Opera- trying too hard or window to the soul

I always found Mozart's opera, The Barber of Seville, easier to take than yer average opera, because it contains characters who are pompous and foolish and who get their come-uppance in comic and foolish ways - this goes well with the operatic singing style and Mozart's characteristically (for this period of his composition), er, cheeky style, which seems to constantly deflate aristocratic pretensions by imitating them as music. Even the way an aristocrat minces as he walks is beautifully described by Mozart's music. He had a brilliant sense of humour.

Ditto Gilbert And Sullivan. But Wagner, urghh. I always think of Castafiore in Tintin, horned helmet on, threatening to sing arias and breaking glass and eardrums wherever she goes...

but why does it feel like such a different universe it might be hard to relate to - especially since singing isn't exactly 'not part' of this one ?

this tension between craft/technique/formality and a sense of innocence/rawness and 'believability' isn't as odd to some as it is to Dan - as evidenced, i think, in a related discussion

(but given Dan's classical training he's either understanding what alot of us don't...... or else HaS BEeN BRaNEWaShED MUWAhahahahaaaaa)

cf: 'contract' - also odd because it seems to allow for a degree of flexibility in arrangements that may just as well verge on the absurd - 'if you just read and sign the contract that we're making here then you'll understand that when you see a red stick it means whimsical nostalgia, and this yellow stick one means bittersweet regret, and so on - then you'll understand the emotional intensity of our special stick waving performance'

Also, btw, Mozart didn't write "Barber of Seville" - it's by Rossini.

Not all operatic singing is good; this is a given. It is also a given that it is not inherently soulless or unworthy compared to a growling punk or a wispy folksinger. It's just different.

I like this explanation, though I'm not sure that it deals with the whole idea of artificiality in opera, though. It's not just that singing is part of the universe - and singing of a specific, very highly-trained, type - there is also the aria used as a sololiquy, the sung and orchestral music very much written to maximise the emotion of a scene. I don't want to say that there's very little left to the imagination, but you certainly have to abandon any kind of realist perspective and accept a world much more concerned with the dramatics beneath the surface, like that of an expressionist play. So, in a sense, there's a lot of effort involved for someone used to more realist media.

In opera comique (e.g. the works of Gilbert & Sullivan, but it's not purely a comic form - Bizet's Carmen is also one), and later the musical, there's the use of spoken language as well as sung, which makes it easier - for me - to differentiate between 'real action' and the 'non-real' emotional world. I think that might be why I'm more fond of opera comique than proper opera. With oratorio, similarly, the recitatives strike me as being closer to normal speech-patterns (or at least to highchurch sung psalms, which I'm conditioned to): they difference in style is an indicator for the point at which you can take a break from the constant bombast. With opera, I can never tell, and it can all get a little too much.

After all, any given sung pop record can be defined as belonging to a universe in which singing takes the place of speech: but they're short enough, focused enough on a single topic, that the suspension of disbelief is easy to come by - and the 'natural' style of a lot of singers helps this by blurring the lines. As does the way in which the lyrics are treated, subjected to less mid-line repetition and less doubling back (except in the normal run of verse-chorus-verse) than the words of a libretto.

Opera exists in such a different register, dramatically as well as musically, that it's very easy to get the sense of non-believeable artificiality from that alone. The difference in singing style is just another problem.

V

! My probably with opera is that I have a very visceral, very negative, reaction to that voice. Opera is visceral, alright, but not in a way I find tolerable.

With movies... hm. Again, depends. I don't think the acceptance that "none of the 'live action' is really happening" is particularly notable as an artificial aspect, because that's pretty much a given for most forms of media.

Most movies tend to stick to 'realism' in terms of acting, characterisation, and visual indicators of emotion. A film can be hard sci-fi, with CG asteroids and wire-trick martial arts scenes done by stunt doubles, but it's easy to accept these given the plot and setting. That sort of suspension of disbelief appears in opera as well - a stage set is accepted by the audience as the Temple Of Day (? it's been a while) for the sake of the plot of The Magic Flute, say. It's the kind of artificiality most people are used to.

In my opinion, music is the primary non-verbal language of opera; the visual is the primary non-verbal language of cinema. In opera you have music which evokes scene, as in Colin's mention of The Barber of Seville, and also music which evokes emotion and can err on the side of the melodramatic. It's the second form which is opera's defining characteristic, its most 'artificial' and the one most likely to turn people off. In general, film doesn't have the same concentration on visual work which evokes emotion - it's definitely there (use of warm colour filters to create an atmosphere of homeliness, for example), but the acting and script are often left to speak for themselves.

