ONTH

THE PHOTOGRAPHER Far From the Truth ON THE

The Audience Magazine of BAM's NEXT WAVE Festival Volume 1 Number 1 October, 1983 THE PHOTOGRAPHER/Far From the Truth Contents Philip Glass: Towards a New Music/Theater by John Howell ...... 3 From Literal Words to Metaphorical Dance: An Interview with Philip Glass by John Howell . . . 7 A New Exposure for The Photographer by Roger W. Oliver ...... 9 Edweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract by Hollis Frampton...... 12 The Photographic Image: An Excerpt from On Photography by Susan Sontag...... 17 Spotlight on Sponsors ...... 18 NEXT WAVE Bookshelf ...... 19

John Howell is the editor of New York Beat. He reviews performance for Artforum magazine and was the performance reviewer for the SoHoNews. Roger W. Oliver is the Humanities Director of the New Wave Festival.

Hollis Frampton is Professor of Film History at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is also a filmmaker.

Excerpt from On Photography Copyright © 1973, 1974, 1977 by Susan Sontag. Reprinted by permission from Farrar. Straus and Giroux, Inc.

"Mr. M uybridge showing his Instantaneous Photographs of Animal The Next Wave Production and Touring Fund is sup­ Motion at the Royal Society;· Illustrated London News, May 25, 1889. ported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Ford Cover: Self-portrait by Eadweard Muybridge. Foundation, AT&T, Warner Communications Inc., the The following Muybridge photographs all courtesy of Daniel Wolf, New York Council for the Humanities, Willi Wear Ltd ., Inc., New York City: The High Sierra from Glacier Rock (1872), page 12. Animal Locomotion plate# 228 (1887), pages 3, 7, 9, 13, 16, 17, the Dayton-Hudson Foundation for B. Dalton Bookseller, 19. Animal Locomotion plate# 536 (1887), pages 14- 15. Dayton's and Target Stores, the CIGNA Corporation and the BAM Next Wave Producers Council. Additional funds for the Next Wave Festival are provided by the New York The NEXT WAVE Festival is produced by the Brooklyn Academy State Council on the Arts, the Robert Sterling Clark Foun­ of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11217 dation, Inc., the Emma A. Sheafer Charitable Trust, the On The NEXT WAVE is published by the Humanities Program Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Manufacturers Hano­ of the BAM NEXT WAVE Festival. ver Trust Company, Meet the Composer, Inc., Philip Editor: Roger W. Oliver Morris Inc. and the New York City Department of Cul­ Designed by Charles W. North Studios, Inc. tural Affairs. WNYC-FM 94 is the official radio station of © 1983 by the Brooklyn Academy of Music the Next Wave Festival. Philip Glass: Towards a New Musicflheatre by John Howell

On the eve of that emblematic year 1984, composer the SoHo lofts to Lincoln Center's opera houses and Philip Glass can look forward to an exciting, brave new everywhere in between. This eclectic, enthusiastic audi­ world of innovative contemporary opera which he, ence has contributed to the creation of that most rare along with some talented theatrical collaborators, has item, a truly popular experimental performing art. created. The Photographer, a "music-theater" piece;' A closer look at Glass' background shows that as is joins the full-blown opera Satyagraha and the operatic often the case, innovation depends less on total inven­ theater epic Einstein on the Beach as yet another radical tion than on bringing together ideas and influences in triumph in a·n art form noted for its conservatism, its elit­ unexpected yet seemingly inevitable and authoritative ist snobbishness, and its sheer "museumness." In these ways. Glass has few peers iR the depth and breadth of works, Glass and company have re-invented for our time his contemporary musical synthesis. that difficult, tantalizing concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, For such a radical innovator, Glass' early musical train­ Wagner's "total work of art" which fuses together ele­ ing is almost a traditional cliche of credits: Peabody Con­ ments of music, theater, choreography, and design into servatory, the Juilliard School, Ford Foundation Fellow­ an inclusive, overwhelming theatrical experience. ship, studies in Paris with the late doyenne of American And this operatic revolution was forged by a com­ composers, Nadia Boulanger. It was in the mid-60s, in poser who, despite his impeccable classical training, Paris, that his conventional, Copland-like compositional never really studied opera . ideas collided with a cerebral, European, Pierre Boulez­ Glass' experimental, popular, and finally exhilarating led serial ism; the result was a frustrating conceptual music-theater is the result of three major factors which standoff until a chance job transcribing Ravi Shankar combine to create this significant rejuvenation of a tired sitar solos for a film soundtrack offered Glass an unex­ tradition. First of course, is Glass' original music style, pected, musical way out of the impasse via the rich world one in itself constructed from several disparate sources: of Indian music. Glass then studied with Allah Rakha, Indian rhythmic structures, rock music's visceral wallop a noted tabla player and teacher, and heard other Third (from the high volume of his Ensemble's amplified instru­ World music in several trips to India and North Africa. ments), and Wagernian time scales-some Glass compo­ From this almost accidental discovery, Glass began to sitions have run four hours or more. Th is music, initially fashion the first of his many works in a distinctive style. composed for concert situations, readily lent itself to Working with Indian music's characteristic structural vocal music; grafted onto the formal conventions of methods-not, Glass is quick to point out, its tonal and operatic singing- solos, duets, choruses-Glass' vocal pitch qualities- he composed with chains of small, mod­ music drew on a pre-bel canto vocal style with ular musical phrases which are added and subtracted, unadorned phrasing and "straight" tones to express his expanded and contracted. These short, repeated phrases characteristic style in song . also featured a constant eight-note pulse and unchang­ Secondly, Glass' background includes a long-time ing dynamic levels to create a thick, continuous band of working involvement with the avant-garde visual and sound in which "events" were reduced to slow and performing artists who are his contemporaries. So the minor alterations in structure. dramatic assumptions which follow from his radical Although Glass stumbled into this relatively unknown musical style have natural, similarly innovative theatrical area by chance, he was quick to seize upon its cultural as ,, equivalents in the mixed-media, non-narrative, genre­ well as its compositional implications. The world of pop blurring works of his colleagues. Many of these theater, music, principally through the well-pu blicized interest of dance, and visual artists, such as Sol LeWitt, Lucinda the Beatles, was also turning its attention to Indian music Childs, and Robert Wilson, have been and continue to and so, from the beginning, Glass allied himself with the be significant and sympathetic collaborators on projects larger cultural zeitgeist rather than being limited to eso­ which are therefore as striking dramatically and visually teric issues within the European-oriented, "serious" as they are musically. This theatrical opening up of a music community from which he emerged. form which usually uses nineteenth-century theater con­ Returning to New York City, Glass quickly located him­ ventions to illustrate its nineteenth-century music has self in another rapidly developing, innovative community, attracted a new, varied audience. that of the downtown art world. The structural rigor of And that is a third point: these works draw a large, Glass' music in this new style coincided with the strict "crossover" audience of a genuinely mixed sort, from architecture of "minimal" art; one ea rly Glass piece was

