Charles Dodge, "Cascando"

CASCANDO
REALIZATION OF SAMUEL BECKETT'S RADIO PLAY BY CHARLES DODGE

CAST OF CHARACTERS
Opener - John Nesci
Voice - Computer synthesis based on a reading by Steven Cilborn
Music - Computer synthesis based on Voice

Realization made at the computer centers of Columbia University and the City University of New York and the Center for Computer Music at Brooklyn College.

CHARLES DODGE
CASCANDO
realization made at the computer centers of Columbia University and the City University of New York and the Center for Computer Music at Brooklyn College

CHARLES DODGE (b. 1942, Ames, lowa) has long been recognized as an accomplished composer of computer music. He was one of the first composers to use computer speech and speech music synthesis in composition. He studied composition at the University of lowa, Aspen, Tanglewood and Columbia University. Among his teachers were Richard Hewig, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Berger, Gunther Schuller, Jack Beeson, Chou Wen-chung and Otto Luening. He studied electronic music with Vladimir Ussachevsky and computer music with Godfrey Winham and has done research in computer music at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. He was Visiting Research Musician at the University of California at San Diego, and he has been Visiting Composer-in-Residence at the M.I.T. summer course in computer music on several occasions. Most of his works since 1970 have been recorded, including those on CRI SD 300 and 348. In 1980, he became Professor of Music at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York where he is director of the Center for Computer Music and Coordinator of Undergraduate and Graduate Programs in Composition. CASCANDO is dedicated to his wife, Katharine Schlefer Dodge.

CASCANDO is Charles Dodge's realization of Samuel Beckett's radio play of 1963. Like Beckett's Words and Music, Cascando has three characters: Opener ("Dry as dust"), Voice ("low, panting"), and Music. "Music" is not characterized by Beckett, but he indicates very precisely in the published play (with rows of dots) where it is to "speak" alone, sound together with Voice, or be overlaid with a comment from Opener. Thus, as Vivian Mercer has remarked in her BeckettBeckett, Cascando could be described as a kind of libretto, and it and Words and Music "inaugurate a new genre-invisible opera."

This "libretto" attracted Dodge when, finishing his Speech Songs (CRI SD 348) in 1972, he began looking for other material for his "pitched speech" composition. At first the Beckett play seemed too long for the purpose, but Dodge ended up using it entirely, word for word, (plus, of course, music for Music). He worked at it, off and on, for more than five years. Beckett gave Dodge permission to "musicalize" Cascando, but initially withheld rights to public presentation. However, on receiving a copy of the finished tape in the spring of 1978, he wrote, "Dear Mr. Dodge: Thank you for your letter of April with the tape of your CASCANDO. Okay for public performance." (Dodge finds the "your" flattering, and we shall see presently how accurate it is.)

There are about as many interpretations of the meaning of Beckett's drama as there have been interpreters of it. Perhaps the narrative Voice is that of Opener himself, the former trying desperately to tell the very last story-to "finish it ... then sleep ... no more stories ... no more words."-while the latter (austere, confident, presiding) opens and closes the bits of story and music, aware (as Hugh Kenner says in A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett) that he is "incomprehensible to censorious folk called 'they"':

They say, That is not his life, he does not live on that. They
don't see me, they don't see what my life is, they don't
see what I live on, and they say, That is not his life, he
does not live on that.
Pause.
I have lived on it. . . pretty long.

The story that Voice tries to tell is about a man called Woburn, going out at night on a familiar search ("same old coat ... same old stick"), who keeps falling (=cascando) "...on purpose or not ... can't see ... he's down ... that's what counts," in mud, in sand, in stones, finally in the bilge of an oarless, tillerless boat "heading out ... vast deep ... no more land." Voice breathlessly follows Woburn, dying to end his story ("...to see him ... say him"), hoping that "this time ... it's the right one." Music is with Voice in this quest; Opener comments, pehaps with wonderment, "From one world to another, it's as though they drew together." But, at the close, although Woburn clings on (to the boat? to the narrating Voice which cries "come on ... come on" together with Music?), there is only extinction. (The last word of the play, a direction, is "Silence.")

