OPERA IN THE

MEDIA AGE
Essays on Art, Technology
and Popular Culture
Edited by Paul Fryer

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Jefferson, North Carolina
ALSO BY PAUL FRYER AND FROM MCFARLAND
The Opera Singer and the Silent Film (2005)

BY PAUL FRYER AND OLGA USOVA

Lina Cavalieri: The Life of Opera’s Greatest Beauty,
1874–1944 (2004)

EDITED BY PAUL FRYER

Women in the Arts in the Belle Epoque:
Essays on Influential Artists, Writers and Performers (2012)

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Opera in the media age : essays on art, technology and popular
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1. Opera. 2. Mass media and music. 3. Music and
technology. 4. Music—Social aspects—History. I. Fryer,
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 After The Twilight of the Gods:
Opera Experiments, New Media
and the Opera of the Future
Michael Earley

As many critics and scholars regularly note1 discussions surrounding lyric

opera or lyric theatre today still reference an art form that, in its development
in the western cultural tradition of the last 400 years, is still based on the fol-
lowing triad:
1. A music-composer-based narrative theatre form that is performed by
instruments and predominantly singing voices, which has always been
encircled by and mingled with multiple arts and technologies in their
respective shape and formation;
2. Institutional structures that reflected a. the necessary production con-
ditions defined by the specific historical representation forms (e.g.
instrumental and orchestral, soloists and choirs, dancers) and b. the
different historic hierarchies of a social and artistic character;
3. Architectural containers or buildings (equipped with historically
established technologies), defined by stage, proscenium, pit and audi-
ence spaces, which reflect relational hierarchies and define a pro-
foundly bidirectional form of performing, seeing and hearing.2
The grip of the traditional and historic operatic canon (primarily the
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertoire but even the twentieth- and
twenty-first-century repertoire) has preserved and enforced the above triad,
even when it has been under stress from modern and contemporary influences.3
Opera studies, as an academic discipline as opposed to a performance disci-
pline, tends to approach its subject with this triad in mind and as a firm anchor-
ing point from which to explore the genre and its history. The triad should
be borne in mind when considering just how far experiments in opera change
or reposition these terms.
229
230 Opera in the Media Age

The introduction of new and enabling technologies (most of which are

discussed in more details elsewhere in this volume) has been to optimize the
effect, albeit modernized, of the traditional performance technologies (e.g.,
design, set construction, light, sound, supplemented by video projections, sub-
titles, broadcasting, recording, etc.) but not change the very shape and function
of the operatic triad. In such instances technology does not seek to dominate
the traditional, but, in many cases, is tamed or made discrete (for the most
part) in order to service and support traditions. So while the operatic produc-
tions of those representative of the “new directors’ theatre” (the notorious
works of the Catalan theatre and opera director Calixto Bieito, the American
Peter Sellers or the British Katie Mitchell, for instance) postmodernize the
terms of stage production, politics, context, setting and narrative, the music
of the great tradition that is a central support to the triad is rarely sacrificed
or radicalized.
The changes in opera, as an art form and a staging practice, shifted rad-
ically from before to after Richard Wagner. Götterdämmerung (“The Twilight
of the Gods”), the last of the four operas that comprise “The Ring of the Nibe-
lung,” is a crucial watershed and tipping point in opera’s changing fortune and
in opera’s new status as an intellectual and artistic enterprise. And while we
could just concentrate on Wagner as a subject and his final opera as a trope
for change in an art form (especially as his recent 200th anniversary has con-
centrated new critical interests in his achievements), his final works do act as
a prelude of sorts for things to come as well as a summary for a more refined
totality of gestures that marked opera at the end of the nineteenth century. In
his long essay “The Artwork of the Future,” with its articulation of the Gesamt-
kunstwerk, a total work of art incorporating music, drama, dance, scenography
and (critically for Wagner) political and socio-cultural engagement, Wagner
consolidates all the different aesthetic hierarchies that will be tested and con-
tested across the twentieth century and down to our own time. The Twilight
of the Gods (1876) as a cultural pivot and a testimony of where opera had arrived
since its inception is a good vantage point from which to view opera’s exper-
iments on different levels, not least of which in its adoption of radical new
staging models and eventually new media and practices.
When we think of opera experiments we normally think first of the steady
and sometimes abrupt and profound changes in the music shaping, from tonal-
ity to atonality, for instance.4 The modernist music battleground was where
most twentieth century operatic skirmishes were fought. Or it might be the
radical ways that opera has been produced onstage and, more commonly nowa-
days, deconstructed in performance by a host of new directors in dispute with
tradition (though not, I would hasten to add, without much change musically).
A rich critical literature has been building to make the case for what is fre-
 Experiments (Earley) 231

quently called “director’s opera” or Regieoper over the last hundred years, has-
tened by post-war developments at Bayreuth and modern productions of Wag-
ner, always the most celebrated and high-profile instances of new directions
in opera staging. In fact, the Regieoper movement can be traced through produc-
tions of Wagner’s “Ring” alone. The added new emphasis on post-dramatic
theatre and staging5 has hastened suspicion of opera’s inherited traditions. Wag-
ner’s own stagecraft and his staging of his own work, fixed in the known stage-
craft of its time, sadly undermined the promise of his forward looking visions.6
Not until the post–World War II era, and the new direction of Bayreuth under-
taken by his grandson Wieland Wagner, did the promise implied in “The Art-
work of the Future” and the so-called “basic features” mentioned in the later
part of the manifesto,7 emerge and take exciting hold as a vision for a new the-
atricalization of opera. And the changes, especially more recently, are largely
directorial and, by extension, scenographic (helped by changes in stage tech-
nology and the embracing of new media). As Herbert Lindenberger observes:
The last thirty years or more have also, above all in Europe, constituted the age
of the so-called Regieoper, in which directors such as Patrice Chéreau, Hans
Neuenfels, and Peter Sellars have radically rethought (some would say dismem-
bered) a good bit of the traditional canon. Through unexpected visual effects
they project—for example, a medieval potentate in black tie, or TV monitors
displaying multiple images of a character singing her aria downstage—or through
the changes in decor that they have instituted, most notoriously, perhaps, intro-
ducing the Rhine Maidens as prostitutes tending a dam during Wagner’s own
time or Don Giovanni operating among gangs in the South Bronx, they have, in
effect destabilized and retheatricalized works whose unselfconscious theatricality
had never before been in doubt. And Sellars, one might note, in 1992 directed a
production of Messiaen’s opera [Saint François d’Assise] for the Salzburg Festival
with a full panoply of TV monitors.8

