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For the Theatre: Opera, Dance, and Theatre Piece Karin Pendle

Women composers in increasing numbers are turning to the theatre as an outlet for their creativity. This article focuses on three representative groups of composers: African-American women drama- tizing their views of black America's history and culture; midwestern women working within the environment of a regional musical and theatrical center; and individual, prog~ssive voices challeng- ing our ears with their unique sounds. Within these divisions the works of Dorothy Rudd Moore, Libby Larsen, Janika Vanderv~lde, Eleanor Hovda, Marjorie Hess, Carol Barnett, Lucia Dlugoszewski, and Pauline Oliveros are highlighted as examples of women's work in the genres of opera, modern dance, and theatre piece.

KEY WORDS opera, dance, theatre piece, women composers, Twin Cities

Writing music for the stage has always been a precarious undertaking for a woman. Largely lacking the opportunities offered by patronage or by family or business ties to the theatres of their time, even those women of the past who attained some success as composers must have thought more than twice about attempting to enter the male-dominated world of the musical stage. Few American women born in the early decades of this century have become active composers of opera. Louise Talma (b. 1906), for example, produced only two operas, and one of them was premiered not in America but in Germany. Vivian Fine's (b. 1913) first two operas are separated by nearly twenty years; a third, Memoirs of UIiana Rooney, will have its New York premiere in August, 1996. Fine's ballet scores, however, are more numerous and demonstrate one way in which women, denied the prestige of the opera house, have shown their competence in writing dramatic music.

Today, America's composers for the stage count among their number women who have directed large portions of their energies to dramatic works. Creators as different as Libby Larsen (b. 1950) and Laurie Anderson (b. 1947), Alice Parker (b. 1925) and Meredith Monk (b. 1943), Kay Gardner (b. 1941) and Lucia Dlugoszewski (b. 1934), and the always adventurous Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932) are producing operas, ballets, scores for modern dance, and theatre pieces. 1 Nor have women of color been left out: works of Dorothy Rudd Moore (b. 1940), Valerie Capers (b. 1937), Tania Leon (b. 1943), Evelyn Pittman (b. 1910), and Betty Jackson King (1928- 94) have appeared on American stages. Women in academia have also written for the stage - Judith Shatin (b. 1949), Elaine Barkin (b. 1932), Judith Lang Zaimont (b. 1945), Beverly Grigsby (b. 1928), and Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1960) come to

1 Interviews of Fine, Monk, and Gardner appear elsewhere in this journal.

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mind. 2 The output of Elizabeth Swados 0a. 1951) includes a wide variety of stage works, from musicals to experimental theatre pieces to formal operas, 3 while Alice Shields" (b. 1943) electronic opera Apocalypse is only her latest in a series of avant- garde dramatic pieces combining electronic, acoustic, and human sounds. 4 Ballets by Pia Gilbert (b. 1921), Rebekah Harkness (1915-82), and Margaret Buechner (b. 1927) take the stage alongside modern dance scores by Eleanor Hovda (b. 1940) or Lucia Dlugoszewski (b. 1934). Throughout the country, American women are successfully meeting the challenges of writing for the theatre.

Americana: The Other Side of History

Many well-known dramatic works draw on the American experience for their subjects: Copland's ballets Appalachian Spring and Rodeo or his opera The Tender Land, Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe, or Floyd's Susannah are just a few. Women's and African-Americans' experiences of history have seldom accorded with those of white men, however. Hence it is of great interest to investigate the ways in which African-American women have dramatized their American heritage.

Evelyn Pittman uses folk themes and African-American idioms in her operas Cousin Esther (1954) and Jim Noble (1978); and her Freedom Child (1970), dealing with Martin Luther King, Jr., has been performed in both Europe and the United States. 5 Though the seven operas of Chicago composer Lena McLin (b. 1928) remain unperformed, her cantata about Martin Luther King, Jr. has been staged both as an opera and a ballet. 6 Similarly, Valerie Capers" Sojourner (1984), which its composer labels an "operatorio," has been staged several times, 7 and many consider her work on the life of black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to be stageable as well.

