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Article Excerpt
This essay studies two multimedia pieces that use recording technology to meld music, text, and image into extraordinarily unified works of art. The author argues that such innovative solutions to the problem of unity make these pieces valuable points of reference for contemporary multimedia aesthetics.
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My title alludes to the Wagnerian ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total artwork, a term that, while not actually coined by Wagner, has become closely associated with the "new musicodramatic unity" extolled in his theoretical writings on music and drama. Wagner's musical drama, with its "maximalist" tendencies, might seem to make a curious point of departure for a study of artists known for their minimalism, but both Steve Reich and Samuel Beckett share several of Wagner's central aesthetic preoccupations. Chief among these is their commitment to a multimedia dramatic aesthetic requiring that the various components of the work be seamlessly integrated into a single, unified, expressive whole. Thus, although Beckett's Ghost Trio and Reich's The Cave bear little resemblance to Wagner's musical dramas in terms of scale, scope, and rhetoric, they do recall Wagner's notion of the total artwork in their desire to integrate music, text, story, and visual imagery into a synthetic whole that would have, as Wagner put it, "a form essentially, nay, uniquely one" and that would exclude "every alien and unnecessary detail," instead leading "all interest to the dominant chief mood" while maintaining "the [formal] unity of the symphonic movement" (226-30). Unity, of course, is an ancient, and fairly standard, criterion of aesthetic worth, but it is of particular concern for anyone working in a multimedia genre like opera, film, television, or the curious quasi-operatic multimedia pieces studied in this essay, because the inherently multiple nature of the multimedia work often runs counter to the goal of organic unity. To be sure, the degree of control offered by video and audio technology makes it possible to integrate the various media into spectacles that are "total" in ways that would have delighted Wagner, but as anyone who has seen many Hollywood special-effects blockbusters knows, the collaborative nature of the multimedia project can result in a highly fragmented, unbalanced, even incoherent, final product. The same tech nology that holds out the potential for total control also increases the risk of ever greater fragmentation.
The traditional mainstream solution to this problem has been to subordinate all elements of the work to the organizing principles of narrative. Film and television, like opera, have most typically been storytelling media, and whatever interest there has been in experimenting with techniques like camera movement, montage editing, music and sound, special effects, and so forth, tends to be subordinated to narrative goals that have not changed in any fundamental way since antiquity. The Aristotelian imperatives of vivid representation, catharsis, and the muthos continue, whether acknowledged or not, to provide the framework for most mainstream discussions of unity, form, and function. But Beckett and Reich, like Wagner before them, refuse to rely on the traditional narrative definitions of unity; they strive instead to redefine unity in terms of the complete synthesis of the thematic and material components of the work. Although Reich and Beckett come out of very different artistic milieux (American musical mini malism, on the one hand, the post-war Parisian literary avant-garde, on the other), and although their uses of the various media differ significantly, their solutions to the problem of artistic unity converge on several interesting points. Chief among these is their shared commitment to integrating the film and sound recording technology into the creative process itself and to making that technology part of the thematic message of the work.
My purpose in this essay is to emphasize such points of convergence in order to suggest how these works might provide the basis for a more general theory of unity in a multimedia context. The work of these artists, although highly experimental, is well known to that segment of the public interested in contemporary developments in the arts, and has even managed to penetrate into the mainstream consciousness of popular culture. For these reasons, I believe that The Cave and Ghost Trio provide valuable insights into what, to paraphrase Wagner, the artwork of our future might look like.
The cave that lends its name to Steve Reich's video opera is the Cave of Machpelah, in Hebron, also known to Jews as the cave of the patriarchs, because it is where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are buried (along with their wives, Sarah, Rebeccah, and Leah) in the Biblical account of Genesis (see Genesis 23,49, 50). The cave provides an ideal theme for a work exploring a hybrid aesthetics of unity in diversity; because the cave has itself become a dual symbol, equally revered in both the Islamic and Judaic cultural traditions. Both cultures trace their origins back through Abraham, and both the Bible and the Koran tell the story of Abraham's sacrifice, where God tested Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice his son. Of course, in the Islamic tradition, it is Ishmael, the founding father of the Arab tribes, who is chosen for sacrifice and then spared, while in the Biblical account of Genesis, it is Isaac, the father of the Hebrew tribes, who is chosen. The discrepancy between the two Abraham narratives has the eff ect of highlighting the common origins of the two cultures while at the same time emphasizing the tensions between their respective master narratives. Reich uses this story, and its link to the cave of the Machpelah (which, he points out, is the only place on earth where Jews and Muslims both worship), as a way to explore relations between the two cultures, and to do so by emphasizing what they have in common, rather than what separates them.
The primary interest of this piece, however, has less to do with the choice of subject matter than with the way that matter is treated. The Cave is not an opera in the traditional sense but a work of what Reich calls "video opera or "documentary music theatre." A traditional opera would have enacted the story of...
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