Anna Nicole, An Opera
Music by Mark Anthony Turnage, libretto by Richard Thomas, production by Richard Jones
Philip Derbyshire explores the performative paradoxes of Turnage's new work premiered at the Royal Opera House in London in 2011.
If, to paraphrase Adorno, every new opera asks the question ‘What is opera?’, then the recent production of Turnage’s new music drama based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith, self-consciously thematises this in the early chorus of ‘What we are trying to say…’ repeatedly intoned by a slickly grey suited male ensemble. And perhaps this opening mise en scène also poses the problem of ‘who’ is trying to say it. The chorus of men have the word – it is their framing and articulation, their stumbling desire that drive the opera forward, and ‘they’ include the composer, lyricist and producer. Opera strives to Wagner’s ideal of the total art-work, but its elements, like those of an Althusserian conjuncture, are differentially dominant. In Anna Nicole Turnage’s music is by far the weakest moment. The rhyming couplets of Thomas’s libretto overcode it and in turn are subordinated to the last instance of Jones’s setting. A good reader of Debord, Jones sets out to stage and critique the appropriation of the eponymous heroine by the machinery of the spectacle and the temporality of the opera is indicated by the growing number of cameras on stage. So the performative paradoxes of Anna Nicole become apparent.
Read more » On Song: Anna Nicole, An Opera
A shorter version of this piece appeared in the Chicago Review 55, no. 1
(Winter 2010)
In my collaborations with Susan Howe, my role is that of a musician and composer, but in the early 1990s, I was a graduate student in English literature at the University of Chicago, studying modern poetry. I was interested in the writing of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, especially as it related to music. The only criticism that I published at this time was a short essay on Pound’s Theory of Harmony that appeared in an issue of Paideuma. It was then that I first encountered Susan’s work, and what appealed to me most powerfully were her two books of criticism: My Emily Dickinson and The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. To generalize wildly, I was in thrall to much poetry but to very little writing about poetry. The stylistic divide between the poetry that excited me and the manner in which it was handled in much criticism seemed distressingly broad. I saw Susan read from The Birth-Mark not long after it was published, and I remember loving those moments in her talk when her writing changes register without warning, when sentences unravel into lines of poems that stay unwritten, that register as shards. Susan’s critical works struck me as a satisfying, promising continuation of that tradition in criticism of which Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael was for me the most meaningful example. In the end, I ceased writing about poetry within my course of academic study.
Read more » David Grubbs – Shadowy Hush Twilight: Two Collaborations with Susan Howe
Poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs present their work live onstage at The Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis.
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