Civilization

Mic h a e l Sa h l & er ic Sa l z M a n

and its Discontents

“…a brilliant aMalgaM of jazz, pop, blueS and claSSical ...” - peter g. daviS, new York tiMeS

C i v i l i z at i o n a n d i t s d i s c o n t e n t s is the title of a famous essay by Sigmund Freud about the ills of society. Civilization And Its Discontents is also the title of a ground-breaking music theater piece, a lively and biting musical satire written and composed jointly by Michael Sahl and Eric Salzman.

It was originally a prize-winning off-off-Broadway music theater comedy, a music-theater recording for National Public Radio that had one of the largest air plays of any work of its kind, and a Prix Italia winner that was aired on radio stations around the world.

The recorded form of the work, especially produced for radio and disc by the authors, originally issued by Nonesuch and now re-issued by Labor, uses the form of a musical radio drama to capture the dark side of the so-called ‘me’ generation in a whirlwind of ‘break-a-leg’ dance music, pick-ups, one-night stands, frantic phone calls, egocentric confrontations and mad man hi jinks.

Carlos Arachnid invites us to join him and his friends in Club Bide-a-wee whose motto is “If it feels good, do it!” Dancing alternates with freeze-frame moments of high anxiety, angry words and sexual come-ons.

Scene II is in Jill Goodheart’s bedroom where a seduction scene is interrupted by a constant string of phone calls, the arrival of Jill’s boyfriend and the deus ex machina appearance of Arachnid who brings us back to Club Bide-a-wee for a deconstructed dance orgy and an ironic morality.

Moments of ‘70s or ‘80s retro alternate with stunning sound images, a relentless musical flow, seduction music of extreme beauty and a social commentary that is as amusing as it is scary and remarkably up-to-date.

— Heiner Stadler Winter 2012

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTSA Music Theater Comedy by Michael Sahl & Eric Salzman

The following are the original album notes by the creators; written more than a quarter-century ago. They reflect the temper of the time the piece was written, but are no less relevant today.

Opera? A musical? Music theater? Theater Opera? A serious musical comedy? A contemporary

opera buffa? A musical morality à la Brecht/ Weill? An entertainment with a message? A modern comedy of manners, a fable with music, a cabaret opera which tries to deliver intense musical and emotional experiences under a light-hearted surface? A revival of the idea of theater as music – or music as theater – in modern form?

Of course, everyone knows what opera is.

Opera is an elaborate, high-cultural entertainment which is expensive, dead

and foreign. Opera is big warbly voices at-tached to large glamorous singers who face front and hurl out high C’s in incomprehensi-ble languages. Opera is overdressed perform-ers and audiences, alternating somnolence with screaming. Opera is opinionated con-noisseurs and camp followers, large ornate

theaters, big orchestras, big voices, vocal acrobatics, magic, silliness, tre-

mendous passions all scrambled up with old-fashioned rhetoric, huge stages filled with soldiers

and peasants, middle-aged lovers, obscure princes and mythological beasts, palaces and forests and storms and transformations, duels and elephants.

If opera can be said to be about any-thing at all, it concerns matters ancient

and obscure, conflicts, philosophies, politics and myths long-forgotten, trivialized into a high-note competition or, as the wit would have it, “a concert in drag.” Performances resemble the famous description of war: long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of intense excitement and tears of self-con-gratulation at the recapture of familiar visual and aural landscapes.

This is what opera is, isn’t it? There are those who love opera in spite of all

this and those who love opera because of it. But it wasn’t always this way. Once, when the illustrious dead were still alive, opera was a form of contemporary public entertain-ment—in fact the highest, greatest, most ancient, most influential, most aristocratic, most popular of all the art forms. Music theater is the universal “natural” theater—of all the ancient cultures as well as all the non-

Western ones (prose theater is therefore, the modern interloper). In the West, opera was The Big Show for more than three-and-a-half centuries providing spectacle, melody, tragedy, adventure, satire, comedy, romance, song-and-dance, sex-and-violence, a mélange of popular and art styles, social comment, he-roes and heroines, catharsis, idealism, experi-mentation, pathos, heightened emotion, the marvelous, the sublime, the ridiculous—all larger than life. Opera was in the forefront of the evolution of the arts and its practitioners were stars. The sexual irregularities of opera stars (not to mention opera composers) were as much on the public tongue as the exploits of movie or television actors are today. Op-era singers became diplomats or consorted with princes of blood or commerce—just as nowadays film stars become princesses or presidents.