The new post-war Bayreuth, like the new opera beginning to emerge in
cultural centers across Europe and the United States, took its cue first from
Wieland Wagner’s experiments (influenced at first by the visionary designs of
the Swiss theoretician and designer Adolph Appia, who himself was in thrall
to Wagnerian music drama) and set the trend for re-visioning opera in exper-
imental directorial ways without touching the music or disrupting the triad.
And so to this day the controversy that surrounds each new production of the
Ring Cycle at Bayreuth is, in the main, cosmetic so to speak, involving staging,
scenography, and interpretation. The music, however, the genuine core of the
operatic experience, remains sacrosanct.9 The triad, at least as far as the music
is concerned, remains firmly fixed.
This distinction and the way most old technology has been used or har-
nessed to serve the triad need to be made clear at the outset. Because while
232 Opera in the Media Age

opera adopts and adapts increasingly to new media interventions that cover a
wide range of stage crafts and technologies, and even seeks to deconstruct nar-
rative through dramaturgical interventions that adopt new cultural theories,
in many instances the traditions of opera are merely re-costumed, re-painted
or then re-gilded and amplified in a different way. So as Intermediality (the
crossing of boundaries between art forms and technologies) has been a growing
phenomenon in cross-performance contexts,10 authentic Intermediality in
opera is still best served and progressed under experimental conditions if breaks
with the traditional triad and works of a new kind are to be forged. It is through
the history of opera experiments, which have taken many forms, that we see
the all too familiar triad both challenged and transgressed by novel and still
emerging forms that test the boundaries by means of newly expressive works.11
Increasingly, productions like those of the prolific Dutch composer,
writer, director, video artist and filmmaker Michel van der Aa, such as his 2013
production of Sunken Garden, “an occult–mystery film-opera” with a script/
libretto by Cloud Atlas–author David Mitchell, have moved into the main-
stream by way of creative co-productions with sympathetic producing organ-
izations (it was co-commissioned by English National Opera, the Toronto
Luminato Festival, Opera de Lyon, the Holland Festival and the Barbican
Centre, London). The willingness, indeed, for new opera experiments to flour-
ish is a result of a growing recognition that a new tradition is being formed
and is supportable. The technological hybridity of an opera like The Sunken
Garden (its use of 2D and 3D film, computer-generated graphics, music and
sound with a contemporary, non-linear, anti-narrative text) is both a curiosity
to some but also demonstrates vital signs of a new kind of energetic mastery
wrought through a coherent and confident use of technologies that have all
been convincingly manipulated by younger artists like van der Aa. Also in evi-
dence at his productions is a much younger and switched-on audience open
to and fully embracing new directions in opera as a result of their association
with distinctive new music.12
Significant of a new generation of composers, producers and stagers of
their own work, van der Aa was first trained as a sound engineer at the Royal
Conservatory in The Hague before going on to study first musical composi-
tion, then filmmaking and eventually stage direction. Like many of the multi-
disciplinary artists who make New Opera/Music Theatre (a tradition much
more firmly rooted in continental Europe than in the United Kingdom or the
United States), he adopts an auteurist approach to the making of performance
compositions and his wide-ranging concerns and attachment to new media
becomes the subject, in part, of the artist’s work. In that he is not unlike Wag-
ner who called for much the same single-minded totality of artistic expression
and control but with technologies that were far too pre-modern to turn an
 Experiments (Earley) 233

overarching aesthetic philosophy into a reality. In van der Aa’s case the re-
working or re-engineering of operatic form is happening from within the oper-
atic establishment that controls the triad; an establishment that is increasingly
embracing the experimental and the new with greater frequency and security,
if only by relegating it to more experimental spaces that are away from or out-
posts from main houses and the economic pressures that weigh heavily on the
costs of producing opera. But van der Aa’s development is also significant
because his work moves away from the periphery (where most new music the-
atre and new opera takes place) and seeks to be more at the center of operatic
action.
Van der Aa is in a new tradition of contemporary visual and performance
artists whose ambitions take the instincts and materials of opera into new areas
where it merges and sits comfortably with other forms of art making. Artist
and performer Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament, being made with com-
poser Jonathan Bepler, is an epic five-hour operatic film that Barney has been
working on since 2007 and is expected to finally finish and release in 2014.13
Barney and Bepler have been developing the work through a diverse series of
multi-disciplinary, site-specific projects loosely based on realizing sections of
Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel Ancient Evenings. For River of Fundament, Barney
and Bepler have been collaborating to produce a seven-part film project that
will continue to draw upon the thematic undercurrents of Mailer’s novel. Set
in pre–Christian Egypt, Ancient Evenings elaborately chronicles the seven stages
of the soul’s departure from the deceased body as it passes from death to rebirth
in accordance with Egyptian mythology. River of Fundament combines the
traditions of narrative cinema with elements of live performance, sculpture
and opera. The long durational scale of the project and its mythical conjuring
are, of course, very reminiscent of Wagner’s Ring cycle and is a further devel-
opment of Barney’s epic urges as seen in his Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002) of
films and his other associated art/performance events.
It is not until we get to the broadly technological twentieth century and
the digitalized twenty-first century (or can we call this the post-technological
century?) that the experimental features of new opera and shifts in the triadic
balance are best seen in full light. But going back to the beginning of the twen-
tieth century we can find greater historical context for the current wave of
new experiments in opera to come.
Opera experiments since Richard Wagner and the turn of the nineteenth
into the twentieth century and then into our own times provide us not only
with a reflection on changes in musical styles and musicology but also with
the art form’s ever changing relationship with staging, technologies and, more
recently, new media. The very word experimental in relation to such a tradition-
bound musical and dramatic genre as opera is problematic, and does not sit
234 Opera in the Media Age

