jwilzewske: recursion

Showing posts with label recursion. Show all posts

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Maya Beiser: Ideas that You Can Hold Onto, or that Recurse and Hold Onto You

B rightly voiced and musically attentive ... young Israeli cellist Maya Beiser has a firm and even hand, regardless of subject: bleak modernism, sultry ethnicity, or Romantic revival.”
— Allan Kozinn, The New York Times.

T he performance by cellist Maya Beiser last night in Boston in the Celebrity Series (at the newly-restored Paramount Theatre at 560 Washington St in the Boston theater district) was deeply inspiring.

Arvo Pärt: Fratres (4 cello tracks, live cello)
Chinary Ung: Khse Buon (cello and electronics)
Osvaldo Golijov: Mariel (4 cello tracks, live cello)
Steve Reich: Cello Counterpoint (7 cello tracks, live cello, video)
Evan Ziporyn (arr.): Like Smoke (cello track, live cello, voice)
David Lang: World to Come (24 cello tracks, live cello, voice, video)

M aya Beiser’s repertoire enthusiastically propels the audience from ‘intention’ to ‘reception’ to ‘understanding’ and ‘liking’.

E lectroacoustic synthesis, digital reverb, and DAW sound-processing effects and antiphonal elements from her electrified cello (miked at its bridge) predominate in Pärt’s ‘Fratres’. Highly realistic cello emulations of classical qin glisses and sounds of other traditional Asian instruments captivate us and hold our interest in Chinary Ung’s ‘Khse Buon’. Maya’s cello technic is astounding—a spectacle in its own right well worth the ticket price just to see this. She and her production team put great effort into visual spectacle as well, on a par with what we would expect from, say, opera. (Classical music presenters, take note!)

M ost significantly, though, Maya’s repertoire does not involve separating art from life, and therefore it’s likely to be widely appreciated and subscribed to—compared to less accessible art music. People are more likely to integrate it into their listening and preferred experiences. Maya challenges us—including her use of Hebrew and medieval texts for her vocals; including rapidly altering meters and polyrhythms; including prolonged stretches of microtonal dissonances that refuse to resolve into hoped-for comfort. But she doesn’t ‘strip our [perceptual] gears’; doesn’t ‘trip our circuit-breakers’.

B y contrast, think of composers like Philippe de Vitry, who composed motets and other choral music where several languages were heard simultaneously. This is probably the nearest thing to what we heard Maya Beiser perform last night. Or maybe Glagolitic chant. Anyhow, Philippe de Vitry is, to me, emblematic of compulsive fuse-blowing and impedance mismatch regardless what century you live in. If you live for querulous reactions, or if your message is symbolic evocation of disparity and alienation and political discord, then, hey, go right ahead—do it like Philippe. Just don’t imagine that people will love it, buy it like hotcakes.

U nless. Unless, you use the complexity as a way to change the narrative or subvert the intention of the original—which is what Maya Beiser does so extensively in this program (and in her recordings).

E van Ziporyn’s ‘Like Smoke’ is based on Tsmindao Ghmerto, a 13th century Sanctus from the orthodox Georgian Liturgy that exhibits extreme polyphony of 15 or more distinct parts or voices, with untempered intervals and shocking harmonic convergences. In Evan Ziporyn’s arrangement, Maya’s voice and Maya’s cello weave a perception-bending pseudo-archaic ‘fabric’ out of tri-filar (two cello tracks; one vocal track) ‘threads’.

G od, the soul you gave me
Is smoke—
Memories of Love burning on eternal pyre.
Once born, we immediately begin to torch,
And so,
Until all the smoke vanishes,
[I am, we are—] Like smoke.”
— Yehuda Amichai.

T he poetic text [we humans are mortal ‘smoke’ that is not ‘real’ or ‘purposeful’ but only someone else’s (God’s) memories, residue of someone else’s love (God’s), destined to be consumed and vanish forever] subverts the religious postulate of eternal life; we are all inconsequential, beautiful-but-meaningless aerosols—mere air pollutants, not individuals with moral standing and worth.

T his beauteous prostrate imagery is mightily at odds with how we (all of us except monks, that is) conduct our lives. The quasi-archaism belies a post-modern, post-minimalist intention. The original sacred, liturgical purpose of Tsmindao Ghmerto is co-opted to the purpose of honoring romantic/carnal love—which is the substitution that is natural for us post-modern, western, sexy media-immersed souls to make.

