Eric Salzman, "Nude Paper Sermon"

-- LINER NOTES --

ERlC SALZMAN (b. 1933): THE NUDE PAPER SERMON (1968-69)
Tropes for Actor, Renaissance Consort, Chorus, and Electronics
Texts from John Ashbery, Three Madrigals; Steven Wade, The Nude Paper Sermon

SIDE ONE (21:31)
A babble; a mdrigal with electronic graffiti --
ther sermon begins; soprano solos; with chorus
[the "10 qualities": bodily, sexual, ritual, sub-verbal, etc.]
--an instrumental canzona--another madrigal--
solos for wind instruments
[racket; bass & tenor dulcian;
bass, tenor & alto recorder;
gemshorn; soprano, alto & bass krummhorn;
kortholt; shawm; rauschpfeife],
with chorus; climax, coda

Side Two (23:22)
Monologues, fragments, "ruins" -- a choral madrigal--
solos for counter-tenor; duet for soprano and
counter-tenor; with chorus, plus gamba & lute--
lute solos with accompaniments; OM; shout,
babble, bells; survival song; wind, birds, stars

STACY KEACH, actor
THE NONESUCH CONSORT
Diana Tramontini, soprano - William Zukof, counter-tenor
Alan Titus, baritone- Kenneth Wollitz, winds -
Lucy Cross, lute- Richard Taruskin, viola da gamba-with Steven Pepper, portative organ
Members of THE NEW YORK MOTET SINGERS, Joseph Hansen, director
JOSHUA RIFKIN, conductor
Electronic sounds realized at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, New York
Special Assistance: Steven Pepper / Produced-and Recorded by Peter K. Siegel
Editing & Mixing: Joshua Rifkin, Eric Salzrnan, Peter K. Siegel A Dolby-system recording
Recorded at Elektra Sound Recorders, New York; A & R Recording, New York
Texts copyright@ 1969 by John Ashbery & Steven Wade


The Nude Paper Sermon is about the end of the Renaissance-the end of an era and the beginning of another.

Therefore it is about old and new means of communication, about verbal and non-verbal sound, about the familiar and the unknown, about human activitv and the new technologies. It is not a "neo-classic" work nor is it a collage; rather it is "post-modern-music, post-modernart, post-style," a multi-layer sound drama that is itself an example of the kinds of experience which it interprets and expresses: the transformation of values and tradition through the impact of the new technologies.

Technology is no longer merely a set of techniques for imposing a certain order on the external world but itself a vehicle for remarkable changes-changes that affect individual experience as well as the nature of the culture. Recorded music is at the center of musical life and communication today; recordings have opened up the musical past, created multiple presents and, one hopes, a future. Recording technology makes all possible musical and sonic experiences of the external world raw material and even, increasingly, part of a common culture. Multi-track, multi-layer experience becomes the norm: Ravi Shankar, John Cage, the Beatles, Gregorian chant, electronic music, Renaissance madrigals and motets, Bob Dylan, German Lieder, soul, J. S. Bach, jazz, Ives, Balinese gamelan, Boulez, African drumming, Mahler, gagaku, Frank Zappa, Tchaikovsky, Varese . . .all become part of the common shared experience.

Recording technology also transforms that which it communicates: it makes all music part of the present and in so doing changes it. There is nothing inherently good or bad about this; technology can liberate and it can oppress. But there is no running away any more; we must master what can oppress us, learn how to use it to create and liberate.

The Nude Paper Sermon is the first "total" work to be shaped oh, by, and through the medium of modern recording; the record is not a reproduction of anything at all but is the work itself. Like a print or film, it has been created to be duplicated in multiple copies. Commissioned by Nonesuch Records for the Nonesuch Consort, The Nude Paper Sermon was composed in "tracks" and was recorded and mixed as such through a unique collaboration among composer, conductor, and producer/engineer. (A related but different live/theater version also exists and was first performed in New York on March 20, 1969.) The elements have all been recorded or synthesized on separate tracks, individually edited; combined with "live" overlays, these are montaged to create an 8-track master; finally, all of these elements-live/recorded and electronic, all iuxtaposed, intertwined, and transformed-have been mixed down to a final 2-track master. The recording acoustics themselves are not "reproductive" but are actual parameters of the work. (Incidentally, all of the unusual sounds and complex passages produced by the vocalists and instiurnentalists are actually performed and not the result of eiectronic manipulation.)