easily with the even more tradition-bound audiences, the very fixed repertoire
and the opera houses themselves; the classic triad, again. The term experimen-
tal usually sparks controversy, conjuring up such oppositions as traditions vs.
novelty, the mighty canon of the romantic repertoire under attack from avant-
garde revisionism, nineteenth-century colorful and Baroque excess vs. grey
contemporary minimalism. Certainly the practices of some twentieth- and
twenty-first–century opera productions and the plethora of new composers
re-visioning opera musically for new audiences, new media and new times are
undeniable. Even the word opera has become seriously problematized as cur-
rent and sometimes even more problematic and contentious replacement and
qualifying terms like “music drama,” “new music theatre,” “new opera” and
even more now “digital opera” and also “postopera”14 invoke shifts in where
we place critical emphasis to demarcate some distinction from the monoculture
and hegemony that represents the lyrical, romantic bedrock traditions of opera.
At the root of this change are shifts to aesthetic attachments and to newer
media.
The history of opera experiments is as old as the form itself, which
evolved, one might say, as a form of ongoing experiments from its beginning.
The Elizabethan Masques, the initial collisions of Renaissance polyphony and
Baroque basso continuo of Monteverdi, the French experiments of Rameau as
he elbowed Lully out of the scene, and more to come during a turbulent eigh-
teenth century all helped to define and to establish a genre as it reached matu-
rity. But once the form did settle down into its classical mode (despite occasional
fits of dissonance) in the nineteenth century opera turned its back on its exper-
imental past, except where musical modernity ushered in a host of changes,
principally with Strauss, Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky, Busoni, Weill and oth-
ers. But musicological change, which has been well documented by many, is
really not the kind of experimentation under discussion here. As the nineteenth
gave way to the twentieth century the well-entrenched triad began to feel pres-
sure.
The legendary Futurist Opera Victory Over the Sun, first staged on 3
December 1913 at the Luna Park Theatre in St. Petersburg—a populist theatre
but a short distance from the more imposing Imperial Mariinsky Theatre—
was probably the key event by both the Russian and international avant-garde
to view opera differently and construct new terms for it.15 It remains to this
day one of the great transitional theatre pieces—post–Wagner—that helped
to define and shape modern experimental approaches to anti-narrative per-
formance art through its mixture of music, movement, nonsensical sound text
(a made-up language called ZAUM ), extraordinary proto–Supremacist sets
and abstract costumes by Kasimir Malevich, which still survive in many draw-
ings (really the only extended and extant evidence we have of this important
 Experiments (Earley) 235

production). It was also a conscious piece of Futurist propaganda and some-

thing of an early Happening.16 This was a theatre piece at the opposite end of
the spectrum from the Russian theatrical realism of Stanislavski, Chekhov and
Gorki or the traditions of Western and Russian classical opera. It was a radical
collage of music and text that was unlike anything we know of as opera. Its
impact and notoriety, following its brief performance, was profound. It chal-
lenged the settled status quo through its deliberate celebration of disorder,
chaos and liberation through destruction. In brief the piece tells of the sun
being captured by strong men of the future. It is a punchy, potent modernist
allegory set against the backdrop of approaching revolution and massive polit-
ical change. It only received two performances and was revived briefly in 1920
during the new Soviet era it seemed to predict. Artistically, Victory Over the
Sun was something of a suicide mission for the young Russian Futurists who
invented and staged it. Association with a belligerent new art form marked them.
Victory Over the Sun was the work of four young artists: Mikhail Matiushin
(the modernist composer), Viktor Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh (libret-
tists of the nonsensical text that featured the machine-like language zaum)
and Kazimir Malevich (designer and Suprematist artist). The score is now
lost, except for a brief excerpt of 24 bars. The text was written in an absurdist
language called zaum and still exists, foretelling what would happen to avant-
garde dramaturgy during the era of 1920s and 1930s with Dadaism and Sur-
realism. There were reports at the time that the chief librettist Kruchenykh
had been carted off to an asylum following the opening performance. Only
Malevich, a Suprematist painter of vision and substance, survives as a signifi-
cant figure a century later.
Victory Over the Sun is one of those unclassifiable works of art perform-
ance that has assumed cult and renegade status. Its brevity and the commotion
it caused (Futurists were always out to cause commotion) is part of its mythol-
ogy. Even in its own time Victory Over the Sun must have been conceived as a
gesture of youthful revolt; “a slap in the face of public taste,” as the Futurists
were to label their work, a call to arms for international Futurists everywhere
to revolt against the conventional and trite traditions. It is little wonder that
Victory Over the Sun was performed on the same bill as Vladimir Mayakovsky’s
poetic drama Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. The whole enterprise sur-
rounding Victory Over the Sun made use of musical, literary and performance
languages that sought to divest words, sounds and gestures of their conven-
tional meanings; to de-romanticize opera of all previous associations. This is
art seeking a new medium through performance. The threat that Victory Over
the Sun posed to traditional opera was profound.
At the same time as their Russian counterparts the contribution of Italian
Futurists, under the artistic leadership of Filiipo Tommaso Marinetti, would
236 Opera in the Media Age

