler Gallery, which closed this past Friday, is a paramount example of things to come.  Apart from the Rise and Fall film for which the exhibition was named – a profoundly melancholic juxtaposition of youth and old age – one particular work seemed to me incredibly prophetic.  Provenance was a series of six framed video panels showing Tan’s family and friends going about their daily lives, filmed with the highest production values that we associate with major films, yet drawn at a slow and studied pace that befits portraiture.  Inspired by 17th Century Flemish paintings (that aroused my formative memories visiting the Royal Museum in Brussels), I can hardly call the series “experimental.”  After El Toro, I find myself at an interesting crossroads, between conventional career, documentary film, and this indeterminate other area of experimental media.  Whether these things might still converge, or represent a point of decision, is an exciting world of possibility.

Hans Op de Beeck's "Staging Silence" plays in the Hirshhorn Museum's Black Box continuously during open hours through March 27, 2011.  WPA's 2011 Experimental Media Series continues with five further screenings in Baltimore, Washington, Richmond and Philadelphia through April 7, 2011.  Visit WPA's Web site for further information.