The ballets The Beloved (1972), Tones (1972), and Dougla (1974) by Cuban-born Tania Le6n, written during her long association with the Dance Theater of Harlem, reveal her multi-ethnic musical roots - Cuban, African, French, and Chinese - along with ideas derived from American gospel and jazz idioms. Le6n's other works for the stage include the theatre pieces Maggie Magalita (1980) and The Golden Windows (1982) and the opera Scourge of Hyacinths (1994).

A major work by an important African-American composer, Dorothy Rudd Moore's Frederick Douglass (1985) is a three-act, three-hour treatment of Douglass's life for which Moore created her own libretto. This opera, which took nearly eight years to move from research to completed score, was premiered in New York by

2 Additional information on Thomas's opera Ligeia appears in an interview elsewhere in this journal.

3 For more information on this composer, see Swados (1988).

4 For additional listings of operas by women, see Borroff (1992).

s According to Edith Borroff (1992, p. x), another work about King, Scenes from the Life of a Martyr (1982) by Undine Smith Moore (1905-89), though labeled a dramatic oratorio, could be staged.

6 Telephone conversation with the composer, August 1994.

7 Telephone conversation with the composer, August 1994.

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Opera Ebony, which had commissioned it, to generally favorable reviews. Based on incidents drawn from the years 1844-62, when Douglass, a former slave, was most active as an anti-slavery orator and writer, Frederick Douglass takes on the quality of a historical pageant. Many of the scenes are sell-contained, and some (e.g., Scene 2 of Act H) could even be performed effectively on their own. This scene and the one that follows contain Moore's most powerful portrayals of situ- ation and character. The figures of Harriet Tubman and the escaped slaves Shields, Green, and Ned are outstanding, and Douglass's famous "Fifth of July" speech rings forth as a powerful monologue. More an extended recitative than a n aria, this monologue illustrates as well as anything in the score Moore's ability to set an emotionally charged text effectively and to write idiomatically for the voice. The crashing contrast between the fearful uncertainties of the Underground Rail- road in Act II, Scene 2, and the boldness of Douglass's address in Scene 3 commu- nicate these events with great power and emotional impact.

Moore's style in both libretto and music is effectively eclectic, and she writes with admirable directness and immediacy. Her text, largely in conversational prose, admits on the one hand some rhymed verses (e.g., Jenny's lullaby, Act II, 2), and on the other hand quotations from the words of Douglass himself (e.g., Act II, 3). Though most scenes are set as continuous music, the presence of arias and the stylistic distinction between recitative and formal number are clear even when definite cadences are avoided. Throughout the work, recurring orchestral motifs - such as ascending wholetone scales or quickly filled-in ascending and descend- ing fourths - provide a consistent fabric from beginning to end. Moore's idiom is that of a twentieth-century expanded tonality that leaves room for references to a distinctive African-American manner (e.g., in many of the choruses) and even for "slave music" (the offstage choral mutterings of the black members of John Brown's army). Indeed, Frederick Douglass is a moving portrayal of an important slice of America's other past.

Under Northern Lights

Given women's historically disadvantaged position with regard to the best estab- lished and most prestigious American stages, one can see the rise of regional theatres as an encouraging development for women who aspire to create works for the stage and to see them performed. The Virginia Opera Company and thea- tres in centers like Cincinnati, Des Moines, Cleveland, Houston, Louisville, Seattle, and Milwaukee have the potential to foster talents that, while not yet mainstream, have something valuable to present. The state of Minnesota, in America's heart- land, began its ascent to the top of the regional theatre class with the opening of Minneapolis's Tyrone Guthrie Theater in 1963. The metropolitan area of Minneapolis-St. Paul currently boasts dozens of theatrical companies and per- formance spaces of varying sizes and seasons, providing venues for the creative pro-ducts of Libby Larsen, Eleanor Hovda, Janike Vandervelde, Marjorie Hess, and Carol Barnett.