equally find notoriety in undermining classical music and its assumptions just
as Futurism, invoking an age of mechanized industrialization and mechanical
reproduction, sought to undermine the entire western humanist tradition.
While producing no great opera experiments to rival the Russian Futurist’s
Victory Over the Sun, in the Italian Futurist’s arsenal of provocation was the
political/artistic manifesto that articulated (though not always delivering)
gestures to dismantle the traditions of art.17 Their great musical experiments
were in creating an “art of noise.” Luigi Russolo, who wrote the manifesto
“The Art of Noise” in 1913, found in modern factory and industrial sounds
an overwhelming music that became liberated music in its own right. Noise
was Futurism’s contribution to moving the boundaries that might subsequently
have influences on opera itself. The recognition of the potential of brute noise
as a source of art still informs the work of new performance sound a century
later.18 Russolo’s patented creation of the Intonarumori or Noise Intoner set
new precedents for percussive, and later electronic, instruments that would
reshape orchestral sound and become, in their own way, objects of perform-
ances themselves; alien presences in the orchestra pit. With the experimental
Intonarumori we begin to get an ongoing parade of instruments, machines
and inventions across the century, increasingly electronic and less hand-driven,
that would shape the change of sound away from the purely traditional acoustic
orchestral to technological apparatuses that would sometimes inform opera
to come, especially the move towards synthesized sound.19 An opera/liturgical
oratorio like Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise, for instance, composed
between 1975 and 1983, makes use of the ethereal ondes martenot, the elec-
tronic instrument that features prominently in the composer’s Turangalila
Symphonie. Synthesized sound refocuses aural patterns, adding new depth and
dimensions to a musical landscape. A multiaurality decenters the listener and
shifts what is heard to multiple channels.
Alongside the Futurist experiments were those of the Bauhaus in Ger-
many, which, like the Futurists, saw art mixing and making a compact with
industry to create a new technology of invention. Although theatre and per-
formance, rather than opera, were a central element of Bauhaus aesthetics,
László Moholy-Nagy’s essay “Theatre, Circus, Variety” probes the idea of a
“Theatre of Totality with its multifarious complexities of light, space, plane,
form, motion, sound, man—and with all the possibilities for varying and com-
bining these elements—must be an ORGANISM.”20 Further along in this
seminal writing that sets out to define new working principles for perform-
ances, Moholy-Nagy speaks of his concept of the Mechanized Eccentric that
would infuse performance with the qualities of machinery and technology.
And then as part of the unfolding futuristic predictions for new art forms we
find the prediction:
 Experiments (Earley) 237

In the future, SOUND EFFECTS will make use of various acoustical equipment
driven electrically or by some other mechanical means. Sound waves issuing from
unexpected sources—for example, a speaking or singing arc lamp, loudspeakers
under seats or beneath the floor of the auditorium, the use of new amplifying
systems—will raise the audience’s acoustic surprise-threshold so much that
unequal effects in other areas will be disappointing.21
The essay ends with a vision of a stage that is truly transformed into a
weightless mass of planes and standing “in a very free relationship with one
another, without the need for any direct contact.”22 The very programmatic
disruption of the triad offered by movements like Futurism and arts schools
like the Bauhaus paved the way for new ways of looking at art where sound
and the totality of effects become an increasingly desired outcome.
Over the course of the twentieth century opera has taken a turn partly
generated by recognition of new art forms in sympathy with technology and
greater interface with the digital word. The very premises of the operatic triad
are increasingly contested to such a point that oppositions, like “New Music
Theatre,” break the link with an operatic tradition and set in place a new tra-
dition:
As the centre of musical culture has moved away from live, acoustic sound
towards loudspeaker sound, there has been an inevitable effect on the way music
is written, performed, produced, and received. In a very general way, we can note
the tendency for live music to sound like recorded music, an esthetic preference
that can be found in concert performances of classical music and in the opera
house just as much as in rock concerts or popular musicals. In new music and
music theater—once the old prohibitions against amplification have been super-
seded —all this offers a wide range of choices in the creation of the performance
of new work.23
Since the twentieth century the speed of change and the adaptation and
take-up of new technologies and artificial intelligences, and the turning of
these into art forms and practice, is radically in steady process and can change
within weeks, much like the technology of micro processing where contem-
porary art forms have made many compacts, becoming even more compact
and portable. So what is said here may even be partially anachronistic by the
time it is published. The laptop is the new keyboard, sound maker, orchestra,
canvas and film studio—often in the hands of and under the direct musical-
authorial-directorial control of a single artist (as in the work of van der Aa).
In a contemporary world of artistic transgression, where science and technol-
ogy devastate previous definitions, former categories—be they history, fiction,
memory, language, image or illusion and even drama and music—lose validity
and can, in fact, become too restrictive. Art forms cross over and borrow prop-
erties from one another, and younger, newer artists are easy about this annex-
238 Opera in the Media Age