But when opera died, like Old Blue in the song, “it died all over”. Musicians,

dancers, choristers and stage hands wanted to earn a decent living. Movies appeared—first silent, then talking and singing—with a spectacle and an emotional intimacy that

What iS civilization and itS diScontentS?

the old-fashioned stage could not rival (and with a new, mass-media economy of scale). Highbrow composers after Wagner stopped writing lyric music and popular idioms were gradually banished from high-culture art music. The musical comedy—especially the American variety which accepted the influ-ence of jazz and pop—took the big public away leaving opera, like some abandoned great city overrun by the jungle, to dreamers, social climbers, archeologists and connois-seurs.

In the meanwhile, a strange hybrid was born: modern opera, a kind of mu-sic theater that is committed to give us the

feeling of what is traditional and past while keeping the appearance of life and contem-poraneity. The seriousness and formality of old opera is preserved through a neo-classi-cism—a re-creation of classical elegance and form—or with an emphasis on philosophical or psychological tragedy. Much as furniture makers in Florence or Madrid bore worm holes into new wood, modern opera tries to create a patina of greatness, of masterpiece, in order to line up contemporary alienation

and anxiety with the greatness of the past. This quality of being “antiqued”, this nos-talgia for vanished European greatness, has dominated opera since Wagner not only in neo-classic operas like Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress but in the post-Wagnerian works of Strauss, Berg and Schoenberg, in the post-Puccini operas of Menotti and his followers and, curiously, even in the meta-operas of the avant-garde.

But this is not all. Against the big opera there is the little opera—the popular musical theater of operettas and musical comedies and its various artistic offspring. This is not such a minor matter if we realize that the his-tory of the popular musical theater includes The Beggar’s Opera, Mozart, Beethoven (Fide-lio is a serious musical comedy), Offenbach, Bizet, Gilbert and Sullivan, Kurt Weill (with and without Brecht) and the American mu-sical. Our musical comedy, the offspring or successor to minstrel shows, revues and mu-sic hall entertainment, has periodically been influenced by the European operetta and, occasionally, opera. The genius of the popular musical play of any age lies in the closed form,

the inner moment, the suspension of dramat-ic time, the song, the set number. American musical theater has remained live and lively by absorbing ideas form the contemporary development of jazz and pop and the musical level has been consistently high.

The American music theater (in this way not so unlike the European opera

that preceded it) is schizophrenic: a vehicle of popular entertainment with a recurrent commitment to a higher artistic and social purpose. The history of the musical is a se-ries of zig-zags between revue entertainment (with or without any slight pretext at story, characters or message) and the more serious “book” musical which comes close to operetta (the literary and dramatic content is more im-portant but the music stays within the closed popular forms). But sometimes musical the-ater goes beyond the closed forms and inner moments (not necessarily rejecting them but putting them in a larger frame) to create a musical expression of character, climate, dramatic movement and conflict; whatever the incorporated styles of music and singing

may be, this is really opera. A musical which is defined by its music (i.e. Porgy and Bess) is really an opera just as an opera made up of songs and dialogue (i.e. The Abduction from the Seraglio or even The Magic Flute) is really an operetta or a musical.

It is not in the opera house but in the theater that the history of American op-

era—music theater, theater opera—has been and continues to be written: by Gershwin, by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, by Kurt Weill and his various collaborators, by Giancarlo Menotti and Frank Loesser, by Blitzstein, Bernstein and Sondheim, by the composers, authors, directors and producers of all the serious musicals and opera, rock and non-rock, who had the vision to see and hear the theater as a place for the evolution of a serious, entertaining, artistic, socially meaningful music theater. If opera is only the traditional fossilized formulation of stage manners, musical structure, vocal production and class distinction, then it is only a museum piece. But if it is any true form of theater in

music—dramma per musica as Monteverdi baptized it in the early days—then opera is alive, rejuvenated through a new rapproche-ment between theater, musical, pop, the old avant-garde, a new public and an emerging view of music theater as serious theater.

Civilization and its Discontents is the third in a series of music theater or

theater opera works which we have written, composed and produced. It is the shortest of these works and the only one (to date) writ-ten specifically as a comedy. We sat down originally to write an operetta with a bite to it—something like Offenbach or Lecoq’s Fille de Madame Angot or Gilbert and Sullivan or Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro but without pre-tending to any part of the past. If you follow the true inspiration of an eighteenth-century opera buffa or a nineteenth-century comedy of manners and morals, you may find yourself in Club Bide-a-Wee. Certain kinds of subjects require certain kinds of language which lead to certain kinds of music and to the amalga-mation of popular speech and musical dia-

lects with the techniques of classical music and the seriousness of intention of classical music theater.

Civilization & its Discontents is like an opera buffa or operetta with mistaken identities, farcical turns of plot, burlesques of serious emotional scenes, ensembles in which different people sing opposite points of view. As in the traditional comic opera, sex and social relationships are the main subjects although the situations and language are those of characteristically modern sexual encounters. The problems are the trivial ones of contemporary life—but any time you think about the trivial ones, you are immediately thinking about the momentous ones; and there is a serious side to all this reminiscent of operatic opera. This underlying subject is something very real and distressing: empti-ness and the way in which people attempt to fill it up or ignore it. The reference to Freud in the title is intentional; however Freud does not actually appear in the work.

—Eric Salzman and Michael Sahl (1981)

Civilization & Its Discontents was the third in the series of six music-theater collaborations between Michael Sahl and Eric Salzman and the only one in a single act. It was written and composed in early 1977 and produced on May 19th of that year at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York on a double bill with Anne Sahl’s dance drama An Old-Fashioned Girl (after Dreiser’s Sister Carrie) with music by Michael Sahl. It was well reviewed and received an award as the best off-Broadway show of the year. In the fall of 1978, this production—with one cast change, William Parry replacing the unavailable Tim Jerome—was performed at the Citicorp Atrium in New York City and then recorded for National Public Radio. It received a nationwide broadcast on National Public Radio in early 1980, won the RAI Music Prize of the Prix Italia (the major international radio award of the European Broadcasting Union) and was subsequently broadcast by the British Broadcasting Company’s Radio 2 and a dozen other national radio networks around the world. That same production was the basis of the current recording, originally released by Nonesuch in 1981. In 1999, a new production directed by Valeria Vasilevski was produced in Amsterdam and toured with a mixed European and American cast.

A Brief History of CivilizationAnd its Discontents

B I O G R A P H I E Scandice earleY is best-known for her portrayal of Donna Beck Tyler from 1976-1992 on the soap opera All My Children. Her Broadway credits included Sandy Dumbrowski in Grease, as well as the Broadway and national tour productions of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar (Mary Magdalene). She was in Sahl/Salzman’s The Con-jurer at the Public Theater and created the role of Jill Goodheart in Civilization & Its Discontents.

paul binotto played on Broadway in King of Schnorrers, It’s So Nice to Be Civilized, Hair and One Night Stand. He performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. in Swing. Other New York credits included Shindig, Helen, Broadway Soul, Us at Lincoln Center as well as the Sahl/Salzman Noah. He also plays bass guitar and writes songs.

karl patrick krauSe (full name karl patrick krauSe von kaSiSchke), a self-described metaphy-sician and Theosophist, brought to the role of Carlos Arachnid his philosophical insights as well his unique voice and imposing presence. He died in 2008 at 67 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. He made his New York debut with the Opera Orchestra of New York as Monastatos in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. He was a member of the New York City Opera and the Cincinnati Zoo Opera and appeared with the Saint Paul Opera, Opera Theater of New Jersey, Venezuelan National Opera, Kansas City Lyric Theater, Opera Theater of Rochester, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Connecticut Opera Association, Long Island Lyric Opera and American Savoyards. He created the role of Vernon in Lee Hoiby’s setting of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke and the roles of Herod and Pilate in the first American professional production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

williaM parrY made his Broadway debut in Jesus Christ Superstar. He worked with Tom O’Horgan (Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Leaf People), at the New York Shakespeare Festival (notably with Elisabeth Swados, including Agamemnon and Dispatches) and with Andrew Lloyd Webber (Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat). He created the title roles in the Sahl/Salzman productions of Stauf and Noah and was also in The Conjurer at the Public Theater. He was Sir Dinaden and Richard Burton’s understudy in the Broadway revival and national tour of Camelot and subsequently appeared in Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George and Passion.

Quog MuSic theater was founded in 1970 to further the development of new music theater and theater opera. Quog performed for a dozen years or so in many of the leading performances spaces and off-off-Broadway theaters in New York City, on PBS (WNET in New York City, WCNY, Syracuse, NY), on public radio (WBAI-FM, NY; National Public Radio); on tour in Europe and in North and South America. Quog recorded for Finnadar and Nonesuch.

cleve pozar is a drummer and percussionist with an extensive background and experience in jazz, rock and contem-porary music. A former member of the Studio C Free Band with Michael Sahl, he has recorded and concertized extensively.