U sing György Ligeti’s ‘Lux Aeterna’ and ‘Requiem’ and Johann Strauss’s ‘An der schönen blauen Donau’ in the film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is similar. Good examples of musical irony. Provocatively subverting our notions of the ‘specialness’ of us as human beings and individuals; provocatively subverting our assumptions/self-delusions about God, about linear time, about whether there is deep meaning in the Universe. Quasi-archaic music to challenge post-modern world-views.

T he dramaturgy and use of irony are engaging—Maya’s edgy acoustic textural and visual fields do not seriously test our perceptual boundaries, not really. Instead, the consistency and the psychological cohesiveness of Maya’s performance (and the cohesiveness of each of these compositions and videos) keep from blowing the listeners’ ‘fuses’, in much the same way that ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ did not blow any fuses.

C ello Counterpoint’ for eight cellos...is irresistibly driven and less overtly contrapuntal than earlier installments in the series. Mr. Reich explores new harmonic ground, not least an almost Romantic lushness aided by Ms. Beiser’s rich tone and energetic playing.”
— Allan Kozinn, The New York Times.

F or Steve Reich’s ‘Cello Counterpoint,’ Bill Morrison filmed Maya playing seven of the eight cello parts. She plays the eighth part ‘live’ alongside this film, forming an all-Beiser octet. The ‘septich’ film panels reveal the mutability of human personality over time. This is a rather long work, and Maya’s serially recording each of the seven tracks that appear in the film must’ve taken a day or longer. The seven panels comprising the ‘septich’ film show Maya and her cello, projected on the 7-meter-high floor-to-ceiling screen, with facial expressions and bowing gestures as widely varied as anyone might have during the course of a day—from fresh in the morning, to fatigued in the afternoon. The eight Mayas do have contrapuntal conversations with each other, as the title promises. But more than this, we emerge with a sense of the recursive quality of the meat-computer inside of Maya’s head, inside of our heads… its small-timescale 200-millisecond canons that return and re-trigger the same network of synapses and reinvoke the same thought that had not yet finished executing.

I rit Batsry made videos for David Lang’s ‘World to Come’ so Beiser appears to perform inside an empty warehouse or in front of rippling water. Lots of recursion, musically and visually, in this piece, too. In other words, Batsry’s black-and-white video is no mere ‘backdrop’ or throw-down scenery. It is genuine accompaniment and the result, a genuine multimedia performance. Fascinating!

O ver the past decade, Beiser has commissioned and performed many new works, collaborating with composers Tan Dun, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Osvaldo Golijov, Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen, and Mark O’Connor among others. Raised on a kibbutz in Israel by her French mother and Argentinean father, Maya Beiser is a graduate of Yale University. Her major teachers were Aldo Parisot, Uzi Weizel, Alexander Schneider, and Isaac Stern. Maya was the founding cellist of the new music ensemble, the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Is Salonen’s ‘Homunculus’ Quartet a Musical Hologram?

optical holographic set-up, (c)2007 HowStuffWorks

D oes Salonen go further to say anything about music and holography? You’ve got the snippet from Salonen’s program notes about wanting to write a compact miniature that implies and acts like much more. And you’ve got the link at the bottom of the post, to the Michael Talbot Universe-as-Hologram thing. But is there a Salonen interview where he actually talks about holograms? Does he think that ‘Homunculus’ could be divided up into smaller bits and each bit would still embody all of the characters and textures of the whole [like a cut-up hologram would do]?”
— Anonymous email commenting on the previous CMT post.

I wanted to compose a piece that would be very compact in form and duration, but still contain many different characters and textures. In other words, a little piece that behaves like a big piece... I decided to call my piece ‘Homunculus’ despite the obvious weaknesses of the spermists’ thinking, as I find the idea of a perfect little man strangely moving.”
— Esa-Pekka Salonen, program notes.

T he blockquote above, which I transcribed from Esa-Pekka Salonen’s program notes, is all there is, unfortunately. I haven’t thought about it a lot (yet), but I do not think that this string quartet [its compositional structure; its acoustical properties when realized in performance] is holographic. If it is holographic, then it is a hologram of (a) ‘low resolution’ in the temporal domain and (Fourier-inverse) frequency domain and (b) represented in a nonlinear medium with ‘low quantization’ dynamic range. Just my impression.