If, as Libby Larsen recently remarked, a successful composer must have "self- esteem, sell-confidence, unquenchable curiosity, unerring discipline, and a burn- ing desire to be heard," then Larsen herself is one of the best proofs of this statement (Wheatley and Mantel 1993, p. 5). Though her interests are wide-rang-

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ing, her nine operas are especially attractive reflections of her craft and aesthetic. Their positions within her career are telling: both Psyche and the Pskyscraper and Lover (1972) appeared just as Larsen was beginning graduate study in composi- tion and were performed by her fellow students at the University of Minnesota. These operas, her first significant compositions, set the tone for a career marked by a philosophy of "write and produce.., and learn as you go" (Larsen, 1994). The practicality and the acknowledgement of the teaching role of live performances are central to her success.

Perhaps it is little wonder that Larsen not only turned out operas at the begin- ning of her life as a composer, but that she returned to the genre periodically as a full-fledged professional. Two of her composition teachers, Dominick Argento and Eric Stokes, are also noteworthy creators of opera. The musical eclecticism, technical savvy, structural ties to operatic tradition, and concern for the visual that mark Larsen's best work also characterize Argento's scores, and are nowhere more apparent than in Larsen's Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1990) and Mrs. Dalloway (1993). 8

Frankenstein consists of fourteen essentially through-composed scenes which at times make room for traditional vocal or instrumental numbers (e.g., the dances in Scene 3, Elizabeth's aria in Scene 6). Several recurring themes and ostinato patterns tie the scenes together, as does the over-all clarity of the text-setting within the context of Larsen's expanded tonal idiom. 'Tune and transformation" (Larsen, 1994), qualities which Larsen cites as recurring dramatic values in her operas, are especially apparent in Frankenstein. A multi-media work using video and elec- tronic manipulation of instrumental sounds, Frankenstein operates in two time- frames: the past (the creation of the monster) and the present (Victor's journey on a ship in the north Atlantic in search of his out-of-control creation). Yet the rela- tionship between the two narratives is not simply that of flashback to present time, for the two planes sometimes interact and are arranged in a symmetrical manner that highlights the monster 's first crime, his murder of the boy William. Temporal relationships in this central segment are fluid, and the focus moves from past to present with little trouble or heralding. At the center stands Elizabeth's aria, "Two Twilights Ago," both a reflection on the past and a suspension of time before we see the actual murder.

The transformation of Victor from an overconfident scientist to a despairing human soul thus occurs at the midpoint of the work in such a way as to under- score Larsen's contemporary message.

Central to the dilemma are the human beings - the Victor Frankenstein, the Oppenheimer, the Joseph Mengele - who, by succumbing to intellectual egotism and ambition, become aliens in the society they wish to enrich . . . . It is that genius we must fear, the jinn who guards a genius theory - nuclear reaction, spontaneous regeneration, cloning, mind-reading com- puters (Larsen, 1989).

8 Frankenstein, libretto by Libby Larsen based on the novel by Mary Shelley, was premiered on May 15, 1990, by the Minnesota Opera, St. Paul, MN. Mrs. Dalloway, libretto by Bonnie Grice based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, was premiered on July 22, 1993, by the Lyric Opera of Cleveland [OH].

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Also central to Larsen's vision is its visual presentation. Working on a bi-level, thrust-type stage, characters make considerable use of orchestrally accompanied mime, most strikingly in Scenes 4 and 9, where the monster 's perceptions of the world around him are expressed in a combination of mime and video. The orchestral sounds are electronically manipulated and combined with the electroni- cally generated tones of two synthesizers. Larsen credits her grasp of such tech- nology-based spectacle to the influence of rock concerts, where multiple stimuli of the audience's eyes and ears are commonplace.

