Blind Witness News. Libretto by Charles Bernstein. Music by Ben Yarmolinksy
Brief NYT review
Background:
Language Writing - a 1970s avant-garde movement in American writing that calls attention to the ideological values implicit in literary conventions and envisions poetry as a space for social critique more than personal expression. Language writing is noted for challenging texts that challenge even conventions involving syntax and grammar.
Summer/Fall 1990: Foreign affairs and war: Provisional Irish Republican Army car bombing; Iraq invasion of Kuwait; First Liberian Civil War; East and West Germany reunified; Gorbachev wins Nobel Peace Prize. Meanwhile, Leonard Bernstein's final concert, the Three Tenors' first concert, Microsoft releases Windows 3.0, and the Web is born.
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Entree Concepts:
1. "alienation effect" - Bertolt Brecht strove to produce theater that dispelled illusions, calling attention to its artificiality, and purportedly bringing viewers into a new relationship to meaning. Distancing "prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, and which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer."
2. "defamiliarization" - Russian Futurists (ca. 1917) and Situationists such as Guy Debord in France (1968) proposed that the spectacle of contemporary society could be punctured if the familiar were rendered strange through art. It is also associated with poetic language.
3. "detournement" - Situationist's practice of turning, negation or derailing of the message from the customary path; especially used with reference to the subversion or satirical reworking of a prior artwork.
_______________
Charles Bernstein (1950-)
"poetry is like a swoon
with this difference
it brings you to your senses"
Post-war American writer, theorist and most recently professor at U Penn., works frequently in collaboration with other artists; he has also written libretti for operas by Dean Drummond and Brian Ferneyhough. His most profound influences include the philosophy of Ludwig Wittenstein, and the poetry of American Modernists William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky and Gertrude Stein. The still unassimliated syntactic experimentation of Gertrude Stein is especially echoed in Blind Witness News. Like all of these writers, Bernstein maintains a strong interest in the sound and expressivity of the spoken word, an interest further born out in his poets' audio website PennSound. Bernstein is primarily known, and in some circles, notorious, as a poet. The complex intellectualism and explicit grounding in Marxist/Feminist theory of his work provokes irritation in uncomprehending, traditional reviewers.
_______________
BLIND WITNESS NEWS, the libretto (1990)
http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/LB/0511/Lalo_Schifrin_-_Eyewitness_News.mp3
http://www.newsmusicnow.com/localmusic.html
Emptiness of content and repetition shift focus to "format": undermining or hollowing out the authority of media; revealing news as a media process producing us.
The rigidified, preformulated aspects of the newscast;
Scenes of the libretto mirror segments in a news program:
Libretto - Scenes: I. Opening Theme; II. National; III. Local; IV. Weather; V. Sports; VI. Closing
Eyewitness News Music Format (WABC/New York) - Open, Talent Open, Topical, Bumper, Breaking News, Severe Weather, Special Report, Weather, Sports, Health, Investigation, Sympathetic, Election/Political, Close.
_____________________________
POETICS - Language, Form, and Texture:
Free vs. closed verse: meter, rhyme; or linebreaks, syncopation and emphasis of spoken rhythms;
Diction (vernacular language, some esoteric terms)
Syntax: passages of non-standard syntax
Repetition
Allusions to nursery rhymes
CLOSE READING:
________________________
OPEN QUESTIONS:
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Yarmolinsky.html
Brief NYT review
Background:
Language Writing - a 1970s avant-garde movement in American writing that calls attention to the ideological values implicit in literary conventions and envisions poetry as a space for social critique more than personal expression. Language writing is noted for challenging texts that challenge even conventions involving syntax and grammar.
Summer/Fall 1990: Foreign affairs and war: Provisional Irish Republican Army car bombing; Iraq invasion of Kuwait; First Liberian Civil War; East and West Germany reunified; Gorbachev wins Nobel Peace Prize. Meanwhile, Leonard Bernstein's final concert, the Three Tenors' first concert, Microsoft releases Windows 3.0, and the Web is born.
_______________
Entree Concepts:
1. "alienation effect" - Bertolt Brecht strove to produce theater that dispelled illusions, calling attention to its artificiality, and purportedly bringing viewers into a new relationship to meaning. Distancing "prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, and which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer."
2. "defamiliarization" - Russian Futurists (ca. 1917) and Situationists such as Guy Debord in France (1968) proposed that the spectacle of contemporary society could be punctured if the familiar were rendered strange through art. It is also associated with poetic language.
3. "detournement" - Situationist's practice of turning, negation or derailing of the message from the customary path; especially used with reference to the subversion or satirical reworking of a prior artwork.
_______________
Charles Bernstein (1950-)
"poetry is like a swoon
with this difference
it brings you to your senses"
Post-war American writer, theorist and most recently professor at U Penn., works frequently in collaboration with other artists; he has also written libretti for operas by Dean Drummond and Brian Ferneyhough. His most profound influences include the philosophy of Ludwig Wittenstein, and the poetry of American Modernists William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky and Gertrude Stein. The still unassimliated syntactic experimentation of Gertrude Stein is especially echoed in Blind Witness News. Like all of these writers, Bernstein maintains a strong interest in the sound and expressivity of the spoken word, an interest further born out in his poets' audio website PennSound. Bernstein is primarily known, and in some circles, notorious, as a poet. The complex intellectualism and explicit grounding in Marxist/Feminist theory of his work provokes irritation in uncomprehending, traditional reviewers.
_______________
BLIND WITNESS NEWS, the libretto (1990)
- The Title - Pun and Irony
http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/LB/0511/Lalo_Schifrin_-_Eyewitness_News.mp3
http://www.newsmusicnow.com/localmusic.html
- "The Talent":
- News Format:
Emptiness of content and repetition shift focus to "format": undermining or hollowing out the authority of media; revealing news as a media process producing us.
The rigidified, preformulated aspects of the newscast;
Scenes of the libretto mirror segments in a news program:
Libretto - Scenes: I. Opening Theme; II. National; III. Local; IV. Weather; V. Sports; VI. Closing
Eyewitness News Music Format (WABC/New York) - Open, Talent Open, Topical, Bumper, Breaking News, Severe Weather, Special Report, Weather, Sports, Health, Investigation, Sympathetic, Election/Political, Close.
_____________________________
POETICS - Language, Form, and Texture:
Free vs. closed verse: meter, rhyme; or linebreaks, syncopation and emphasis of spoken rhythms;
Diction (vernacular language, some esoteric terms)
Syntax: passages of non-standard syntax
Repetition
Allusions to nursery rhymes
CLOSE READING:
- "Foreign Menace" (17)
- Local news (23-24)
- "The rate on purchase" (25)
- "Lets Check the radar" (31)
________________________
OPEN QUESTIONS:
- Does the libretto use defamiliarization to call aspects of media culture, celebrity, language, and truth into question?
- What aspects of the libretto produce an "alientation effect" in readers? and what kinds of realizations does it seem designed to provoke?
- What kind of audiences to Jack, Jill, Jane and John want? What kind of audience does this opera want? What are the implications of using opera as performance context for a contemporary critique of the television news?
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Yarmolinsky.html
