Three Tales

01/2005, Ensemble Modern Newsletter No. 17

You are where ever your thoughts are
Interview with Steve Reich

Steve Reich interviewed by Hermann Kretzschmar on behalf of the European premiere of You Are (Variations), 2005

Listening to this piece and comparing it to other works the Ensemble Modern has performed in the past - eg. Music for 18 Musicians, City Life or Three Tales - I have the impression that structurally the piece is a sum of these earlier works.
Actually when I wrote this piece I started with the attitude that I would simply enjoy myself composing and go back to earlier pieces as a starting point. The piece I wrote before this piece was Cello Counterpoint. It's the most difficult of the counterpoint pieces and harmonically the most dissonant. I worked very hard on it and I think it's a very good piece but in You Are (Variations) I decided to just go back to the world of Tehillim, The Desert Music, Music for 18 Musicians, start that way -you know when you hear the beginning of You Are (Variations) you could think it's the beginning of The Desert Music - and see where that led me. In other words I was not trying to consciously do something new. I was just starting by doing something that I knew - and - let's see what happens.

You use no electronics but only four pianos, strings, winds and the choir.
And two vibes and two marimbas. - Exactly. I felt, after Three Tales with all that sampling and technology that I needed to compose several pieces that were just music. And this is already the third piece. There are two smaller ones that I already did, Cello Counterpoint (2003) and Dance Patterns (2002).

But it surprised me that in You Are (Variations) you only use live instruments.
When I had composed so many pieces like City Life or The Cave and then Three Tales I used so much sampling and computers that I finally felt, basta! - I've had enough. I needed a break, I needed to work with just musical instruments. Now I'm writing still another instrumental piece, this time for the London Sinfonietta to be choreographed by Akram Kahn, an indian dancer. It's for three string quartets, four vibraphones, and two pianos. So I'm in an acoustic period. But I'm still using amplification.

For each instrument?
Yes. In You Are (Variations) every instrument and voice is amplified. Basically its mostly for the winds, strings and voices and a little bit for the pianos and percussion. It was premiered in Los Angeles and there they had three on a part for the strings so there where three first violins, three seconds, three violas, three cellos and one bass. In London and Frankfurt I think we have only string quartet or possibly two but two string quartets are difficult to keep in tune. And also in Los Angeles they had three to a part for each singer for a total of eighteen singers. Here in Frankfurt and London we have one to a part for a total of six singers. So we'll need a little bit more amplification for the voices.

So we now have more of a chamber music version.
Yes, it will be a little bit more precise and with a bit more of a sharper edge because there won't be any doubling.

Was it your decision to do it this way?
It can be done either way. I liked the idea of three for a part, particularly for the strings, but I haven't heard it with one to a part, so I'll find out in Frankfurt. But the singers you know, Synergy is so good. They sound fantastic by themselves. I wrote the piece so it could be played by a single string quartet. All double stops are possible with one player. So it can be played either way. And when I hear it with Ensemble Modern and Synergy I'll probably love it and it will just work in a different way.

Another thing that surprises me is the form of the piece. It is depended upon the texts but not as constructed as for example Three Tales where the parts are more contrasted. So You Are (Variations) is much more like a musical monolith.
The first and the third movements move around harmonically but the second and the fourth only use the harmonies two, four, six and five - basically I wanted to see if I could do something that was interesting this way and I think because of the harmonic rhythm - the rhythm in which these chords move which is quite unpredictable - it works extremely well. I wanted to write something which I found emotionally very moving. And I hadn't worked like this since many years ago, in Tehillim. The form, the variations, are really because the texts are so short.

Why did you choose them, though?
Purposely, you know the piece Proverb?

We did it in London.
O.k. In Proverb I learned that in using one short text you are forced to develop just this one idea. I liked this very much and I wanted to go back to that kind of composing. When you have a long text you must travel with the text wherever it goes. And I had done this of course in The Desert Music, The Cave, and Three Tales. So here I wanted to go back to Proverb and I picked four short texts. I think they are very interesting to people just because they are so short. Three of them are from the Jewish tradition, one from Wittgenstein, but a lot of people said to me they were like Zen Koans: very short aphorism that invite meditation. "You are where ever your thoughts are". That's true of people, and it's also very true about listening to music. When you are really listening your consciousness is filled with the music and where ever the music goes, that's literarily where you are. Someone taps you on the shoulder and you come back to another reality. But when you are listening your mind is filled with the music. Where ever the music goes, you go too, if you are really listening. Obviously if you are watching TV or listening to the radio this is something different. It is a truth about human beings that they can be physically somewhere but their mind can be elsewhere and that's really where they are.

