I downloaded Mycale's album off Amazon last night, which apparently gave me a 20GB Amazon Cloud Drive. Remains to be seen how useful such a thing is. There appears to be no API and no linux client to access it yet??
As far as I can tell, right now its main significance to me is that it belatedly implements a feature Amazon should have supported from the start- the ability to, for no extra cost, redownload music I've already bought from Amazon. Other e-vendors like Baen have done this for ages, but neither Amazon or iTunes supported it, leading to lovely situations like the various times I've had to bug customer service when a downloaded interrupted midstream and wouldn't allow me to restart because I'd already downloaded it. Now all I'd need to do is go back to my cloud drive and redownload it. The fact that Amazon beat iTunes to it adds to my appreciation of Amazon, but it's not really a gamechanger. My music collection is saved in about three places already, but it'd be nice to have a Cloud place for it, though I'm not sure the 60 bucks a year is worth it for my 60GB music collection.
As to whether I will upload some or all of my collection to Amazon, well, I'm not sure yet. I have an MP3Tunes locker that I never use, because the interface is screwy and uploading huge amounts of music is a pain in the ass. If Amazon makes the process easy, I may do it. If it makes the process hassly and especially if there are anti-piracy components, I will avoid it. Especially if there's no way to make it talk with Amarok.
No fucking clue how to review the three Monodramas that New York City Opera staged last week. No fucking clue.
The night was about as high concept as you get. Three one act operas by 20th century composers, each written for solo soprano. The classic "Erwartung" of Arnold Schoenberg, his earliest atonal opera, was the most well-known part of the repertory in the show. The other two pieces: John Zorn's "La Machine de L'Etre" and Morton Feldman's "Neither", were even more obscure.
Zorn's been a favorite musician and composer for years, and as he's a major figure of the East Village music scene I went to a lot of his concerts back when I was in school. Schoenberg's even more central to my musical taste- he wrote my favorite opera, Moses und Aron, along with many other longtime favorite pieces, especially Verklarte Nacht. I have anticipated this night for months now, even as I struggled to persuade someone to attend it with me. I managed to convince Noah to come along, finally.
The show opened with the Zorn, which is dubiously an opera at all, though it's clearly a monodrama even if it's not an opera. Its 'libretto' consists of wordless syllables. And even though I usually love Zorn, I definitely will admit I struggled with this piece, especially its first half. I was saying to Noah at intermission that my understanding of the significance of the Schoenberg revolution is that convention was thrown out the window to be replaced by constant semiotic renegotiation. Before, an elaborate language of musical convention governed our response to a piece of music- major and minor keys, tempos, orchestrations, musical forms. After Schoenberg, every composition could define its own musical vocabulary, either basing it in whole or part on someone's previous work (Terry Riley's "In C" striking me as a great example of this) or starting as much from scratch as possible. So when I listened to the Zorn, the beginning involved working through that negotiation with the composer, figuring out what kind of musical language he was using and how much sense I could make out of it. It took me a few minutes, and the piece was only ten minutes long, so there was only about five or six minutes where I felt like I was in the same world as the music. I think if I saw it again I would enjoy it more.
But what I did get of it, the second half of the piece, I thought was really interesting and moving. Michael Counts, the director, began with dozens of people on stage wearing brown abayas and hijabs- traditional Muslim female clothing. A man and a woman in mens' eveningwear moved through this crowd undressing random members of the crowd to reveal a variety of costumes- a man in a brilliant red suit, a woman in white undergarments, a woman in a black evening dress. The woman in the black dress turned out to be the singer who would perform the monodrama, while the rest of the people responded to the music and to her singing.
Beginning with everyone in Muslim clothing had me on the lookout for problematic depiction , but what I saw was surprisingly warm. A number of those so dressed were established as individual characters. They danced, played jokes, gallivanted across the stage. The hijab certainly stood for the anonymity and uniformity enforced on Muslim society, but in one scene six women had their outer layer removed to reveal that beneath, they were all black-haired white women with identical haircuts wearing identical wedding dresses, cleverly suggesting that Western society equally has ways of enforcing uniformity, not to mention femininity.
