Interview with Composer Brian Felsen - by Michael Graham, JMM Quarterly, Summer 2001
A: "It's not really an opera, because instead of having human characters, the actors are symbolic internal voices and homunclii. Also, the entire plot of the work takes place over the course of only a few seconds, rather than days or months. It uses the full orchestra rather than a chamber ensemble, and to call it a concert piece sounds like it's a staged version of some opera for which the producers were too cheap to buy costumes. It's most like an oratorio, but without the religious or heroic connotations that one would normally associate with that."
A: "The piece is about the memories, fantasies and impulses brought to various levels of its author's consciousness during a very brief period of the piece's own creation; so, it's recursive in that way. What this means is that the entire third movement takes place over the course of only a few seconds, and the first two movements provide a psychological foundation for that..."
A: "By dealing with memory, fantasy, commentary, and so on. the first movements deal with half-remembered and half-related scenes from the author's childhood - such as writing a book report, his family life over dinner, sorting through a baseball card collection, being nagged to clean up his bedroom, and so on - all of which leads to, and then provides an escape route from, the stretto of sexual memory which is the core of the third movement. Interwoven with this "plot," the memory voices - from what he's read - provide a running commentary on the parliamentary debate taking place in his head as well as the fast flipping of voices that he hears which forms the human experience of consciousness. I like to say that if you listen to the piece, and relax and squint a little and focus on a point in the distance, that the forty minutes of music will represent twelve seconds of consciousness in the mind of its creator. And the work's success at doing so will depend largely on the bitrate at which it was able to sample itself while sampling."
A: "Any work of art necessarily forwards a philosophic position, even if it's only to comment on the current artistic debate going on at the time of its creation. I've been making music all my life some form or another, having performed as a classical pianist and then in rock bands and was even in the pop music industry. In any event, Strangers' Gallery does tell a very human story - what greater human story is there than the evolution, the shape, the varieties, and the nature of consciousness itself - what it looks and feels like? Of course if the piece only dealt with the science and not the story, what you'd end up with would be a libretto of recited lines quoting various research studies - (sings) "I see a red dot, now I see a green dot, ow mister scientist that electrical shock was a bit high..." Anyway, the last thing I'd want my piece to have would be a libretto - which is why I wrote lyrics."
A: "Take the word lyric - it implies rhapsodic. Emotion. The Lyric Suite, the lyre, contests between Greek gods. Libretto implies the text of a work. "That rock album has an awesome libretto, dude!" At Peabody in Baltimore I heard John Corigliano tell an audience of young composers that the English vernacular could never be gracefully set to classical music. Of course he was trying to get a rise out of the audience, but I thought he was right in one regard: that trying to graft another language's musical forms, like German or Italian music, onto your own language's text, sounds about as good as French or Turkish rap music. You shouldn't have to look at the supertitles to understand an opera written in your own language, but that's what happens. A lot of this is caused and encouraged by the programmers and people who give commissions and grants - they reward artists who establish themselves as the natural inheritors of a lineage, who can display some kind of musical family tree. So you end up with Berio obsessively quoting Mahler's 2nd symphony, or a Brit, Thomas Ades, following Cowell and Cage and dutifully applying blu-Tack to his piano strings - how exciting!...The problem I have with these libretto-setters is that they lack of a certain something below the belt or above the heart. For all of rock music's recent descent into reactionaryism, and for all of the limitations of its song structure, it does know how to use the natural rhythms of the language, which is why the lyrics of Beastie Boys sound so much more natural than those set by, say, Stephen Paulus - 'I got arrested at the Mardi Gras for jumping on a float, my man MCA has a beard like a billygoat!' "
A: "That sounds about right. Many if not most of figures who influenced my writing are American - the cognitive science writers, the poets, the jazz musicians, the rock stars - all American. But the influences extend to the modern experience of being here. Although I lived overseas during much of the piece's creation, the Strangers' Gallery reflects all of my native cultural influences, the experience of growing up here, breathing my country's air - of being a Ritalin-deprived channel-flipping internet-surfing American. What it does not reflect is the view many American composers take of the past. We have this spectacle of modern composers all lining up to become the next Billy Joe Jim Bob Bartok, turning our folk tradition into some neo-romantic view of 19th century Appalachia. It would be as if someone 150 years from now were to write an opera about the Jerry Springer show and trailer parks. Have any one of these people ever heard any of the Harry Smith American Anthology of American Folk Music? Have they heard of Harry Smith, or even Alan Lomax?"
A: "One of my favorite genres of American music right now is hip-hop, which has a wonderfully shattered quality. The dense soundscapes and the mosaic of styles, the brief song-fragments that make up a great rap record, really give a flavor of the hyperstimulation, the overwhelming simultaneity of experience that is urban life. That fragmenting, that simultaneity, reminds me of how the cubist painters broke their subjects into aspects in order to render four dimensions of spacetime onto the two dimensions of canvas. My subject is consciousness itself, and So to be able to convey the large variety of moods and emotions and voices, and the ebb and flow of conscious states that occur even over the very small time-frame of twelve seconds, I took the flavor of collage - and of bricolage - from American hip-hop, and applied it onto various rock and classical forms, using the instruments of the classical orchestra."
A: "The overarching structure of the piece lies in its three movements, which represent the House Speakers, the Central Chamber, and the Presiding Secretariat. These themes serve as "semantic halos" that guide the piece in the same way that our free will and thoughts and memories are guided and limited and defined by the biological and social framework that we live in...Within each movement, the musical structure changes, depending on the particular aspect of the twelve seconds of the author's consciousness that's being represented. Depending on those requirements of time or subject matter, the piece will merge from one vocal line into a canon, or it'll change moods like a hormone or neuromodulator, or it'll use bitonality or juxtapose musical keys if an internal argument is breaking out or consensus is being formed among the voices; musical ideas will become altered and revised just like the drafts of consciousness develop, and so on...Jazz music is a great precedent for this in purely musical terms. In the extended works of Ornette Coleman or Anthony Braxton, the structure itself is often up to change and debate. Players won't only improvise on a phrase or even on different phrases, but also on different rhythms and textures, and time signatures, and concepts of development and recapitulation."
A: "The Strangers' Gallery from which you're viewing the play of consciousness is mirrored and non-centralized, and whatever motions you notice being raised on the floor below in the debate, also depend on where you sit, where you look, when you arrive, and the interactions among the visitors. So if you even look at the the screaming arguments, the benign alliances, then you're an actor too. Which ties in with themes in cognitive science today, most especially with the death of the central witness, who was severally murdered by people from Nietzsche to Dennett. A musical work representing all this must have a shape that takes into account that it's impossible to have a text set in in stone, written by a Major Henry Robert for example, that forcibly imposes some rules of order on the debate independent of who shows up to watch."
A: "Not on this scale. I wrote a series of songs in 1995 called As Good As Dead In March which got warm reviews by the rock press, but that almost got me killed when I performed some of it in Philadelphia in front of the wrong crowd. It was an experimental song cycle influenced by Morton Feldman. I built these huge blocks of chords and emphasized their components. I used them to force quarter-tone lines to be sung on top, not just passing blue-notes, and my voice wasn't great to begin with. I don't think they understood what I was doing - the lyrics were surrealistic and I was parodying the rock idiom - they were very unamused. After I left the stage, I was surrounded by a bunch of fraternity boys, which led into a fistfight between people trying to stop them from hurting me... I used some of those ideas in Strangers' Gallery, but in a very different way. After the great experience I had at Mannes studying with Rudy Palmer, I began to take a more linear approach to the development of melody and counterpoint, emphasizing the lines of the instruments rather than the large building blocks of the piano chords in March."