But you also use this sentence pronouncing only two words. So they get also another meaning. It makes a difference if you only say: "You are".
Yes, exactly. What happens is when the piece begins you have the sopranos singing "You are" very long. And the tenors sing very short "You are". The women are very long and the men are very short. So it's a little bit funny and it's almost like two different texts. One is fully augmented and abstract like Perotin and the other is as if you were talking. The second variation it's just the opposite: the tenors have the very long tones and the women have the short ones. So this is how I began the piece. Each section treats the text differently. It's always harmonized differently, though my original idea was to keep a constant chord progression throughout. Instead, I started changing a couple of the chords. And I thought: "I like this!". I decided to go with my musical intuition and not with my plan that I made before I started composing. And the result was that the harmonies began to get more and more removed from my original plan. And the only thing that always brings them back is a kind of D major dominant chord. But usually it's with a G in the bass instead of an A. So it's between a four chord and a five chord or an inverted five chord or whatever you like. But that chord is the heart of the harmony throughout the piece. The most dissonant part of this piece is in the second half of the first movement when the four pianos start playing by themselves and continue to the end of the first movement - there it's almost polytonal.

Does the tension of the text correspond to the tension of the harmony?
Well, sometimes it's a wonderful day, and you're looking at the clear sky, you feel fine and your back isn't bothering you or your girlfriend or wife has been nice and you're very proud of your work and other times your eyes are bothering you and you're going in for surgery, your wife has left you and you feel horrible - so by bar 130 it's getting a little bit darker (laughing). And it's getting darker all the way till the end of the first movement. And then starts the second movement which is from the 16th Psalm, in the original Hebrew "Shaviti HaShem L'negdi". This means, "I place the Eternal before me". This could be literal - you can interpret this so that you keep the four letter Hebrew name of God as a visualization in your mind's eye. And I think this is perhaps one of the things Kind David meant in that Psalm. But in our day, it could mean that you keep whatever is most important to you in mind. What you think of the basis of your life. The most important things in your life enter into your consciousness when you're at certain points in your life. So it's a suggestion of where to put your thoughts. It's no longer saying "You are wherever your thoughts are", but rather, here's a possibility, here is something to meditate on. - And then at the end of that movement there is a pause because all the musicians are tired. The lips of the oboe player are tired and I feel Hermann and everyone saying: "I need a little break".

How did you choose the texts?
Oh, it took me six months of reading in Rabbi Nachman of Breslov who is the author of the first quote, and then reading the Psalms, and reading Wittgenstein and Pirke Avot from which the last text comes. I put these books in my suitcase when I was travelling and on the airplane and in hotels I would read. I have maybe twenty different versions of these and other texts - all short - in my computer. People perhaps look at the texts and say it probably took you a few minutes. And I say: "It took me six months!" All these different possibilities, different orders and sometimes it was all in Hebrew or all in English or different quotes and finally I came up with this and it's the best I could come up with. These texts don't tell a story - but they do certainly make sense together. And they work well when repeated.

And it refers to the music...
Well, the first, "You are wherever your thoughts are" certainly does. The second "Shiviti HaShem L'Negdi" ("I place the Eternal before me.") is not about music, but is simply a text I set to music which I hope illuminates the meaning and spirit of the text.
After the Psalm comes the Wittgenstein. "Explanations come to an end somewhere". Wittgenstein was talking about science and also about how a child learns a language. Explanations come to an end somewhere in the sense that, for example, Newton, when he formulated the theory of gravity, was a genius, and everything he said was true. However, it turned out with Einstein that what Newton was describing was only part of reality and he wasn't aware of certain things because it was not possible to be aware of them at that point because of the available measuring instruments, etc. Einstein opened up another reality that we weren't aware of. At one point we thought atoms were the smallest bits of physical matter, then we discovered protons and neutrons, then we discovered quarks and now we talk about string theory and everything may be vibrating almost like music. So every 20 or 30 years in physics, which is the most basic of the sciences, you have some basic new insight that opens up a whole new door to another reality. And this is not because there was something wrong before, but just that we couldn't see this new reality at an earlier point. So we know that tomorrow we will see something we couldn't see today. In that sense, clearly, "Explanations come to an end somewhere." You know from your personal life as well, that many things you want to understand just happen and they surprise you and they are not what you expected and are not under your control. As I get older I realize I know less than I thought.
The last text is taken from Pirke Avot, which is an early part of the Talmud. The Hebrew says, "Eh'mor mah'aht va ah'say harbay". The translation could be "Say little and do much". It's also a very contemporary text, a very American text - "Don't talk so much, just do it!". However, musically, the english "much", is a terrible word because it closes on the consonant "ch" just when you need a word that ends in a vowel you can sing for a long time. The Hebrew was perfect: "Eh'mor ma'aht". A very short phrase, which sounds like what it means: "Say little" . Then "Ah'say harbay", and it sounds just like what it says, "do much", Perfect for singing. You can extend all those vowels for a very long time, which I do. So I chose it. It's also interesting to work in a language people don't know. If you take a text whose meaning is clear but put it in a language people don't know, it makes it a little bit more mysterious. Stravinsky was talking about this by using Latin. You have a distance from the words. You Are (Variations) is a combination of some English and some Hebrew. The second and fourth movement are musically very similar, and the Hebrew texts, particularly in the second movement, are 'covered' they are not open to view, as befits sacred matters. You don't know what it means unless you look up the translation. I don't want to shine a bright light on it. If you are a person who will practice this, then you should know about it, and you'll take the time and effort to find out what it means, but if you're not, then it's covering up something that should be covered.

Ensemble Modern

23 July 2002, Rhein-Main-Zeitung

Vom Kribbeln der Klänge
Zweiteiliges "Komponistenporträt" mit dem Amerikaner Steve Reich

[...] zuvor war der Komponist im Gespräch mit der Journalistin Kornelia Bittmann persönlich zu erleben und wurde selbst Zeuge der Schwierigkeiten, mit denen die Interpreten seiner Werke konfrontiert sind: Unglaubliche Konzentration muss es erfordern, etwa im "Triple Quartet" von 1999 oder im "New York Counterpoint" für Klarinette und Tonband (1985) mit und gegen die eigenen Aufnahmen der anderen Spuren zu spielen. Denn wenn das für drei Streichquartette geschriebene "Triple Quartet", wie jetzt im Eswe-Forum, von vier statt von 12 Musikern interpretiert wird, werden die Quartette Nr. 2 und Nr. 3 vorab auf Tonband aufgenommen und im Konzert zugespielt.
Ähnlich verhält es sich mit dem Klarinetten-Opus von 1985, das mit zwölf Musikern besetzt werden könnte, beim RMF aber von Roland Diry in einem atemberaubenden Alleingang gegen die Doppelgänger aus dem Verstärker gemeistert wird. Wie alle Musiker des diesjährigen "Komponistenporträts" ist auch er Mitglied des Ensemble Modern, das im Mai Steve Reichs Video-Oper "Three Tales" in Wien aus der Taufe gehoben hat. Dass man sich also kennt, bestens versteht und gerne in die Werkstatt schauen lässt, vermitteln alle beteiligten Musiker um den in sympathischer Selbstironie zum Plaudern aufgelegten Komponisten: "I love them", sagt Reich über seine Interpreten, die wieselflink ihren Konserven hinterherspielen: Jedes Mal ein Wunder, dass man punktgenau gemeinsam aufhört und keiner auf der Strecke bleibt.
[...]
Als ein Schlüsselwerk in der Abkehr vom strengen Minimalismus wurde am zweiten Abend im Kurhaus vom Ensemble Modern unter Jonathan Stockhammers Leitung und mit Reich an einem der Flügel die "Music for Eighteen Musicians" (1974-1976) präsentiert: Ein einstündiges Ohrenbad in einem klingenden Ameisenhaufen, in dem Streicher, Schlagzeuger, Pianisten und die Stimmen der Neuen Vocalsolisten Stuttgart emsig umherwuseln. Das vermeintliche Chaos ist freilich mit höchster Präzision organisiert und lässt ein begeistertes Publikum zurück, das dem Ensemble Modern und dem Komponisten stehende Ovationen bereitet.
Weniger lautstark, aber nicht minder intensiv wurde am Vorabend "Different Trains" für Streichquartett und Tonband gefeiert: Die Eisenbahn-Erfahrung seiner Kindheit zwischen New York und Los Angeles weitet Reich im Mittelteil assoziativ zum jüdischen Schicksal im Europa der Kriegsjahre, setzt seine Jugend in einen Kontrapunkt zur europäischen Erfahrung. Sprach-Samples von O-Tönen gleichaltriger Holocaust-Überlebender werden instrumental behandelt, der Sprach-Gestus von den Streichern aufgegriffen und begleitet. Dabei meint man ständig, die Hast rollender Räder zu spüren. Ausdruckslos ist diese Musik gewiss nicht.

Volker Milch

18 May 2002, Guardian

Dolly the sheep's night at the opera

[...]
Now Reich and Korot have produced Three Tales [...] It is a much tighter, more incisive work than The Cave, at the same time more visually and musically complex yet more straightforward to perform. The advances in computer techniques over the past decade have allowed Korot to manipulate complex patchworks of images in a single frame. The visual effects are thrillingly virtuosic but can now be projected on a single screen, while an ensemble of instrumentalist and singers functions as a chorus, commenting on and reinforcing what is seen and heard on the video.
[...] Three Tales deals with the technological present, focusing on three key moments in 20th-century history: the crash of the Hindenburg airship in 1937; the atomic-bomb tests on Bikini atoll in 1946; and the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1997. Korot's source in the first two tales is newsreel footage from the time. For Dolly, which leads on from genetic engineering to an exploration of artificial intelligence and what the 21st century could produce, she and Reich make use of specially filmed footage of interviews with leading authorities in the field, from Richard Dawkins and Stephen J Gould (disagreeing, typically) to Steven Pinker and Marvin Minsky. The whole 65-minute piece is a huge achievement, visually and musically, which gets more and more engrossing as it goes on. With each tale longer than its predecessor, the trajectory seems perfectly judged.
Three Tales really defies classification. Reich and Korot describe it as music theatre, but it is a very personal take on the genre, and very much the amalgamation of their talents. [...]
Certainly no one has made such a symbiotic amalgam between the two media as Reich and Korot, or made it seem so naturally effective. [...] it is hard to imagine how they could top Three Tales. [...]

Andrew Clements

17 May 2002, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

From Genesis to Genetic Engineering
Steve Reich and Beryl Korot's New Trilogy Performed at Vienna Festival

[...]
Korot turned the historical images into a complex artifact by means of blueprint silhouettes and video animation. Part of it was inspired by Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times." The closing airborne shot into the burning remains of the airship and over people running for their lives is most disturbing.
The popular association of the word "bikini" with a two-piece bathing suit is shown only briefly toward the end. The most important impression is the nuclear blast. The bomber plane looks as silvery-golden as the airship before, and Paul Gauguin's paintings of peaceful, happy islanders have been electronically geometricized. We see countless heroically-pulled countdown timers and levers. Pompous patriotism, the worship of technology, mushroom clouds, military and naval schematics are contrasted with images of goats and cows that are taken to the test site. They were used to examine the effects of the explosion.
Then that sheep, Dolly, stares us down. The poor creature is followed by an artificial one. A metaphysical dimension is added in a double sense. Not only is the act of cloning fundamentally related to genesis. The modern gods of genetic engineering are also presented in words and pictures: Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy, Richard Dawkins, James D. Watson and others talk about chances and risks, benefits and horrors of the new possibilities.
[...]
Conducted by Bradley Lubman, members of the Ensemble Modern, two pianists, percussionists and vibraphonists as well as a string quartet play Reich's monotonous, happy tunes in a way that retains their acoustic puzzle character, part of which lies in the permanently changing relationship between picture and sound, fact and fiction.
[...]

Gerhard R. Koch

14 May 2002, Südwest Presse

Dolly und das Bikini-Atoll
Steve Reich erzählt in seiner Oper "Three Tales" drei Geschichten zum Untergang der Menschheit. Eine Uraufführung bei den Wiener Festwochen.

[...]
Der kontrolliert-suggestiven Film- und Klang-Wirkung dieses erklärten Gesamtkunstwerks kann man sich nur schwerlich entziehen. Anfangs zwar noch etwas moralisch-betulich wie eine Brechtsche Schuloper, überwältigt mit der Zeit allein die pure Obszönität der verfremdeten Bilddokumente, der Korot am liebsten mit Standby-Taste und Duplikator am digitalen Schnittpult zu Leibe rückt, und die Reich zudem mit Geschick illustriert und instrumentiert hat. Schlagzeilen wetteifern mit Schlagwerk, drei Tenöre klagen mit dissonanten Schrunden (hervorragend die ausführenden Synergy Vocals und das Ensemble Modern unter Bradley Lubman), rasante Video-Schnitte geben einen hämmernden, morsenden Rhythmus vor.
[...]

Wilhelm Triebold

14 May 2002, Salzburger Nachrichten

Aus Geschichte und Gegenwart
Die Videooper "Three Tales" von Steve Reich und Beryl Korot bei den Wiener Festwochen

Als Uraufführung, in minutiöser Präzision und Abstimmung zwischen Bildern und live gespielter Musik, präsentierte sich Steve Reichs gemeinsam mit der Videokünstlerin Beryl Korot in mehrjähriger Arbeit erstelltes neues Opus "Three Tales" im Wiener Museumsquartier.
[...]
Zum Playback-Sound des Videos spielt das Ensemble Modern live Steve Reichs aus Sprachstrukturen generierte Musik - faszinierend, wie etwa die auf dem Screen wie Karaoke-Schriftzüge erscheinenden Zitate rhythmisch punktgenau harmonisiert und in Musik gesetzt werden.
Weiters reflektiert ein Chor aus drei Tenören und zwei Sopranen die Handlung. In dezenter Choreografie und Beleuchtung präsent, verwandelt er Textpassagen zu modernen Madrigalen und Kanons, die mitunter durchaus an Pop-Artefakte der sechziger Jahre erinnern, aber raffiniert in das aus vielen Montagen bestehende visuelle und akustische Gesamtkunstwerk verwoben sind. Standbildern entsprechen "Sound-Zeitlupen", angehaltene Vokale des Soundtracks zeitigen musikalische Dehnungen und Intensivierungen des Gesprochenen.
[...]

Heinz Rögl

14 May 2002, Kurier

Technik ist Pfui, Gott super
"Three Tales" von Steve Reich bei den Wiener Festwochen

[...]
Die "Three Tales", die nur 65 Minuten lang dauern, besitzen in den besten Momenten eine starke emotionale Kraft, eine Sogwirkung, für die Reich und Korot gleichermaßen verantwortlich sind. Reich hat drei Geschichten ausgewählt, die auf den ersten Blick nicht viel mehr miteinander zu tun haben als ihre Beschäftigung mit Technologie und ihre Zivilisationskritik: Den Absturz des Luftschiffes Hindenburg 1937 in New Jersey, die Atombombentests 1954 auf dem Bikini-Atoll und das 1997 geklonte Schaf Doily.
Bald aber schließt sich der Kreis und die Geschichten bekommen eine starke Klammer. Zuerst geht es um die Überwindung der menschlichen Grenzen, um die Nähe zu Gott, um das "lkarus"-Symbo. [...]Die Bikini-Story ist die stärkste. Die Musik von Reich mit den sich ständig wiederholenden Motiven, immer lauter, immer schneller, passt perfekt zum Countdown für die Bombenzündung. Das Ensemble Modern (Dirigent: Bradley Lubman) spielt professionell, drei Tenöre und zwei Sopranistinnen singen beklemmend.
Filmisch fesselt die Dolly-Geschichte am meisten, wenn Wissenschaftler zu Wort kommen und auf der Leinwand dupliziert, multipliziert werden.
[...]

Gert Korentschnig

14 May 2002, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Was uns Dolly alles nicht erzählen kann
Bill Joy und Ray Kurzweil mahnen: Reichs und Korots "Three Tales" in Wien uraufgeführt

* [...]
Beryl Korot hat die historischen Bilder durch Monteurs-Schattenrisse und Videoanimationen, mitunter nach dem Vorbild von Chaplins "Modern Times", zum vielschichtigen Artefakt überhöht, beklemmend nicht zuletzt in der Schlußeinstellung vom Flugzeug aus auf das brennende Wrack und die flüchtenden Menschen.
Die gängige Bikini-Assoziation vom Badezweiteiler kommt nur am Schluß ins Bild. Hauptsache bleibt der Atomknall. So auratisch-silbrig wie der Zeppelin fliegt nun der Bomber, und die Gauguin-Bilder friedlich-fröhlicher Südsee-Insulaner werden elektronisch geometrisiert: technologisch gerasterte Idylle. Immer wieder sieht man Countdown-Uhren und Hebel, die heroisch umgelegt werden. Patriotisches Pathos. Technikkult. Atompilz. Zielgebietskarten und Schiffsformationen werden in ihrer Abstraktheit konterkariert durch Aufnahmen von Ziegen und Schweinen, die ins Abwurfgebiet gebracht werden: Auch an ihnen sollte die Wirkung der Explosion getestet werden. Danach sieht einen Dolly an: Der armen Kreatur folgt die künstliche. Hinzu kommt die Doppel-Meta-Ebene: Nicht nur wird das Klonen fundamental auf die Genesis bezogen, auch die Gurus der Gen- und Nanotechnologien kommen frontal ins Bild und zu Wort: Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy, Richard Dawkins, James D. Watson und andere äußern sich über Chancen und Risiken, Heil und Horror der neuen Möglichkeiten. [...]
Mitglieder des Ensemble Modern, zwei Pianisten. Schlagzeuger und Vibraphonisten, ein Streichquartett, spielen unter Bradley Lubman Reichs Monotonien so, daß ein fortwährender Happy-Duktus doch nie seinen tönenden Vexierbildcharakter verliert, zu dem auch das permanent changierende Verhältnis von Bild und Ton, Dokument und Ton gehört.
[...]

Gerhard R. Koch

14 May 2002, The Times

An Atomic Bomb, a Zeppelin, a Warning About Genetic Manipulation

[...]
The three tales are presented as one in the 65-minute performance, tightly and excitingly given by members of the Ensemble Modern and Synergy Vocals under Bradley Lubman. "Hindenburg" - much improved since it was first done four years ago and now smoothly taking its place as prologue - uses film clips of the fire that swept over the eponymous airship as it landed in New Jersey in 1937. "Bikini" similarly takes off from newsreel images of preparation leading up to the 1946 testing of an atomic bomb.
In "Hindenburg," musical processes are paramount. The opening sequence is a slow deceleration for the ensemble of vocal quintet, string quartet, piano duo and four percussionists, so that the sung sounds lengthen to join with the appalled whine of the reporter who was there. After this, while the building of the airship is shown on screen, recorded and live percussionists construct with the pervasive rhythm from the anvil-driven Nibelheim interlude in "Das Rheingold," and the pianos purloin two chords from Wagner's score. "Bikini", has much more of a sustained sweep in which sound and screen are conjoined. The cross-cutting of images - islanders leaving, a plane in flight, streaming numbers, a radar display - mirrors Mr. Reich's agile maneuvering of different textures and harmonies, while his pulsings actuate the forward drive implicit in the story. "Hindenburg" began with the airship already in flames; "Bikini" keeps up the tension of countdown, a tension that extends, through the firestorm in the palm trees, into the beginning of the third and final episode.
[...]
The best of Mr. Reich's music has always involved a tender touching of natural and electronic, human and mechanical, spontaneous and repetitive. It does so in this piece, for instance when the singers in the hall, live but wired up, join their voices; to that of the 1937 announcer. Here is a quiet truth, that of sympathy across barriers of time and medium. [...]

Paul Griffiths

05/2002, Ensemble Modern Newsletter No. 9

A Theatre of Ideas
Steve Reich and Beryl Korot interviewed by David Allenby, 2002

How did the idea for Three Tales first come about?

SR: When The Cave premiered in 1993 its first commissioner, Dr Klaus Peter Kehr of the Vienna Festival, asked if we'd ever thought about doing a piece about the twentieth century. One of the things that came to mind very quickly was that the twentieth century had been more touched and driven by technology than almost any other human endeavour. This wouldn't create a music theatre piece in itself - we needed some events, some signposts from the early, middle and late parts of the century that would be emblematic of the period and its technology.
Hindenburg came to mind rather rapidly. It signalled the end of a failed technology when the airship exploded and crashed in New Jersey in 1937. It was also the first major disaster captured on film. Beyond that, Hindenburg the man was the German hero of World War I who then ended up appointing Hitler chancellor in 1933.
The atom bomb was in many ways the emblematic technology of the century. For the first time we'd created a technology with which we could destroy the planet. We settled on the tests at Bikini, which were between '46 and '52, signalling the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War. It brought together the most ultra-sophisticated hi-tech known to man at that time and some of the least technological human life on the face of the Earth - the Bikini people of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.
For the third tale we were originally going to use the explosion of the Challenger spacecraft, but we soon felt this was one disaster too many for the piece. Then in 1997 Dolly the sheep was cloned and we both took one look at each other and said "That's it!" It's a totally different technology, growing out of medicine and biology, and pointing to what life might be like for the rest of the twenty-first century.

BK: Also, in contrast to the first two acts, Dolly is looking within, to ourselves, to the impact of technology on our own physical bodies. And it symbolized the whole range of issues now brought about by technology to impact on our bodies, not only by manipulating the basic blueprint of that body, but by actually bringing technology into our bodies.

How did your personal experiences from handling technology feed back into your creative work?

BK: Even in the early 1970s, when I first started working in the genre of multiple channels, I looked to the ancient technology of the hand loom for ideas on how to program multiple channels of video. The loom was after all the most ancient of programming tools and held out very useful ideas to me of how to think about programming multiple images. I have always liked the tension between working with a modern technology and thinking about the older tools which preceded it and learning from those tools. The positive and negative aspects of the technologies that relate to our lives is also something I've always found of interest. The impact of media on the social and cultural environment in which we live was the focus of a magazine I co-edited in 1970 called Radical Software. That double-edged sword of the gains and losses of each new technology that we incorporate into our lives is one of the subtexts to Three Tales.

SR: When I first began working with tape in the '60s nothing seemed more interesting than gradually changing the phase relations between two identical tape loops. This produced It's Gonna Rain and Come Out. Rather quickly I felt that if this were something only for machines, it wasn't worthwhile pursuing. I then discovered, to my amazement, that I could produce that gradual change of phase with myself and another musician playing two pianos, which led to Piano Phase. Phasing itself is really just a variation of canonic technique where the rhythmic distance between two or more voices is flexible. While the electronics suggested something, it was the connection to living musical tradition that made that suggestion fruitful and worthwhile. Right now I am obviously attracted to making music with digital samplers to playback speech and sound recordings as part of a video opera and at the same time I have no interest in using synthesizers to substitute for traditional instruments. I also find that after working with technology, as in Three Tales, I then need to compose a piece or two, or more, just for acoustic instruments and voices.

Do you see any contradiction in using sophisticated audio and video technology to question the role of technology? Is Three Tales advising us to turn away from technology?

