![[Animated Future of Opera logo]](images/fut-ani.gif)
Note: Part I has been previously published in Bone Games Winter 1995 issue.
The Future of opera. Who gives a fuck about the future of opera? The music industry has finally purified it of all possible relevance, passing off the shrieking match between Luciano and Placido and that other penguin as the culture of our time. Art used to be a real event; today it is a video. No need to actually confront the bellowing Viking hag in the flesh. No need to contemplate the awful smell that this performance must entail. Nope, it is now TV just like every other important thing in life. I want an opera that I can love, and opera that actually works, an opera that makes a difference for me in my life.
Make no mistake, though. Opera-as-we-know-it is still "legitimate culture," this is the sort of thing that governments feel obliged to pay for. They want the same old crap, the classical stuff, because that art is ridden through and through with their image system and hierarchy of relations. Sit in your chair and listen to this. It is good for you. It is the culture of your people. Here you have a place, and you must sit in it until intermission, even if it means wetting your pants. You are expected to anticipate such a problem, and wear protective undergarments if necessary
.(1)There is still an audience that enjoys this variety of 'discipline.' Not only masochists, they are also proud exhibitionists; they want very much to be seen in the act. They display their privilege, certain that they really know what is going on, desperate to occupy that space in the hall so all the others can see they are in the club. Of course, this situation presents highly fertile ground for humor farming. A friend of mine worked for a while at a theater here in Toronto that periodically hosted opera performances. According to her, the opera audience was distinguished not only by their finely dressed arrogance but also their inability find their seats, embellished by a decided reluctance to be seen to have this difficulty.
(2) They plow on in, sit right down, and insist that someone else must be in the wrong, no matter what the tickets and seat numbers say. My friend quietly enjoyed helping groups of 'connoisseurs' set the tone for their evening by fighting over territory. She didn't have to do anything to get them to put on their display! And, since she knew where the seats were, she always got to play on the winning side. If you want to look good, it is important to have some idea what is actually going on.Dueling penguins, bellowing hags; the bottom line is that whatever image springs to mind, it is of an irrelevancy; a performance of culture lacking totally in interest or appeal for the truly contemporary awareness.
(3) But did opera ever mean anything important? Wagner sure as hell thought it did, and David Littlejohn must agree, having called his collection of essays The Ultimate Art. But Littlejohn is just another fucking critic, and I, as a reformed musicologist, spit on his finely groomed head. Wagner was an artist, and an artist should know art.In The Art-Work of the Future he wrote this:
As man stands to nature, so stands Art to man. When Nature has developed in herself those attributes which included the conditions for the existence of Man, then Man spontaneously evolved. In like manner, as soon as human life had engendered from itself the conditions for the manifestment of Art-work, this too stepped self-begotten into life.
God! What an attitude. This is what I think he's talking about: the appearance of Art (his capital) marks an exponential scale evolutionary breakthrough that occurred when the humans had developed sufficiently to produce it; one of those new age paradigm shift type things. He compares it to the qualitative difference between Nature's unconsciousness and the self awareness that Man (his genderization) brought to existence. This big 'A' Art is, of course, distinguished from mere 'art' or 'music' or 'dancing' - how otherwise could he make a claim of 'extra specialness' for his own product?
In his writing he rambles on about the art and culture of the Greeks, claiming it as the starting point of 'our art of today.' He says "...the Spartan youths learned the nature of the god [Apollo], when by dance and joust they had developed their supple bodies to grace and strength..." Hmmm... A taste for Greek boys, eh? I don't want to read too much into this. Some people like Greek boys; what can I say to that? The 'left hand' of Western culture has always found a way to accommodate what the 'right hand' would consider 'perverse.' One of its most endearing qualities. Anyway, it's the art that is important, right? In his Gesamtkunstwerk (universal art work) he can build his own little perfect world - the Spartan Youth of the imagination magically transformed into shrieking Vikings - all perfectly webbed together with leitmotifs and stuff. Then we can become Musicologists, and find all the Jungian archetypes in it and insist we learned something about our deepest inner nature so that we can go forward, smugly lecturing everyone on human nature and True Culture.
However you end up taking the theory, Wager deserves a listen simply because he did write actual 'art,' and we all know that you can't tell 'art' from Art without hearing it.