ation. And so the very term “opera” is steadily under continued assault or reap-
propriation by artists for other means.
Perhaps one of the most celebrated experiments and appropriations of
operatic form and content reconstituted into something new and daring was
Philip Glass’s and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, composed in 1975
and first performed in 1976. Opera, in the cases of Glass and Wilson, meant
only “a work”24 and, indeed, Robert Wilson had been calling even his non-
musical, epic theatre works “operas” for some time (even ones that were silent)
before their famous collaboration took place. Although Einstein on the Beach,
which was revived in 2012 in Europe and the United States, owes its celebrity
to the fusion of Glass’s musically repetitive minimalism and Wilson’s theatre of
images and extraordinary scenography, it is a major milestone in late twentieth
century operatic experimentation that lasts, on average, over four-and-a-half
hours. The processed features of Glass’s musical minimalism are like something
generated by a computer. And once mixed with the robotic gestures that Wil-
son required of his performers and Andy DeGroat and Lucinda Childs required
of dancers, Einstein on the Beach can be seen as a highly constructed piece of
music theatre (not unlike the 1913 Victory Over the Sun or a work envisioned
by Bauhaus thinking filtered through Moholy-Nagy). The arithmetic, additive
processes in Glass’s score and the mimed writing by performers within the
scenography are reminders that we are watching an opera about a scientist,
Albert Einstein. But we are also dreaming an opera with a future tense, as dream
is one of the liberating factors that will propel so much of Robert Wilson’s
work. Curiously, however, the work calls for little in the way of electronic
intervention (only electronic piano/organ, miked voices and the all-important
lights (designed by Beverley Emmons) and scenography (by Robert Wilson).
The history of such a well-known new music theatre work like Einstein
on the Beach, which sets the worlds of traditional opera and new opera on a
collision course and unbalances the triad, also demonstrates that work like
this in a whole new key are formed as works in conscious opposition to the
artistic status quo.25 For Einstein on the Beach set the downtown New York
experimental world of new artists against the uptown classical world of old
artists. But its history, as recounted by Glass and others, also charts how a new
market and appetite for new opera in new forms was also being appreciated,
finding productions and attracting audiences that might just become a new
generation of opera goers.
Almost as a means of distancing itself from opera and all that its traditions
imply, experiments in operatic work (more often than not some combination
of music, singing, narrative, scenography and technological enhancements)
have widely adopted the term “music theatre”26 In Salzman’s and Desi’s The
New Music Theater, which is part history of a new movement and part polemic,
 Experiments (Earley) 239

the development of music theatre falls into three distinct phases: 1900–1930,
reflecting the experimental, abstract and revolutionary character of mod-
ernism; 1940–1970, linking the concentration of musical serialism to forms
of political engagement that are both world political and active alternatives
to the established musical and operatic institutions; and 1970 to the present
day, finding in the “technological (r)evolutions” the theatricalization of con-
cert performances along with extensive use of new and old media that has
been increasingly digital.27 In the third phase the multiplicity of musical and
theatrical forms together with hybrid electronic platforms has produced a
bewildering array of new music theatre intentions to such an extent that the
argument with traditional opera has ceased as a whole new genre has taken
root. This is an important step, as far as upending the triad is concerned by
replacing it with a new post-digital triad. There are now new music/operatic
forms that inhabit their own space and time, attracting their own new audi-
ence. Music theatre has established itself as a new genre(s) in its own right,
with its own variety and variations that sometimes draw on new music, new
performance and new visual arts. What joins it all together are its synthetic
properties: the use of computers and platforms, artificial light, performance
techniques that embrace heterodoxy, a blending of visual arts that are part
painterly, part sculptural and manifoldly digital. The space of performance
no longer even needs to be an opera house or a traditional theatre; it can be
in a warehouse (increasingly so). In reviewing and remarking on performances
of the radical operas Light (Licht) by Stockhausen and Europeans 1 and 2 by
John Cage, Alex Ross remarks that “the vogue for repurposing industrial-age
spaces towards cultural end … has been a boon for avant-garde works that are
still ill-suited for traditional venues.”28 In fact, since the Millennium new
opera/music theatre has found a more harmonious and sympathetic home in
the detritus of the post-industrial age (e.g. abandoned mines, derelict ware-
houses, deconsecrated churches, abandoned office buildings, galleries rather
than theatre spaces. The concert halls and operatic theatres that may have once
shown an overt hostility to new forms have become, within the last decade,
more receptive to experimentation.29 Operatic works nowadays are just as
likely to take place in a gallery where none of the three categories of the triad
are operative or, increasingly, just on one or more video screens, the focus more
and more becoming as much about the technology as the music. The music
might even become a parody of the classical tradition.
Opera in a Small Room (2005) was an installation conceived by Canadian
(sound) artist Janet Cardiff and her collaborator/partner George Bures Miller.
In their own description of the piece:
There are twenty-four antique loudspeakers out of which come sounds, arias,
and occasional pop tunes. There are almost two thousand records stacked
240 Opera in the Media Age

around the room and eight record players, which turn on and off robotically
synching with the soundtrack. The sound of someone moving and sorting
albums is heard. The audience cannot enter the room. To see and hear this
world, they have to look through the window, holes in the wall, the cracks in the
doorway and watch his shadow move around the room.30
Art this is, as an installation, but is it opera? Well, yes and no. It is certainly
theatrical and operatic. It draws on the pure nostalgia of opera: a man (it is
almost always a man) listening alone in his room to opera, a fatal attraction
to song and aria, to liebestod, the vinyl tradition of ghostly great performances,
a shadowy world, a world that almost feels funereal and otherworldly. But the
textures of the piece draw on sophisticated technology and media to support
a kind of illusion. It references the phonograph record (our first hint that tech-
nology would enter the world of opera and recorded sound); but it also uses
more sophisticated digital technology to create a simulacrum of the opera exper-
ience. And it is art, visual art, using sound to define new parameters and new
properties. In miniature we have a mise en scène of emotions, solitude, private
contemplation. A cabinet of curiosities and memories that take us back to the
Renaissance and the birth of opera. An uncomfortable and transient experience
that says this is a history that has ended and indeed become dated through
the renaissance of better technology. A simulacra within a greater simulacrum
using synchronous effect without the presence of any human form except the
ghostly and partial … and the enhanced and unrelenting robotic technology
that drives the installation. But it is also playful and thoroughly absorbing,
much like being overwhelmed by opera in a darkened theatre but contradictory
because we know that opera happens more often in grander bigger theatres
and not in cabin-like room isolated in the Canadian wilderness or in the corner
of an art gallery.
Opera in a Small Room, although conceived for a gallery and not a theatre,
is, in miniature, the apotheosis of what opera has made of technology: it has
cooperated with and appropriated opera, in some ways being respectful of its
music, but frustrated with its traditions and trappings, seeking to make some-
thing new through the intervention of other arts and media. And the history
of experimental opera is encapsulated in Opera in a Small Room: embracing
but also casting suspicion on a tradition, dressing the outmoded in new modes
of presentation and representation.
Take another, somewhat similar example, a portable opera like John Cage’s
Europera 5 (1991), written for piano, soprano, tenor, 78-rpm Victrola and tape
recorder. The work is a collage scored for two singers, each singer performing
five arias of their own choosing from the standard opera repertoire (signs of
Cage’s chance variations). A pianist accompanies (if that is what he does) them
by playing six different opera transcriptions. They are joined (accompanied?)
 Experiments (Earley) 241

