Video of the day

Name in Print

Theatre Bay Area Magazine is featuring Mordake on the cover as part of an article about the SF International Arts Festival.  The article quotes me quite a lot, even going so far as to extemporize a bit beyond what I may have actually said. But what the hey.  

Mordake Visuals, Construction, Music et al

I was informed by electronic post late last night that Lynne has been blogging her work for Mordake. As of yesterday morning I finally finished setting the last of Douglas's text, almost just barely too late as we really are in the middle of rehearsals, and Herr Weiß is here only for another week or so, and M. Duykers is back in Florida performing final excruciations on his students. Several would-be assistants had other projects interfere with their participation, but luckily our friend Diana showed up direct from Amersfoort NL, firmly gripped the handle of our construction problems, caused the Jack in the Box to pop out, and has left us all deeply satisfied with her work. 

Mary Ellen Hunt dropped by to interview Frieder and me for a mention in the Chronicle's article about the SFIAF, but we've been corresponding a bit about those people who, like Mordake are double-faced.  She referenced the young Indian girl who is believed by some to be a reincarnation of Ganesh, I countered with Chang Tzu Ping (with a nod to the recent alleged Lakshmi reincarnation), and then on to various other facial tumors and skin ailments and so on. These photos disturb me a bit even though I wish I could just accept them as part of the continuum of human styles and substances.  Like the murder victim we happened across today draped with a cloth and surrounded by police tape and squad cars, they seem to remind me too much of my own fragile physical nature, one step away from worm dirt.

Theological, phrenological, surgical

John Duykers performing I'm no murderer from Mordake at Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, 10th of January 2008. Libretto by Douglas Kearney, directed by Melissa Weaver, production by matt:matt, costume by Kathleen Crowley, with some buzzy extra sounds from Thom Blum, filming by James Bisso, with a backdrop of an altered photo taken by Lynne of a bedroom of the Reutlinger House.

I wrote the gender changing software used at the end - a phase vocoder with formant shifting - for Korporate Marionettes. In this aria, Edvard Mordake tries to shuffle off responsibility for beating his man onto The Other, his shadow, his sister. The text setting in this opera is turning out to be a bit different for me, less driven by the prosody and with more common meters instead of the different-meter-on-every-bar or melodies floating in their own rhythmic world above more regular but still less common meters. Maybe this is because Douglas's words are more poetic and less prose-like than my usual texts. One unintended but happy result is that there is much less need for a conductor.

Mordake Appears

Our teaser presentation of the Mordake opera took place Thursday night to hoots and hollers from a pretty friendly audience. Note: I can recommend such an audience to all budding theater folk. Plus we got the audience good and liquored up beforehand (which I also endorse). The production came together well and it looked good in the Intersection space. John moved me to tears in one spot; he can work it when he needs to. The technology all functioned, from the formant-shifting gender changing to the video to the wireless speakers and everything. I'll be putting up a video or two but for now I've included a short clip from the Making of where I prompt John for the courage to go forward.

One too many speedballs

Duykers and I have been sneaking coke and aspirin out from under the watchful eye of Melissa, our dear director. She seems to think it a symptom of unhealthfulness, and doth not accept our need of it for our creativological inventionity. But I say more and more and more and to follow it up with shots of icy cold Belvedere, poured down my open throat by a young lesbian, hand on my throat, an unseen assailant yanking back my hair. But this is the way we artists must move our world forward, innit?

The Mordake story has become more personal for me as we have proceeded. Mordake has a problem integrating a perceived feminine shadow-self; a typical Victorian who represses all his imperfections, his vices, sexuality, etc, and who wants his nature blocked off in neat gardens whose borders are at right angles. Is there a modern connection between us and him, that his faults come from this difference between who he really is and the image that he presents to the world? I know that I have struggled with integrating the so-called darker aspects of myself with those images carefully chosen, and as well integrating the masculine and feminine, qua engineer and artist (which is which is left as an exercise for the reader).

It's been great to see the piece come together. It's wonderful to hear Duykers sing it - so much better than hearing me sing it, even though I do like the sensation physique of the vibrations passing through my body, the Navier-Stokesian eddies forming about my glottis, like The Eternal Syllable of the Hindu. Matt Jones leaps up to satisfy each of our whims, cutting bits of paper dolls when we require it, tearing apart circuits and speakers, rigging floating gramophones and of course subversively continuing to prepare the way for our robot overlords.