3 titled 600 Lines and was just that: short phrases with orientation. In Glass' case, this took the form of sheer minute alterations marked off like a list. The slow unfold­ volume as a major aspect of his compositions. Aware of ing of such musical machinations also tallied with an the increasing sophistication of amplified music in the interest in "process" art, an idea about art which valued rock world, and aware too that the experience of listeners the act of making than the finished product. And the whether over radio or stereo unit, or live at concerts, ·overall basic re-thinking of musical fundamentals which was increasingly mediated by electronic amplification, Glass' music displayed fit neatly with an emphasis on Glass worked with a sound engineer, Kurt Munkasci, to "conceptual" art, art which emphasized the philosophi­ develop a distortion-free, electronic system for his cho­ cal underpinnings of aesthetic thinking. sen instrumentation of electric keyboards, horns (flute, These boundary-blurring art world attitudes of the late saxophone, clarinet), and voice. An unanticipated result '60s and early '70s cut across notions of tradition and of this enormous amplification when applied to Glass' genre, and included similarly inclined experimentalists in work was the creation of sounds not actually played but the performing arts as full and natural partners in a col­ still clearly audible. These harmonic overtones and beats lective exploration. The Mabou Mines theater company became a psycho-acoustical phenomena which added was a charter member of this scene, and as their music an element of mystery to the mathematical rigor of director, Glass wrote music for their productions. Chore­ Glass' composition. Although other minimalist com­ ographers also responded to the rhythmic beat and con­ posers also explored these spontaneous acoustical sonant pitches of Glass' music, and a few dancers began events, Glass was the only one to make loud sound into what is now a widespread use of his compositions as set­ a significant issue in itself. tings for dances. So these performing arts experiments Paradoxically, the tremendous amplification resulted in found their initial support and audiences within the art two apparently contradictory but finally compatible psy­ world structure; concerts were held in galleries and chological effects for listeners: both a trance-like state of museums, and were often the result of collaborations contemplative meditation and a toe-tapping rhythmic among artists from different fields. excitement. So, while Glass' music developed out of an While this art context was an apparently cerebral revo­ unusual blend of conceptual elements, its synthesis .a lso lution, it was also one with a visceral edge to its schema- included a sheer auditory sensuousness and visceral

4 Douglas Perry (center) in the role of Gandhi in Satyagraha as presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 1981 . Photo: Johan Elbers. punch w hich appealed to a varied crowd-this was one made use of every techn ical feature of BAM's opera "serious" music with a little something for everybody house. Wilson's vast scale, his slow-moving pace, his despite its esoteric sources. architectural structuring of visually oriented scenes, and One other aspect of Glass' foundation-laying was the silence of his plays (there was hard ly any language) the cultivation of an ensem ble (which included Glass as a had led Wilson to call them "operas:' His collaboration player) which specialized in playing his music. As in rock, with Glass proved that the work of both did indeed cre­ this consistent group took on the quality of a band, with ate a novel Gesamtkunstwerk of operatic standards. In both collective strengths (Glass favored Louisiana horn Einstein, Wilson's precise, detailed stage pictures were players with jazz and blues roots to counterpoint his con­ perfectly set off by Glass' rousing, mathematical, sci-fi servatory-trained keyboards), and individual interests: score. The vocals were sung by multi-purpose per­ several members of the Glass Ensemble have composed formers (actors-dancers-singers), and consisted of and performed notable pieces as artists in their own right. solfege syllables and numbers which mimicked the This ensemble, a unique idea in the "serious" music score's structure. world but a common one in popular music, served Glass' In Satyagraha, a collaboration with librettist Constance practical purposes by bringing in income from perform­ DeJong and designer Robert Israel, Glass made use of ances and by assuring that his work would be well played. a typical pit orchestra and trained singers. The staging Furthermore, the chance to perform frequently with resembled Wilson 's somewhat, but the score was softer, skilled, dedicated musicians also meant that Glass' devel­ more thoughtful than Einstein's hard-driving music as opment could proceed much faster than it would played by Glass' ensemble. The transference to orchest ra have otherwise. and serious opera singers proved that Glass' style adapted Despite his constant and important collaborations easily to conventional orchestration and vocalese. with theater groups, it was not until the successful Euro­ Now, Glass calls The Photographer "a music-theater pean tour and stunning showcase performances of Ein­ work;' preferri ng that the term "opera " be used only stein on the Beach in 1976 that Glass' contributions to when the main thrust of the action is carried by vocal music-theater moved into high gear. His collaborator music. The Photographer deploys an unusual structure, was Robert Wilson, a director-designer who had been one devised by co-author Rob Malasch who provided staging large-scale epics for some time; most notable, the original dramaturgy and direction; Act One is a play, perhaps, was The Life and Times ofJoseph Stalin, a Act Two is a music concert, and Act Three is a dance. "play" that lasted for twelve hours, had a cast of some Malasch's idea was to examine a once well-known scan­ 150, and deployed an amazing series of tableaux which dal in the famous photographer's life-his wife's -affair 5 with another man, the birth of a child by her lover, Muy­ Glassian motifs and sophisticated electronics to a score bridge's murder of this lover, the subsequent trial and written in the '30's but based on fourteenth-century acquittal-by moving from a literal presentation (a play monk's songs. Both the medieval text and Orff's struc­ using language) to the abstract- music, then dance tural simplicity adapt well to this treatment, and the accompanied by music as a way to give a metaphorical result is a radical re-working of a classic which updates thread to an essentially non-narrative music-theater piece. and enhances without violating its essential spirit As in his other collaborative projects, Glass has assem­ And Glass is currently composing Akhnaten, an opera bled a group of co-creators with impressive credits in about Egypt's Sun King, another mythic figure like Einstein their respective areas; director JoAnne Akalaitis, chore­ and Gandhi (of Satyagraha) which reverberates with trans­ ographer David Gordon, and designer Santo Loquasto cendental significance (Muybridge is a more domestic have collaborative backgrounds in exactly the kind of subject, Glass admits, but then it's really Malasch's mixed-media theater of which The Photographer is a choice). Finally, that transcendence is the ultimate goal particularly ambitious example. Provocative experiments of Glass' music. For all its mathematical rigor and strip­ like The Photographer require a special kind of collabora­ ped-down dogmaticism, the conceptual clarity of his tive give and take, and this particular group meets those work exists as a platform for a quasi-ecstatic, exhilarated conditions. In this piece, we find Glass drawing on the state, a blend of Indian trance and Wagnerian swoon. essence of his basic music style, but again changing it to Among the short list of great contemporary operas, fit the situation-"! think it's very melodramatic to suit Glass' are almost alone in aiming for this response, and the story" he says. Likewise, the collaborators are col­ unique in actually eliciting it leagues, some of whom he has worked with before, but Like Bach, who described the point of his work as that all are determined to "make it new:· even to the point of of glorifying God, Glass' music reaches for the expres­ rewriting the first act play (there will be new text by writer sion of a truth which has a generally religious impulse Robert Coe). As usual, Glass and company are extending behind its efforts to transport the listener to an exalted the meanings which define "opera" in our time. state, as has all great music throughout history. Even the Opera, or music-theater, or theater-epic, or even "madri­ more prosaic subject of The Photographer still generates gal opera" (Glass' term for his music-theater work, The this response by its unusual structure, its fertile collabora­ Panther) continues to attract Glass. While his ensemble tive contributions, and of course, its driving, riveting plays a wide range of national and international venues musical score. Glass succeeds again, and contemporary from Carnegie Hall to rock clubs like Danceteria, Glass music-theater is all the richer for another addition to its plans more large-scale, operatic compositions. With Ray small pantheon of truly innovative, intelligent, and finally Manzerak of The Doors, he has re-worked Carl Orff's moving works, most of which have the name Philip opera, Carmina Burana; their reorchestration introduces Glass attached to them.