The three characters of the drama are realized by Dodge in three different ways: Opener is represented by a normal speaking voice (that of actor John Nesci); Voice is represented by synthesized pitched speech derived from a reading of the part by another actor (Steven Gilborn); Music is represented electronically, but it is derived from, and relates directly to, the opening speech of Voice. It may be useful to describe the various steps along the way to the final composition, partly to insist on the close relationship between computer-aided synthesis of sound (as Charles Dodge does it) and traditional ways of composing-to insist, that is, on the profound musicality of Dodge's CASCANDO.

Dodge began by composing the basic part for Voice, from start to finish. Both rhythm and pitch are notated conventionally, but Separately. Both were arrived at empirically, not according to any "system." The rhythms are close to natural speech rhythms. The pitch-successions are freely chromatic but not twelve-tone; they were chosen, says Dodge, "to capture the spirit of what I thought the Voice was like." Also, Beckett's many repetitions of words and phrases-but in many different contexts-were taken into account: "I tried to use the same pitch successions for the same words, when they recur. The problem became how to compose a pitch-pattern for a particular word that would be suitable in all of the contexts in which it occurs." The pitch-patterns of individual words, then, became recognizable musical motifs, and their recurrence is a significant factor in the integration of the work.

The separation of rhythm and pitch components facilitated things at the next stage of composition. Steven Gilborn recorded the Voice part, reading it in the rhythms Dodge had given it but not attempting to reproduce the pitch-patterns. That recording was run through a computer, programmed so as to convert it from analog to digital state-to a stream of numbers- and to analyze the material on the tape in infinitesimal detail: the computer analysis is of some 24 attributes of sound, of which four are printed out: (1) high frequency amplitude; (2) low frequency amplitude; (3) ERRN, a relationship between (1) and (2) which helps distinguish between voiced and unvoiced phonemes; and (4) the average pitch, expressed in cycles per second. The print-out consists of pages and pages of lines of "frame numbers," each line representing the four attributes at 11120 of a second. The beginning (only) of the sound of the "c" in Voice's first line, ("if you could finish it"), for example, looks like this in the computer analysis of Gilborn's reading:



With the print-out of the computer analysis, Dodge had a finely detailed picture of the Voice part, with the rhythmic component more or less as he wished it. Next came a re-synthesis of Voice, based on the Gilborn reading as analyzed by the computer (and the analysis studied by Dodge) but now introducing the desired pitch-successions and the quality of the sound. The latter, Dodge had decided, was to-have both pitch and noise components in about equal measure, "as though you made simultaneously a pitched voice and a whispered voice!' This resulted poignant, too.

Now the synthesized Voice was re-converted to analog tape, and, with razor blade and splicing tape. Dodge went to work editing it, to make sure that all the timings were just the way he wanted them. This, then, was the Voice part.

In Dodge's realization of Cascando. Opener's part is left unmusicalized: it is simply a recording of an actual human voice. This was taped separately, the actor who read it going through the part a few times, Dodge choosing the best take of each passage. The parts for Voice and Music, however, are musicalized. There are eight "solos" for each, alternating as the piece unfolds, and at times they engage in "duets:' Having finished the composition of the Voice, and the tape-editing of the Opener, Dodge turned to Music. How was it to relate to Voice (if at all), and how were the two to interrelate (if at all) during the duets?

Dodge decided to relate Music's quality of sound to that of Voice by having it, too, consist in equal-mixture pitch and noise, and he decided that the pitch-succession of the two would also be related:

What I finally settled on was that the sound-quality of Music would be directly derived from the recording of Voice by feeding the synthesized Voice back into the computer and doing further operations on it to eliminate its intelligibility but to magnify its pitch-and-noise quality-its musicality. It was to be almost as if you trained on the Voice a microscope so powerful that the larger patterns, forming words, would be imperceptible; only the microscopic details would be apparent. Or as if you took a magnifying glass to a photo in a newspaper and viewed the individual dots, all of varying shades of grey.