W hich draws attention to the exoticness of holograms even now, sixty-some years after holograms were discovered/invented by Dennis Gabor. The usual notion of optical holograms is that the recording medium has linear contrast formation across a very wide range—6 or more binary bits of intensity quantization or more. And the usual notion of optical holograms—oh, cut off little a corner of the hologram and illuminate it and you still get the image of the whole thing.

B ut what’s seldom expressed—or what’s seldom conveyed in popular accounts for non-physicists, anyhow—is how the hologram image from the cut-off corner differs from the image from the whole intact hologram. Yes, the little cut-off corner is itself a hologram, from which you can cut off yet another corner and once again see the ‘same’ image of the original scene. But you can’t engage in decimation of the hologram down to a minuscule, invisible ‘corner’ of film that has only one atom, say. Or digital decimation of a file that was once many megabytes in size, down till what’s left is only one binary digit—one ‘bit’, a one or a zero.

N or is a [tiny but still visible/macroscopic] holographic ‘corner’ that is 1/1000th the size of the original—one milligram of film, out of an original hologram that weighs 1 gram—capable of showing the spatial detail or contrast that the full-size original did. Over-simplified, Future-obsessed DiscoveryChannel-ified ‘lay-audience’ excuses for ‘science journalism’ has no patience for these practical facts. Instead, we get breathless, sensationalized misinformation that backhandedly suggests that Miracles happen; that Fact is Stranger than Fiction; that infinite regressions of hologram snipping do not diminish the information contained by the progressively smaller snippets. It would be so much better if the journalists and marketers and popularizers were not running the show and if instead physicists and engineers wrote or edited the copy, for longer format shows that allowed time for a bit of real-world detail...

E very part of a hologram contains the image of the whole object. You can cut off the corner of a hologram and see the entire image through it. For every viewing angle you see the image in a different perspective, as you would a real object. Each piece of a hologram contains a particular perspective of the image, but each also includes [or contains the representation of] the entire object.”
— R. Nave, Hyperphysics, Georgia State University.

S o when you cut up an optical hologram, the contrast and information corresponding to larger-scale structures does go down. Information is lost. The projected image from a tiny corner does broadly resemble the original, but its resolution is lower and other structure ‘signal’ information may now be so weak as to be overwhelmed by ‘noise’. Holograms have a ‘transfer function’ and signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), just like any other system. And those are not scale independent.

A nd the same thing would happen with holographic music, notwithstanding Brian Eno’s and others’ gee-whiz comments. I do not think Salonen’s ‘Homunculus’ is holographic, in part because I do not think it has ‘extra notes’ in it. By contrast, most ‘minimalist’ and ‘ambient’ music does contain extra, dispensable notes. I do not see how Salonen’s string quartet can be shortened without the omitted elements being conspicuous for their absence. There is no way that the ‘many characters and textures’ that Salonen put in there will be preserved if we cut the piece from 12 minutes down to, say, 6 minutes or 3 minutes or 1 minute. No way.

I t would be interesting, though, to examine ‘Homunculus’ through affine transformations of tempo, which would be analogous to optically scaling holograms with changes in wavelength (the inverse of frequencies corresponding to the colors of light). You could do this in live performance—doubling the tempo, say. Or you could do it by resampling a digital recording of it—accelerating the tempo by some multiplicative factor but leaving the pitches and timbres of the strings intact. Are the expressive consequences of affine transformations of tempo similar to the consequences of reanimating an optical hologram in blue light versus red light? Do the phrases appear shorter? At the faster tempi, are the phrases’ cognitive/emotional “reach” and the strength of interactions with each other more limited in scope, compared to how they are at slower tempi?

L ikewise, are ‘polarization’ effects observed in holographic music? That is, when wavefront-aligning (polarizing) constraints are imposed on two or more voices in a piece of chamber music, then are the interference patterns manifested by the other parts also polarized? In other words, has the composer established a polarizing ‘medium’ through which all of the ‘signals’ are propagating, and does the resulting acoustic ‘image’ behave in measurable ways that are analogous to an optical ‘polarization hologram’?