by a single 78-rpm Victrola-player, playing six historical opera recordings and

a performer playing a pre-recorded tape, plus the use of a radio and a mute tel-
evision set. Here you have all the makings of contemporary experimental
opera: singers, instrumentalists and the invasive and pervasive old vs. new
media. As a description of the piece notes “the separation of the various ele-
ments in Europera 5 produces a spaciousness and awareness of distances that
is so characteristic of Cage’s music. Cage also offers us a unique sense of his-
torical distance—the singers performing the older operatic music in our pres-
ence; the pianist performing ‘romanticized’ interruptions of romantic music
and the Victrola presenting old music in old performances, coming through
to us by means of an old nostalgic technology. It is only in the silences and
the use of the radio that our present time intrudes.”31
The problematics of new opera in relation to the triad are here empha-
sized: post-modern disassociation from but clinging to relics of the past; play-
fulness and parody pitted again deadpan seriousness; the open declaration
that for most of us who cannot afford the high prices of opera the experience
of opera comes to us via the radio and recordings. Europera 5 instantly declares
its minimalism (because it is something by John Cage), its playfulness (always
part of a Cage performance), an openness to chance (a patented trademark of
Cage’s) but exposes something that is also essential in opera—a love and potent
nostalgia for favorite arias sung by soprano and tenor, singing of love and
death. In this Cage’s mixture of affections and wariness is much like that of
Cardiff ’s and Bures’ Opera in a Small Room. While Cage’s work undercuts all
that is essential in lyrical opera and its suspension of absurdity he also cele-
brates, upholds and reinforces it. The classical and the modern and the very
contemporary are held in perfect balance but also in perfect tension. Cage
wanted his piece to be a bricolage of diverse and tangible references and what
he described as a collage of sorts, of a pulverized sort, of European opera. It’s
“Europera,” which are the words Europe and opera put together but it also
sounds like “Your Opera,” pejoratively directed at a European tradition. As
always with Cage, and any composer working in new opera, there is the simul-
taneity of homage and burlesque critique sitting side by side. Self-consciousness
and self-referencing are the stock in trade of new music. Surprises are found
inside the familiar alongside startling and knowing effects. To experiment is
to take the old and re-fashion (or “re-function” as Brecht said) it into some-
thing surprising. “You see,” Cage said at the premiere of his first Europera,
“I’ve come to the desire to free each person in the performance from anyone
like a conductor—or, for that matter, from a lighting director or costume
designer or scene painter or any the traditional opera craft expert.”32 As Richard
Kostelanetz, a long-time Cage expert, writes: “What Cage did for Europera,
essentially, was to ransack the archive of traditional operas that were no longer
242 Opera in the Media Age

protected by copyright; from them he selected fragments, each no more than

16 measures long, that could, by the workings of chance, be reassembled dif-
ferently for each performance.”33
And so what might the future be for experiments in opera? One can look
to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for an indication and to
its “Opera of the Future” research group:
The Opera of the Future group (also known as Hyperinstruments) explores con-
cepts and techniques to help advance the future of musical composition, per-
formance, learning, and expression. Through the design of new interfaces for
both professional virtuosi and amateur music-lovers, the development of new
techniques for interpreting and mapping expressive gesture, and the application
of these technologies to innovative compositions and experiences, we seek to
enhance music as a performance art, and to develop its transformative power as
counterpoint to our everyday lives. The scope of our research includes musical
instrument design, concepts for new performance spaces, interactive touring and
permanent installations, and “music toys.” It ranges from extensions of tradi-
tional forms to radical departures, such as the Brain Opera, Toy Symphony and
Death and the Powers.34

Death and the Powers, a new opera composed by project leader Tod
Machova with a libretto by Robert Pinsky that premiered in 2010 and has
been steadily refined since, is the work of a team of faculty, staff, and graduate
and undergraduate students at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachu-
setts, that brought a host of innovative technologies to the stage, anchoring
them to a Faustian narrative of a wealthy businessman and inventor, Simon
Powers, out to harness technology and achieve endless life. From robots to
visuals to sound-producing Hyperinstruments like a giant Chandelier, more
than 40 computers are required to run the production, all backed by extensive
wired and wireless networks. These computers run a broad range of distrib-
uted control systems that were developed expressly for the production, in
which each component can share information with any other in order to create
a synchronized and unified presence for the central character in his hyper-
technological environment called “The System.”
A mixture of human and robotic performance, the production makes
much use of animation and animatronics and of robotic movement and light-
ing. If need be, puppeteers above the stage can assume manual control of any
parameters of a robot using a typical video game controller. An absolute posi-
tion tracking system monitors the location of robots and actors onstage to
help the robots navigate, as well as affect sound and visuals.
After the character Simon Powers enters The System, the singer por-
traying him exits the stage, though he continues to sing and act as if he were
onstage. In a new technique called Disembodied Performance, gestural and
 Experiments (Earley) 243