Also, the pitch-patterns of Music, I decided, would be related directly to those of Voice's opening speech, but greatly elongated.

The latter relationship-between the pitch-patterns of Music and those of Voice-is based on an inversion of the latter. However, each of the pitches thus derived is greatly protracted, and there are many overlappings of pitches, so that, to the ear, the derivation of Music from the opening speech of Voice is hardly perceptible.

On the relationship between Voice and Music in their duets (of which there are five): Throughout the play, Voice is very fragmentary; it constantly starts and stops. Says Dodge:

I wanted to capture something of that in the music, but not to have the music starting and stopping. So what I did was to "track," in the computer, the way Voice starts and stops. When the voice is "on"--that is when the computer, in "reading" the Voice parts, finds that there is sound--it emphasizes pitch qualities. When it finds that there is silence, it emphasizes noise qualities.

Another kind of relationship between Voice and Music in the duets was derived from the fact that speech has two kinds of syllables, voiced and unvoiced. The word "story:' for example, consists of two voiced syllables ("0-ry") preceded by an unvoiced one ("st-"). The predominance of noise or pitch at any given moment in Music's part was partly determined by the nature of Voice's syllables at that moment, and by the order of voiced vs. unvoiced syllables. In short, Voice "triggers" Music, which is why in the duets Music often seems to well up shortly following Voice: there is a tiny time-lag.

The actual mixing of the Voice/Music duets was done in the computer, as the last pre-editing act. Then came the job of putting everything together: spoken voice (Opener), synthesized voice (Voice), synthesized music (Music), and the duets. By January 1983, Dodge's CASCANDO ("your" Cascando, said Beckett) was complete. -- H. Wiley Hitchcock, Director, Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College

STEVEN GILBORN is a professional actor whose favorite medium is the stage. He has performed leading roles at regional theaters all around the country: among those roles are Prospero, Brutus, Malvolio, and Benedick. He has also worked extensively in radio, television and film, his most recent movie appearances being in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and Vamping. CASCANDO is his third collaboration with Charles Dodge. JOHN NESCl has worked with Charles Dodge on recordings of Richard Kostelanetz's He Met Her in the Park and the radio serial Lights from Below. Nesci has appeared in films and on television and the stage. His work includes productions with Mabou Mines, La Mama Etc., Sam Shepard and Robert Wilson. Originally from Chicago, Nesci lives and works in New York City.

CRl's Board of Trustees wishes to express its gratitude to the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation and the Norman and Rosita Winston Foundation for support during 1982-83.

This recording was made possible by grants from the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University.
Liner: 1983 Composers Recordings, Inc.
FOR CRI
Producer: Carter Harman
Product Manager: Michael Bennett
Cover: Judith Lerner 1983
LC#: 83-7431 93
1983 Composers Recordings, Inc.
THIS IS A COMPOSER-SUPERVISED RECORDING

Heinz Holliger, "Come and go"

Come and go, chamber opera after a dramaticule by Samuel Beckett for 9 female singers, 3 flutes, 3 clarinets, and 3 violas (1976-77).
Commissioned by the Hamburg Opera
Premiered on February 16, 1978 in Hamburg under the direction of Heinz Holliger

Vocalists: Regula Zimmerli, Dorothee Labusch, Ursula Grossenbacher, Diana Sarovarov, Theresa Klenzi, Blandine Jeannest, Nora Tiedcke, Cynthia Crose, Elisabeth Bachmann-Mac Queen
Violas: Marianne Haeberli, Susanna Andres, Juerg Daehler
Flutes: Philippe Racine, Berhard Batschelet, Felix Renggli
Clarinets: Ernesto Molinari, Thomas Friedli, Stephan Siegenthaler
Conductor: Juerg Henneberger
Recorded in Jun 1989 at the studio of Radio Suisse Romande in Lausanne by Jean-Claude Gaberel

PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE

-- Liner Notes --

BECKETT AND HOLLIGER

The two Beckett plays chosen by Heinz Holliger have an undeniable musical quality. Not only does their construction combine the principle of the variation with the form of the rondo, but also their language loses a large part of its denotative function thus unveiling the very object of the speech : it remains secret and unnamable. Come and Go and What Where also suggest a musical score where everything is written with the most extreme precision (notably for the musical indications), but at the same time requires direction and interpretation. In fact, it is the reader, or the spectator, who is called upon to define the context where archetypal situations and banal words take on meaning. By shifting Beckett's text to a musical context, Holliger has thus put forward his own interpretation.

Come and go

In Come and Go, he has even changed the structure by a process of amplification which underlines paradoxically what appears as a ritual of extinction. The three women are not only doubled by three instruments with identical timbre, but they are multiplied again by three (and the instruments with them) [NOTE: The work can be played with all or a reduced number of the elements: for example, the instruments alone, or only three flutes (or three clarinets or three altos), etc.] So the music presents the text on three simultaneous "stages," each one defined by a language [French, English, and German versions are used simultaneously) and by a specific timbre. Logically, the play is repeated three complete times. Thus the music effects a transposition in time and space. The "image" is found in the score : the melodic lines are usually unsynchronized within each group as well as between the groups. The musical voices are staggered in echo, in dialogue, or complement each other. They are expressed with increasing movement or retention, almost organic, sometimes revealing knots, convergences, and siumltaneities. The writing is essentially polyphonic, a polyphony that is free and very controlled at the same time. Holliger exploits Beckett's play of permutations which exhausts the combinations possible between the three women and has an infinite characteristic which suggests children's rounds. But it is undermined by the secret that the women, two at a time, whisper to each other about the absent one, and by the movement of time, which the circular form does not manage to hold within its magic circle.

Holliger has made these absent figures - which are not spoken, which are not seen - the foundation of the musical form. Each repetition of the play brings about both a reduction of the sonorous and verbal elements, and a sinking of the registers and the intensities. Thus in the second part, the singers pronounce only the consonants in the text, and sound effects (harmonic and multiphonic sounds, noises of keys or blowing, various modes of play, etc.) invade the musical space; while the second clarinet changes to the bass clarinet, the second flute to the alto flute, and the second alto lowers its last string by one tone. In the last part, the phenomenon becomes stronger: the voices mime the text releasing only a few key words ("Oh!," "Weiss sie es nicht?," "A Dieu ne plaise", "alten", "often", etc), the sounds become rarer, and the intensities diminish till they are almost inaudible; while the contrabass clarinet and the bass flute enter and replace the third clarinet and the third flute, and the third alto lowers its last string by two tones. The end is felt physically as if all possibilities of speech have been exhausted (the play forms one immense decrescendo starting from the fff beginning to the pppp ending). Becket had signalled this erosion of time by the nostalgic evocation of a bygone period, the memory of which is ever receding ("Just sit as we use to do, in the playground at Miss Wade's Holding our hands - that way. Dreaming - of love"; "Can't we talk about the old times? About what comes afterwards?") and by these last enigmatic words: "I feel the rings" (in his stage directions Beckett writes: "no visible rings"). It is the symbolic images of maturity of a child's dream, that of the circular space pierced by the arrow of time. -- Philippe Alberra

Beckett vs. Shakespeare

When you pit two of theaters unparalleled geniuses against each other on the same subject matter (subjugation of the female) in two plays that were written nearly 350 years apart, the differences are striking for the performer.

A Winter's Tale contains the most famous stage direction in all of Shakespeare ("Exit, pursued by a bear."), and the climax (excerpted below) involves a female statue coming to life. By Shakespeare's standards, that's a heap o' stage directions!

Happy Days opens on a woman buried up to her waste, and closes with her buried up to her neck. As strikingly similar as Hermione and Winnie's plights are as women (both frozen in time and place by their duties as wives), as theatrical roles, they are worlds apart, almost complete opposites.