I f the answer is ‘Yes’ then maybe there are other holographic features in there, too. If the answer is ‘No’, then we can add that as evidence against holographicness of ‘Homunculus’.

I s any of Ferneyhough’s writing holographic, do you think? Can we tell what is a hologram and what is not by examining the ‘text’ (score), in a way that’s analogous to how we can tell whether the image on a piece of film is holographic? How would we go about composing a piece that we intend to be a musical hologram?

Scaling of spatial dimension when hologram is exposed to light of different frequencies/wavelengths

It’s Notes All the Way Down: Salonen’s ‘Homunculus’ Quartet

Johannes String Quartet, photo © Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

I have long been fascinated (and amused) by the arcane Spermists’ theory, who held the belief that the sperm was in fact a ‘little man’ (in Latin, an ‘homunculus’) that was placed inside a woman to grow into a child. This seemed to them to neatly explain many of the mysteries of conception. It was later pointed out that if the sperm was indeed an homunculus—identical in all aspects but size to an adult—then the homunculus must have sperm of its own, [and, in turn, the homunculus’s sperm are themselves micro-homunculi with their own micro-sperm, which, in turn, are nano-homunculi, and so on]. This led to a logical ‘reductio ad absurdum’—an endless chain or infinite regress of [uncountable trillions of] homunculi within homunculi! This was not considered by [reality-challenged] Spermists to be a fatal objection, however—insofar as it neatly explained how it was that, in the biblical Adam, all [future human beings] had sinned: the whole of humanity [and its misdeeds] ‘was already contained in Adam’s loins’.”
— Esa-Pekka Salonen, 2008.

I wanted to compose a piece that would be very compact in form and duration, but still contain many different characters and textures. In other words, a little piece that behaves like a big piece... I decided to call my piece ‘Homunculus’ despite the obvious weaknesses of the spermists’ thinking, as I find the idea of a perfect little man strangely moving.”
— Esa-Pekka Salonen.

T he performance by the Guarneri String Quartet and the Johannes String Quartet together last night in Kansas City was amazing. The program included:

William Bolcom: Octet
Esa-Pekka Salonen: Homunculus (Johannes Quartet)
Derek Bermel: Passing Through (Guarneri Quartet)
Felix Mendelssohn: Octet

T imothy McDonald has a nice review in the Kansas City Star here.

Guarneri Quartet, photo © Dorothea von Haeften

T he Salonen ‘Homunculus’ quartet has many different expressions of parallelism and simultaneity in it—which is surprising, maybe, considering that the term ‘homunculus’ is ordinarily associated with concepts of hierarchy and encapsulation of things within things.

T here are rapid sixteenth-note figures and sextuplets that come in waves—liquid waves, violins spilling, viola spilling, cello spilling. The patterns evoke a sense of ‘being-as-process’, as opposed to ‘being-as-object’.

F rom the title, one might expect that Salonen had been inspired by—or is exploring—individual subjectivity: the interior experience of an individual self and the self-regard that each of us has through introspection, mapping and remembering our own history.

B ut instead Salonen’s ‘Homunculus’ suggests that a quartet is (can be) one individual-in-aggregate, or, conversely, that a single individual is (can be) a collocation of multiple selves, each of whom has its own real existence and identity.

I t’s not so much what the self ‘is’ that interests Salonen, I think, but what the self does (hears, sees, thinks, anticipates, intends, ... ) and how it does it. It’s all ‘process’. Identity has no reality except as it is enacted through acts and processes and events. ‘Homunculus’ not only asserts (abstractly) that this is so; it also defends the argument by way of quartetly examples and illustrates the cognitive and emotional range of self-as-process. ‘Homunculus’ illustrates how rapidly selfhood can be constructed/revealed—with gestures and textures that unfold over a few seconds only. Salonen’s craftsmanship here is clear, but it’s never over-worked. Organic plausibility, palpable Truth.

S ome portions of the work have ‘sectional’ writing for three parts (Vn2, Vla, Vc, say) and the fourth part (Vn1, say) is essentially autonomous, doing its own thing. Several bars/seconds elapse, and the ‘section’ has been reconstituted by a different trio (Vn1, Vn2, Vc, say) and a different one (Vla) is doing the extemporizing. The effect is vividly evocative of the ebb and flow of our normal thought-patterns—the shifting of attention amongst a variety of ideas and ‘mental sets’.