SR: No, to both questions. If you want to know, for example, about a certain kind of car or a certain kind of medical procedure, you go to someone who can tell you what is good about them and what is not so good. You don't take advice from someone who knows nothing about them and has no experience with them. This piece needed artists who had some experience with technology so they could reflect on it and find some inner resonance. What we are doing, reflecting our own experiences and religious outlook, is presenting events of a tragic or ambiguous nature and then in Dolly letting the audience see and hear important scientists themselves in an unusual context of musical theatre. The audience draws its own conclusions about the character and intent of these scientists and one religious figure.

BK: It used to take hundreds of years for a technology to develop and have an impact. Now it takes decades, or less (think about the internet). When tools develop and become upgraded so quickly, offer so much accessibility, their physical and social impact on our lives is transformative, and we have very little say over this impact. Is this part of our evolution? Are we in control? Can we be? Have we ever been? Bill Joy suggests we have no brakes. Adin Steinsaltz says "The sin of Adam, in eating... He was too hasty."

"He was too hasty." What does that mean?

SR: The idea that Adam was too hasty comes from the Zohar, the central book of Jewish mysticism. The Torah makes no mention of which fruit Adam and Eve ate. The apple is never mentioned anywhere in the tradition. The Talmud suggests three possibilities; a fig, a grape or wheat. The fig has clear sexual implications, the grape leads to wine that can alter consciousness and wheat is the cornerstone of agriculture which made possible cities and eventually all our other technologies. Adam and Eve were created on the sixth day and the Zohar says they ate the fruit just two hours before sundown when the Sabbath begins. If they had waited they would have been able to bless the Sabbath with wine, then bread and then enjoy marital relations that are particularly encouraged on the Sabbath. The forbidden fruit would have been permitted when the context was right.

What are the differences between the technologies employed in The Cave and Three Tales?

BK: The differences are enormous. Within two or three years of completing The Cave it became possible to get a computer and work with programs that could combine photography, film, video and drawing, all within a single frame. Three Tales exists on a single screen, unlike The Cave where the complexities came from the relationships between the images and the timings of the images on five different screens. It's still mind boggling to me that an artist can work at a computer, import the raw materials for the work, and then transfer the finished work to a tape deck sitting next to the computer, and hand it to a projectionist as a finished product for performance. You can make a work with considerably powerful tools at your disposal, sitting at home working alone.
There are also techniques I developed in the course of the work to create distance from the documentary source material. For instance, in Bikini I turned the live film footage of the islanders into photographic stills, made these stills painterly and then animated them at a different frame rate from the usual 30 frames per second. It creates a very different feeling from usual slow motion and places the documentary material in a new context, which is the intent throughout the work.

SR: In The Cave, as in Different Trains, I followed the speech exactly - as they spoke, so I wrote. The result, because there are a lot of short speech samples, was a constant changing of key and of tempo which makes it, particularly in The Cave, difficult to play and often lacking in rhythmic momentum. In Three Tales I thought OK - prima la musica. Musical concerns would predominate and the sound samples would be altered to fit the music. This allows the musicians to work up some momentum in one tempo over a longer period of time as in most of my other pieces. It also allows me to control the overall harmonic movement of the music and make the samples fit that. This is particularly appropriate in this piece which, particularly in Dolly, deals with how we are beginning to alter our bodies using technology. I also use two new techniques that I originally thought about in the 1960s, but have only recently become technically possible. The first is what I call slow motion sound, which is slowing down a speaker or other sound without changing pitch or timbre. The second is the equivalent of freeze frame in film. While one of the interviewees is speaking on videotape I make an extension of a single vowel in time so that it becomes a kind of audible vapour trail and, in fact, becomes part of the harmony. This also means that what the interviewee was speaking about, the thought itself, becomes extended, along with the vowel, into what follows, which is of course an intensification of something that happens with speech and ideas in our lives.

Moving on to Bikini, how do you make connections between the atom bomb tests and the Biblical stories of the creation of humans and the Garden of Eden?

SR: The chief reporter for the New York Times who was stationed at Bikini during the tests writes about seeing a huge tree - a Tree of Knowledge - with alpha particle and beta particle fruits. The atom bomb was the device where we first realized that mankind had become so powerful that it could destroy the world. The bomb produced a feeling of quasi-religious awe because of the scope of it. We decided to present parts of the two stories in Genesis which deal with the creation of humans as a way of gaining a bit more perspective on the situation. There are, in fact, two stories. The first is the one that many people know, describing how G-d created Man and Woman at the same time and gave them dominion over the birds and beasts and everything on the face of the earth. If you read some social critics nowadays you'll find them using that to beat us Westerners over the head - of course we're going to rape the earth because Genesis tells us we were given dominion over everything. Unfortunately, those social critics don't know that the text goes on and there is a second retelling of the story.