Beckett writes nearly 16 words of stage directions for the poor actress who plays Winnie to every 1 word of dialog.

Shakespeare's ratio is the inverse.

The challenges of mastering Shakespeare's verse are just as daunting as those of mastering Beckett's directions. When Fiona Shaw set to crafting her unforgettable portrayal of Winnie, her first reaction to Beckett's play was of horror, "All those stage directions — it made my blood boil. It seems like linguistic fascism or something."

Is there a parallel in music? Now let's see, what two composers would we possibly pit against each other in a similar fashion? (Regular readers of this blog will surely know!)

SAMUEL BECKETT, HAPPY DAYS
[Ratio of words to stage directions, 1:16]

Expanse of scorched grass rising center to low mound. Gentle slopes down to front and either side of stage. Back an abrupter fall to stage level. Maximum of simplicity and symmetry.

Blazing light.

Very pompier trompe-l'oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance.

Imbedded up to above her waist in exact centre of mound, WINNIE. About fifty, well preserved, blond for preference, plump, arms and shoulders bare, low bodice, big bosom, pearl necklet. She is discovered sleeping, her arms on the ground before her, her head on her arms.

Beside her on ground to her left a capacious black bag, shopping variety, and to her right a collapsible collapsed parasol, beak of handle emerging from sheath.

To her right and rear, lying asleep on ground, hidden by mound, WILLIE.

Long pause. A bell rings piercingly, say ten seconds, stops. She does not move. Pause. Bell more piercingly, say five seconds. She wakes. Bell stops. She raises her head, gazes front. Long pause. She straightens up, lays her hands flat on ground, throws back her head and gazes at zenith. Long pause.

WINNIE: (gazing at zenith). Another heavenly day. (Pause. Head back level, eyes front, pause. She clasps hands to breast, closes eyes. Lips move in inaudible prayer, say ten seconds. Lips still. Hands remain clasped. Low.) For Jesus Christ sake Amen. (Eyes open, hands unclasp, return to mound. Pause. She clasps hands to breast again, closes eyes, lips move again in inaudible addendum, say five seconds. Low.) Begin, Winnie. (Pause.) Begin your day, Winnie. (pause. She turns to bag, rummages in it without moving it from its place, brings out toothbrush, rummages again, brings out flat tube of toothpaste, turns back front, unscrews cap of tube, lays cap on ground, squeezes with difficulty small blog of paste on brush, holds tube in one hand and brushes teeth with other. She turns modestly aside and back to her right to spit out behind mound. In this position her eyes rest on WILLIE. She spits out. She cranes a little further back and down. Loud.) Hoo-oo! (Pause. Louder.) Hoo-oo! (Pause. Tender smile as she turns back front, lays down brush.) Poor Willie - (examines tube, smile off) - running out - (looks for cap) - ah well - (finds cap) - can't be helped...

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A WINTER'S TALE
[Ratio of words to stage directions - 15:1]

PAULINA
As she lived peerless,
So her dead likeness, I do well believe,
Excels whatever yet you look'd upon
Or hand of man hath done; therefore I keep it
Lonely, apart. But here it is: prepare
To see the life as lively mock'd as ever
Still sleep mock'd death: behold, and say 'tis well.

PAULINA draws a curtain, and discovers HERMIONE standing like a statue

I like your silence, it the more shows off
Your wonder: but yet speak; first, you, my liege,
Comes it not something near?...

...Music, awake her; strike!

Music

'Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;
Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come,
I'll fill your grave up: stir, nay, come away,
Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him
Dear life redeems you. You perceive she stirs:

HERMIONE comes down

Start not; her actions shall be holy as
You hear my spell is lawful: do not shun her
Until you see her die again; for then
You kill her double. Nay, present your hand:
When she was young you woo'd her; now in age
Is she become the suitor?

LEONTES
O, she's warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating...