Category: Uncategorized

Happy March everyone! And happy end of spring break! My spring break was wonderfully productive and was in no way filled with dormancy.

As we all make the sad, sad transition back into school, I want to talk a bit about my favorite topic, the world of classical music. But! Before you stop reading and write me off as an old fashioned boring old guy in a suit that goes to opera and comments on the divinity and “high class” of the music that I’m listening to! I want to talk about where classical music intersects with popular music, where classical music is TODAY and why YOU should care. Because you should. It’s cool stuff.

So I want to start with how I got into this world of contemporary music by highlighting one of my favorite groups, a new music ensemble called Alarm Will Sound.

Alarm Will Sound could be called something like a “chamber orchestra,” if you wanted to give it a name. It has string, woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments, and they are all arranged around one conductor. It’s a “chamber” group because it has so few numbers: only one or two musicians per part (compared to a full symphony orchestra, which has quite a few musicians playing the same part…). All the musicians in Alarm Will Sound are classically trained—all have graduated with at least one degree in music. In fact, they started as a group of students at the Eastman School of Music. But what makes Alarm Will Sound different, in my mind, in their willingness to explore and be open to all kinds of music. As it says in the intro video above, AWS’s members have experience in all kinds of music, from world music to jazz. And this shows in their output: in 2005 they released an album of Aphex Twin covers, called Acoustica. Go back and read that again. Cover album. Aphex Twin. Y’know! The electronic artist, who made tracks like this…

and Alarm Will Sound’s cover?

This is a “classical” ensemble that sees electronic music as just as valid as anything that has Beethoven’s name on it. It’s such a wonderfully forward thinking strategy! And the things they produce are just really cool.

They also came out with another album in 2009, called A/Rhythmia, a project highlighting rhythmically challenging works. And this is where I first discovered AWS and fell in love with their music. In particular, I really dug this piece, called Yo Shakespeare by Michael Gordon….

But before I start to melt into uncompromising praise for a group of musicians I’ve never seen live, I’ll just take note of what an ensemble like AWS says as to the current state of music. To me, it says that there are no longer any boundaries. Genre is a meaningless term. All music is good music, and all music deserves a listen. So check out this “classical” music and see why I love it so much.

And I’ll leave you with one last video, Alarm Will Sound’s performance of Paul Dooley’s Point Blank. Paul is a doctoral student at the School of Music ,Theatre and Dance. Go Blue.

Illness, whether a mental or physical debilitation, has been the subject of countless works of art throughout history.  It has been pictured scientifically, religiously, sympathetically, heroically, and any number of other variations.  In relation to the artistic discourse, the ways in which illness is depicted reflects historical stigmas as well as broad human emotions.  Much of what we know about responses in society to illness, like the Plague, are documented in art but it is often used to evoke an appeal, like in works by Picasso or Basquiat, to universal distress.  To examine this, works concerning illness spanning several centuries will be analyzed, as well as texts related to art in illness and artists that suffer from illness themselves.  In order to do this, it is important to look at these works of art comparatively, thus many works will be compared to others in their same time period and other eras.  Illness is complicated through art because it can take something fairly scientific objective and turn it into a work that is subjective, propaganda, or even just reflect it back objectively.

Though art traces its roots back much farther than the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, some of the most terrifying and prolific images of illness came from these eras.  An example of this would be Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Triumph of Death.  The “Triumph of Death” (or the “Dance of Death”) motif was a common one, arising from medieval times with religious reinforcement.  In the face of the Black Plague, this theme was given ample commissions by the Catholic Church as a memento mori, reminding the public of the pains of Hell and the rapidity that death can come in.  The hysterical lust for repentance during the outbreak and spread of the Bubonic Plague reflected the religious fervor that gripped Europe, and this is partially why the Triumph of Death’s savage depiction of illness is important documentation.  In Bruegel’s painting, finished circa 1562, Death is seen ravaging every social hierarchy, from peasants to emperors.  Some “Triumph of Death” works from this period even went as far as to include Catholic bishops among those being cut down by Death (represented by skeletons).  In relation to illness, this painting shows the intense religious reaction to a fear of sickness.  Through depicting illness and death, Bruegel examines people’s frantic and desperate desire to escape the inevitable but not without religious propagation.

In the same vein as Bruegel’s piece, artists continued to use their talents to the liking of higher authorities.  The subject of illness and death seemed to be a point of supreme sympathy or relatability for the masses because it continued to be the center of many works commissioned by governments or churches, possibly because of its ability to tap into the fears of every person; dying is inescapable for everyone and you’ll be lucky if you don’t suffer greatly while doing so.  In the 18^th Century Neoclassicism began, unlike its state commissioned predecessor Rococo, to use illness to illustrate “civic virtue” in relation to the rise of Republicanism in Paris.  Themes included bodily sacrifice for the state, like in Drouais’s The Dying Athlete, David’s The Death of Socrates, or Regnault’s Liberty or Death.  It was considered a great honor to die for the Revolution and those running it spent lavish amounts of money in order to propagate this ideal.  Jacques Louis David even proposed parading the decomposing body of one of the Revolution’s “martyrs,” Jean Paul Marat, in the bathtub he was murdered in through the streets of Paris (though the body atrophied beyond recognition before this could be carried out).  Unlike the previous religious implementations of illness into art, the Neoclassic and later Romantic usage was meant to display a choice: Republicanism or an un-honorable death, or Republicanism with a heroic death.  However, both religious and Jacobin propaganda stressed