Sheryl Sutton and Lucinda Childs in a scene from Einstein on the Beach. Photo by Babette Mangolte.

6 From Literal Words to Metaphorical Dance An Interview with Philip Glass conducted by John Howell

and he asked me if I would be interested in working on a performance about Muybridge. I said of course . Muybridge is someone whose work is very familiar in the art world, and I scarcely know an artist who doesn't have a Muybridge postcard or photograph on their studio wall, probably because the severe structuralism of his photographic series appeals to a modern sense. JH Muybridge was a favorite source during '60s and '70s "minimalist" and "process" art. PG Yes, he was, but when Rob began explaining his ideas for the piece, a lot of them had to do with events in Muybridge's life, none of which I was aware of. JH We're talking about the eternal triangle, about Muybridge killing his wife's lover a~er ~he h~d the lover's child, and a scandalous tnal m wh1ch Muybridge was acquitted. . PG Right. This was international news because Muybndge was very famous and caught up in this domestic mur­ der. But other than the facts, there seems to be very little biographical information about Muybridge. Rob provided me with a book about him and we u~ed 1t as a starting place for our ideas. Rob saw the p1ece as beginning with the literal events of Muybrig~e's life. and ending up with a very abstract presentation, w1th slides of Muybridge's work appearing throughout. So we developed the basic structure as three parts: play, concert, dance. From literal words to metaphoncal Phil by Chuck Close. Collection of Whitney Museum of American dance. Art, New York. JH Your other major music-theater works, or operas, also seem to be biographies. JH Do you think of The Photographer as your third PG The reason for that is that I didn't want to do a story large-scale opera after Einstein on the Beach opera. But if you're not going to tell a story by t~an­ and Satyagraha? scribing a famous play, for example, then what 1s the PG I wouldn't call it an opera at all. I consider the operas opera going to be about? These historical fi~ures, Ein­ to be where the main thrust is carried by the singing, stein, Gandhi, Ahknaten, became a conven 1ent way and that's not true with The Photographer. Einstein, to develop a theatrical focus. All the characters are Satyagraha, and my new one, Akhnaten, are really charismatic persons who have mythic and totemic vocal works with orchestral accompaniment, but proportions. So those operas are really portra1t operas: there's very little singing in The Photographer. It falls the character is the story. into that strange area of music-theater pieces, what we used to call mixed-media. It's in three distinct JH But Muybridge doesn't have that kind of spiri­ parts: Act One is a play, Act Two is a concert, and Act tual resonance. Three is a dance. PG That's true. Remember, Muybridge as a subject was Rob's idea. By comparison, Muybridge is a much JH How did you decide upon such an unusual more domestic-size figure than Einstein, Gandhi, or structure? Ahknaten, and I think the smaller scale and shorter PH This is the conception of Rob Malasch, the co-author length of The Photographer reflect that differ~nce . I and director. I had worked with Rob before in Holland also think that the music is more melodramatic to on a madrigal opera, presented in a different staging reflect its subject. in New York under the name of The Panther. He was commissioned by the Holland Festival to stage a work, 7 JH What do you mean by melodramatic? best one, it's just the one I came to as an author and PG It's just the way it sounds to me. I think the music has with the people I worked with, Constance DeJong a lot of drive to it. and Robert Israel. Over the two years that Stuttgart JH The Photographer was first produced in Hol­ has presented their very different version, I've gone land. How will the BAM production differ from back to see it several times and I have a better idea of that original production? how a work can grow. I think that people can bring PG Both Rob and I feel that the structure provided by his things to theater works which enlarge them. dramaturgy makes it possible to do a lot of different JH What about the trend for opera directors to so interpretations. So we're inserting a new play for Act change an opera as to almost re-write it? One, a script written by Robert Coe in place of the PG I feel secure enough that some fundamental concep­ original play that Rob wrote. Th is play will be directed tion of the work will remain no matter what anyone by JoAnne Akalaitis of the Mabou Mines company. does to it. Of course, we've seen interpretations of And David Gordon will choreograph the dance section. standard repertory work where the original idea is so JH So you keep the same characters, the same changed that it has been violated. Even that, though, events, and the same music, but rearrange defines a certain limit and then you can go back and them? rediscover the original conception. Robert Wilson and PG Yes. I think one of the interesting things about the I have talked about this a lot because we will be structure is the extent to which the identity of the doing a new production of the original version of Ein­ play can tolerate these kinds of revisions. We can do a stein in '84-'85, and after that the piece will be avail­ fair amount of revamping and still have the same able for people to do it. It will be interesting to see piece. what happens. JH The Photographercredits you and Rob Malasch JH In The Photographer, yet another "post-mod­ as "co-authors." How is that collaboration ern" choreographer is working with your different from your single-credit operas? music. What attracts so many different kinds PG There's quite a big difference. This is a co-authored of new choreographers to your music? piece as was Einstein. Satyagraha and Akhnaten PG It's got a good beat. One of the most interesting aren't, so I feel free to guide the piece in certain things about David Gordon is that he'll do something ways. With The Photographer, like Einstein, it was a with the music that no one else has done. We've question of melting two points of view, of creating been part of the same art community for years, but some kind of symbiosis. The collaborations are harder we've never worked together before The Photogra­ for me to do, although there's always an element of pher. I always felt the music could work with different interest that you don't get with the solo pieces. For dance vocabularies, even ballet as in Jerome Robbins' example, I would never have thought of Rob' idea of Glass Pieces. There's never been any school of dance The Photographer's structure. Or, with Einstein, that that I felt closer to than any other, although like every­ way of joining the spoken word with the action and one in my generation, the Cunningham company has the images was totally original to Bob Wilson. So been a big influence in terms of a dance esthetic. It's there are things that those people brought to the a company I've always liked watching, but also like works that I couldn't have done myself. Of course, in watching many others. I like to see as many different many ways it's easier to work within your own con­ kinds of dance as possible done to the music because ception . I tend to go back and forth between collabo­ it tells me about the music. rations and solos so that I don't get stuck in one way JH Not only did you collaborate with a co-author, of working. The collaborations are always something Rob Malasch, but other collaborators-director I learn from, then I go back to working by myself with JoAnne Akalaitis, writer Robert Coe, choreogra­ a more evolved and developed idea of what theater pher David Gordon, designer Santo Loquasto­ work can be like. are involved from several different disciplines. JH What do you think about directors re-interpret­ Why set up such an unusual working situation? ing operas? PG JoAnne has worked with Mabou Mines which has PG We're at a stage now where we're getting radical re­ always been a very collaborative theater so while she interpretations of the standard repertory, so that takes her role as director very seriously, it's not a prob­ directors are almost assuming authorship roles. Take lem but a familiar way of working for her. There's something like Carmen, which has been done thou­ always more of a strain working with so many other sands of times. After different productions over the people but it can be very enriching, a very positive years, a sort of consensus idea emerges of what Car­ thing. In The Photographer, I think the mix of collabo­ men is, of what this opera might be. This is happen­ rators is extremely exciting. ing with Satyagraha. I saw a very different interpreta­ tion of it in Stuttgart, Germany, which at first was very shocking to me, then I saw it had been a contri­ bution to how we think about that opera. In other words, my idea of Satyagraha was simply the original one. When I say simply, I mean it's not necessarily the 8 A New Exposure for the Photographer by Roger W Oliver

When THE PHOTOGRAPHER/Far From the Truth opens real events. "We have added the subtitle 'Far From the BAM's first NEXT WAVE Festival on October 4, it will bear Truth; Ms. Akalaitis explains, "to emphasize that this little resemblance to the original version, simply titled piece is not a docu-drama~· The Photographer, which premiered at the 1982 Holland The Eadweard Muybridge of THE PHOTOGRAPHER/ Festival. Basic elements of that version remain: the Philip Far From the Truth is thus shown being initiated into Glass score; the tripartite structure of play/concert/ another stage of his art, one made possible by the dance; the subject matter of Victorian photographer catharsis he experiences after the revelation of his wife's Eadweard Muybridge's life and work. But the concep­ adultery and its consequences. In addition, the main tion of the piece, as well as script, direction, movement, characters are referred to only by their first names-Ead­ and design, will all have been radically altered. Just as weard, Flora and Harry-to universalize them beyond choreographers have refashioned ballets like The Rite of the specific events being dramatized. The script also Spring and The Firebird countless times, retaining introduces a series of invented characters-including a Stravinsky's music but changing the conception as well Mesmerist, Lecturer, Advocate, and Eulogist-to further as the steps employed to carry out that conception, so create the mythic, ritualistic level of the piece: for Ead­ the NEXT WAVE's production of THE PHOTOGRAPHER/ weard the play becomes a falling away from the world, Far From the Truth is a new work rather than a reinter­ an action paralleling the mythic journey experienced by pretation of an already existing entity. classical protagonists who are humbled by circumstance The persons primarily responsible for the new vision/ and then shown a vision of a spiritual rather than mate­ version are director JoAnne Akalaitis and author of the rial world. new book Robert Coe. Although THE PHOTOGRAPHER/ THE PHOTOGRAPHER/Far From the Truth creates a Far From the Truth is based on Muybridge's photo­ surrealistic evocation of the Victorian era through lan­ graphic work and the crime of passion which resulted in guage, gesture, movement, design, and costume, influ­ his murder of his wife's lover, in no way should the work enced in part by the twentieth-century artist Max Ernst. be considered an attempt at the factual recreation of In his "novels"-La Semaine de Bonte (The Week of

The Photographer, Act Ill, Holland Festival1982, Amsterdam. Photo: Bert Nienhuis.

9 Sighs) and La Femme 100 Tetes (The Hundred Headless skipping across stones or kissing. There are also a num­ Woman)-Ernst presented an imaginative approach to ber of images of women degraded, including a series Victorian life where dreamlike versions of an action entitled "The Woman Ashamed;' where the naked sub­ appear simultaneously with the main action, or a picture ject is turning away from the camera and attempting to on a wall offers a totally different view of events taking cover her body. The men, on the other hand, are usually place in a room. Ernst's illustrations have served as the lifting, throwing, wrestling, fighting-involved in activi­ inspiration for much of Santo Loquasto's scenic and cos­ ties that suggest aggressive rather than passive stances. tume design, and influenced Jenifer Tipton's lighting In this way Muybridge's so-called scientific analysis of design as well. movement became an expression of the way he, as an In addition to Ernst's surrealistic Victoriana, another individual and as a member of society, viewed male and important influence on the language of the text and the female roles. style of the production has been Victorian melodrama. With this analysis in mind, The Photographer's sub­ But rather than merely reproduce the exaggerated emo­ title, "Far From the Truth" takes on the further meaning tions characteristic of that genre, according to Mr. Coe, of questioning the relationship between photography THE PHOTOGRAPHER/Far From the Truth will "try to do and what is true. For Mr. Coe, although a photograph is for emotions what Muybridge did for motion: formalize tangible evidence of a certain past existence, its truth is them, atomize them in time, break them down into con­ private to the individual looking at it-and thus relative stituent parts~' Thus THE PHOTOGRAPHER/Far From the and subjective. He sees a different metaphysic operating Truth will be an investigation of melodramatic form with motion pictures, both because of the movement using an analytic rather than imitative approach to the that gives them greater dimension and because films are inflated emotions and actions of melodrama. not viewed alone, but in a room with other people as In preparing his new text, Mr. Coe said that he was part of a communal event. In THE PHOTOGRAPHER/Far very aware of the dramaturgy of Ms. Akalaitis' own the­ From the Truth this difference is vividly dramatized in atre work. "JoAnne once mentioned how Werner Herzog the transition between the second and third acts, where [The German film director] says that he puts whatever he the slides that have been projected disappear and are wants into his films;' says Mr. Coe. "I wanted to collage replaced by dancers and actors who now embody a text from a great variety of sources and then work on aspects of the actions previously represented by static continuity- on creating a more traditional dramaturgy­ images. Furthermore, some of these images have after the fact~' The aim is not, however, to create a con­ reflected back upon the melodrama dramatized in the ventional realistic play, one where the characters are seen first act. While many of the slides in the piece are of from a consistent point of view, but rather a dramatic Muybridge photographs, others come from actual Vic­ structure wherein different facets of the characters-and torian pornography as well as pictures of the actors in the world they inhabit- can be revealed at different times. the first-act play. This fragmentation of reality-the cornerstone of THE PHOTOGRAPHER/Far From the Truth thus is a much twentieth-century art-is especially appropriate genuinely intermedia work, one that constantly blurs the for a theatre piece dealing with photographic images, boundaries between these media. Music, movement, which elevate one isolated fragment of the world into a projected image, film all become incorporated into the totality. In fact, many of the sequences found in THE theatrical evocation of a world initially suggested by PHOTOGRAPHER/Far From the Truth have their origins in Muybridge's art and life. Even though Philip Glass' music the investigation of the nature of photography and its was the starting point for the current collaboration-and relationship to the world it seeks to portray. For Mr. Coe one of the elements that attracted Ms. Akalaitis to the the themes of adultery and photography raised by Muy­ project in the first place-the director insists that THE bridge's life and work share the common characteristic PHOTOGRAPHER/Far From the Truth is not "a semi-opera of deceit and deception, engendering a contrast or an operetta or a musical comedy or anything like thaf' between what is revealed and what is concealed. A dia­ One of the most intriguing aspects of THE PHOTO­ lectic then emerges between the over-inflated melodra­ GRAPHER/Far From the Truth, no matter how one classi­ matic emotionalism of a nineteenth-century crime of fies it, is the way in which form mirrors content through­ passion and the cool, "objective" eye of the camera. out the piece. The repetition with slight variation of As Mr. Coe and Ms. Akalaitis researched and prepared Muybridge's animal and human motion studies finds a their new version of THE PHOTOGRAPHER/Far From the parallel in the Philip Glass music. After Eadweard's Truth, a new way of looking at Muybridge's photographs acquittal of Harry's murder at the end of Act One, we emerged for both of them. Once the events of his life see evidence of his return to life through his work in Act and the nature of the world he inhabited came into per­ Two. When that work is given three-dimensionality spective it was impossible to accept Muybridge's concep­ though the movement of dancers and actors in Act tion of his work as a photographer's detached, objective Three, the photographs will be given life in a similar dissections of motion. Both Ms. Akalaitis and Mr. Coe way to that of the motion pictures Muybridge's experi­ point out that the differences between Muybridge's pre­ ments helped make possible. The ultimate impact of sentation of men and women in his photographs are THE PHOTOGRAPHER/Far From the Truth will thus be extreme. Women are portrayed doing domestic activi­ established through the structure of a performance that ties, like pouring water, or in soft movements, such as utilizes the full resources of the contemporary theater.

10 1 J.

l'

Collage scene from Une Semaine de Bonte by Max Ernst. 11 Eadweard Muybridge_: Fragments of a Tesseract by Hollis Frampton

It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography been a dry measure of grain; the elder Muggeridge, who which lies, for in reality time does not stop. Rodin died when the boy was thirteen, had been a corn­ chandler. Exit then, at about the age of twenty, Ead­ Enter Edward James Muggeridge, on April9, 1830. weard Muybridge, young Romantic, already considered He is supposed to have received a good education. Local an eccentric. (Thousands of miles away, and 25 years tradition held Kingston to have been an ancient seat of later, a man who had been his intimate friend was to tell Saxon royalty. In 1850, the Coronation Stone (I'm told a jury, in support of a plea of insanity: "I have known that half the towns in England boast one) was set up in Muybridge to sit up all night reading generally some the Market Square, upon a hexagonal plinth engraved classical work~') with the names of the kings crowned there. Two of the His destination was California, a simply fabu lous land, six were Eadweard the Elder (900 A.D.) and Eadweard like Szech uan of the West of Eng land, where gold, ship­ the Martyr (975 A.D.). Muggeridge, an East Anglian ver­ ping, and the whalefish had kept some men rich enough sion of Mod-Rydd, an Old Norse name with magical long enough to make them hungry for culture. He set up associations, was less pliable. But a "muy" had once shop as a genial bookseller in San Francisco, got to know 12 -

the bohemian crowd, and prospered by outfitting the 1877 brought his last major work in still photography local gentry with entire libraries. proper: an immense 360° panorama of San Francisco, in In 1860 he returned to England, convalescent from a 13 panels, taken from the roof of the Ma rk Hopkins serious stagecoach accident, for a visit that lasted nearly house on Nob Hill. He had already resumed his studies of seven years; while he was there, he learned the cumber­ locomotion, at Palo Alto, and this time it was in absolute some, delicate craft of the collodion wet-plate, and discov­ earnest. He was forty-seven years old. ered his vocation as a photographer. When he returned to California, it was to work under the pseudonym Had Muybridge left us none of his celebrated sequen­ "Helios:' affecting the broad-brimmed hat and velvet ces, his place as an innovative master in the history of cape of continental poets and painters, and calling him­ photographic art would nevertheless be assured. The self a "photographic artist:' huge body of work from his years of greatest creative During the next five years, he systematically photo­ expansion, the decade 1867-77, sustains from the very graphed the Far West, producing some 2,000 images in outset, with almost voluptuous intensity, a marked ly per­ several series catalogued by Bradley & Rulofson, a photo­ sonal vision. Among early photographers of the Ameri­ graphic gallery that distributed his work: these series inclu­ can West, there is sca rely anyone (with the possible ded views of San Francisco, lighthouses of the Pacific exception of Timothy O'Sullivan) to put alongside him: Coast, Vancouver Island, Alaska (as Director of Photo­ he is the Grand Progenitor of a West Coast school of graphic Surveys for the United States government), view camera photography that has included Edward Farallone Island, Railroads, Geyser Springs, Woodward's Weston, Imogen Cunning ham, Wynn Bullock, and Gardens, Yosem ite, Mariposa Grove. "Helios' Flying Stu­ others in our own time. He was, moreover, an indefati­ dio" work was at first only sporadically pursued with gable steroscopist; his stereo images, committing him, crude equipm~nt. Muybridge pronounced himself dis­ by definition, to the most thoroughgoing photographic satisfied with the results, which nonetheless attracted a illusionism this side of full color, function as a curious pal­ good deal of attention as curiosities and augmented his impsest to the mature sequences, from which very many considerable international reputation. In 1873, he photo­ of the illusionist strategies available to photography have graphed the progress of the Modoc Indian War, making been rigorously evacuated. images of considerably intimacy on both sides of the In his advertising cards for Pacific Rolling Mills, and for conflict, apparently acting as a free agent, much as Bradley & Rolofson (neither are isolated instances) he Roger Fenton had done in the Crimea . When he seems to anticipate much later developments elsewhere returned home, Flora Muybridge presented him with a in the visual arts. "Stud ies" of trees and clouds (the latter baby boy that she had conceived in his absence by one emphatically including the sun) predate by 50 and 80 Harry Larkyns, ne'er do-well. On October 17, 1874, Muy­ years respectively the t ree photographs of Atget and bridge traveled by boat and wagon to Calistoga, where Alfred Stieglitz' last work, the Equivalents. Larkyns was staying, and killed his wife's lover with a sin­ If any other photographer in the 19th century fore­ gle pistol shot. After a sensational trial, the jury found shadows the 20th as massively, that man must be Oscar the homicide justifiable. During four months of imprison­ Gustave Rejlander (1 813-1875); and it is curious that ment, Muybridge's hair and beard had turned entirely Muybridge's method for making the serial photographs white. was a practical elaboration of a theoretical scheme pub­ He left immediately for a year-long photographic lished by Rejlander. One wonders whether Muybridge expedition in Central America . While he was gone, Flora ever met the man who began with The Two Ways of Life sued him for divorce on grounds of extreme cruelty (in and ended with The Artist's Dream, becoming Charles support of which she deposed only that Muybridge had Darwin's illustrator along the way. looked through their bedroom window, seen her sleep­ But what interests me most, in all this work of Muy­ ing, and then left; the case was dismissed, and we are bridge's first career, is something that seems to antici­ left to imagine the ferocity of the man's stare). Shortly pate, almost sublim inally, the sequences of Animal LocO­ thereafter, she died. Returning to California, Muybridge motion .. .a preoccupation that is restless, never quite issued an immense portfolio of photographs from Pan­ consistently present, seldom sharply focused: I refer to ama, Guatemala, and Mexico, including a study of the Muybridge's apparent absorption in problems that have cultivation of coffee. to do with what we ca ll time.