BK: These two creation stories in Genesis describe two types of human beings that are aspects of all of us to different degrees. In the first story man and woman are created together and achieve dominion over the earth and its creatures. In the second, man is made from the dust of the earth, woman from his rib. They are placed in the Garden of Eden 'to serve it and to keep it' - a more humble type of human being. In the events that combined to create the situation at Bikini in 1946, the man of dominion came upon humble man and asked (or rather told) him to make a sacrifice of their homeland for the sake of all mankind. The Bikinians are a paradigm for the plight of displaced people, past and present, to return to their beloved homeland. These two aspects of humankind represent an ongoing struggle, both internally within a single human being, and also between nations.

SR: We do have dominion, and therefore responsibility, whether we like it or not, yet at the same time we get sick, we die, we doubt ourselves, we don't really understand our place in the universe and we probably never will - and that's not because of a lack of scientific knowledge.

BK: In the work itself, the Genesis texts interrupt the ongoing flow of images and are typed out, white letters against black, whereas other texts within the piece appear as part of a collaged image and are often in the form of headlines. The bomb in fact is never seen, but when it does explode a group of palm trees, animated and painted on as I've described, precede the final image of elderly Bikini people walking along a beach on one of their brief returns to the island.

Turning to Dolly, the cloned sheep, we're brought up to the end of the century.

SR: Cloning is emblematic of the many biological procedures and digital devices by which we are now beginning to manipulate the human body. The possibilities are endless and the question arises whether we are the right beings for the job. As we step into remaking our own species, we cross a line never crossed before. We encounter opportunities and dangers we've never contemplated. Dolly meditates on this and the religious background from which we came.
With Dolly's dominance of 'talking heads' we seem closer to a theatrical world of human characters. But what sort of theatre are we talking about here?

BK: Our private subtitle to this work is "Two Tales and a Talk." It's a theatre of ideas. As with The Cave, we used a very tiny percent of the overall recorded material. Some truly terrific interview material did not make it into the final cut. Sometimes the presentation of the ideas wasn't what we wanted, or didn't fit with the other answers we were editing. Sometimes someone might have given us fantastic answers but if that person didn't deliver the words in a certain way, or look convincing when delivering those words, then they didn't make it into our final cut. So in a way the interviewees are being cast like actors. The video provides both the visual action and the theatrical set, which in performance is underscored or subtly elaborated on by the stage designer, costume designer and lighting designer. The performers are fairly static and iconographic, but add a live presence that both extends into live space and supports what is on the screen. This is not theatre with a capital T trying to be a classic form of opera or drama. The theatre is really there to serve the video and music.

SR: The main theatrical action is on the screen. The singers act as a kind of chorus, reflecting on the action on screen. Each of the three acts not only looks and sounds like its historical period, each is formally organized quite differently to comment on that period. Hindenburg is in four scenes with short pauses between them in a more or less conventional way you might have found at that time. Bikini, as Beryl mentioned, is in three image/music 'blocks' which are each repeated three times as a kind of meditation with a coda at the end. There are no pauses. Dolly is much harder to diagram formally. It is non-stop with certain kinds of material recurring in no clearly discernible pattern. Musically one might say it was a kind of free rondo. The forms of each act reflect the historical period they describe.
With regard to the 'talking heads' in Dolly, we picked interviewees who are important scientists at places like MIT and Oxford. They are very accomplished in their field and they are 'doers' talking about their activities and theories. It is clear from the onset that they are very different personalities, and their characters reveal themselves more and more as the piece progresses. The speech melodies of these eminent scientists provide dramatic revelation through utterance. One can observe different attitudes within this scientific community through the way they present things and perhaps most significantly by their capacity for humility.

Having completed Three Tales, will the work influence your future plans?

BK: In the 1980s I left video behind to paint. As I've mentioned, after The Cave, by 1996, I was able for the first time to combine many different elements, film/photography/video/text within a single frame instead of working in the multiple channel form that I'd been doing since the early 1970s. In working on Three Tales, with a single image comprised of many different sources, there were many ideas that occurred to me, or briefly appeared, that I was not able to develop because of the needs of this particular work. I look forward to developing these visual ideas, creating much shorter, more visually intense works, which I think of as video paintings.

SR: First off, I need to compose some purely musical pieces which is what I did after The Cave and after composing Hindenburg. This is a kind of working rhythm that I've developed recently that feels right and that keeps my energy up. Music theatre, then pure music, then back to music theatre. We'll see. I think the use of sampling and video in opera and music theatre is clearly growing. It's simply an honest expression of the life we are living now. 'Timeless' music theatre has in fact always reflected its time and its place.

Ensemble Modern