Also multidimensional in time and space, Mrs DaUoway is structurally a more traditional opera, with more frequent and clearly defined numbers for the major characters. Nowhere better do Larsen's idiomatically vocal lines serve the pur- poses of drama and characterization, from the sustained lyricism of Mrs DaUoway's "I Remember" (Rehearsal #16) to the mad ravings of Septimus as he makes his way to the doctor's office (Rehearsal #180). Both acts of Mrs Dalloway use recur- ring themes or ostinato figures to define key structural points and to effect shifts from one locale o.r plot line to another. The theme that most clearly serves both structural and identifying functions is introduced in the opening bars: a long, slow, written-out trill in the tenor range of the clarinet, which will recur omi- nously not only to separate scenes and actions from one another but to under- score ironically the recurring refrain "Fear no more" sung by Septimus, also a tenor.

The medium of opera is ideally suited to represent the parallel lives of Mrs Dalloway and Septimus Smith. Though they develop almost entirely inde- pendent of one another, they must be seen as existing simultaneously in a kind of cinematic relationship. Flashbacks occur in both stories, demanding that the bi- level stage serve the needs of many times and places with the fewest possible physical changes. In fact, it is not the stage but the characters who are transformed - Mrs Dalloway for the better, Septimus for the worse - while, like the clarinet trill that seems everywhere, life goes on around them.

Like Libby Larsen, Wisconsin-born Janike Vandervelde received her degrees in composition from the University of Minnesota, where she studied with Dominick Argento and Eric Stokes. Though she had already established a reputation as a composer, Vandervelde did not attempt an opera until she met writer Judy McGuire at an opera-development workshop in the summer of 1985. The initial results of their collaboration led Minneapolis's New Music-Theater Ensemble to commis- sion a full-length work from the pair. The result was Seven Sevens. 9 The opera's title refers to the seven groups, each of seven characters, who confront the opera's heroine, Meridian, an unsettled inhabitant of the modern world who, in the course of the piece, learns to take charge of her life and to enjoy the moment.

The groups of seven - days of creation, days of the week, deadly sins, conti- nents, dwarfs, ancient wonders of the world, and levels of the soul - are repre- sented in each of the seven scenes by single individuals from each group and by a particular musical style - black spiritual, tango, country-western, cabaret, reg- gae, rock ballad, all of them challenges that the classically trained Vandervelde meets admirably in a score that stretches the traditional concept of opera. While

9 Seven Sevens was premiered in Minneapolis by the New Music-Theater Ensemble on June 9, 1993.

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this essentially plotless work deals with serious issues, they are presented in a manner that is "wonderfully playful, sometimes even frolicsome," and their even- tual revolution becomes more a matter of accommodation than of truce (Steele, 1993). Meridian will be doubtless meet her tormentors again, but she will be better able to handle their challenges.

The striking contrasts between Vandervelde's characters and musical idioms finds an anchor in an equally varied orchestra made up of electronic and acoustic instruments. In addition, a prerecorded electronic score interacts with the live performers, and a tape of street noises plays softly throughout the piece from speakers underneath the seats in the house.

That Seven Sevens works well on the stage is due not only to the considerable talents of its creators but to the way in which it was born and grew to maturity. The initial summer workshop of 1985 was just the first stage in the writing and rewriting that coalesced into the finished work. Between 1985 and the full pro- duction in 1993 came other workshops where Vandervelde and McGuire could develop their ideas and see how they played on the stage. They also added direc- tor Carolyn Goelzer to their team, and tried out musical and dramatic ideas on singers, some of whom appeared in the final production. In the end, Seven Sevens worked because it was not just the product of a single mind but a true collabora- tion between composer, writer, director, performers, and production staff to cre- ate something better than each could have done alone.