13 Philosophical questions about the nature of time, orig­ seract, of unimaginable int ricacy. W. H. Fox Talbot, inven­ inating in the ascendancy of Newtonian mechanics, var­ tor of photography and also a mathematician who was iously energized and vexed much of 19th-century thought. certainly acquainted with the incremental model of time, Einstein's relativistic mechanics eventually established writes of his longing to "capture ... creatures of a single that time is simply a function of the observer's frame of instant": the creatures in question are landscape images reference; 20th-century cinema discovered, quite early projected on the groundglass of his camera obscura. He on, that temporality is precisely as plastic as the filmic would escape time, and fix his instantaneous pictures, substance itself. It is remarkable that cinema depends immutable and incorruptible, outside the influence of from a philosophical fiction that we have from the para­ entropy, the destroyer. But it was not long before still doxes of Zeno, and that informs the infinitesimal calculus photographers began toying with the temporal : The f irst of Newton: namely, that it is possible to view the indivisi­ known narrative sequence (i llustrating t he Lord's Praye r) ble flow of time as if it were composed of an infinite suc­ dates to 1841 , and that opened the field to t he likes of cession of discrete and perfectly static instants. Little Red Rid ing Hood (high seriousness in four panels, But during the long interval that concerns us, the by Henry Peach Robinson, originator of new sins). That question brought forth a profusion of views, each of even 'the single image, in epitomizing an entire narrative, which met its scientific apology and its specific imple­ may thereby imply a temporality, was knowledge mentation in art. The heathen opinion has been that learned from the still photograph, of which t he Surreal­ time was some sort of personifiable substance, Chronos, ists were to make much. a corrosive universal solvent into which all things were The work of Etienne-Jules Marey, a scientist w ho dumped at the moment of their creation, and then switched from graphic to photographic notations of ani­ slowly sank, suffering gradual attrition. From some such mal movement under Muybridge's direct tutelage, sum­ simile, speculations proliferated. Time w as duration, or marizes t he point of disjunction between the still photo­ was rate of change, or it was the sum of all conceivable graph and cinema; his studies consist of serial exposures rates. It was seen, always, as linear and isotropic. Time, it made on a single plate. The photograph could no longer was said, passed ... which looks, nowadays, like an exces­ contain t he contradictory pressures to affirm time and to sively euphemistic w ay of saying that we pass. deny it. It split sha rply into an illusionistic cinema of Art historians invented a variation, "influence:' in incessant motion and a static photographic art that which the fluid metaphor becomes a hydraulic system remained frozen solid for decades. So complete and for transmitting energy: The frog Vergil, jumping into the immediate was the separation t hat by 1917 the photog­ old pond, makes waves w hose widening rings eventually rapher Alvin La ngdon Coburn (an ex-painter, who is joggle the cork Tennyson. The flow is still seen as rumored to have collaborated in a Vorticist film, long unidirectional. T.S. Eliot's crucial insight, that the tempo­ since lost, with Ezra Pound) could speculate in print­ ral system of a tradition permits, and even requires, and in ignorance-on the "interesting patterns" that movement of energy in a// directions, could not have might be produced if one were but to do what Marey taken place within the metaphoric continuum of "classi­ had in fact done, mountainously, 30-odd years before. cal" temporality. On first inspection, Muybridge's ea rly work seems to The underlying assumption was that time "exists:' just affirm the antitemporality of the still photography as he as fictions like ether and phlogiston were once supposed had inherited it. He may have meant to do so; an imper­ to exist, on a basis of parity with the paper on which fection of his material ran counter to such intentions. these words are printed. Whereas a conjectural sum­ The collodion plate w as slow, exposures long, the image mary of our own view might read: "Time" is our name of anything moving blurred. Yet Muybridge, in some of for an irreducible condition of our perception of phe­ his earliest landscape work, seems positively to seek, of nomena; therefore, statements which would separate all things, waterfalls; long exposures of which produce the notion of time from some object of direct percep­ images of a strange, ghostly substance that is in fact the tion, are meaningless. tesseract of water: what is to be seen is not water itself, Much of the early history of still photography may be but the virtual volume it occupies duri ng the whole time­ looked upon as the struggle of the art to purge itself of interval of the exposure. It is certain that Muybridge w as temporality. The normative still photograph, the snap­ not the first photographer to make such pictures; my shot, purports to be an ideal, infinitely thin, wholly static point is that he seems to have been the first to accept cross section through a four-dimensional solid, or tes- the "error,' and then systematically, to cherish it.

14 In the photographs concerned with Point Bonita Light­ delirium of inexorable logic and with little modification, house, there is a kind of randomization, or reshuffling, synthesis following analysis; the results, at least in of the sequence of approach to the lighthouse, seen excerpt, are known to everyone who associates anything from several different viewpoints in space, which at all with the name of Eadweard Muybridge. destroys the linearity of an implied molecule of narrative Having once consciously fastened upon time as his time, reducing the experience to a jagged simultaneity grand subject, Muybridge quickly emptied his images as that was to be more fully explored in film montage 50 nearly as he could of everything else. His animals, ath­ years later. letes, and subverted pa inters' models are nameless and Generically allied to this series is the tactic adopted in mostly naked, performing their banalities, purged of an advertising photograph made for Bradley & Rulofson drama if not of occasional horseplay, before a uniform (and their center-ring attraction, Muybridge himself). The grid of Cartesian coordinates, a kind of universal "frame resemblance to later collage and accum ulation pieces of reference," ostensibly intended as an aid in reconciling long familiar to us is striking (the year is 1873), but it is, I the su<;cessive images with chronometry, that also think, superficial. Because the elements of the image are destroys all sense of scale (the figures could be pagan themselves illusionistic fragments of photographs, of constellations in the sky), and utterly obliterates the tac­ varying implied depth, the space is propelled backward tile particularity that is one of the photograph's para­ and forward on an inchmeal basis as we contemplate mount traits, thereby annihilating any possible feeling of the contents of the frame; only the edges of the individ­ place. About all that is left, in each case, is an archetypal ual elements, and the graphic lines of type which make fragment of living action, potentially subject to the inces­ us conscious of seeing marks on a surface, tend to com­ sant reiteration that is one of the most familiar and intol­ press the image into the shallow inferential space proper erable features of our dreams. to Cubism. But the arrangement of photographs within Beyond that, there is a little that Muybridge, looking the image is deliberate, and what we do infer is the from close up, could not have seen: I am always aware, sequence in which the pieces of this still life were laid looking at the sequences, that the bodies of Muybridge's down: in compounding a paradoxical illusionist space, actors are somehow strangely unlike our own, as if Muybridge has also generated a "shallow" inferential slightly obsolescent: The men seem to be heavy-duty temporality. models; and all but the stoutest women are round-hip­ Muybridge continued this same investigation in at ped, with small high breasts that remind me of least one other work: the title page for the Central Cranach's Judgment of Paris. Their postures, gestures, American album issued in 1875, the largest number of gaits are not quite ours, either, and seem to mean some­ images from which remain breathlessly immobile. But in thing a little different. one subset (the photographs are in Kingston) of a hunt­ The children, birds, dogs, haven't changed much. The ing party in Panama, Muybridge transgresses against horse is notable chiefly for appearing with what at first one of the great commandments of view camera pho­ seems uncalled-for frequency- until one recalls that there tography, permitting what was at that time the most vio­ was once a time (geologically remote in feeling from lent smearing and blurring of moving figures (again, he our own) when the horse represented very much more acknowledged the images, and assumed responsibility than the rather mannered recreation we know today. for them, by allowing them to be publicly distributed); And it was over Muybridge's photographs of the the jungle background against which they are seen is horse, of all things, that a great storm of controversy rendered with canonical sharpness. broke in his own time. Painters, it seems, were absorbed Finally, in the great San Francisco panorama of 1877, in rendering, with perfect verisimilitude ... the horse! he condenses an entire rotation of the seeing eye Emotions ran high, and so forth, and so on. I have nei­ around the horizon (an action that must take place in ther space nor inclination to pursue the argument here. time) into a simultaneity that is at once completely plau­ Paul Valery, in the midst of a discussion of Degas, gets to sible and perfectly impossible; it is as if a work of sculp­ the heart of what was serious in the matter; I reproduce ture were to be seen turned inside out, by some prod igy his discussion as definitive: of topology. Muybridge's photographs laid bare all the mistakes that scu lptors Muybridge returned, then, to Palo Alto and his and painters had made ... [in their renderings of the various pos­ sequences. The new attempts were immediately success­ tures of the horse.) They showed how inventive the eye is, or ful, and the work continued, for nearly two decades, in a rather how much the sight elaborates on the data it gives us as the positive and impersonal result of observation. Between the perception seems vividly arrested: erotic rapture, or the state of vision as mere patches of color and as things or objects, extremes of rage and terror come to mind. Eadweard a whole series of mysterious operations takes place, reducing to Muybridge may be certified as having experienced at order as best it can the incoherence of raw perceptions, resolving contradictions, bringing to bear judgements formed since early least one such moment of extraordinary passion. I refer, infancy, imposing continuity, connection, and the system of of course, to the act of committing murder. I submit that change which we group under the labels of space, time, matter that brief and banal action, outside time, was the theme and movement ... [This was why the horse was imagined to move upon which he was forced to devise variations in such in the way the eye seemed to see it; and) it might be that, if these numbers that he finally exhausted, for himself, its signifi­ old-style representations were examined with sufficient subtlety, the law of unconscious falsification might be discovered by cance. To bring back to equilibrium the energy gener­ which it seemed possible to picture the positions of a bird in ated in that instant required the work of ha lf a lifetime. flight, or a horse galloping, as if they could be studied at leisure; So that we might add, in our imagination, just one more but these interpolated pauses are imaginary. Only probable posi­ sequence to Muybridge's multitude, and call it: "Man tions could be assigned to movement so rapid, and it might be raising a pistol and firing:· worthwhile to try to define, by means of documentar/ compari­ son, this kind of creative seeing by which the understanding When the work was done, Muybridge retired to filled the gaps in sense perception. Kingston-on-Thames. Withdrawing from all contention, he serenely took up the British national pastime of gar­ A question remains to haunt, and I will offer a bare dening. The old man imported sago palms and a ginkgo intuition of my own by way of attempted answer. tree from California, and planted them in his backyard. I Quite simply, w hat occasioned Muybridge's obses­ am told that they sti ll thrive. When he died, in 1904, he sion? What need drove him, beyond a reasonable limit was constructing a little pond, in the shape of the Great Lakes of North America. of dozens or even hundreds of sequences, to make them by thousands? For the "demonstration;· if such a thing I am tempted to call it a perfect life. was intended, must have been quite adequate by the time he left California. Instead, with Thomas Eakins' The steps a man takes, from the day of his birth to the help, he went to Pennsylvan ia and pursued it into ency­ day of his death, trace an inconceivable figure in time. clopaedic enormity. The Divine Intelligence perceives that figure at once, as I will simply invert Rodin's remark (he was, in fact, man's intelligence perceives a triangle. That figure, per­ speaking of Muybridge's work) to read thus: "It is the haps, has its determined function in the economy of the universe. . h . f h . photograph which is truthful, and the artist who lies, for -Jorge Lu1s Borges, T, e Mirror o t e Emgmas in reality time does stop:· Time seems, sometimes, to An expanded version of this article first appeared in the March 1973 stop, to be suspended in tableaux disjunct from change issue of Artforum magazine (Volume XI, Number 7). Copyright © and flux. Most humans beings experience, at one time 1973 and published with permission from Artforum International or another, moments of intense passion during which Magazine, Inc. The Photographic Image An excerpt from On Photography by Susan Sontag

A new sense of the notion of information has been that organization. In contrast to the amorous relation, constructed around the photographic image. The photo­ which is based on how something looks, understanding graph is a thin slice of space as well as time. In a world is based on how it functions. And functioning takes ruled by photographic images, all borders ("framing") place mtime, and must be explained in time. Only that seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated, can be made which narrates can make us understand. discontinuous, from anything else: all that is necessary is The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is to frame the subject differently. (Conversely, anything that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never can be made adjacent to anything else.) Photography be ethical or political knowledge. The knowledge gained reinforces a nominalist view of social reality as consisting through still photographs will always be some kind of of small units of an apparently infinite number-as the sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. It will be a number of photographs that could be taken of anything knowledge at bargain prices-a semblance of knowl­ is unlimited. Through photographs, the world becomes edge, a semblance of wisdom; as the act of taking pic­ a series of unrelated, freestanding particles; and history, tures is a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers. The rape. The very muteness of what is, hypothetically, com­ camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. prehensible in photographs is what constitutes their It is a view of the world which denies interconnected­ attraction and provocativeness. The omnipresence of ness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical character of a mystery. Any photograph has multiple sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with meanings; indeed, to see something in the form of a a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascina­ that the world is more available than it really is. tion. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is Needing to have reality confirmed and experience to say: "There is the surface. Now think-or rather feel, enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism intuit-what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies it looks this wai' Photographs, which cannot themselves turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irre­ explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduc­ sistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for tion, speculation, and fantasy. beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a Photography implies that we know about the world if redemption and celebration of the body of the world­ we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the op­ all these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the posite of understanding, which starts from not accepting pleasure we take in photographs. But other, less liberat­ the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is ing feelings are expressed as well. It would not be wrong rooted in the ability to say no. Strictly speaking, one never to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: understands anything from a photograph. Of course, to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, photographs fill in blanks in our mental pictures of the having an experience becomes identical with taking a present and the past: for example, Jacob Riis's images of photograph of it, and participating in a public event New York squalor in the 1880s are sharply instructive to comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in those unaware that urban poverty in late-nineteenth­ photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth­ century America was really that Dickensian. Neverthe­ century aesthetes, Mallarme, said that everything in the less, the camera's rendering of reality must always hide world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything more than it discloses. As Brecht points out, a photo­ exists to end in a photograph .... graph of the Krupp works reveals virtually nothing about

17 Spotlight on Sponsors Each issue of On the NEXT WAVE will present informa­ tion on some of the government, foundation and corpo­ rate supporters of The NEXT WAVE Production and Tour­ ing Fund and NEXT WAVE Festival.