Gerard Grisey changes a tire

I went to see Alex Ross speak tonight at Wheeler Auditorium on the campus of my nourishing and most bounteous mother the University of California at Berkeley. The talk was a brief overview of twentieth century music and the Bay Area's contributions, especially those of the more famous of the minimalists, since many of them had their early careers here. He's on a combined book tour (The Rest is Noise) and trip to see the premiere of Appomattox by Philip Glass at the San Francisco Opera. Lynne and I saw it on Tuesday and I was weeping unconsolably afterwards for the loss of one of my heroes, drinking one Baileys after another sitting in the Biergarten at Zeitgeist. I should have given up after Galileo Galilei, for which we also made the mistake of making an effort to see the premiere (at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in the hot midsummer of 2002). John Duykers asked me to go to the latter since he was starring as the mature GG, but some terrible truths are better left unknown.

Even though Jim Bisso stood me up for Berlin - Ecke Schoenhauser, I did finally meet Richard Friedman in the flesh, and Paul Dresher was there. In 1990 I was in Japan for Yamaha demos and I went into an enormous music store in Tokyo - don't remember the name - where I picked up a tremendously beautiful edition of the complete scores of Satie. But the small heart lifting experience was finding the 'west coast composer' section which contained only two CDs, Paul's and mine, proving that from a very great distance two people of such markedly different stature can look almost the same size.

Speaking of heroes and those of great stature, I've been thinking about Gérard Grisey a lot lately. Partiels is a tremendous work and he died way too young and neither he nor I could change the tire on my old yellow VW bug when it blew out on the way back from Stanford.

Mordake visuals

We just finished a week and a half in the Paul Dresher studio working on the Mordake project with everyone. It's very very preliminary but we did come up with some interesting looks. Who knows if any of it will make it into the final piece, but below are a couple of videos, the first consisting of various clips of interest set to an instrumental version of some of the music, and the second consisting of the opening narration and music with a sketch of some visuals. Sorry for the noisy sound in the first half - it's just from the camera microphone. Melissa Weaver directed, John Duykers performed, visuals by Frieder Weiss, camera mostly by Matt Jones, the room sketch by Lynne Rutter (after Renzo Mongiardino) and music written by me. The gender changing of John's voice was performed by the Korporate Marionettes software, written in the spectral domain^† by yours truly with help from my dear colleague Thom Blum. It is always a treat to hear John sing and his voice is beautiful when left unencumbered by technology but, just like theatrical blood poured over the body of a beautiful woman, there is something quite excitingly creepy about the altered sound. And I do like the moment where the celesta comes in in a slowed-down stretto retrograde of the tune. Why yes ma'am, I am quite fond of them there irrational rhythms.




^†For those that care, gender change is typically done by shifting the formant structure of the voice independently of the pitch. In the KM software, the pitch change is accomplished through the use of a phase vocoder, but the smoothed spectral envelope is removed first and reapplied after. We've found that, in general, it's not enough to do the mathematical operation and it's most helpful to have the singer affect their voice just a bit. Women and men tend to sing a little differently stylistically and those cues need to be generated to aid in the suspension of disbelief.

If love be the food of music

John Duykers and I were on the radio last Sunday on KRCB, the local NPR station near his home in Sebastopol. He's a farmer as well as an internationally renowned opera singer, so he was the one invited onto what was ostensibly a food show, to wit Mouthful. A direct link to the podcast is here but it's also on iTunes. John brought in a lovely dish consisting of multiple potato species, kale, collards, and a buttery spicy drizzle. I would say that, if one wants to work in opera, one should make sure that the artists with which one works should provide at least one of your other basic human needs besides artistic fulfillment, e.g. companionship, fresh organic produce, sex, laughter, knowledge, linguistics, and so on. Maybe in a future post I will present a bipartite graph where the one of the two disjoint sets consists of my artistic partners and the other my basic human needs and the readers will be invited to draw in their guesses as to the graph edges. But I was on the show to provide some musical interludes (the quite lovely numbers brightness 2 and Casus Tertius) But work on Mordake is heating up in preparation for Frieder Weiss to come and give the visuals the Frieder touch. Light, but persuasive.