But what I really enjoyed was the conjunction of machine and etre, mechanism and being, that drove the whole staging thematically. Many of the gestures produced onstage were reversible processes that were shown going through a highly mechanistic cycle, as in my favorite moment, the man in the red suit being elevated above the stage and then lowered on wires. And the music, quirky but clearly aching, methodical and prescribed but full of human moments, told the same story. It was a story about people living in a world that tries to force them to stay on the tracks, to color within the lines, whatever those lines might be. And it says that being, existing, is about trying to escape the lines, ascend out of the machine.
Or at least, I think that's what it was about. At intermission the question everyone was asking each other was "What did you think the Zorn was about?" The Schoenberg was comprehensible, though the staging wasn't quite. The Schoenberg was also a little bit dull in places. Nobody was talking about Erwartung at intermission, they were buzzing with questions and theories and jokes about "La Machine de L'Etre". Even the people who didn't like it, who didn't get it, who found it dull or incomprehensible, they were talking about it.
And yet Feldman's "Neither" surpassed it, after the intermission. At least in my opinion. Noah disagreed, I think. He told a guy in the subway after the show that he preferred the Zorn, but that was kind of a snap judgment and perhaps with time both of us will change our mind.
Built on a spooky, meditative text by Samuel Beckett, designed to consist entirely of textual ambiguities, and stretched out to an intoxicating length by Feldman's high, monomaniacal score, it gave the director a lot of room to work. And in some sense I think Counts struggled with that freedom. This was not an entirely successful work because it was at places tentative and it gave too much room to Beckett's ambiguities. But it did some really cool things.
Rather than a 'set' as we've come to know it, Counts's lighting designer constructed an architecture of light, using a host of interesting reflective surfaces to throw light, both white and colored, about the set in intricate and beautiful ways. Centrally, dozens of mirrored boxes, suspended by strings from the ceiling and dropping down and moving up along with the music, provided the major focus for the eye during the performance. I told Noah that if my primary theory was proven wrong, my fallback was that this was an opera about Tetris.
But my primary theory was that this was an opera about Quantum Mechanics and Uncertainty. With a set built out of light, the libretto made allusions to the quantum nature of light - "from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither" seeming to me to be a great expression of wave/particle duality, whereas "unheard footfalls only sound" signaled Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the way it involves the observer in the experiment. Various dances throughout the piece suggested quantum entanglement to me- one dancer begins moving and others, at other points across the stage, begin moving in identical ways.
And I found myself moved deeply by the micro made macro, as the expression about the Schrodinger experiment goes- by the way Quantum theory casts serious doubts not just about the experience of our senses but about our overall place in the world. The sense we have that Uncertainty can infect our lives, how the great and terrible power of scientific discovery has not given us anything resembling comforting truth, though it has exposed us to the imposing majesty of the cosmos. And I like to think that in his libretto Schoenberg is musing on this trade, and whether it's worth it. And I like to think that Feldman, by stretching out the libretto, gives us both time to reflect on it and a physical appreciation for the way our senses can be distorted.
But it could be an opera about Tetris.
Back to "Erwartung", which I skipped so I could directly contrast "Neither" to "La Machine de l'Etre". Here I can only make recourse to my theory of the Revolutionary Orthodoxy, the principle by which I consider canonized works of avant-garde art. Art which was designed to challenge the audience and challenge some artistic status quo, but which, being successful, undermines its mission. I usually have referred to this idea in talking about visual art, because MoMa is my main example of a building to showcase the canonized avant-garde.
The important thing to think about when experiencing a Revolutionary Orthodox work is that you can't forget that it was created to be different and controversial. Even if you don't find it controversial, even if your artistic vocabulary has entirely assimilated the new concepts, you have to keep poking yourself and reminding yourself that the work was intended to be provocative or you won't understand what the artist is doing.
And, well, that was "Erwartung". It is a stirring piece of music, powerfully psychological, but it's nearly a hundred years old now and it didn't feel as fresh as the Zorn. And it didn't feel like the director had much to add to it. And in the middle I felt like it got lost a little bit. But not at all inappropriate on the bill with two pieces clearly inspired by it.
All in all, the thing I'll say is that I want to echo all the critics saying how amazing it is that we have an institution in NYC that dares to put on a show like this. In Lincoln Center.