physiological sensors, as well as voice analysis, capture the singer’s offstage per-
formance, which is then used to generate in real time the visual representation
of Simon Powers in the bookshelf displays and other aspects of the production.
Mapping software was created that can connect sound, robots, and visuals to
the singer’s performance. A custom graphics environment allows these live per-
formance parameters to generate expressive graphic representations of Simon
in The System.
Another method of representing The System’s omnipresence is through
sound. Over 140 speakers are used to create a unique sonic environment. Two
formats of surround sound are used in the production. Wave Field Synthesis
uses an array of tiny speakers across the front of the stage to create the impres-
sion of a sound emanating from any point on the stage. Ambisonics technology
is used to move sound all around the theater. Software and plug-ins for com-
mon audio packages were engineered to allow the hundreds of streams of audio
to be processed in real time.
All of this technology—although complex—is designed to work invisibly
behind the scenes, helping to draw audiences into the unusual, mysterious, and
“animate” world of Simon and The System. The Chorus of Operabots and
three large bookshelf periaktoi are controlled centrally using software devel-
oped specifically for choreographic robots onstage. This software includes a
3D visualization for monitoring.35
Curiously, Death and the Powers resembles something from Wagner in
its ambitions: a new kind of The Twilight of the Gods set in a high tech world
of robotics and capitalism. The music for the production, though obviously
integral to the experience of Death and the Powers, might be subordinate to
the elaborate technical means used to carry out this experiment in opera that
has been created largely in a laboratory rather than a rehearsal room. But we
might also think that a hundred year after the first experimental opera, Victory
Over the Sun, Death and the Powers continues a tradition set in motion by the
Russian Futurists. And what has refined over that time is a greater use and reli-
ance on technology to mediate the experience of opera and bring some kind
of oppositional force to the enduring triad that forms the experience of opera.

Notes
1. See, for instance, The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies (2012), edited by
Nicholas Till, for a good summary of the issues.
2. I am indebted here to an unpublished address given by Andreas Breitscheid, Ger-
man composer and former artistic director of Forum Neues Musiktheater, Stuttgart Staat-
soper, who made his remarks at Astonished and Terrified: Opera and the Transformation
of the World by Technology, a conference organized by the Centre for Opera and Music
Theatre, University of Sussex, June 22–23, 2012.
244 Opera in the Media Age

3. As contemporary an operatic masterpiece as George Benjamin’s Written on the

Skin (2012; with a libretto by Martin Crimp and first directed by Katie Mitchell), fusing
the legacy of twentieth-century modernism and twenty-first–century tonality, still preserves
the triadic distinctions and balances.
4. Shifts in musical styles and their effect on opera composition are noted coherently
in Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music (2005), particularly the volumes
The Early Twentieth Century and The Late Twentieth Century.
5. “Postdramatic theatre” is a phrase coined by Hans-Thies Lehmann to chart the
new forms of theatre and theatre making, in uneasy relationship with tradition and text,
that emerged throughout the latter stages of the twentieth century. See Hans-Thies Leh-
mann, Postdramatic Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2006), especially his views on musi-
calization, pp. 91–93.
6. See Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, for a good overview and
incisive survey and also an analysis on approaches to Wagnerian productions.
7. For the most recent translation of Wagner’s seminal work see Richard Wagner,
“The Artwork of the Future,” translated by Emma Warner, in a special issue of The Wagner
Journal, 2012.
8. Herbert Lindenberger, Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 217–18.
9. The 2013 200th anniversary of Wagner saw extreme controversy when the new
version of the Ring, directed by the provocative German director Frank Castrof, had open-
ing night audiences booing for 20 minutes. Yet it was written into Castrof ’s contract by
the Bayreuth management that not a note of Wagner’s score was to be changed. And,
indeed, the production was accorded a music triumph even if the staging was heavily crit-
icized by Alec Ross in The New Yorker. The music, however, as conducted by Kirill Petrenko,
was thought superb by Ross and other critics.
10. See Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, eds., Intermediality in Theatre and Per-
formance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006) for a larger applicability of the term across new
forms of performing arts.
11. An example of such change would be the way the International Journal of Per-
formance Arts and Digital Media devoted an issue (vol. 8, no. 1, 2012, edited by Áine Sheil
and Craig Vear) to surveying a series of digital experiments in opera that posit new means
and new meanings that take us away from the triad under discussion. Ongoing digital
experiments also take place in pockets around the world, not easily detected and often
secreted within closed experimental worlds.
12. In the month prior to The Sunken Garden’s first performance at London’s Bar-
bican Centre the sound artist Ryoji Ikeda’s superimposition appeared, employing a spectac-
ular combination of synchronized video screens, real-time content feeds, digital sound
sculptures and—for the first time in Ikeda’s work—human performers; superposition
explores the thrilling conceptual world opened up by quantum theory. The totality of the
work certainly resembled the kind of new operas being written and performed more often
in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
13. The work’s premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York continues
the then-new tradition established by that institution in the 1970s to present contemporary
work by that performing arts institution that has always sought to define new traditions
in theatre, music and dance.
14. For the use of the term “postopera” and its relation to “postdramatic” see Jelena
Novak, “From Minimalist Music to Postopera,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to
Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 129–140.
15. For a full history and understanding of the work see Victory Over the Sun: The
 Experiments (Earley) 245

