WAKTM musicography
Some of the music, films, operas & shows that have been inspiring me to compose the music for WAKTM
John Adams; Dr Atomic (Opera, Lighting, Sound FX, film footage)
I Was Looking At The Ceiling And Saw The Sky, The Death of Klinghoffer,
The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Nixon in China,
Damon Albarn; Monkey: Journey to the West (Instruments, design)
Louis Andriessen; De Materie
J S Bach; Christmas / Easter oratorios
Alban Berg; Lulu
Berlioz; Damnation of Faust, Romeo & Juliet, Requiem (size of orchestra)
The Damnation of Faust — “Opera without decor or costumes…Instrumental timbre is as integral to the characterisation as are melody, harmony & rhythm” (David Cairns) // Faust — “grave string chords…modally flavoured harmonies…proudly arching phrases…” // Marguerite — “demure flutes and clarinets…naively angular, aspiring themes…” // Mephitopheles — diminished chords, “dry pizzicato, …trombones…piccolo…cymbals”
Romeo & Juliet; Aria, Song, Choral narration, Vocal commentary; “Symphony with chorus, soloists, and choral recitative” shows Shakespeare’s “mixture of tragic and comic scenes within the same play, of action sharply mixed with reflection, of soliloquy, prose dialogue and lyrical verse and songs…”
Blue Man Group [London, c2007]; theatre, (rock) music, design, colours, humour / comedy, audience engagement. Fast scrolling statistics about email/internet projected onto screen. Where can I get these statistics? They should be up to date and/or reflect changes.
Havergal Brian; 1st Symphony — scale (longest/biggest symphony?)
Edward Elgar; The Dream of Gerontius; operatic
Feeney; Dracula [‘narrative dance drama’] (orchestra, chorus, soloist)
Philip Glass;
The Voyage / the civil wars / The witches of Venice (operas)
Einstein on the Beach / Satyagraha / Akhnaten (portraits, narrative/lack of)
1000 airplanes on the roof (music theatre)
A descent into the maelstrom (music theatre)
Monster of Grace (digital film opera)
La Belle et la Bete (film opera) [based on Cocteau’s 1950 film]
Les Enfants Terribles (dance opera) [based on Cocteau]
5th Symphony (choral / ‘requiem’)
(composer) Glass + (director) Godfrey Reggio
Koyaanisqatsi (75–83) “an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds — urban life and technology versus the environment…If one lives in this world, the globalized world of high technology, all one can see is one layer of commodity piled upon another. In our world the “original” is the proliferation of the standardized. Copies are copies of copies.”
Naqoyqatsi (c2002) “chronicles the most significant event of the last five thousand years: the transition from the natural milieu, old nature, to the “new” nature, the technological milieu”…New nature achieves this unity through the awesome power of technological homogenization. NAQOYQATSI is a reflection on this singular event, where our subject is the medium itself, the wonderland of technology. The medium is our story. In this scenario human beings do not use technology as a tool (the popular point-of-view), but rather we live technology as a way of life. Technology is the big force and like oxygen it is always there, a necessity that we cannot live without.”
Evidence — Looks “into the eyes of children watching television — in this case Walt Disney’s “Dumbo”. Though engaged in a daily routine, they appear drugged, retarded, like the patients of a mental hospital.”
Mahler; 8th Symphony ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ (choral)
Moross; dance cantata
Mozart; The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute
Michael Nyman; The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Facing Goya
Andre Previn (composer) & Tom Stoppard (playwrite);
EGBDF (play/concert, VERY simple design)
Queen & Ben Elton; We Will Rock You; Musical — story based around existing songs. “Everything we want to get, we download from the internet”
Steve Reich (composer) & Beryl Korot (video); 3 Tales — film opera / doc / talking heads / real footage. Video opera Three Tales which uses 3 events (The Hindenburg disaster, the atom bomb* and Dolly the cloned sheep) to summarize the C20th.
Richard Strauss; Ariadne auf Naxos: “a theatrical piece…with incidental music…” / “the play-going audience…had little interest in Strauss’ opera; and the opera audience had absolutely no desire to sit through over two hours of spoken drama…” (Stephen Jay-Taylor, 2009), Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier,
Igor Stravinsky; Les Noces (Dance cantata + Ballet), Eodipus Rex (orch, male chorus, speaker), Rite of Spring,
Tchaikovsky; Eugene Oneigin (opera), Swan Lake, Nutcracker (ballets)
“A second handicap for the non-Russian listener is that the dramatic structure is very different from that of, say, Figaro, Don Giovanni or Cosi fan tutte, Tchaikovsky employing the characteristically Russian technique of the stage picture where each of his sevenscenes presents a single crucial incident or stage of the drama. The method is that of thestrip cartoon, requiring of the listener powers of deduction to supply the intervening action;…Yet while this denies Onegin that sense of evolution and that natural variety which we associate with Mozart’s opere buffe, with their swift succession of dazzling musical realisations of dramatic an emotional complexes, such single-situation scenes, whose lifelies in the intense emotions of the participant(s), afforded Tchaikovsky opportunities for music of remarkably concentrated, sometimes very heightened expression.”
Eugene Onegin, D Brown, Tchaikovsky / Eugene Onegin, cond. Solti, ROH Covent Garden, Decca, (p) 1975/ © 1987
Tippett; A Child of Our Time
Verdi: Aida, Il Travatore, Nabucco (operas), Requiem
Wagner; Parsifal, Tristan & Isolde, Rheingold (operas)
Andrew Lloyd Webber; Jesus Christ Superstar, Starlight Express, Evita, Cats, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor™ Dreamcoat (musicals)
Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita / Cats / Starlight Express
“Matty aka Mathew Thorpe; Think Harrison Ford in Bladerunner” (Chris Eales)
“thematically enfolding the philosophy of religion… the implications of technology for the environment and society by reaching to the past, using literature, religious symbolism, classical dramatic themes, and film noir. This tension, between past, present, and future is mirrored in the retrofitted future of Blade Runner, which is high-tech and gleaming in places but decayed and old elsewhere.” … “frequently referenced migration of humans to extra-terrestrial (“off-world”) colonies” … ”The film goes so far as to put in doubt whether Deckard is a human, and forces the audience to reevaluate what it means to be human.” (Blade Runner (wiki), accessed 22/6/2010)