Well, I have listened to it; and I just couldn't take it. And I must confess: it was because the music inevitably channeled a terrifying psychic entity to me, and it was The Shrieking Viking Hag. And it isn't just the costuming, it is also the endless, excruciating melodies, the complete lack of earth or grounding, the constant frustration of resolution. This music is a major tease - it just never seems to want you to get what it promises.
They say that there is a kind of transcendental resolution, clarified vision, or some kind of payoff of some sort, if you pay attention to the whole work. Never mind that it might go on for Ten Hours ! Ten Hours of the Viking Hag fighting with her family! Masochists! Masochists! Masochists!
Oh, God. Let me mop up.
Okay. So I don't like Wagner. Does this mean that he has failed it his attempt to make a true Art Work? Well, for me, obviously he has. But perhaps he has done it for his 'Folk,' the people he wrote his stuff to inspire. Here's Wagner now to introduces them:
The "Folk" is the epitome of all those men who feel a common and collective Want . ...only the assuagement of a genuine Need is Necessity; and it is the Folk alone that acts according to Necessity's behests ... Who now are they who belong not to this People? ... All those who feel no Want ... Want , - which shall teach the world to recognize its own true need ; that need which by its very nature admits of satisfaction . ... The Folk will thus fulfill its mission of redemption, the while it satisfies itself and at the like time rescues its won foes. Its procedure will be governed by the instinctive laws of Nature; with the Necessity of elemental forces, will it destroy the bad coherence that alone makes out the conditions of Un-nature's rule... etc.
Hmm.... some sort of innate gang affiliation spiced up with a bit of 'real men know what they want,' and finally, the folk, in all their divine glory, will destroy - yes, destroy - that which they deem un-Folk. There is trouble brewing here.
When Hitler's Nazis brought him into Paris after the surrender, the first place they took him was the Opera house.
(5) Hitler was real tuned in to Wagner. He was Big 'F' Folk all the way (except for his Jewish blood). The opera suited his view of things fine; he could project his ego into those howling creatures, and his heart would swell with pride in the glorious wonder of it all. Mere 'man' would swoon, swept away by the Mighty 'Art-Work' of the Mighty 'Folk.' We had to kill that guy.Now, Hitler may not have been your typical Opera fan. The difference is that he could actually do something with his fantasy fueled megalomania; most of them can't. (Though I suspect that those people you can never talk to at the bank, the ones who make the really stupid policies I want to argue about, I bet they like Opera. They see themselves bellowing away in a Viking costume; they think that would be the coolest way to get things done...)
No, these are not my Folk. But then, what Folk do I have? I'm a suburbanwhitekid. I had the radio, TV, movies. Today I have billions of images, words sounds; everything in the world , all at my disposal.
(6) I went to church, I went to school; I missed the point of that stuff entirely. I have always said, and maintain to this day, that I learned much more from Mysterious Sources than I did from my teachers. I Have No Culture , in the sense that Wagner and Hitler imagined. I have had no coherent culture handed down to me by the institutions of my nation that I respect in any way.(7)Maybe I could build one - I could travel the world, eat strange food, get strange diseases - but in my mind's eye I see the suburbanwhitekid standing there in the dusty road, hot and pissed off, wishing for nothing more than the comfort of his clean bed Back Home. So what is that ? I'm out there in my imaginary world of travel, poor enough to have to stay away from the First World hotels and resorts, and I find that not only is this place bizarrely and frighteningly different from my home, but it is also bizarrely and frighteningly different from the last imaginary place I stayed. I do have some sort of standard reality that I find threatened in the bigger world. Maybe I can stick it out for a while, but a lifetime? No, eventually I'm going to want my Mommie real bad.
The problem is not just that I can't learn everything or get used to everything, it's that I can't understand or believe everything. I have certain foundational experiences that lead me to expect certain behaviors of others, and to react in certain ways when those behavioral expectations are met, or thwarted. Make me eat fried monkey brains (or fucking eggplant ) and I will vomit, at least psychically. Give me that fried up cow disc. Pleeaasseee!!!
Likewise, I will not be able to stomach hereditary class structures, religious proscription of some of my favorite behaviors, etc.
