Saw Anthony Minghella’s ENO production of Madama Butterfly. The visuals are occasionally sumptuous — as one expects when one pays for opera tickets. Then, after elegant entrances or little choreographed bits, there are bits where the singers mostly stand and sing, gesturing a little. But, as this score has lots of tunes, moving melodic motifs and catchy fragments, there was plenty to wash over one, even when there was little stage action.
The story is so basic that one isn’t constantly wondering — What’s going on? Who’s that? Did I miss something? It’s easy to follow.
(AP photo)
The love child is played by a puppet operated by bunraku-type operators in black, an often used technique that in this case worked for me. “Pinocchio” was more simply expressive than many of the flesh and blood singers — the turns of its head and longing looks — it’s up there with Gollum and Yoda. Here are pictures from the web — unfortunately the puppet looks stupid close up — from a distance it works much better.
Brownian Motion
Last night saw the second of Steve Reich’s shows at Carnegie Hall. A sexy cellist played with a video sextet of herself playing the accompanying parts. A drummer hit midi percussion pads along with a video of himself playing the other parts (the audience loved this one — it was a real techno tour de force.) A new piece followed, dedicated to the murdered reporter Daniel Pearl (I think it was commissioned via Pearl’s father.) It incorporated references to the Biblical Daniel and to the slain journalist, who was also a fiddler. Large ensemble for that one. (Who will commission the pieces for the hundreds of thousands of slain Iraqis? — though Pearl was in Pakistan at the time, his reporting was about the U.S. invasion.)
All these pieces sounded African-inspired, as Reich has often noted (he traveled there early on.) The repetitive patterns and layers of parts, the interlocking rhythms that shift slowly, the pulse and sense of stasis in motion (homeostasis is a lovely metaphor.) Reich avoids the sweeping build-ups and climaxes typical of Western music — build ups are slow and gradual, not the tsunami-like emotional waves of Puccini (above). You can hear the structural antecedents of these melodic modules and riffs in Sunny Ade recordings (and those of others — high life bands, field recordings etc.)…where there are layers of multiple guitars shimmering over percolating percussion. Reich sometimes writes for strings, not for guitars, and for high-pitched percussion rather than for drum kits. The intended audience is Western classical — they wouldn’t dance to this in the context of MoMA or Carnegie Hall, as they would in Africa to music with similar structures. Context makes you listen to these structures in a different way.
The music shimmers; it’s a kind of musical Brownian motion. Even when he incorporates cellos and strings the effect is percolating, bubbling.
The last piece “Drumming” was a big breakthrough when it was performed and released on vinyl in 1974 and was released on the Deutsch Grammaphone Label. I bought it back then, a boxed set of LPs. That piece involves a lot of phase shifting — rhythm patterns going out of phase and then, after a moment or two of chaos, a new syncopated pattern appears. It’s a sort of technical demonstration of cross rhythms, a moiré pattern in sound.
When the players moved to glockenspiels and began playing their intricate patterns the sound was almost aggressive — loud, piercing and shimmering — like that sound when your ears ring, but imagine if that were really loud.
This music is as radical as it ever was, which is saying something. It’s still new and even shocking. A lot of music from that time sounds dated and avant-garde corny, a parody of “experimental” music. This still has a rigor that holds up. My complaint would be that it doesn’t groove. Oh, occasionally it hits a pulse and stride, but having stood for hours around Candomblé drummers in Bahia, rumba drummers in Cuba and elsewhere, having seen Ade’s band — who also play non-stop for hours — a few times and joined the sweaty dancers, I miss the body connection with Reich’s compositions. When music of this type physically and neurologically connects it has the effect of generating a feeling of transcendence, a liberating out of body feeling that most of us have felt, however briefly, at one music concert or another. These kinds of interlocking melodies and rhythms can be transporting — it can make you feel like you are floating…but cooled down for this classical context some of that is removed, and we are left with — well, maybe not just something less — maybe something new.
