A CALL TO DIVE VII - 'Lament'
Last week of the Crowdfunder!
Click on the link below to pre-order a CD, get a couple of downloads for a taster, order tickets for the launch...
'Lament' will almost certainly be the last track in the CD.
A very simple, and very elegant, plaintif melody sung (and composed) by Fides over the subdued remnants of 'The Storm'.
Canada's new anti-spam legislation (CASL).
I'm sending this series of emails out to friends, family, and folks I think might be interested, specifically focused around a one month long Crowdfunding project. Please know that you can unsubscribe at any time - there's a link at the bottom of every email - and I assure you I will take no offence at all. Electroacoustic opera is hardly everyone's cup of tea! ; ] Thanks for bearing with me so far!!
- nik
* A note of clarification. These pieces of music that I'm presenting are rough drafts which will go into the creating of a CD to be completed somewhere between September and December 2014. The music was written for the sonic theatre/opera work, 'DIVE'.
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Previous Emails
- A Call to DIVE I
- A Call to DIVE II
- A Call to DIVE III
- A Call to DIVE IV: The Crowdfunder!
- A Call to DIVE V - Lighea's Idyll
A Call to DIVE VI - The Storm
'Music for DIVE' - Rough Mixes
1. Prelude & The Pearls
2. The Pastry Shop
3. Lighea's Lovers
4. Bar Hades
5. PaulArio
6. Lighea's Idyll
7. The Storm
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Lament
Click here to listen
Fides Krucker - vocal improvisation/composition
Nik Beeson - PolySix, composition, mixology & production.
Rick Sacks - voice recording engineering
The bed track for 'Lament' was built up using the same set of Poly Six improvisations as 'The Storm'. I cued a section of those improvisations for the first workshop we ever did of the play with live actors. Fides just launched straight into an improvisation at the very end of a read-through. We were taping and when I listened to the improvisation later I've never wanted anything else. It was fantastic, and beautiful, and deeply evocative, all in some mode that she seemed to have pulled out a couple of sessions we had listening to really old Tarentella music.
The morning after the Senator's astonishing revelations of his relationship with the mermaid Paolo drops him off to catch a ferry to Naples so that he can attend a scholarly conference which he has been invited to. The next day the phone rings at Paulo's newspaper and he is informed that the Senator has disappeared. "Fell overboard from the deck of the Garibaldi as it was steaming towards Naples. Body not recovered. Cause of
death: presumed drowned..." [1] And so, we presume, Rosario has at last freed himself from the mast....
[1] DIVE (The Professor and the Siren) - Richard Sanger
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Throughout the composition of DIVE I was very conscious of, and sensitive to, the relationship between the mermaid, and Mussolini. In the opening Prelude the mermaid vanquishes Mussolini and his fascist crowd with a mighty roar. Later the mermaid plays directly with Mussolini's speech by improvising over a distorted and stretched out version of it (this piece of music was not included in any of the mailouts), exaggerating it and distorting it, but also really digging into it and almost becoming a part of it.
While fascism is in so many ways a force of oppression and repression, it has also been a channel for violent energy, and the wild can also be violent. The difference being that the wild is intrinsically uninhibited because it is without consciousness, and so no judgment, just or unjust, can be assigned to it. Fascism arises most potently where there is already a strong sense of injustice and helplessness, and it very intentionally inflicts organized violence to assert its simplistic ideological agenda.
Rosario’s encounter with the divine and wild Lighea both completely intoxicated him, but also terrified him. In the face of her request that he join her, he fled back to his books and his Platonic ideals. But ideal forms have only two paths in reality: violence (the Procrustean forcing of an ideal onto a reality which can never conform to it) or escapism (the flight from a reality which can’t conform to an ideal). Mussolini chose the former, Rosario chose the latter. Neither can survive.
So, what does it really mean when Rosario flings himself into the ocean from the deck of the Garibaldi?
Is it the ultimate act of escapism from a reality which he found intolerable?
Or is it a final act of re-integration: ideal with real, flesh with divine?
I guess the answer depends on whether you can believe in mermaids…
Thoughts, ideas, suggestions on the music, on the story, on spreading the word, on my sanity?
I'd love to hear from you!
nikbeeson@gmail.com
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TwitNik
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"Utram bibis, aquam an undam?" - 'Which are you drinking, the water or the wave?'
-- John Fowles, The Magus
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www.nikbeeson.com
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