Duluth-born Eleanor Hovda has carved out for herself a career that has em- braced not only composition and choreography but performing, college-level teaching, and arts administration and advocacy. A composition student of Gordon Smith, Esther Williamson Ballou, Mel Powell, Kenneth Gaburo, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hovda has also studied dance technique and composition with such luminaries as Lucia Dlugoszewski, Erick Hawkins, and Merce Cunningham, and currently works with choreographers Nancy Meehan, Laura Pawel, and Sharon Friedler. Though she now maintains residences in St. Paul, MN, and New York, Hovda spent several years as the Executive Director of the Arrowhead (north- eastern Minnesota) Regional Arts Council in her native Duluth and is an active member of the Minnesota Composers Forum.

Hovda's musical aesthetic combines spatial and temporal elements with con- siderations of pure sound. "I use sound to magnify silence," she says, "and si- lence to magnify sound. Images of sonic excavation, ancient resonances and energy fields are central to articulating 'the sound within the sound.' Each piece is a sonic choreography using concepts of space/time, multidimensionality and energy-shape motion as important aspects of the composition" (Hovda, 1994). This aesthetic has been translated into some fifty works for modern dance as well as numerous, primarily instrumental concert works for chamber ensembles or orchestra. In addition to traditional Western acoustic instruments, Hovda has called on nonwestern instruments and electronic media. Indeed, her imaginative instru- mental combinations are a mark of the uniqueness of her repertoire. "Hovda examines pitches and instrumental colors as if they were drops of water under a microscope," writes Boston critic Richard Dyer; "they turn out to be teeming with life" (Dyer, 1992).

Hovda began dance composition in earnest when she entered Sarah Lawrence College as a graduate student of Bessie Schonberg, then head, of the dance depart-

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ment there. "For me," says Hovda, "the medium of dance liberated the music. The concerns of dance, like weight, energy, space, effort- concepts that a composer doesn't necessarily have to take into account - added important dimensions to my thinking about music" (Bush Fellows, 1991). Among these dimensions were broadened concepts of time and the interaction of time's dimensions with physi- cal movement in dance, as well as experimentation with "found" instruments (objects not normally used in the production of music) and alternative ways of using standard musical instruments. In addition, Hovda credits dance with forc- ing her to examine questions of notation:

�9 .. the convenience of notation is a double-edged sword: you may save time, but you are always working within the limitations of a system you didn't develop, and you may miss chances to explore what might be outside it (Bush Fellows 1991, p. 6).

A look at selected scores for Hovda's frequent choreographer-collaborator Nancy Meehan reveals the sorts of sonic combinations Hovda creates for the stage. In Nine Leaf Window (1990) a solo oboe and an electric bass offer gestures described as "frolicsome aural curlicues" and "music coming to a boil" (Kisselgoff 1990). In Guest to Star - Part II (1986) as well as Into Summer (1987), Hovda herself per- formed the music, creating "marvelous sounds inside a piano or on mysterious blown or shaken instruments" (Jowitt, 1986)�9 Here as elsewhere Hovda has tried to discover the evocative "sound within the sound" and to coordinate it with physical movement and gesture in a modem Gesamtkunstwerk that leaves behind the world of the everyday.

Pennsylvania-born Marjorie Hess (b. 1956) settled in Minneapolis primarily because she saw in that city "the greatest possibilities for producing opera and other works of theatrical music which are her greatest love and interest" (Hess, 1994). Since 1990 Corn Palace Productions, an opera company which she founded with two other composers, has produced three of her operas before the youngish audiences drawn to the experimental theatre space provided by the city's South- ern Theater (also the site of Seven Sevens" premiere). Though she studied compo- sition with Princeton University's avant-gardists Milton Babbitt and Peter Westergaard, her style took on a down-to-earth eclecticism when, in the course of an opera-writing workshop in the Twin Cities, she was challenged to turn out musical scenes very quickly found herself reverting to her musical roots in tradi- tional classical, jazz, and popular idioms.