unwavering devotion.  French Revolution artists would have been fools not to draw from Christian artwork though; centuries of blind Catholic following in France was a resource widely tapped into by the likes of David and Ingres.  There was already the perfect model of martyrdom and illness: Jesus.  Probably the most famous work to come out of the 18^th Century was David’s Death of Marat, styled after countless Pietas, most famously by Michelangelo.  Along with the death motif the painter made a point of displaying Marat still in his bathtub.  Marat spent most of his time in that bathtub because he had a very sensitive skin condition, something that increases the perception that this was a cruel murder against a helpless victim.  This shows how, among other things, illness can be manipulated and exploited in art.

Toward the middle of the 19^th Century state commissioned art began to disappear.  With the restoration of the Bourbon Dynasty in France, less concentration was paid to funding political art in an attempt to disassociate themselves from the still leftist and revolutionary artists prevalent at the time, like Daumier, who was imprisoned briefly for unkind caricatures of Louis Philippe in the form of a sickly, rotting pear (which also caused a nationwide ban on any depictions of pears) or Delacroix.  A new form of bourgeoisie was also in place, one offended by the growing influx of peasants drawn to the city during the Industrial Revolution.  With this brought unclean and unhealthy living environments, along with a fantastic rise in prostitution and an artistic desire to depict these realistically, hence Realism.  Emile Zola, an ardent supporter of Impressionist Realism, remarked upon hearing outcries from the upper classes over Manet’s masterpiece Olympia “Why not be honest?”  Olympia, a sardonic response to Cabanel’s saccharine Birth of Venus, shows a thin, pale, and bold prostitute lacking the typical voluptuous body that was associated with beauty.   This pursuit of the real, an unglorified view of the sickness the Parisian poor were experiencing, became a fixture in Impressionism.  This was done, almost to a grotesque point, by Degas in his sculpture Little Dancer of Fourteen Years ⁹.  Called by one critic the “Flower of the Gutter,” Degas disgusted critics with his bony, often speculated as anorexic, ballerina.  His original sculptures of Little Dancer of Fourteen Years was not a bronze cast as the current ones are but a wax sculpture with genuine human hair  and displayed in a glass case.  Unlike today, displaying a sculpture in a glass case was not common practice for artists in the 19^th Century and was perceived as a reference to medical displays.  This was a scandal; prior to Impressionism artists did not attempt to exhibit realistic interpretations of the lower classes.  Full scale paintings were previously reserved for heroic battle scenes, aristocrats, or works of civic virtue but to devote them to the flâneur and prostitutes, and not kindly done, of Paris was an outrage.  Other then class relations, Realism changed how illness was dealt with.  It was no longer used as a tool to instruct or cause fear for the masses, but was instead a point of power and change in shocking the bourgeoisie.

There are upon this earth a great number of places where there is beauty to be found in the intersection of the human and the natural. There is urban decay, where manmade structures are gradually reclaimed by the elements, the thing around which urban exploration revolves. There is the landscape redefined, modernized, the urban landscape. And then there is something else, something that encompasses that and more, something that is in a way their opposite, at least as a manner of perception. The anthropogenic landscape is one that seems now natural to us. Of course everything has to some degree been touched or altered by human actions; the pristine is now rare, valued, and, in many cases, on its way to becoming commoditized.

Where man has been, it tends to leave an indelible mark (though that too is subject to temporal perspective). It is often on the overlooked fringes of ordinary civilization and in its in-between spaces that the most unexpected things might be found. It’s the sparsely-populated stretches between cities and towns, it’s the desolate-looking land peppered by isolated industrial complexes. It’s the pin-straight best soccer predictions lines of a planted forest, the threads of roads snaking across the desert, the carven bulk of a terraced mountainside. Or perhaps on a smaller scale, it’s where tire tracks appear in gravel or a cluster of rubbish bins sit in a field, where a house sits perched on the top of the bluff.

Anthropogenics curates images of these places, “depicting the human-made, human-marked, post-natural, contemporary landscape,” framing the ordinary in such a way as to make them appear to be more than that. Its collection, it says, is “borne of the belief that “pretty” landscapes lack interest… the appeal of landscapes and photographs of landscapes is in the ways in which humanity has altered, or even created, them, not the ways in which we find them pleasing to the eyes.” While it might not be entirely fair to say that the unaltered landscapes conventionally prized for being aesthetically pleasing “lack interest,” it is undeniable that they receive far more attention than the human-affected. Pristine alpine meadows and city skylines alike have been much photographed in their many iterations. What lies in between often goes ignored, which Anthropogenics seeks to remedy.