Maybe opera could be compared to certain genres of cinema where there is a noticeable use of the artificial. Japanese animation has a definite visual language - in comedic anime especially, you'll get things like the sweatdrop, which expresses a very specific reaction/emotion (somewhere between embarrassment and confusion at either your or someone else's behaviour): it could be expressed naturalistically, as could emotion in opera, but there is an active choice to use the more exaggerated signifier. And if you're not an anime fan and not attuned to that visual language, it can be pretty off-putting.

I think we're used to accepting a certain level and a certain type of artificiality in the media we consume, certainly. Opera just happens to have a slightly higher level - or a slightly different kind - of artificiality than most.

(...Christ that was long.)

but i think that these techniques sound more like someone having learned a particular special language rather than a general structural-grammatical capability - or imagine maybe writers who learn a particular *kind* of grammatical construction which, while making sense, can also seem very controlled and crafted and ornate and formal and actually somehow 'removed' from what it might try to express - not because it is 'done badly', but because it has been developed and formally passed down in the belief that this was how things were done, how one accomplishes a particular purpose
(aren't there old 'gothic' novels which are quite difficult to read for such reasons - not because they are regarded as 'bad writing' by academics but because the style seems alien to us now and you need to learn how to get it)
also other days, other ways -> like o.nate said, particular historical reasons for it sounding the way it does

the point is not whether there is such a thing as 'natural' singing and whether it is more 'honest' - it is about how much a particular type of technique-modification is appropriate for the task at hand, and the extent to which the nature of the algorithms used in any kind of translation/communication into these forms is innate/learned/contextual/up-for-grabs
obviously it depends on the listener's translation-matrix - but are there any meta-criteria by which we can judge these?
(this whole issue is about a very feelings-centric way of listening to music, for instance)

'unconscious or implicit' contracts imply to me a situation where there's a tighter coupling between the innate emotional/physiological phenomena and the process of representing them:
so i usually find that 'growling' or 'wispy' or whatever non-operatic voices are more appropriate & effective at communicating certain feelings than operatic ones -
even if the operatic singer is doing whatever they can to colour the tone, it sounds like they're working in such a formal straitjacket of notions about volume, vibrato and pronunciation that it usually doesn't work
eg i would love to hear a performance of purcell's 'dido's lament' that sounds as beautiful as the music for it, but every singer i've heard on CD or R3 just seems to lay it on with a trowel

(this is not a %100 rule - I find some of Douglas Perry's singing in that PGlass opera about Gandhi very moving - but I think it is very restrained and quiet by comparison with most)

ha what we need is for dan to list a C90 of operatic vocal perfs he thinks are the beez kneez + saying why - maybe he could get us educated!

Re: none of it is really happening -- with opera it is, on stage. Movies and studio-recorded music is constructed via edits and fragments. Realism is arguably a much greater illusion with movies and CDs than it is in opera.

Being "presented in real time, on a stage, with actors" - although admittedly not generally singers - has never prevented a play from being 'realist'. I don't disagree with you that the artificiality of opera is a necessity, but I'm not sure it's particularly to do with the physical nature of the medium. It's more likely to be tied up in the era in which opera first became popular, but I'm not too hot on my late baroque/early classical. If you consider, though, that 'realism' in theatre wasn't much of a concern until maybe Ibsen in the late nineteenth century, opera is rooted in a theatrical world where the artificial is the defining paradigm. Nowadays, we've come to expect realism in visual and musical media - of course opera, emotionally extravagant and illusionist as it is, is going to be hard to 'get' as an artform.

Realism is arguably a much greater illusion with movies and CDs than it is in opera.

Well, yes, but. Opera and theatre may have actual people on stage, but the stage is quite obviously not the place where the action is supposed to be happening (unless it's a metaplay. uh). And none of it is actually happening: they're actors, this is not their living room, he isn't dead. A film may be constructed using edits, but it looks like it's all happening right in front of you and in a real space, even if you're aware that it's recorded and they are actors and this is not their living room and he is not dead. Movies don't require you to imagine that black-painted boards are in fact a garden, because they show you an actual garden; plays don't require you to conveniently forget that the action has been splinched together by an editor, because the action is live and in front of you. They're - arguably - equally artificial, in that respect.

(and now I have to go out, so any further pretentious twaddle will just have to wait.)

I think the era's physical/technological limitations had as much to do with opera's appearance as its artistic preferences. (That said, opera's real origins are in the church, and if its patrons and practitioners are a bit "traditional" with their artifices, it could be leftover dogma.)

And I guess we'll have to agree to, if not disagree, then approach this stuff from diff angles, as I do think anyone going to watch a movie has to make the decision to believe what they are seeing, despite knowing it's a fantasy -- a decision I think is just as significant as the one made by opera patrons at the sight of wigs and cardboard backdrops. (And of course, a lot of this is probably personal: when I see a cool effect in a flick, my first instinct is to ask "how did they do that", where I'm generally not likely to ask myself why that diva onstage is wearing so much blush.)

when i cry to pop music [last week, it happened when running up that hill came on the headphones], am i "buying into" anything the way one does with the opera plot, the movie plot [and the star's face], the book's plot [and the strength of characterization]?

sometimes i think yes, what i am buying is the overarching poetry of the track, the sound, the humanness of the voice, the lyric, etc. sometimes i think no, i'm crying because the song reminds me of a blue period in my live or someone i broke up with. often i relied on the song then [but there are cases where i first heard the song later than the time it call up].

you can see this distinction easier i think by remembering the cliche of the 1930s maudlin italian-american immigrant who, every so often when he's worked up, puts on his 78 of pagliacci, shuts the door to the outside world, and bawls his head off.

does he cry because of the story? is he making a "contract", here? it's sort of a knee-jerk emotional response that once was certainly derived from his "buying into" the story, as he did when he first went to the theatre, but on its own, it's more like a trigger, a pavlovian bell that releases pent up emotions.

if i heard running up that hill right now, or can't be sure by the sundays [i only listen to this those times i want to have a cry] i wouldn't cry. i need to set up a substitute story myself, and then i hear the song, and it tips me over the edge. how do i do this, set up the substitute story? what is the substitute story? it's an emotional state brought on by contemplating one's life. but there is some amount of buying into the story of the song as well - the kate's drumbeats gave me the feeling of running up the hill. i speak her lyrics to myself and want those things.

so it's a combination of course but it seems clear that this talk of artificiality is just scratching the surface. you don't just accept a contract with the artistic style. you take in the story, and make that leap called the suspension of disbelief; and some things don't even need a story to make you build up an emotional story enough to cry [classical music or dirty three or singing you can't make out the words to].

i call this an emotional story because i really do think that's what's going on: the brain starts concatenating memories and thoughts and opinions and judgments and suddenly it clicks into an emotional reaction.

btw i was glad to read snowyman's post, i agree with everything in that. i prefer listening to songspiel over classical opera usually, and theatrical readings of lieder as opposed to operatic. give the singer a microphone, if you have it use it. once i was trying to explain to my young brother about the story in la vissi d'arte as we were watching it on pbs but he asked [age 14] why do they sing like that? ie it isn't pretty to someone raised on pop music.

in fact lots of people like cello concertos who hate violin concertos for the same instinctive reasons - the cello doesn't squeak like a violin and doesn't play as many notes. but of course this is just a question of taste. opera wouldn't get much state support worldwide if it wasn't so conservative.

anyway i always wanted to help organize an amateur opera company that performed using all the modern tools - microphones, theatrical / pop / indie singing styles, electric instruments, etc.

As it happens, I agree that opera performance is quite a ways removed from what "the people" want/are used to. But then, so is classical music in general -- even new classical music. I'm all for the idea of revolutionizing opera to that point that everyone takes notice -- not sure what that would take, or if the end result would be even be something I'd listen to (though it's certainly something I'd love to participate in).

true, nobody actually pays to listen to it, but that's because they don't serve alcohol there OR allow small children, and they charge too much, and letting guys like yo yo ma take their shirt off and improvise is frowned upon instead of encouraged [as it was during the lizst / paganini days]

Musicals?

obviously that's the idea - broadway hasn't been afraid to use mics, electric guitars, etc., so why should opera be so prim? of course stockhausen and other children of the 60s do write experimental operas that i enjoy but they just don't go nearly far enough, they are bogged down in weird shit and pretensions.

if you were really gonna do it
start with something pretty familiar like zauberflote or peleas et melisande
cast a few forward thinking opera singers
tell them to start experimenting with microphones and p.a.'s
give them some records like diamanda galas and laurie anderson and sounds of the humpback whales
pair them with a couple unknown bands who can read music passably well -
some sonic youth wannabes and some stereolab wannabes
get a music director who's done a musical or two but understands opera or vice versa
get an assistant who can teach the bands their parts
make some demos and get some arts grants
rehearse for couple months til it's sloppy, rowdy, but they know most of the notes
take the damn thing on the road to indie clubs and experimental theatres
serve alcohol

I don't think I have to set up a story at all, in order to be moved by music.

great, could you explain this for me? pick a storyless bit of music that really moves you, tell me why - is it just chord changes and timbre and abstract stuff like that? how much do cultural references come into it? some morricone bits i love to death where there's just a eurobabe moaning and chanting - it moves me but not just cos of the notes and sounds but i'm thinking of her weird emotional state as she sings and it all clicks, i get into that state with her i think, and it's very much an exoticism i'm buying into of late 60s bertolucci/pasolini decadence that starts to sort of materialize around my skin.

or the dirty three, i start smelling graves or forests - not to the point that i know it's a grave or a forest, but i start to smell something funny, know what i mean?