Hess's largest stage work to date, Mirabell's Book of Number (1991), derives its libretto from poetry created by American writer James Merrill (d. 1995) in the course of attempts to contact spirits of the past by means of a Ouija board. Work- ing with Merrill's approval and collaboration, Hess arranged a selection of al- ready written verses into a colorful but essentially plotless libretto nearly a decade before she felt fully comfortable setting it to music. As a kind of practice medium she first staged another poetry-based piece, The Disappearance of Luisa Porto (1989), which taught her how to draw song forms from writing that was neither strictly metered not rhymed. Hess's most recent opera, The Damnation of Felicity (1994, libretto by Marjorie Hess), is a satirical turn-about feminist fantasy loosely based on the Faust legend, with a score she describes as "somewhere between Bernstein and minimalism" (Freese, 1994).

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As a composer of opera, Hess sees herself following in the footsteps of the Classical and Romantic masters whose artistic vision was often joined by a need to write their operas within a relatively short time and to get them onto the stage as expeditiously as possible. Her willingness to take-chances, perhaps to stumble and even fail, but to learn from experience, stems from a practical philosophy: "I think writing opera is a real craft, a really specific kind of craft, in terms of making things happen dramatically, making things develop" (Hess, 1995). Fortunately, she has landed in a nurturing environment that just may see the creation of a future masterpiece.

Carol Barnett began work on her opera Snow in 1991, when a Camargo Foun- dation fellowship enabled her to spend several weeks in the south of France with no other necessary activities except to compose. "I'd never had that much time just to write before," she commented. "It was really challenging too, because I was used to writing an hour or an hour and a half a day" (Kelly 1995, p. 23). (Like most composers, Barnett has found it impossible to make a living solely by writ- ing music.) Like Larsen and Vandervelde, Barnett did her composition studies at the University of Minnesota, where her teachers were Paul Fetler and Dominick Argento. An experienced composer of choral music (she is composer-in-residence with the Dale Warland Singers), she made what must have seemed a natural move to the larger vocal format of opera. Completed in 1994, Snow calls for eight instru- mentalists and six singers and lasts about an hour. It currently awaits its premiere performance.

It's a W h o l e N e w World

Writing for the stage has given many American women opportunities to find their own musical voices and to develop those voices in surroundings that provide valuable feedback in a stimulating environment. In fact, some of America's most progressive women composers are those who have worked with the stage in mind. Female performance artists like Laurie Anderson or Diamanda Galas have devel- oped distinctly individual ways of communicating their messages. In opera, Meredith Monk has demonstrated how music, choreography, gesture, and word- less vocalism can combine to produce often profound meaning, while Alice Shields has explored the possibilities of electronic media and multicultural expressions. In a class by themselves stand Lucia Dlugctszewski and Pauline Oliveros. With her interest in sound for its own sake and in attempting to change the ways peo- ple listen and respond to that sound, Dlugoszewski found her first home in the world of modern dance and the medium of acoustic instruments, while Oliveros created many independent theatre pieces that often branched out to include both acoustic and electronically generated or manipulated sounds.

Even as a teen-ager in her native Detroit, Lucia Dlugoszewski (b. 1934) was interested in sound from a unique perspective: "I was fascinated/' she says, "with the idea that you could get sounds that wouldn't stimulate your emotions but would stimulate your sense of wonder" (Gagne 1993, p. 59). Her association with dancer/choreographer Erick Hawkins, beginning in the mid-1950s, gave her the opportunity to do just that, leading her not only to explore the widest sound

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possibilities of conventional instruments but to invent instruments of her own. The timbre piano, a type of prepared piano, came first (1951), but more far- reaching and fascinating are the approximately one hundred percussion in- struments she had built by sculptor Ralph Dorazio. Starting work on Hawkins' hour-length ballet Eight Clear Places (1958-6), Dlugoszewski realized that conven- tional instruments "would interfere with the purity of his nature meditation." At first rejecting percussion instruments as "so masculine in the wrong sense," she soon was inventing more delicate and subtle percussion instruments of her own.

