Spotlight on VOX: Steven Potter

 

This week, composer Steven Potter talks about his new work, The Officers, which will premiere at this year's VOX festival in May.

 

 

My goal was to create an artifice that closely resembles the banal reality of our everyday lives, or at least everyday life as I've experienced it at one time or another.  It's a way of affirming life, recreating on stage stuff that regularly takes up our time.  Bits of reality that we take for granted as trivial or unworthy of attention, are regarded here as deserving heightened attention.  That said, this material isn't present at every moment of the piece, and harmony and musical gesture actually play a much bigger role than everyday noises, especially in the excerpt to be performed at VOX.

 

 

A lot of the words sung in the piece are taken from non-literary texts that function to regulate certain situations in the world, usually for the sake of safety or efficiency.  For example, a flight safety demonstration regulates the airline's relationship to its passengers in order to ensure emergency preparedness, or at least it appears to do so.  Some flight demonstrations are on video these days, but I was impressed in the past by how similarly these things were performed by different people on different airlines.  So there are two kinds of regulation going on -- the ready-made text that regulates the behavior of diverse flight attendants, and the performed demonstrations that regulate the emergency preparation of passengers.

 

Another source for the piece was a water bottle label.  Incredibly, the label I found stated instructions for use.  I wrote a text as if from a monitoring organization saying, "it's okay to sell this brand of water."  A representative from this organization is the 'regulatory voice' here.  He comments on each word of the label as if performing a religious ceremony.  So in reference to the words 'hi-pure clean' on the label, he notes, "The Office reveres the sanctity of the factory, and certifies the title of purity."

 

Other texts sung in the piece, like tourist pamphlets, the pledge of allegiance, and stuff from airport signs, all regulate in different ways.  They seem to do it without even trying, but they regulate experiences of diverse people in diverse places at diverse times, often with a success that is astonishing to me.  But again, these somewhat robotic voices are not the sole voices in the piece.  I also created less automatically determined texts by transcribing and integrating bits of poems, philosophy, and modernist literature.  The drama of the piece comes from the collisions between these fixed voices and less predictable, more enigmatic voices.

 

 

Familiarity with classical repertoire would no doubt help the performers in learning their parts.  The more individualistic passages of text even have moments of expressivity.  But in some scenes, any training to sing in a classically expressive manner is irrelevant.  Plainness of tone and deadpan delivery are a big part of the sound of the piece.

 

Though I find some operas really worth seeing and hearing (including some by Mozart, Janacek, Britten, Berg, Monteverdi, Shostakovich, Bartok, and Strauss), the tradition that produced such operas is dead to me, though it lives on thanks to cults of nostalgia.  For me, a living musical theater tradition (not that there necessarily need be one) would dispense with pre-defined genres.

 

 

'Critique' sounds very grand.  I don't think my piece is systematic enough to be considered a critique of anything, though it may insistently poke fun at a few things.

 

And no, there wasn't an over-riding concern; the piece is set in distinct scenes that deliberately resist unification, which is probably what invited your very appropriate question.  Don't take my answer as authority, but if I were to oversimplify a bit, I'd say the piece is about humans-as-robots.  I sense that today, only anachronisms like priests, rabbis, and performance artists include being human among their career goals.  For those of us who want to go with the flow of history and feel relevant to our contemporaries, being human is just one hobby among many others available to us in a super-duper-market era.  Most of us still indulge in this very cool hobby regularly, but it's not essential to our lives.  Just as art is proclaimed useless (by fans and detractors alike), being human seems quite useless and is probably a hindrance to societal progress.  This is exaggeration of course, but I think there's truth worth exploring in these observations.

 

Even more generally, the piece asks the question, "how much do we affirm the present historical moment?"  One character in the piece, Parvula, imagines it would be easy to affirm human society only if it had stayed close to nature, a situation emblemized for her by dry rubble masonry in rural Ireland.  But other characters take technological developments more in stride, or simply don't notice them.

 

I should add that this piece came into being, first of all, through non-vocal music.  The prevalence of mechanical repetition in new instrumental music of all kinds was a concern for me when making the piece, so I took it on as a reference point.  There's a polarity in the piece between music that follows a mechanistic process and music that explores a given harmonic space.  The way I intuitively relate to musical automatism of various sorts was as big a factor in the piece as well as any thoughts I had on our relationship to technology.

 

 

This piece was experimental for me -- I didn't so much plan a drama as set up oppositions between disparate textual and musical resources and wait to see what would happen.  Not having calculated a particular effect, I am curious to see what effect the piece has -- both on myself and on other audience members.