The words are taken from Three Madrigals by John Ashbery (texts for soloists and chorus) and The Nude Paper Sermon by Steven Wade (texts for actor). The latter, produced especially for this work, is 'written to suggest the contemporary verbal barrage, that endless language stream of all those who use words to manipulate others: preacher, politician, TV personality, professor, news-caster, even poet. The actor's part is a kind of scoring imposed by composer and performer on fragments of text that are used emotively and as a kind of, symbology. At times words dominate, at times they are submerged, at times a precarious balance, interaction, or inteweaving is maintained.

By and large, printed texts would be beside the point; spoken language - heard and.overheard, comprehensible and incomprehensible, clear, elusive, simple, complex, logical, mystifying - is the subject matter here. Perhaps one printed text is in order, however: that part of one of Ashbery1s madrigals which has a traditional structure but is made out of a series of word images and verbal snapshots. It occurs near the very beginning of the work and is set as a kind of Renaissance ruin-real fake Renaissance music ("why don't composers write like that any more?") overlaid with electronic graffiti:

Not even time shall efface
The bent disk
And the wicked shores snore
Far from the divining knell!
On his livid perch
Let not the master be cast
Back on the petitioner
To wise limits of the secret
That hurt the whole city.
The ever prospering shepherds
Are that, who have tasted lament
The shell splashed bitter darkness on the shore
Near the intruder's arch.
The last party to be seized
At twilight and time was cold
To the lovers. And seized their praise
Wild that to the room
With brother and sister came.
That passions are a fence
Draw the vines out of the earth
And listen to new
Memory falls on your olive hands,
The undying luck
Of the dying million ageless
Pushed to hands for approval.
Along the level bay
A dim blaze of diamond
Walking to you: what you had

Not even time shall efface
The bent disk
And the wicked shores snore
Far from the divining knell!
On his livid perch
Let not the master be cast
Back on the petitioner
To wise limits of the secret
That hurt the whole city.
The ever prospering shepherds
Are that, who have tasted lament
The shell splashed bitter darkness on the shore
Near the intruder's arch.
The last party to be seized
At twilight and time was cold
To the lovers. And seized their praise
Wild that to the room
With brother and sister came.
That passions are a fence
Draw the vines out of the earth
And listen to new
Memory falls on your olive hands,
The undying luck
Of the dying million ageless
Pushed to hands for approval.
Along the level bay
A dim blaze of diamond
Walking to you: what you had
ERIC SALZMAN

Eric Salzman's works include Verses and Cantos, The Peloponnesian War (dance/theater collage with Daniel Nagrin), Feedback (with visuals'by Stan Vanderbeek), Foxes and Hedgehogs, and In Praise of the Owl and the Cuckoo; he has also composed the score for Can Man Survive?, a mixed-media environmental exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the summer of 1969, he toured South America, giving performances, seminars, and lectures. Educated at Princeton and Columbia and in Europe, he has been a critic with the New York Times and Herald Tribune, and is currently a critic for Stereo Review and music director of WBAI-FM in New York. He is the author of a book on 20th-century music and numerous articles that have appeared in this country and abroad.

Stacy Keach played the title role in MacBird!, Falstaff and Peer Gynt with the New York Shakespeare Festival, Coriolanus with the Yale Repertory Theater, Edmund in King Lear at the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, and the drifter in the film The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. He has studied at the University of California at Berkeley and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art; he has also been assistant professor of acting at the Yale Repertory Theater. In the 1969- 70 season, he stars !n the film End of The Road and, on Broadway, in Arthur Kopit's Indians.

Joshua Rifkin studied at the Juilliard School of Music, New York and Princeton Universities, and in Germany. His music has been performed in America and Europe; he has also written arrangements for singers Judy Collins and Tom Paxton. As musical supervisor of Nonesuch' Records, he founded, the Nonesuch Consort in 1968; although the major activity of the group is the exploration of early music, contemporary works also play a significant role in their repertoire.