Michael Sahl was born in Boston in 1934, studied with Israel Citkowitz, at Princeton with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt, at Tanglewood with Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss and in Europe. His music is a self-described cross-breed of classical and popular music which he calls ‘funk/romantic’ and includes symphonic, chamber, electronic and tape music, film and dance scores, as well as songs and music for the theater. He has performed with Judy Collins and recorded “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” for Elektra Records with her; she also recorded his “Prothelamium” on a subsequent Elektra album. Sahl has performed as a pianist with the Buffalo Ensemble for New Music, the Studio C Free Band, for dance companies and on tour; he was also pianist and arranger for The Tango Project. His recordings include A Mitzvah for the Dead with violinist Paul Zukofsky, Tropes on the Salve Regina and String Quartet 1969. Other works in various media include Dances of Glass, commissioned by the New Corning Museum, Corning, NY, Saltimbocca for the Louis Falco Dance Company and Flamingoes for Sara Rudner; several chamber pieces combining romantic and jazz or rock elements (Symphony 78, Doina, Fantasia); a score arranged for Chris Stein of Blondie for the film Union City with Deborah Harry; and the score for Boxes, the sixth of the theater opera series with Eric Salzman. Dinner and Delusion with Nancy Manocherian was produced by the Center for Contemporary Opera and his series of operas with Margaret Yard includes John Grace Ranter, Katrina: Voices of the Lost, Legacy, and Love in the Face of Death. Other works include Music for Band and Strings and Symphony 09 for 10 instruments. Included on a recent Albany

CD were Jungles for mixed ensemble and Serenades for solo piano. For more information see www.michaelsahl.com.

eric SalzMan was born in New York City in 1933 and studied at Columbia, Princeton (Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt) and in Europe. He is one of the founders of the new music theater and has created or co-created over two dozen music-theater pieces for stage and media. His work is innovative, involving new vocal techniques, electronic extensions, pluralistic styles and forms, as well as new media technologies. His earliest music theater works, Foxes and Hedge-hogs and The Nude Paper Sermon date from the 1960s and he has continued to work in this field over the years since, collaborating with major artists like dancer/choreographer Daniel Nagrin, filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek, video artist Jackie Cassen, stage directors Tom O’Horgan, Rhoda Levine, Michel Rostain, Yuri Rasovsky, Antoine Laprise and Lee Nagrin, poets John Ashbery and Steven Wade; his work has been performed by Pierre Boulez, Dennis Russell Davies, Lukas Foss, Victoria Bond, William Schimmel, Rinde Eckert, Kristin Norderval,Quog Music Theater, American Music Theater Festival, Center for Contemporary Opera, La Mama, Theater for a New City, the Théâtre National du Cornouaille (Quimper, France), Théâtre du Trident (Québec), NPR, BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Company, NewOp, etc. Recent work includes The True Last Words of Dutch Schultz, text by Valeria Vasilevski (premiered in Amsterdam and at Symphony Space, NYC), Jukebox in the Tavern of Love with Ms Vasilevski (commissioned by the West-ern Wind; performed at New York’s Flea Theater and Bargemusic in Brooklyn) and “Accord/Discord” for mezzo-soprano and tango ensemble; texts by Bertholt Brecht (Center for Contemporary Opera; toured in Eastern Europe with Laila Salins). Big Jim & the Small-time Investors with librettist Ned Jackson, is scheduled for performance in late 2010. Salzman’s“The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body”, with Viennese composer/director Thomas Desi, was published by Oxford in 2008.

B I O G R A P H I E S , C O N T I N U E D

Sahl and SalzMan collaborated in writing,

composing and producing a series of music-theater or theater-opera

works beginning with The Conjurer (Public Theater 1975; produced

by Joseph Papp, directed by Tom O’Horgan) and continuing with

Stauf (“an American Faust”; Cubicolo 1976), Civilization & Its

Discontents, Noah (Pratt Institute, Washington Square Methodist

Church, N.Y.C. 1978, The Passion of Simple Simon (Theater for the

New City, 1979; National Public Radio, 1980) and Boxes (a radio opera,

commissioned by KCRW-FM, Santa Monica; words by Salzman, music

by Sahl). They co-authored Making Changes: A Practical

Guide to Vernacular Harmony (G. Schirmer/Hal Leonard).

“…A brilliant amalgam of jazz, pop, blues and classical forms, cleverly developed and timed to make the satiric points stand out in the most vivid musical and theatrical terms.” — Peter G. Davis, New York Times

“…a work that builds up its own undulating momentum and sustains it so thoroughly that the audience boogies long after the music stops. A skillful,

rhythmic integration of words, music and movement is responsible for the compelling power of this stunning show.” — Show Business.