W ithin the model ‘self’ is a concept embodied in a [measurably] finite number of critical sub-units of the overall system of ‘mental sets’ that are accessible to our ordinary experiences. If there is no involvement of one or more parts of this ‘self structure’, then we feel uninvolved; our internal ‘observer’ will be felt to be not present.

S ure, the self can be ‘divided’—have a look at Jon Elster’s and others’ writings about this. But because each self exists in a set of subsystems that are totally finite, the ‘division’ can’t go on indefinitely. After a couple of hierarchical levels, ‘self’ can’t be divided further without either losing the normal sense of the word ‘self’ or division’s becoming arbitrary, unsupported by evidence from ordinary experience. There is a philosophical/aesthetic reason why Salonen wrote this for quartet and not sextet or octet or something larger. In ‘Homunculus’ we get a pretty specific statement from Salonen about how finite each of us really is...

S o there are in fact some neuropsychological models that still characterize how our minds work in terms of homunculus-like mappings and correspondences, but the encapsulations are finite—there is no infinite regress or vast hierarchical matryoshka-type nesting.

I n fact, self watching self watching self … is implausible on its face. Every day we are amazed at our forgetfulness and limited attention. Have a listen to ‘Homunculus’ in concert if you have the opportunity to do so. I think you’ll find Salonen saying (abstractly, musically) that we are each complex selves, but we are not arbitrarily or infinitely complex. (Salonen convinces me, and I take comfort in his having succeeded in this.)

O ne of the ‘complex’ things about ‘complex’ music is its quality of refusing to present a straightforward object (as for instance in much minimal sculpture): it is always perceived in the act of underlining its own ongoing and provisional nature. It doesn’t present the illusion of not being an illusion—in large measure because of the continual problematization of the performance/interpretaton context.”
— Brian Ferneyhough, Responses to a Questionnaire on ‘Complexity’, 1990.

T o fully explain how we experience what we do in this piece (or any other), a theory of consciousness would have to address real-time self-knowledge, self-understanding, self-awareness, self-monitoring, and goal setting: our selves as we know and understand and experience them; our selves as they are seen by others and used as a basis for their recognizing us as us; our selves as the sense of values and personal history and memory that constitutes our own recognition of who we are.

B ut, our minds (selves) do quite a lot of processing that’s ‘parallel’, not hierarchical or serial. We walk and chew gum at the same time; we contemplate and monitor several ideas at once; we process the concurrent expressions in this Salonen quartet and observe our own spontaneous reactions as we do this.

F or whatever forms and depths the ‘division’ of the self plausibly may have, though, the extent of the division is limited to the finite resources that in fact constitute ‘self’ within the system of mental sets that constitute our psyche. And those finite resources change on a moment-by-moment timescale. For example, the tutti and sectional structures in this 12-minute Salonen quartet do not place demands on us that are as great as the parts of the composition where the voices diverge from each other. As the processes unfold, the evolving cognitive demands—for the performers and for us listeners—are not excessive, and the musical result is coherent, pleasurable, beautiful.

T he narrative arc is compelling, and the effort of the collected selves apprehending this Salonen quartet is richly rewarded. I’ll have to get ahold of a copy of the score, to get a more detailed sense of how Salonen’s design accomplishes so much in such a short piece.

F our, five, six, eight voices at a time are about my own cognitive limit, however—which stands in stark contrast to the recent maniacal, parallel-not-hierarchical IVF exploits of Octo Mom to explore far higher cardinalities and polyphonies in one household.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Dr. Atomic: John Adams’s Photographer’s Gaze

It is useful to think of chamber music as ] a narrow deep area between the novel and film.”
— Lewis Baltz.

There was a time when we thought it was enough just to photograph objects at eye level, standing with both feet on the ground. But then we began to move around, to climb mountains, to fly in space, to go to the bottom of the sea—and to document what was there and our responses to what was there. John Adams’s compositional ‘concision’ is tremendous—he is able to imply so much with so few notes, with so few compositional gestures! He is not satisfied with things apprehended at eye level.

Adams’s opera, Dr. Atomic, is nominally about the history of J. Robert Oppenheimer and others who participated in the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, to create the atomic bomb. But the text fragments that were incorporated into the opera or adapted to become part of its libretto offer close-ups so extreme as to become abstract—studies of textures, microscopic studies of the ethos of the period. In places, it’s as though we have waveform-sampled, electroacoustic still-lives of Oppenheimer and colleagues. The opera is painterly—or, more accurately I think, photographerly.