I am sort of surprised by the idea of needing to turn a piece of music into a story in order to be moved by it. I don't feel exceptional in being moved by music without that extra step. Anyway, yes, I think musical form itself can be moving, and cultural references may only play into it to the extent that you, as a listener, have absorbed certain cultural expectations of what sort of feelings to associate with what sort of musical forms. Of course, often enough I do have some additional associations with a piece of music (images, for example, though I don't exactly see them). I listen to a lot of vocal music, but in foreign languages, and there might be enough universals in how feeling is expressed through the voice that I can use those clues to "know" how to feel in response. (Oum Kalthoum's "Ya Zalamny" starts off on what seems to me to clearly be a sad note.)

A couple instrumental examples: Sun Ra's "Pleasure". There is an achingness in some of the soloing at certain points which is very poignant. Fripp & Eno's "Evening Star." I don't have this stuff at hand to listen to and say anything about, but I think the second piece, especially, is something that I don't have any visual or narrative associations with, but which effects me in an immediate way.

(Something like this might make a good thread topic, though maybe it has been done before.)

ping me offboard if you'd like to discuss the similarities and differences between nonrepresentational visual art and music. very briefly i would say that there are some situations where experiencing music produces pleasure in a way very similar to viewing abstractions like moire effects or color fields and blobs, and thus has no _overt_ reference to a concrete lingually traductible thought or even vague intimation; but they run thin on the ground, as i imagine the mind to work. and even there, in such rarified cases i might object that... [you get the picture]

mig, I don't know. It seems to me that we are experiencing music very differently. To me one of the biggest thrills about music is precisely the power of those "abstract" sound forms to affect me emotionally in very strong ways. I like being able to push narrative aside. And I also like the fact that sometimes music conjures up very precise feelings I don't even have a label for.

I understand that you aren't necessarily talking about lengthy stories, but maybe some sort of micro-narratives?

i was trying to illustrate in my little hypothetical diy indie opera kit how opera might conceivably be approached with less rigor, with less fealty to conservative values and norms of the pre-electric era. i don't expect that to happen but i wanted to illustrate my frustration that such fantastic music seems trapped in amber.

opera *tries too hard* to sound like it did in 1890. the atmosphere is like a gothic cathedral with latin mass when with a bit of tinkering you might produce a rockin' gospel stomp in a systolically pumping triangular shack.

'dominique, i have to disagree about classical music. you put a string quartet in a mall doing shostakovitch or beethoven, people will dig it. you put a grand piano with someone playing scriabin or even hindemith, people would dig it. you put a soprano there accompanied by a piano or pocket-sized ensemble, and no matter what she sings from the true opera repertoire on up to carmen, normal people will actively avoid it, ridicule it, or approach it with the same keen curiosity with which they would regard a cleverly trained bear - careful not to get too close.'

this wz screened today (only caught the last 10 mins of it):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/tv/flashmob.shtml

I'm not sure that people would really dig piano sonatas or string quartets unless they played a recognisable tune (but I can't remember the last time I saw any classical music being performed in a mall), and that is what was played in this event.

'Musicals?
obviously that's the idea - broadway hasn't been afraid to use mics, electric guitars, etc., so why should opera be so prim? of course stockhausen and other children of the 60s do write experimental operas that i enjoy but they just don't go nearly far enough, they are bogged down in weird shit and pretensions.'

this programme wz broadcast a cpl of weeks ago: http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/09/20thcenturygreats/bernstein1.html

and talks abt how operatic elements were used in 'west side story' - I do like some of the 'operas' that I have heard post-50s (actually I don't have a single record of an opera from before the 40s, not even berg but this will end soon) and the few I've heard don't sound as grandiose...anyway wanna ask which ones post-50 have you heard mig, how are those 'bogged down' -- i think you're right that it doesn't go far enough as far as using technology but also it might be interesting to have a more accessible, musical like drama on stage - a way to reconcile the public with some of this 'difficult' music (avant garde music has been heard as soundtracks).

http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/0-9/20thcenturygreats/bernstein.html