“…jazz and pop elements in an understandable idiom, in addition to avant garde traits originating in the New York experimental scene…swinging

melodies that seem to stem from gershwin, combined with strong, somewhat abrupt but exciting harmonies and surprising rhythmical accents

that are reminiscent of Thelonious monk…Kurt Weill for our time.” — Doron Nagan, Algemeen Dagblad (The Netherlands).

“…a delightful, tuneful satire…not everything is funny [because] the underlying subject is something very real…This is a wonderful work.”

— Rita H. Mead, Newsletter of the Institute for Studies in American Music.

REVIEWS of Civilization

and its

Discontents

C I V I L I Z AT ION & I T S D I S CON T E N T S O N E A C T, T H R E E S C E N E S club bide-a-wee / jill’S apartMent / club bide-a-wee

CAST I N O R D e R O F A P P e A R A N C e

Carlos Arachnid……………………Karl Patrick KrauseJill Goodheart…………………………..Candice EarleyDerek Dude……………………………...William ParryJeremy Jive………………………………..Paul Binotto

MUSICIANS

MICHAEL SAHL…………………..keyboards (piano, organ)

CLEVE POZAR…………………………...drums, percussion

written, coMpoSed, and directed bY

Michael Sahl and eric SalzMan

Produced by Steve Rathe and the authors for WXXI-FM Rochester, N.Y. National Public Radio, and Quog Music Theater as part of the Soundscape artists-in-residence

program of WXXI-FM, and was funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts. • Final master production for radio by Steve Rathe with the authors at

Magnagraphics Studios, New York City, ZBS Media, Fort Edward, New York, and at the National Public Radio studios in Washington, D.C.

Recorded by Steve Galasso for WXXI-FM, Rochester, Tom Bartunek, Station Manager. • Engineering: Robert Prewitt, Magnagraphics, N.Y.C./Bob Bielecki, ZBS Media,

Fort Edward, N.Y. • NPR mastering by Skip Pizzi • Disc mastering by Bob Ludwig, Masterdisc, New York • Nonesuch Coordinator: Keith Holzman

Cover ArtistsTitian Danaë and Eros (1545 version) Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.

Caravaggio Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, National Gallery, London

Goya Saturn Devours His SonMuseo del Prado, Madrid

Branwell Brontë The Brontë SistersNational Portrait Gallery, London

John Ruskin Self-Portrait, 1861 Morgan Library, New York

Edvard Munch Puberty c. 1891 National Gallery, Oslo

John Marin Brooklyn Bridge, 1912Metropolitan Museum, New York

Morton Sacks Self-Portrait ,1969 Private Collection, Newport

Lucien Freud Night Portrait Face Down, 1999 Private Collection

Van Howell Wanna Buy a Bridge? New York Times Sunday Business 31 Dec 00

Joyce Finlayson Brooklyn Bridge & Twin Towers © Joyce Finlayson.

NASA Europa Haysville Community Library, Haysville, Kansas

Palm Desert Chamber of Commerce 45th Annual Golf Cart Parade 2010

Gathered and assembled, along with photos from family albums, etc., Titian was the source of our two main figures, as well as any vestiges of grace and rhythm iin the final composition., which attempts to apply the retrocubist theories of all-encompassing space promoted at the New York Studio School c. 1969—whose then dean, composer Morton Feldman, generously contributed the head of Carlos Arachnid. Thanks also to Sarah Maher for lending her lovely left eye to Charlotte Bronte and Miss Chicken—and to Heiner Stadler of Labor Records for his patience and tolerance during the completion of this project, on which I started work in 1981. —Van Howell

“…A work that builds up its own undulating momentum and sustains it so thoroughly that the audience boogies long after the music stops. A skillful, rhythmic integration of words, music and movement is responsible for the compelling power of this stunning show.” Show Business

CAST:Karl PatricK Krause as carlos arachnid

candice earley as Jill Goodheart

William Parry as dereK dude

Paul Binotto as Jeremy Jive

& © 2012 Labor Records

www.laborrecords.com

Under exclUSive licenSe from noneSUch recordS

Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.

Made in U.S.A.

D e s i G N B Y v A N H o W e L L N o t e s o N o t H e r C o N t r i B U t i N G A r t i s t s i N s i D e

Recorded In 1978 for WXXI-FM, Rochester, NY Engineer: Steve GalassoProduced by Steve Rathe, Michael Sahl and Eric Salzman

Mastered for CD Release by Malcolm Addey. Analog Tape Transfer: Bob Wolff

Reissue Produced by Heiner Stadler

1. cluB Bide-a-Wee 12:41

2. Jill’s aPartment; cluB Bide-a Wee 31:37