John Cage photo courtesy of EM Records/Omega Point
In 2013, the New York City Opera—the city’s second largest opera company—filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. A move from Lincoln Center to Brooklyn, a buzzworthy, pop-music-infused opera about Anna Nicole Smith and a Kickstarter campaign couldn’t save the 70-year-old company, which had been struggling for years to reconcile its commitment to staging modern, adventurous works with its fundraising difficulties. Now, even the centuries-old Metropolitan Opera—with its crowd-pleasing programming (18th and 19th century classics, largely), A-list stars and huge endowment—is in dire straits. Current general manager Peter Gelb has racked up huge production costs with lavish and controversial new productions, while attendance is flagging: Receptive younger audiences are being priced out, and the older, traditionally-minded base is, as Gelb bluntly put it, dying off, or not interested in seeing any wheels be reinvented.
These difficulties in New York illustrate why daring new works are so rarely programmed by major American opera companies: Even the most modest attempts to stay artistically relevant can be bad for business. As a result, significant avant-garde works written decades ago—from Gyorgy Ligeti’s surrealistic fantasy Le Grand Macabre, to John Cage’s glacial, indeterminate Europera pieces to Robert Ashley’s spoken-word driven masterpieces—are still never mounted. These days, the "modern opera" placeholders in opera companies’ seasons are often works from post-minimalist composers like—or following in the tradition of—John Adams or Philip Glass. Blending the propulsive rhythms of classical minimalism with elements of older, pre-modern styles, these operas do not push the conventions of the art form too far, usually sticking to conventional vocal writing, plot structure, and tuneful, tonal music.
And so experimental opera is kept alive, mostly—outside of universities and colleges—in small, rented theaters and DIY spaces. The aptly named Experiments in Opera is one of the more interesting new-opera groups in New York City, subsisting on grants, generosity and volunteer enthusiasm. Last week, the five-year-old company presented "Story Binge," a two-day festival at Brooklyn’s Roulette consisting of seven brand new productions. These works are "operas" in the broadest sense of the word: that is—as one of the festival’s composers Nick Hallett put it—dramatic situations in which a "story interacts with a musical landscape." In the works premiered at Roulette, all other limitations, and even that one (most often, the idea of a "story") were either questioned or ignored.
The provocative pieces were not tailored explicitly to new-opera devotees; they seemed to be equally aimed at drawing in open-minded audience members with no pre-existing interest in the genre. The composers and performers came from backgrounds in electronic music, free improvisation, world music and pop or rock music—notably, Faith No More’s keyboardist Roddy Bottum contributed a piece. Avoiding typical and stereotypical operatic gambits, their work did not rely heavily on classically-trained singing. Traditional operatic singers shared the stage with poppier stylists (singer/composer Gelsey Bell sang with a straight-toned, Feist-ian lilt in Rolodex, in which performers used a rolodex as an adapatable score), readers (Aaron Siegel delivered an intensely personal monologue in hushed, NPR-ish tones in "Laughing") and computerized vocalists (most of the libretto of Sam Hillmer’s drone-filled, non-narrative That Was Soon, and That Was the Web This is Going to Be was rendered by text-to-speech bots, and hardly included live vocals at all).
The best of the operas juxtaposed wildly contrasting musical styles. Hallett’s dark comedy To Music was the most elaborate collage, blending off-center pop and Broadway-styled songwriting with blasts of dissonance and electronic detritus. Staged beneath intricate projections of fake laptop activity, the opera features a fictional composer muttering to himself while checking his mail (responding to congratulatory messages from Moby and Marina Abramović), attempting to play buffering YouTube clips (the skips are cleverly echoed in the music), and, ultimately, chatting with a possible Catfish of a social media follower. Co-curator and mod-synth mastermind Jason Cady’s The Captives, meanwhile, was even more committed to being non-serious. The piece is a conversation in alternating songs (static new-wave disco tunes anchored by tinny drum programming) between a human couple forced together by a tyrannical alien species to reproduce. The singers were part of the onstage band, contributing unruly, Remain in Light-style synth blasts when not singing, and an alien appears in a plasticine Halloween-pop-up-store alien mask and gloves. Funny and engaging, it was carried by Cady’s precise, funky arrangements and spirited vocal performances from Vince B. Vincent and Katie Eastburn.
A story and music playing off one another in a dramatic context is one of the oldest relationships in art, but there are various stigmas surrounding it. For musical ideologues from "absolute music" advocate/composer Johannes Brahms to the heckling metal head at the high school musical, there is something inferior about concoctions of music and narrative, whether it’s stylized performance conventions, cookie-cutter emotional platitudes or other perceived elements of gimmickry and cornballness. Experiments in Opera and groups like them, however, seek to insure the continued development of music-drama, overturning preconceptions and avoiding textbook moves. One can only hope that work like theirs will find ways to adapt and subsist, to gain new supporters and even, if very rarely, to make a difference on a wider scale.