The public contributes images through their Flickr pool, where more images can be found.

Dramaturg.  Part two.  New works.

For me, this is the most exciting part of dramaturgy.  While you do uncover really interesting information when doing production dramaturgy, new works dramaturgy is where it’s at.  It’s fast-paced.  It’s exciting.  You see a new play form right in front of your very eyes, and, if the playwright is open to your input, you see your ideas shape the play into its best possible form.

New works are really my bread and butter.  This partially comes from my aspirations to write plays for a living.  If people aren’t interested in new plays, then I basically have no career ahead of me.  So I am an advocate for new work.  This is not saying that the classics aren’t important (I still love Death of a Salesman), but I don’t think our respect for the older works should hinder interest or investment in new, innovative art.  While the plays of Miller, Albee, and O’Neill still hold great meaning and insight into our modern age, there is nothing that can be more relevant to the here and now than something that is written in the here and now.  Many audiences are afraid of new plays, seeing something in its first iteration, but where would we be if audiences hadn’t taken chances on those playwrights I mentioned above?  Or Paula Vogel?  Or Sarah Ruhl?  Or Tony Kushner?

The aim of new works dramaturgy is to take what the writer already has and what they’re trying to say and clarify and strengthen it.  Sometimes, a playwright thinks that his message or even plot points are clear, but what is in his head does not quite translate to the page.  It is a dramaturg’s job to parse out what is being said, and help the playwright discern the most effective way to say that.  Oftentimes, it is taking an image or wording that already exists and giving it greater import.  For example, something that seems to happen frequently is that a playwright creates a symbol in the first half of the play but abandons it after the first few scenes.  Just reintroducing the symbol in the second act could strengthen the theme it illustrates and clarify the overall trajectory of the play.

Some playwrights are resistant to dramaturgs.  This is understandable, especially when the dramaturg is brought into the process at a later stage, like a first staged reading or even first full production.  The playwright has been working, usually in solitary, for months, possibly even years on this work, and then the dramaturg has the audacity to tell them that they need to change it?  What most playwrights come to realize after working with a good dramaturg (or at least we hope they realize) is that the dramaturg does not have malicious plans to change the play into something completely different from what the playwright envisioned.  We want to see their vision come to life in the most effective way.  We are really there to help, not hinder.  While I have met many dramaturgs who also write, like myself, when you are working on someone else’s show you have immense respect for what that writer is doing and you are not trying to push your own agenda or writing style on the playwright.  You are respecting what they do.

In this way, text is king.  As I indicated in my last post, dramaturgs are the biggest word nerds.  The importance of language is magnified ten fold in new plays, because you are still at a stage where you can control the words.  Watching a playwright do on the spot rewrites after being given a suggestion about the character’s vocabulary is one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen.  You see the wheels spinning, the motors whirring, and then they produce the perfect sentence.

Dramaturgy is a very personal profession.  The role of the dramaturg in completely dependent on his relationship to the playwright and what that particular playwright needs from him.  For some playwrights, they just need the playwright to tell them things they already know but are too close to the material to decide.  It might benefit the play to cut a character entirely, and the playwright may know that, but because they have spent months with this character, they can’t bring themselves to cut it or convince themselves that the character is necessary.  Sometimes they just need the push and logic of a dramaturg to take that step.  Depending on the size of the production team, the dramaturg can also take all of the opinions of the rehearsal room and really pick out what the playwright needs to hear and what is best ignored.  The dramaturg can eliminate the problem of “too many cooks in the kitchen” that is all too common in rehearsal rooms.

New works dramaturgy is quick and frenzied and thrilling.  There is anxiety and enthusiasm around a new play that you really don’t get with older works, especially if the company you’re working with is nurturing, inventive, and collaborative.  At its best, new works dramaturgy is a partnership between the playwright, possibly the director, and the dramaturg.  Each has the utmost respect for the other, and each is aware of his own aesthetic as well as the playwright’s, so they know how to tailor their opinions to fit the needs of the show.  I was lucky enough to be a part of a process like that this past summer.  Even as an intern, I felt comfortable enough at a table with the playwright, director, and dramaturg to voice my opinions and actually got to see them incorporated into the show. I think the show was better for it.  When the show opened, I felt like an integral part of the team, something that can be missing in production dramaturgy where you have left after the table work is over.  In new works dramaturgy, you are there every step of the way, watching incredible artists do their thing and feeling free to focus on the words and the dramatic arc and symbolism and themes and all of the nerdy stuff that you can’t help but notice.

Even writing about new plays makes me want to delve into some brand-new manuscript, devouring its innovations and hearing the distinctive new voice tumbling around in my head.  I want to help bring works to the stage that we have never seen before.  I want audiences to be excited about new works and not afraid that they might fail.  Because, hopefully, in the hands of a gifted playwright and capable dramaturg, the audience will feel that same enthusiasm and excitement as the lights rise on the career of a young playwright.