World’s First Futurist Opera, edited by Rosamund Bartlett and Sarah Dadswell (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 2012).
16. Happenings, from the 1950s and 1960s, in which the influential American com-
poser John Cage would play a role, would provide the re-shapings and appropriations that
would influence new kinds of music theatre experiments like Nam June Paik’s multi-screen
TV Cello (1964) and Opera Sextronique (1967). The sensation seeking of Happenings and
the associated Fluxus moment from the 1960s and after often saw traditional opera as one
of its primary targets.
17. However, the Futurist spectacles or Futurist evening produced from January 1910
onwards were precursors of the Happening and would sometimes feature operatic gestures,
especially in the recitation of sound or tone poems and cabaret acts.
18. See Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (New York: Continuum, 2010), for a
useful survey of the growth of sound art and its associations with performance.
19. For a very graphic and useful history of electronic devices that would help shape
these changes see Simon Crab’s online “120 Years of Electronic Music” (http://120years.
net/wordpress/). “This site charts the development of electronic musical instruments from
1870 to 1990. For the purposes of this project electronic musical instruments are defined
as instruments that synthesize sounds from an electronic source. This definition leaves out
a whole section of hybrid electronic instruments developed at the end of the last century
that used electronics to manipulate or amplify sounds and tape recorders, wax recording
devices, Musique Concrete and so on. It has been decided to leave in some non-electronic
instruments such as the Futurists ‘Intonarumori’ due to their importance in the history of
and influence on modern music. The main focus of the site is on instruments developed
from the beginning of the century until the 1960s. The more modern and current Synthe-
sizer companies have been included for the sake of historical completeness but are already
well documented elsewhere on the Internet.”
20. Lásló Moholy-Nagy, “Theater, Circus, Variety,” translated by Arthur S. Wensinger
in Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, eds., Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2001), p. 22.
21. Packer and Jordan, p. 24.
22. Packer and Jordan, p. 26.
23. Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi, The New Music Theatre, (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2008), p. 27. Salzman and Desi is one the primary means of defining the
breakaway movements that contest the operatic tradition in the late twentieth century.
24. When interviewed in 2012 about the revival of Einstein on the Beach Philip Glass
told an interviewer: “the work came to be called an opera because it needed to be produced
in a hall with a proscenium stage and an orchestra pit, as well as ample flies and wing space,
plus singers and dancers.… So, we did Einstein on the Beach, and people would ask, why
are you calling that an opera? We would answer that we never called it an opera. But, of
course, that’s a very provocative thing to say,” Glass remembers. “We had these ludicrous
conversations with audiences, and, finally, I said, ‘Look I call an opera things that you see
in an opera house. What’s a stable? A stable is where horses live.’” https://www.musicworks.
ca/featured-article/featured-article/philip-glass.
25. See Philip Glass’s heavily anecdotal account of the genesis and progress of Einstein
on the Beach in Philip Glass, Music (New York: DaCapo, 1995), pp. 27–62.
26. Salzman and Desi attempt a fuller understanding of the term “music theatre”
and the different forms it now takes. The term music theatre, however, has been adopted
by different experimental camps to mean different things and, indeed, the way the genre
functions and is practiced in Europe, for instance, may differ remarkably from America.
27. Salzman and Desi, p. 376.
246 Opera in the Media Age

28. Alex Ross, “Opera in the Clouds,” The New Yorker, September 10, 2012, p. 105.
29. More than just the occasional new opera/new music theatre work features on the
schedule of major opera houses around the world and quite specifically in the smaller exper-
imental spaces like the Linbury Studio Theatre at London’s Royal Opera House.
30. See the artists’ website: http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/inst/opera.html.
Materials: Mixed media with sound, record players, records and synchronized lighting.
Duration: 20 min. loop. Dimension: 2,6 × 3 × 4,5m.” See also the interview with Miller:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?=vXeGVGEBNYks.
31. See http://www.moderecords.com/catalog/036cage.html.
32. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/10/arts/music-john-cage-s-first-opera-writ-
ten-by-the-numbers.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.
33. http:// www. nytimes. com/ 1988/ 07/ 10/ arts/ music- john- cage- s- first- opera-
written-by-the-numbers.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.
34. http://www.media.mit.edu/research/groups/opera-future.
35. The description for this work is freely taken from http://opera.media.mit.edu/
projects/deathandthepowers/technology.php.

Selected Bibliography
Bartlett, Rosamund, and Sarah Dadswell, eds. Victory Over the Sun: The World’s First Futur-
ist Opera. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2012.
Carnegy, Patrick. Wagner and the Art of the Theatre. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006.
Causey, Matthew. Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Chapple, Freda, and Chiel Kattenbelt, eds. Intermediality in Theatre and Performance.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
Glass, Philip. Music by Philip Glass. Edited by Robert T. Jones. New York: Da Capo, 1995.
Hegarty, Paul. Noise/Music: A History. New York: Continuum, 2010.
Kittler, Friedrich. “World-Breath: On Wagner’s Media Technology.” In Opera Through
Other Eyes, edited by David J. Levin. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. New York:
Routledge, 2006.
Machon, Josephine. Immersive Theatre: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Per-
formance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2d ed. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
Packer, Randall, and Ken Jordan, eds. Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. New
York: W.W. Norton, 2001.
Potter, Keith, Kyle Gann and Pwyll ap Siôn, eds. The Ashgate Research Companion to Min-
imalist and Postminimalist Music. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.
Reich, Steve. Writings on Music, 1965–2000. Edited by Paul Hillier. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
Ross, Alex. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. London: Fourth Estate,
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_____. “Stockhausen and Cage.” The New Yorker, September 12, 2012, 104–106.
_____. “Wagner Summer: A New ‘Ring’ in Bayreuth; ‘Die Meistersinger’ in Salzburg.” The
New Yorker, August 26, 2013, 107–109.
Salzman, Eric, and Thomas Desi. The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the
Body. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
 Experiments (Earley) 247

Taruskin, Richard. Music in the Early Twentieth Century. Vol. 4 of The Oxford History of
Western Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
_____. Music in the Late Twentieth Century. Vol. 5 of The Oxford History of Western Music.
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Till, Nicholas, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies. New York: Cambridge
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Wagner, Richard. “The Artwork of the Future,” translated by Emma Warner. A Special
Issue of The Wagner Journal (2013): 13–86.
Žižek, Slavoj, and Mladen Dolar. Opera’s Second Death. New York: Routledge, 2002.