The images affect us on the physical level, the depictive level, the mythic level. The setting of a John Donne sonnet is made to sound archaic by Adams’s choice of a slow, solemn D minor chaconne. All the typical 17th-century ingredients of a breakfast still-life painting are here. On the left is a large römer, a green wine glass with prunts on the stem. Next to it is a salt cellar with a Chinese porcelain dish on top. It contains capers, which go well with fish. The still-life is subdued in color—only the yellow of the lemon grabs the eye. Delightful details, such as the curling lemon peel and pewter plates jutting out from the table, divert our attention. Dr. Atomic has still-life compositional qualities like these.

R eality has started to be understood as a type of writing—one that can be decoded [through photographs]… Photographs are not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it, a replacement for it.”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography.

This type of still-life is sometimes called a ‘vanitas painting’, in which arrangements of fruit and flowers, or lavish banquet tables with fine silver and crystal, are accompanied by symbolic reminders of mortality. A skull, an hourglass or pocket watch, a candle burning down, a book with pages turning, serve as a moralizing message on how short life is. Look! The fruits and flowers themselves are starting to spoil and droop. Look! The boy comes to get a glass of milk from the nanny! Look! The bomb!

D r. Atomic came out very fluidly, and largely without my analyzing it [in the process of composing it]. [Don’t] make the mistake of walking through the kitchen to get to the restroom—and come back having lost your appetite. [Don’t] look in my kitchen here, but for the moment just enjoy what’s on the plate.”
— John Adams, in interview with Thomas May, FEB-2005, p. 233.

Interplay among the levels of experience that Adams devises for us is what creates tension and meaning in this opera. The collapsing of depth, foreshortening of events, telescoping of time by way of the festinating micro-marches that Oppy and Groves make together across the stage—these create new relationships; they don’t just reveal and characterize existing historical ones.

Some of the moral or ethical implication of Dr. Atomic is diminished by the libretto’s obsessing over trivial and self-absorbed dialogue of the scientists and military characters. But this, too, is a choice on Adams’s and Sellars’s part. Possibly their intent is to portray the Americans’ inhumanity and hubris even more brutally, by downplaying the characters’ attention to the destructive implications and casualties that the bomb will have. But the effect of this choice—minimizing the characters’ attention—also tends to reduce our own.

Dr. Atomic, ‘Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God

General Groves’s candy-bar eating and weight management issues—his recitative about the 200-calorie brownies and three pieces of chocolate cake—are maybe genuine historical artifacts, but their inclusion here is conspicuous for the vacuousness and/or sociopathy they imply.

Kitty Oppenheimer spends the majority of the second half of the opera on center stage, passed out in her chair from consuming too much scotch whiskey. This, too, may be historically accurate. But the choice to have one character inert and stationary—whether due to psychological strain or moral incontinence or some other cause—is a curious one for the composer and librettist to make.

T he photographer can identify with the circumstances. Choosing is the final, essential act of creativity. If, as Poincaré suggests, the subconscious brings up ideas in pairs or in crowds, then it is up to us to choose what makes sense to us. If, as he suggests, this bringing into consciousness is directed by an aesthetic force, the best one can do is not undo it but take it as it is... What I call imagination is simply that active link between intuition and rationality.”
— David Travis, p.77.

Dr. Atomic is a work that can hold special significance to people of a certain age, say, those who are today 55 years and older and who have a clear personal recollection of the milieu of the 1950s or of the 1940s. Adams and Sellars take imagery and texts from that period and make them more complex and multi-layered by injecting them into this latter-day composition. Although in many ways the historicism of the quoted texts and images makes them ‘stay the same’, the farther we go in this process the more different they become and the more intriguing the results are—and the more those results play to our imagination and compound the complexity. There’s a ‘fractal’ quality of memory that Adams evokes in us—and we’re led to recognize a mathematically recursive quality of our memory—led to recognize the inherently, unavoidably ‘revisionist’ nature of our human cognitive process. Our minds continually re-contextualize everything! We cannot help it!

