Tom suggested recently that I should point my collaborators at some alternative approaches to "musical theatre". Not really my area, but a few things immediately sprang to mind*.
First up, Philip Glass has become the great contemporary opera composer. But while his chops as a composer have become ever more refined, his approach to opera has arguably become ever so slightly more conventional. It wasn't always thus. His breakthrough "opera" Einstein on the Beach, conceived and composed while he was still driving the night shift as a cab driver in New York, not only defied categories but arguably defined several. Here's the "hit" from the shoe, "Knee Play 1:Train":
Glass's contemporary Steve Reich has pretty much eschewed opera, but works such as his 1993 collaboration with Beryl Korot, The Cave, are certainly some kind of music theatre:
Robert Ashley's career is, er, orthogonal to the Mininalists'. Actually, everything about Robert Ashley is kind of orthogonal to, well, pretty much everything. Here's the first act of his 1983 magnum opus, Private Lives, a "television opera". (And can you believe that this was premiered in its entirety by Channel 4? Different times, people.)
Another difficult-to-pin-down polymath, albeit a rather more famous one, is Laurie Anderson, whose live shows combine video, songs, soundscapes, and gnomic storytelling. So much to choose from, but I've gone for her deeply moving 2015 film Heart of a Dog (which her own website describes as a "documentary"!)
In 1990, singer-songwriter Tom Waits collaborated with Beat author William Burroughs and designer Robert Wilson (one of Glass' key collaborators on Einstein on the Beach) on the stage production The Black Rider. It seemed like a huge deal at the time, although looking at this (admittedly terrible VHS transfer-quality) recording now, it feels like perhaps the most dated and least successful of the pieces here. But still: Waits, Burroughs, Wilson!
Finally, Pina Bausch. Now, Bausch's work generally gets categorised as "dance", but that's about as helpful a label as, say, "jazz" is for John Zorn**. As in: doesn't quite capture things. Bausch's productions are all essentially "music theatre", or they're nothing. They're also fiendishly difficult to track down on the interwebs, at least in full. This clip from 1978's Kontatkthof (from a Fassbinder documentary) barely does justice to the multilayered storytelling of her work, but anyway, it's huge fun (and a bit saucy in parts, with apologies):
* For the record, I've pretty much avoided "conventional" modern opera here; that may or may not form the basis of another (and probably much longer) post.
** Tom, if you're reading, I know wang on about Zorn a lot, but honestly, you should have known me thirty years ago... you'd have heard little else from me...
Some great sources here. Robert Ashely is someone I've been meaning to engage with again for some time and I really must - Wolfman was a big thing when I was in York but not my scene then. I'd be interested to know how you collaborators reacted to this - a discussion with them about it (set them some 'homework')might be a good idea. There is still time to take onboard influences from this kind of work if you like. No need to apologise about Zorn - not someone I'm that well across but his eclecticism I really admire (and skill).
Posted by: Tom Armstrong | May 10, 2022 at 08:22 AM