sen_no_ongaku | (no subject)

This past Saturday, we drove down to NYC to see Steve Reich and Beryl Korot's video opera The Cave with

tenwaxmen.

The Cave is Reich's first opera, and postmodern to the hilt. It is scored for four singers (two women and two men), string quartet, three pianos, wind quintet, and lots of percussion. "The Cave" refers to the Cave of Machpelah in which Adam and Eve, and Abraham and Sarah are supposedly buried, and the piece centers around the story of Abraham, Sarah and Isaac, and Hagar and Ishmael[1]. One of the many valences of the story is that the Jews consider themselves the sons of Isaac, the Arabs consider themselves the sons of Ishmael; and thus both feel that they are the rightful inheritors of God's legacy to Abraham.

The staging is simple: all the musicians are on the stage, along with five video screens[2].

Reich and Korot are uninterested in a reenactment of the Biblical account, instead focusing its interpretation. The opera is in three acts, each focusing on videotaped interviews they did with various people; the first act is comprised of interviews with Israelis, the second Arabs, and the third Americans. Each interviewee was asked, "Who for you is Abraham? Sarah? Isaac? Hagar? Ishmael?" The piece is built around bits and pieces of these interviews, which are shown on screen; generally, two screens show the interviewee while the other three display some still close-up of them, focusing on a lock of hair, or the design on a suspender, etc., as a kind of visual commentary

There are two main musical techniques at work:

To introduce the first, the opera opens with "Typing Music", the sound of typing on keyboards as percussion, as syllables of selected verses from the King James version of Genesis appear on the center screen in time to the typing, interspersed with other typing as translations of the verse into French and German appear on the screens flanking it. The section grows as the typing is joined by other unpitched percussion -- claves, wood blocks, and heavy drums[3]. Typing Music provides the foundation for all later sections featuring the Bible, now accompanied by pitched instruments and singers who sing the text as it appears on the screen.[4]

The second is tied to the snippets of interviews we see; in the sections of the opera centered around the verbal commentary around the Bible, the musical material is based on the speech melodies of the people on screen[5].

The Cave is built around providing multiple levels of commentary; the interviewees' responses, , the music's commentary on their speech melodies, the visual commentary of the video close-ups. Even the formal aspects of the music reflect its semantic content; in the first two acts, featuring people who are closely linked to Abraham both spiritually and geographically, their and the Bible's words are always clearly sung, while in the third act, Biblical text and interviewees' words are sung in canon, confusing them and making them more difficult to understand -- but also enriching the harmony.

This is a huge and dense work, and much can be written about it, so I'm going to stop now -- suffice to say that this description feels wholly inadequate. The Cave has its flaws, but it's still an amazing, impressive, and glorious piece of art, completely transforming the stale and reactionary medium of opera into something vibrant and meaningful.
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(1)I'm feeling lazy, so you'll have to look it up.

(2)In this production, the singers were slightly and elegantly costumed for each act.

(3)tenwaxmen picked up on many things I hadn't, such as parts of the text in which angels speak are accompanied by kick drum, which lends a real heft and weight to the music.

(4)I can't imagine a better or more beautiful setting of Biblical text.

(5)First developed by Reich for his piece Different Trains.