I wanted to create an ego-less sound possibili ty. . , so that you would help the ear just to hear the sound for its own sake . . . . I wanted something non- intervaUic, so emotion wouldn' t interfere (Gagne 1993, p. 62).

Hawkins' fluid dance style, with its celebration of nature and the human body, became the ideal physical counterpart to Dlugoszewski's aesthetic of sound. Once her instruments had been constructed, she frequently could be found onstage with the dancers, playing her battery of struck, shaken, pitched, and unpitched per- cussion.

Feeling closed out of the avant-garde scene for some years after moving to New York, Dlugoszewski found that her work for Hawkins gave her a chance to dis- play her musical ideas before the public. Working from Hawkins' choreography, she created scores of varied sonic colors, episodic pieces that partook in their own way of the space and motion she found in dance. In Angels of the Inmost Heaven (1972), a tour de force for brass ensemble, traditional playing techniques mix with muted glissandos, flutter-tonguing, sounds produced with mouthpieces alone, or combinations of hummed and played pitches all within a discontinuous form that conveys a sense of the airiness, the flight, the nervous activity of the dance. Joel Thome describes the piece as:

Sudden explosions of incredibly fast notes adjacent to extremely soft, ex- pansive glissandos. Passages exploring the greatest possible dens i ty . . , jux- taposed with the purest transparent scoring . . . . Wide leaps which expand the outer bound[a]ries of the instruments to new heights played simultane- ously with quarter-tone trills on one note constituting the most minute in- tervaUic relationships (Thome, 1975).

Evaluating her work for the stage, Dlugoszewski has observed:

I think I've probably done more in creating a new musical form that's seri- ous for writing for dance than anybody else has. I think I've made dance, formally, as important as, say, the libretto in an opera; here, you have move- ment instead of the words for performance (Gagne 1993, p. 76).

The dance in turn did much to form Dlugoszewski's distinctive voice and to give her a place among America's most progressive composers.

Early in her career Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932) was recognized as the sole woman among the ranks of America's musical avant garde of the time. Though more women have since joined this group of progressives, none has caught the imagi- nations of audiences and critics alike more consistently than she. Some aspects of

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her uniqueness can be seen in the theatre pieces she wrote during the 60s and 70s, when a teaching position at the University of California-San Diego gave her the financial security she needed to create works which included visual and kinetic elements along with sounds.

These elements then began to be interchangeable for me. A sonic rhythm could be continued or played against a visual or kinetic rhythm. My works became theater pieces. My perceptions of the visual environment became as interesting to me as the sound field . . . . I charged myself to be aware of everything all the time: sound, sight, movement, all that the range of the sensory system can tune to (Oliveros 1984, pp. 183-84).

Pieces of Eight (1964), for example, combines acoustic sound and sounds from mechanical devices and prerecorded tape with the stage movements of eight costumed musicians within an arrangement of props that includes a cuckoo clock, eight alarm clocks, a weather cock, a bust of Beethoven, a wooden packing case, a crowbar, a cash register, church collection plates, scales, a banner, and a large piece of paper on which a black dot appears. The performance instructions - more a scenario than a score - include actions, timings, costuming, even "the mental attitude and breathing that should be used during the performance. "1~ Though meant to be performed seriously, Pieces of Eight is not without humor, some of it derived from the audience's own freely associated connections between t h e surrealistically displayed sounds, objects, and stage motions.

Another theatre piece of the 60s, AOK, works in a mandala-based plan of concentric circles moving around a central figure: Oliveros herself playing the accordion. Around her are eight country fiddlers; then, in a second circle, mem- bers of a chorus; and then, in a third circle, a number of conductors trying to influence the chorus members as they pass by. The final circle, the audience, can take part by chanting. In the comers of the room, audio speakers present on tape delay the sounds of the accordion from the center of the mandala (Oliveros 1984, p. 243). Oliveros's involvement of the audience as a component of her theatre pieces, an expression of the egalitarianism espoused by feminism, becomes more pronounced as her thinking expands to include techniques of group meditation. Link (1971), renamed Bonn Feier (1976) when it was entered in a contest for works to be performed as part of a Beethoven festival in that composer's birth- place, provides a good example of this merger of theatrical and meditative elements, u Other pieces of the same period (e.g., Crow Two [1974] and Rose Moon [1977]) take on elements of ritual or ceremony. Common to all her theatre pieces, says Oliveros, is:

� 9 that the musicians' actions as performers and the visual elements are as important as the sounds produced. My concern with stage behavior and its unusual nature tends to disorient audiences and is intended to bring about in varying degrees a new understanding of how to listen (Le Page 1980, p. 174).

10 Von Gunden (1983), pp. 71-78, discusses both Pieces of Eight and another theatre piece, Double Basses at Twenty Paces (1968), in detail.

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For The Theatre 79

Oliveros's exploration of new ways of hearing music lead to her "Deep Listen- ing" experiments, performances, and recordings of the 1980s.

Though the stage works of both Lucia Dlugoszewski and Pauline Oliveros share certain attributes with each other and with those of other avant-garde creators, their voices are their own. Surely the theatre, the stage, the movement, and their correlation or cohabitation with sound played important roles in the develop- ment of these voices. As more women take up the challenges of writing for the stage, we can expect the historically silenced feminine sensibility to emerge in dramatic works in yet more interesting ways.

References

Abdul, R. (1985) Reading the Score: Musical Event at Aaron Davis Hall. New York Amsterdam News 0uly 6, 1985).

Borroff, E. (1992) American Operas: A Checklist, Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press. Bush Fellows (1991) The Composer as Archaeologist: Profile of Eleanor Hovda (BAF '84). Bush

Fellows News, undated article (ca. 1991) pp. 5-7. Dyer, R. (1992) A Night of 'Contrasts' at Musica Viva's Season Opener. Boston Globe (Oct. 3, 1992). Freese, J. (1994) Tradition Be Damned. Corn Palace Reinvents Opera. Minnesota Women's Press

(Sept. 7, 1994) p. 15. Gagne, C. (1993) Soundpieces 2. Interviews with American Composers, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow

Press. Hess, M. (1994) Biography (typescript). Hess, M. (1995) Interview by Karin Pendle, Cincinnati, OH, Feb. 24, 1995. Hovda, E. (1994) Unpublished press-release biography. Jowitt, D. (1986) Dance. Village Voice (May 27, 1986). Kelly, D. (1995) Composer Profile. Minnesota Women's Press (Dec. 28, 1994-Jan. I0, 1995),

pp. 1, 23. Kisselgoff, A. (1990) Nature Suggested by Eddies and Tides. New York Times (March 28, 1990). Larsen, L. (1989) Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, preface to the piano-vocal score, Boston:

E.C. Schirmer. Larsen, L. (1994) Interview by Karin Pendle, Minneapolis, MN, August 11, 1994. Le Page, J. (1980) Women Composers, Conductors, and Musicians of the Twentieth Century, vol. 1,

Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Oliveros, P. (1984) Software for People, Baltimore: Smith Publications. Page, T. (1985) Opera: World Premiere of Frederick Douglass. New York Times (June 30, 1985). Pendle, K. (1992) Lost Voices. Opera News (July 1992), pp. 18-19, 44. Steele, M. 'Seven Sevens' Opera, Mixing All Kinds of Music, Rates a 10. Minneapolis Star-

Tribune (June 13, 1993). Swados, E. (1988) Listening Out Loud, New York: Harper & Row. Thome, J. (1975) Liner notes for Lucia Dlugoszewski's Angels of the Inmost Heaven, Folkways

recording FTS 33902. Von Gunden, H. (1983) The Music of Pauline Oliveros, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Wheatley, S. and Mantel, S. (1993) Reflections of Change: A Comparative View of Crawford and

Larsen. International League of Women Composers Journal (June 1993) pp. 1-5.

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