Now, as a reformed ethnomusicologist, I am aware that significant cross cultural experience is possible, and I know it can feel real good. I spent some time (here at the 'University') in an immersion class studying African (specifically Ghanan) dance and music. I learned a lot about some aspects of that culture, and I loved what I saw. Not only that, but I felt comfortable with it. I felt that in some way this was closer to me than the institutions I had been brought up with. My 'culture' had no sense of the body at all; as far as I knew, feeling good in the body (just feeling good for its own sake) was irrelevant (at best) to the authorities who governed my inherited reality. The Ghanans seem to love feeling good, and showing it. My people are cursed with the enthusiasms of the body, must hide it, must not give in to the weakness of the flesh . The Ghanans seem to enjoy corporality.
(8)So here I am - a suburbanwhitekid who despises his inherited 'culture' but who sees in the culture of the anthropological 'other' a reflection of a certain personal inner truth. How can I explain this?
Well, there is no 'Folk.' There is no single ideal anything. Universal Art-Work my ass. Art is not big enough for the universe.
So then: if there is no necessary goal in life, why not just go after what you want? Make up your own gods and rituals and TO HELL WITH CULTURE AND FAMILY VALUES AND RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY AND FUCKING SMUG CULTURE CRITICS, AND TO HELL WITH OPERA.
I'm sure that you all completely agree with me. But before you go off raping and pillaging, I caution you to be sure to find out what you really want. I want some sort of culture, some sort of family values, some sort religion, and a real authority that I actually respect. I want to get along with people, as long as they let me do what I want when it doesn't concern them. And I do want Opera, or something along that line. My Opera would address the world as it is significant to me, not to Wagner. Or Mozart or Bellini. It will not be a universal art because the universe is just too much for me to handle. I want them to tell me about the things that interest me.
So I better get composing eh? Ha! Someone is here to get me off the hook.
Brian Eno writes:
"...Music is actually a contingent combination of sounds whose emotional resonances are entirely dependent on the audience's personal and shared histories as listeners. ... Cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. Their 'value' is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them. ...Brains hear patterns and connections, or certainly seem to try their hardest to. In a sense the function of 'composer' then becomes shared between me (who set the thing in motion) and the listener ( who connects it together mentally).
This gives me a nice warm feeling. I always like to start from my own experience since it is the thing I know best. What is it that I respond to in the 'art' that I find pleasing and useful? What is the nature of that response? Next, By what philosophic/cognitive leap am I able to move from this pure subjectivity to objective notions of culture and 'Art?' What actual existing 'art' can I find that will trace the arc of this leap? Is there anything out there that can become the Opera of the Future? And what kind of future are we talking about anyway? Will we be dancing at the Apocalypse, or descending into some crazed cyberpunk world, with constant and disorienting juxtapositions of terrible banality and overwhelming power and beauty? Will Luciano and the other blowhards be singing the same old tunes hundreds of years from now, as clones owned by their descendants? Will there be knockoffs that you can have in your own home? Your own pet Viking Hag! Won't the neighbors complain?
More to come. Stay in touch.
Back to Part I again or on to Part III
Part II
Zombie Opera. The soundtrack for the Walking Dead. That’s what it is; cold, stiff but it won’t fucking shut up, lie down, and rot away like a respectable corpse. It eats money and talent like politics and taints the magic of music with its pompous arrogance. We all know it. Now I question you: should we just kill it? Sometimes I say yes, and the sooner the better. Think of all the helpless music students we could liberate from the prison of the aria, set free to howl about what they really have up their backside. But then, perhaps all we would have is rock and roll; beer and brawling, and though it is more alive, it is in the end no less stupid.
No; to kill a zombie is simply to finish the evil job of some other perpetrator, and direct struggle with the foundational evil is certainly beyond the scope of our pathetic efforts. Zombie Opera will lurch through what remains of the history of Western civilization, oblivious to irrelevance, gradually fading to deserved obscurity. Our task is to try to understand the Institution of the Walking Dead, and if possible, to wake some of the small ‘z’ zombies from their stupid-trance. This presents an important analytical challenge: we must seek out and expose the foundation of the Zombie arts, and lay bare the empty space where the heart should beat.