V ertov is right. The task of cinema and of the camera is not to imitate the human eye, but to see and record what the human eye normally does not see. The cinema and photo-eye can show us things from unexpected viewpoints and in unusual configurations, and we should exploit this possibility.”
— Ossip Brik, in Wells, p. 90.

This opera is chock-full of implication—open-ended imagery that empowers the audience to enter into constructing individualized meanings. Adams is aiding and abetting curiosity and conjecture. This is not mere ‘optical’ fidelity—a claim to correctly transcribe visual appearances (‘It happened, and it looked this way.’). It’s emotional fidelity—accurate, in part, because we’re engaged by Adams in actively generating its truth. That said, this is not an opera for anyone incurious—anyone who’s unprepared to be engaged and unwilling to be actively implicated.

The sparseness of the set, its raising and lowering mountains-scrim and bomb and gantry/scaffolds, and the repetitiousness of the choreographed movements all present challenges to audience members who are expecting activity on-stage to have a purpose, advance the story, or make a point. In many ways, the point seems to be the utter lack of a point—the absurdity of the process of making the bomb, the impersonal and unstoppable momentum that the process has when it is underway, the existential horror that that zombie-like activity has.

Unexpectedly, the imagery in the Dr. Atomic production was reminiscent of the Pieter Ombregt XYZ photographs I had seen earlier in the day, at the Columbia College Chicago exhibit at the Water Tower on Michigan Ave.

Angular, inhuman geometry and architecture. Harsh, inhuman light bathing depersonalized human figures as morally impoverished objects, not subjects. Entering and exiting doors and apertures, to fulfill purposes unknown or no purpose at all.

Found Art’ can be the epitome of a consumptive, exploitative capitalistic political economy. But this opera is not ‘Found Art’. It’s not shameless appropriation and naked, direct presentation of historical texts set to music. Instead, it creates new connections, creates an aura—empowers us to find these connections, discover our own aura. The aura may be ugly and disheartening, though. The quiet recorded Japanese voices that percolate down on us from the balconies as we wait for the bomb test detonation in the final 5 minutes of Dr. Atomic are terrible reminders of how needless, how cruel, and how avoidable the deployment of these weapons was. There is no catharsis here. And it is difficult to applaud afterward. Dr. Atomic might be best done with instructions to the audience to exit the theater silently, to go home and meditate on how to make amends and how to be better human beings.

I have never attempted to squelch the kind of energies inherent in my music in order to avoid a catharsis or ‘crisis’ or climax. I don’t view my expressive world as teleological. Rather, I try to allow what’s latent in the material to flower naturally. I think a lot of being a good composer is like being a good gardener. You have to know when to wter something, to cultivate it, and also when something needs judicious pruning.”
— John Adams, in interview with Thomas May, FEB-2005, p. 28.

Adams is—in this opera and in other of his work—a specialist in creating quasi-historical scenic wonderment for the audience. It’s as though, say, he (re-)introduces the mid-Century concept of phosphorescence, as it was before the era of television and fluorescent lights—before the wide public experience of phosphors and phosphorescence had expunged the cultural remembrance of what ‘phosphorescence’ had been in the literary age that went before.

T he concept of revelation—one hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives... Everything happens involuntarily but, as in a gale of a feeling of freedom... The involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all: one no longer has any notion of what is an image or a metaphor... It actually seems as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

Adams’s detached, clinical observation—leads him to compose still-lives of these carefully selected and edited ‘found’ objects. His material and inspiration lead him to construct views through barn doors and beyond relay-racks filled with arrays of meters and glowing pilot-lights, to mountains and prairie grass and historical people outside. It is very much in the aesthetic realm between the novel and the film, as photographer Lewis Baltz once said. Very much like the objectification that happens in the Ombregt photographs.

Adams’s wife, Deborah O’Grady, is a photographer. I wonder whether she sees photographerly influences in his work, with regard to John’s compositions and compositional techniques. I wonder if harmonious ways of seeing are part of what brought them together.

Truth in photography may involve some degree of verisimilitude to the objects seen, but the primary reference shifts from object to subject. Truth now refers not to accurate representation of the objects but rather to accurate representation of the artist’s response or interpretation of the object. Truth now means fidelity to the subjective experience, of the artist and the viewer.”
— Jerry Thompson, p.22.

Music Hall, Madison Ave, Szarkowski, 1943