Sound of Mind
Professional music-making
works along the principle best defined by Chevy Chase when he opened
Saturday Night Live 's "Weekend Update" with the portentous phrase, "Good
evening. I'm Chevy Chase. And you're not." Whether they play rock or country,
classical music or jazz, performers are engaged in a conversation with one
another, and with their predecessors. The rest of us are listening in, although
there have always been some who don't like feeling forced into silence. Poet
Adrienne Rich, for example, called Beethoven's Ninth "music of the
entirely/ isolated soul/ yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego/ music
without the ghost/ of another person in it."
Tod Machover, a composer
based at MIT's Media Lab, thinks computers will bring the isolation of the
musical soul to an end. In this he is partly influenced by the Media Lab, which
champions the idea that a seamless global web of information will soon blur the
line between reader and writer, performer and listener. But Machover also likes
to quote late pianist Glenn Gould, who said that the "best of all possible
worlds" is one in which "art would be unnecessary. ... The audience would be
the artist and their life would be art."
Machover's Brain Opera is a performance-cum-interactive stunt. Roughly
an hour long, it was presented seven times a day over the course of several
days at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York (it closed Aug. 3). In it,
Machover weds Gould's Whitmanesque vision to John Cage's Zen-inspired idea that
music is not sounds chosen by a composer, but a quality of awareness about what
you're hearing. The vehicle for all this is the expensive, complicated, and
most un-Zen-like apparatus of computerized electronic music. Brain Opera
supplies members of its audience with a variety of strange-looking digital
instruments and asks that they play around with them. We not only get to
explore a cool new technology; we get to collaborate with the composer. We move
toward being the artist, our lives, the art. In theory, anyway.
B
>rain Opera begins in the Julliard School lobby, which has
been transformed into a thicket of plastics molded into shapes suggestive of
fruits or plants, or maybe cells. We mill around in the dark among the
machines, some of which emit fanfares, drumrolls, or gusts of melody, so that
between the bumbling and waiting-to-try and noise, we feel much as we might in
a video arcade. The games, though, are more interesting.
The
"Gesture Wall," for instance, puts a little zip of electricity through you,
which makes you intelligible to some sensors in front of you, which means you
can "play" snippets of music and sound by gesticulating. (My fillings vibrated
a little; though that could have been caused by the ambient noise.) There are
also dirigible-shaped pods about the size of beach balls that, depending on how
hard you hit the nubby pads that stick out of them, cause nearby speakers to
spit out percussive clicks and bops. Another device is called "The Speaking
Tree"; it engages you in conversation about music. You can have any type of
discussion you want, provided it's the one Machover expected. ("What is your
favorite piece of music?" asks the Tree. "I don't know," say you. "When you
hear it, what do you feel?" asks the Tree.)
Machover wanted the experience to feel like "walking into
somebody's brain while a piece of music is being created," because, as the name
suggests, Brain Opera is about the nature of mind. It is based on the
theories of Marvin Minsky, an artificial intelligence expert at MIT who holds
that consciousness is built up of loosely connected separate processes. What I
think of as "me," says Minsky, is actually a pattern that emerges as a lot of
components of my brain go about their business of seeing or hearing or eating
or whatever it is they do----much the way a traffic pattern emerges out of the
actions of a lot of drivers, or an opera performance out of the actions of
musicians, singers, a conductor, and a stage manager. Brain Opera both
presents and enacts Minsky's theories: The music emerges in part out of our
noodling around with the gizmos right before we go in to hear it.
After a
half hour or so in the lobby, we're led into the recital hall, where Machover
appears and explains that "some 60 percent of the piece is in place before, and
40 percent will be created at this performance." He and two colleagues take
their seats; Machover's is inside a more professional version of the "Gesture
Wall." He ignites Brain Opera with a sequence of chopping hand motions
and vigorous leanings in his chair (picture the Enterprise under attack); this
brings forth a sonic crash from the computer. We hear a lot of musical
quotations--from Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring to Leonard Bernstein's
Candide to Bob Dylan and Duke Ellington--that bounce around a theme from
the "Ricercare" of Bach's Musical Offering . Images that would work well
on album covers fly by on big screens --the moon, a baby, the great red spot of
Jupiter. We hear a comment or two from the Speaking Trees ("I think it has to
do with the electrons in the air"; "music changes your mood very definitely").
The words of the libretto zip past on the screens. Prerecorded voices sing it
to New Age melodies. A red square appears, signifying, apparently, that people
logged on to the Brain Opera Web page who are participating in the piece
on "virtual instruments" are now being sampled and folded into the work.
I >t is all quite
lively, and far from dull. But by the end I feel a little glazed and tired,
much as I might feel after too much time spent on the Web or reading somebody's
hypertextual "novel." There's the same sense of scope and technical mastery,
and absence at the core. I missed the individual voice, the unique and
compelling emotional timbre, of the sort that characterizes less interactive
music--including Machover's own, when he's not trying to bring the whole world
into it. Also performed at the festival, for example, were his works for
"hyperinstruments," electronic versions of a cello, viola, and violin, which he
invented himself. Each of these compositions suggested the powerful currents of
one soul's anguish, jauntiness, fragile serenity. But Brain
Opera
is swamped by the sound of Whatever, of Nothing in Particular.
Giving up his musical
individuality, it turns out, has not paid Machover back with a glimpse of
Gould's perfect world. From the moment we are guided into the play arcade, each
alone, each face to face with technology designed and controlled by MIT, we are
maneuvered along paths laid down for us. We are no more collaborating than a
lab mouse collaborates with a medical researcher. Brain Opera is an
opera, and we are not.