All creative processes begin with a vision, evoking a passion to realize the vision and share it with others. For the forerunners and designers of Opera (and for Wagner, as we’ve seen), that vision was the ‘Greek Ideal’.
Opera emerged in the early baroque era, a time when the Greek was the model for the arts, even though there was then (and is now) very little in the way of specific historical knowledge of precisely what Greek music was like, and particularly how artistic performances looked and felt. There is, then, a lot of scope for imaginative elaboration. The emergence of Opera itself is connected to a group of fellows known as the Florentine Camerata, some arty guys who intended to create a performance art modeled on the Greek solo song, which was imagined to be super wonderful in some, well, classical sense. Here it is again; the right way to make art, an opportunity to impose a subjectively defined objective idealization on the practice of music-making. Now words are more important the mere music, the drama is the central point, new rules and procedures are invented, decay and decent into rule bound zombiedom following quickly the birth of vision. ‘Tradition’ is all too often the elevation of the easily understood (and manipulated) to the imaginary status of perfection. The Greek Ideal is reduced in this elevation, made squeaky clean and safe, distant; in essence a set of rules which formulate inquiry and response. The context of art is limited to a cynical cartoon of aesthetic participation, with taste to be learned, elaborated on, and defended in a sort of unwinable chess game with the ‘standard’. Art is Eternal, beyond the individual’s hope to touch it, and the individual’s state of consciousness is restrained to that. Everyone knows they should have an opinion, and since opinion is cheap on the street, to be culturally astute is to be persuasively opinionated.
(1)There is however another notion of the Greek to be explored, not that conjured when names like Plato and Aristotle are lofted over our heads from the academic pulpit. Turn to the back the pages of any big city entertainment weekly. Some ‘escorts’ (read prostitutes) will offer ‘Greek’ service.
Confronting such an offer could be problematic. There are no rules for this; rules are manifest by literate institutions, and what most of us can know of these matters must be gleaned through either the fumbling amateurism of self education, or chaotic initiation with explorers on the fringe of our culture world. There are no expectations really either, because how could you know what to expect? Mommy never told her he might want to put it there, and neither did the Pope. Many people think you should die forever for even thinking about it. But the humans want to have a look, and once the back door to the base brain is open, all sorts of unnamable perversities well up in their imaginations. Zombies begin to stir from their slumber.
The familiar arts of Ancient Greece are all those which have survived the test of time precisely because of the medium in which they reside; stone, ceramic, and recorded language. The whole realm of performance - drama, oral culture, dance, music - is simply not present to us. And then there is the overriding contemporary context of Greek philosophy, which presents a very systematic and logical interpretation of the performing arts. This coupled with our own bias placing the value of the literary over that of performance (and experience) has, in the words of Richard Squires, "...obscured the reality of the early tragic performance, which are best thought of as ‘Gesamtkuntswerk’ - a song, dance, groupings, color and ‘spectacle together’. In contrast to the common image of wooden actors pounding our ponderous verse, the real Greek theater was a passionate exhibition of wild dancing and rhythmic lament."
(2)Now that’s more like it. Gut did you notice that word Gesamtkunt-swerk showed up? Isn’t that the label Wagner hung on his ponderous Viking show? not a lot of ‘wild dancing and rhythmic lament’ there. Passionate exhibition maybe - dark, slow creeping emotionality that comes on like nausea - but this just depresses me. In sleep, the zombie Wagner has mistaken fantasy for ecstasy.
Squires’ article The Meaning of Ecstasy, explores his experience as an actor and how it lead to a theory of the function of ancient Greek theater. Permit me now to offer an extended quotation in which he describes his interpretation of a vivid out-of-body experience he had during a dramatic performance:
I don’t believe in supernatural phenomena, and this experience, ironically enough, has only strengthened my bias against them. It seems more reasonable to assume that the world is a coherent place in which every event is a natural phenomena; to relegate an event to the supernatural is to make it in some sense unreal. So when I seek an explanation for what happened, I think of the various degrees of frenzy in my fellow actors, the desperate pitch to which I had been pushed, the charged and silent concentration of the audience upon my wildly dancing body, and the infinite web of electromagnetic energy of which we are all a part and which constitutes the current scientific definition of reality. I wonder if there might be times when a man becomes so charged with electrical potential that the normal boundaries of the mind dissolve for a moment as the charge is released. This sudden, lightning-like transit would be what the ancient Greeks called "ecstasy".
