The Wasteland Company<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A>, which he formed with
\nConant “to explore women’s roles in music theater.” Beckett was notorious for not allowing
\nanyone to monkey with his plays. He not only gave permission to use the texts but upon
\nmeeting Osborne in Paris in 1986 regarded him as a kindred spirit.<\/P>
\nI first came across Osborne in 1997, not as a composer but as a social activist who was
\ninstrumental in pressuring the Vienna Philharmonic to revoke its historical policy of excluding
\nwomen from its ranks. Reporting on the issue in the Los Angeles Times, I used Osborne as one of
\nmy sources and subsequently wrote a magazine article for the National Arts Journalism
\nProgram<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> at Columbia University about his activism. He worked
\nlargely via the Internet to organize protests against the Vienna Phil, posting thousands of e-mails
\naround the world, and he wrote scholarly articles<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> tracing the discrimination
\nagainst women at the VPo and other orchestras. <\/P>
\nFull disclosure: I am now a friend of both Osborne and Conant.<\/P>
\n
When I asked him to enlighten me a bit about “Cybeline,” he was in the midst of rehearsal. To
\nsave time, he referred me to his program notes — both the
short version<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> and the long version<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> with extensive notes. Here’s an
\nexcerpt:<\/P>
\n
\n
Cybeline is about a cyborg trying to be a talk show host to prove she is
\nhuman. It is about nature, virtual reality, biotechnology, and the mass media — and about finding
\nthe heart and poetry in technology as it also contemplates its horrors. What does a fifty-year-old
\nstructure of silicon have to teach a five-billion-year-old structure of carbon?
\n<\/P>
\n
Cybeline has two modes, on-line and off-line, abruptly separated by a loud buzzer. Her
\nproducers\/programmers toggle her between the two. When on-line, the pace of her talk show host
\nroutines are relentless, emulating the frenetic character of video cuts used by commercial
\ntelevision. When off-line, she enters a dream-like world where the music is partially determined by
\ncomputer programmed random operations that allude to the “music of nature.” The music is thus
\ndifferent for each performance.<\/P>
\n
During the off-air random music, Cybeline hears almost imperceptible random whispers
\ncoming from all around her that become increasingly present as the work progresses. She is not
\nsure what they are, but prefers to think of them as the voices of goddesses. The voices, which are
\nmade from hundreds of sampled whispers, are collages of her memories, fragments from Native
\nAmerican poems, our own poetry, the Old Testament, and other
\nsources.<\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
<\/P>
\n
Bill points out that “Cybeline derives her name from the Goddess Cybele who was brought to
\nRome from Phrygia in 204 B.C. Her temple stood on the Vatican, where St. Peter’s Basilica
\nstands today, up to the 4th century A.D. when Christians took it over.” He notes that “Roman
\nemperors like Augustus, Claudius, and Antoninus Pius regarded her as the supreme deity of the
\nempire” and that “Augustus established his home facing her temple.” And he adds these
\nfascinating details:<\/P>
\n
In the 5th century, Christians relentlessly destroyed the religious beliefs
\nsurrounding Cybele, especially her embodiment as the Mother Earth. St. Augustine called her a
\nharlot mother, “the mother, not of the gods, but of the demons.” Churchmen believed the powers
\nof “witches” came from the same sort of contact with the Mother Earth. Arresting officers often
\ncarried them to prison in a large basket, so their feet would not touch the
\nground.<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\nFor the last 30 years, he writes, his and Abbie’s collaborations have been
\npieces for chamber music theater, a genre that “hardly exists in Western culture
\nbecause it is extremely difficult to successfully combine theater with the sparseness of chamber
\nmusic. Even efforts by composers such as Schubert and Schumann are little more than
\nmelodramatic curiosities.”<\/P>
\n
Bill explains:<\/P>
\n
In opera, the orchestra pads the drama, epic sets and pageantry blur over the
\nsuperficiality of the plots, and the acting need only be sufficient for people looking through
\nbinoculars. The focus is on singing and occasional orchestral fireworks. In chamber music theater,
\ncomplex scripts have to be delivered with convincing theatrical skill even if combined with utterly
\nprecise timings and inflections dictated by the music. Cybeline compounds these problems with an
\nabrupt collage of styles, moods, video and twelve tone music. This leaves a burden on the
\nperformer to develop new performance practices and techniques that hardly exist.
\nTo create a genuine integration of the arts we write our own texts and music and produce and
\nperform the works ourselves. We also created the video for Cybeline. Though our orientation is
\nnot specifically technological, we incorporate many of the most recent developments such as
\nsurround sound, video and live electronics. Our artistic concerns are generally social, so we try to
\ncombine our experimentation with styles that are moderately approachable to a broader
\npublic.<\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
<\/P>
\n
But that’s as much explaining as he will do:<\/P>
\n
Beckett once said that his theater is an “enigma wrapped in a mystery.” The
\nbeauty of theater is that its iconic meanings are left open to each individual’s interpretation, so we
\ngenerally avoid “explaining” our works. We continue to find new meanings in them even years
\nafter their completion.<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\nWhat else is there to say but “amen,” and if you’re in Los Angeles or anywhere nearby “get
\nthee to REDCAT” Tuesday night for their performance. Tickets are available online here: “The Wired Goddess and Her Trombone.”<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A><\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The inaugural season at the Walt Disney Concert Hall is not all Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic or, for example, Alfred Brendal and Midori giving separate Beethoven recitals. Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins get into act. Even Arlo Guthrie and the Klezmatics made it onto the hall’s eclectic schedule.But for cutting-edge music, dance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-596","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-9C","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}