In its original usage, "ecstasy" (from the Greek ek , "out" + stasis , "standing") had two meanings: the state either of someone who was "out of his mind" or of someone whose soul had been transported from his body in religious trance. Since the word was regularly applied to the cult of Dionysus, it’s tempting to think it was used in the first sense by those who opposed his orgiastic and theatrical rites and in the second sense by those who actually experienced them. Whether ekstasis meant madness or the liberation of the soul from the prison of the body would have thus depended on one’s own experience.
The thrust of this branch of the Greek is not concerned with knowledge and polarities of analysis, its about experience: getting high, getting active, and getting off, getting real, getting awake. Then there is a need for explanation, and the theory flows thick and fast. But by then you know what’s real and what’s theory, and the choice of value is yours.
There are examples of this variety of musical experience widespread through history and geography. And while what we tend to see in them is the ecstatic, back door aspects - animal sacrifice, frenzied dancing and music making, etc. - there are elements of classicism in these performances. Often they involve the impersonation of religious deities or the reenactment of some larger than life drama, such as an astronomical anomaly. we can’t see these elements because our own experience is locked into the banalities of mass media art. But we need the drama, and we need the excitement; our cultural sphincter is straining hard to hold the putrefying mass of our unexpressed sensuality, and it is ripe to blow big. Welcome to Contemporary Western Culture! Bombs Away!!
Notes for Part I:
1. In the November, 1983 issue of Vanity Fair, Judith Martin describes what is undoubtedly the greatest institutional event of the Opera World, the Bayreuth Festival: "Bayreuth is the Wagnerian Endurance Olympics, where heavy-duty Wagnerites proudly demonstrate their physical vitality, patience, imperviousness to bodily or emotional hardship, and unlimited attention spans - in short, their worthiness to be devotees of Richard Wagner. ... The 1,925 seat theater, neither air-conditioned nor heated, has no aisles, and the orchestra seats are the armless, wooden, pop-up kind found in junior high school auditoriums. Cushioning them, management and audience agree, would ruin the acoustics. There is some thin upholstery in the box towers, but by way of compensation, no air circulation.
Although Bayreuth weather simulated laboratory conditions for creating head colds - intense heat, followed suddenly by steady chilling rain - coughing and sneezing are not permitted. No human frailties whatsoever are in evidence. In any other theater in the world, bathrooms are under mass siege after forty-minute acts. In the Festspielhaus, where eight-five minutes is nothing for a single act, and beer and champagne are consumed throughout two one-hour intermissions. There is never a lounge line of more than three.
When the temperature inside the theater reached 104 degrees last summer, not one person left before the very end. Not even one relaxed enough to pass out."
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2. (There is being 'seen' and being seen. These people don't like to be seen. )
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3. Oh, alright. Some people might actually get something out of this stuff, but I don't want to spoil my dark humor. If I want to rant on to make my point, you can't stop me. I'm a piece of information.
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4. From a book called Richard Wagner's Prose Works. I'm not going to tell you what page because I don't have to . OK - it's on page 69. Go check.
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5. See the film Architect of Doom.
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6. People who say our access to information is critically limited by media and government are simply wrong, at least in Canada. Some stuff is secret, but everything you need to be a happy productive person is right there for you, if you learn how to dig it out and interpret it. People are too lazy to learn anything, or unable to do anything with what they know, perhaps they really just don't care. Cynicism is the refuge of the otherwise impotent.
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7. Some shithead will probably want to deconstruct that statement. Go ahead. Make my day.
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8. I am not an authority on the experience of the Ghanan people. This is just the way it looked to me.
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9. Eno, Brian. "Resonant Complexity", Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1994.
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Notes for Part II:
1. An easy ideal to attain, given that it is a natural posture for the umimaginative, low energy subjectivity that peers out from under the brow of the harried, paranoid bureaucrat when he finally stops thinking about work. "Fucking art?? I can manage that!"
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2. Squires, Richard. The Meaning of Ecstasy, Gnosis Magazine, Fall 1994.
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3. Ibid.
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