MANUFACTURERS HANOVER TRUST COMPANY THE NEW YORK COUNCil FOR THE HUMANITIES Friends across the span of time, Manufacturers Hano­ The New York Council for the Humanities was formed ver Trust and the Brooklyn Academy of Music have been in 19-75 to help promote public understanding and working together since they were neighbors on Monta­ appreciation of history, culture, values and ideas among gue Street. In the late 1800's, while the Brooklyn Bridge the citizens of New York. was rising over the East River, the Brooklyn Academy of The Council has made a generous contribution in sup­ Music was forming the foundation for the arts in Brook­ port of the humanities/public education aspect of BAM's lyn, and Manufacturers Hanover was establishing its NEXT WAVE Festival, which aims to enrich and amplify financial roots. the performance experience for audience members. Now, over 100 years later, MHTand BAM continue The Council's grant will help BAM underwrite the cost of pub­ their cooperative efforts to improve the quality of life in lishing audience magazines (such as this one), arranging dis­ Brooklyn. MHT has provided generous support to the cussions led by scholars and artists, presenting exhibitions Academy by assisting in the funding of general operat­ and undertaking special outreach efforts. In particular, the ing expenses and special projects. grant will make it possible for BAM to bring high school MHT gives financial assistance to BAM and other arts students to a NEXT WAVE event, helping them to gain organizations, but also to a host of health, welfare, edu­ an appreciation for the performing arts. cational, civic, and cultural institutions each year. "The New York Council for the Humanities is very proud Just as the Brooklyn Bridge became the connecting to be associated with BAM, assisting them to build link between Brooklyn and Manhattan, Manufacturers audiences and build understanding for the arts through Hanover Trust is a connecting link between Brooklyn's their work;' said Dr. Jay Kaplan, Executive Director of the civic organizations and the business community, provid­ Council. "We hope that through our contribution to ing a strong financial base for the enrichment of daily the Festival, we will assist audiences in understanding living in Brooklyn. and appreciating the very creative and exciting things that are taking place in this modern cultural fermenf' THE NATIONAl ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES The National Endowment for the Humanities was PHiliP MORRIS INCORPORATED created in 1965 by a special Act of Congress to support As one Philip Morris executive described the Brooklyn research, education and public activities in the humani­ Academy of Music, "It is the only major institution in the ties throughout American society. The term "humanities" U.S. where the important young artists ... the emerging refers to a wide range of academic disiplines such as and the avant-garde ... can be seen:' language, literature, history, law, philosophy, archaeology, Since 1976, Philip Morris has generously supported and ethics, as well as the history, criticism and theory several of BAM's most exciting, innovative programs by of the arts. contributing both in-kind services and direct financial The Brooklyn Academy of Music received a generous support. grant from the NEH in support of the NEXT WAVE In November of 1981, Philip Morris supported the Humanities/Public Education Program which supple­ world premiere of the brilliant Philip Glass opera, Satya­ ments the performances of new work at BAM during graha. And now BAM is delighted and honored to have the Festival and provides material to cities participating the chance to work with the corporation once again in the NEXT WAVE tours. through the NEXT WAVE Festival. The grant was awarded by the Program Development The programs BAM offers are in keeping with Philip Office, which is part of the Endowment's General Pro­ Morris's 25-year history of corporate patronage and to grams Division. The BAM NEXT WAVE Humanities proj­ Philip Morris's commitment to change and innovation in ect was chosen as particularly suitable to receive a grant business matters. The excitement generated by last because it directly fulfills one of the Program Develop­ year's NEXT WAVE series continues to be felt, and we are ment Office's primary goals: to encourage projects that delighted that Philip Morris has joined forces with BAM develop an historical, critical and theoretical approach to to insure the success of our 1983 NEXT WAVE Festival. the arts, as well as foster an understanding of the We look forward to a continuing rapport. humanities, particularly among the general public.

18 WARNER COMMUNICATIONS INC. AT&T Warner Communications Inc. funded BAM's 1982- 83 Over the past th ree years, the Brooklyn Academy of NEXT WAVE series and is again one of the major corpo­ Music's NEXT WAVE programming efforts have received rate supporters of the 1983 NEXT WAVE Festival, Produc­ funding from many organ izations. However, one corpo­ tion and Touring Fund. This vital assistance stems from ration- AT& T-has supported the NEXT WAVE from its an ambitious and generous arts support program that inception and continues to be one of BAM 's most impor­ the corporation initiated in 1982. tant funders. "Being an entertainment company;' said Peter Wolff, In fact, AT& Twas instrumental in helping BAM trans­ Executive Director of the Warner Communications Foun­ form the NEXT WAVE from a series into an intensive two­ dation, "we feel an obligation to the arts-our primary month Festival and national tour. The first Festival plan­ support is in the arts and in nurturing you ng artists:' ning session was held at the AT&T headquarters in Speaking of the past two NEXT WAVE series, Mr. Wolff September 1982. The company then provided a gen­ said that "it's rather overwhelming that in an experimen­ erous three-year grant to BAM 's NEXT WAVE Production tal milieu, [BAM] was able to have such consistently high and Tourinq Fund . quality. We're thrilled to be able to continue supporting if ' "As a courageous presenter, BAM has always helped Regarding his corporation's arts contributions policy, lead the public into the future of the performing arts;· Roger Smith, Vice President of Corporate Affairs, recently said Anne Alexander, Staff Manager, Corporate Contri­ said, "We believe that thriving arts organizations are cru­ butions, "The NEXT WAVE Festival didn't suddenly cial to the quality of life in this country. They are incuba­ emerge full-blown, but grew out of BAM's commitment tors of much of our most creative talent and have proved to producing younger artists and new work. By includ ing to be a vital element in urban stability and economic the NEXT WAVE Festival in AT&T's current national grants development:' program, we are recognizing the importance of the pri­ vate sector support of younger artists and experimental work and of bringing them to major arts centers:· BOOKSHELF

The following books are suggested by the NEXT WAVE Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the Humanities Program for further reading in topics related to History of American Music by Wilfrid Meller (Alfred A. Knopf, THE PHOTOGRAPHER/Far From the Truth. New York, 1965; Hillstone. New York. 1974). All American Music by John Rockwell (Alfred A. Knopf. New Music in the United States: An Historical Introduction by H. Wiley York. 1983). Hitchcock (Prentice-Hall. Englewood Cliffs. N.J .. 1974). Animals in Motion and The Human Figure in Motion by Muybridge Man in Motion by Robert Bartlett Haas (University of Eadweard Muybridge (Reprinted by Dover Press. New York. California Press. Berkeley, 1976). 1955 and 1957). On Photography by Susan Sontag (Farrar. Straus. and Giroux. Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Critical Anthology of the New New York, 1973). Music. edited by Gregory Battcock (E.P. Dutton. New York. 1981). Theatre of Mixed Means by Richard Kostelanetz (Dial Press. Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Musicians by New York, 1968). Walter Zimmerman (A.R.C. Publications, Vancouver. 1976). The Theatre of Images. edited by Bonnie Maranca (Drama Book Eadweard Muybridge The Man Who Invented the Motion Picture Specialists. New York. 1977). by Kevin MacDonnell (Little, Brown and Company, 1972). Modern Music: The Avant Garde Since 1945 by Paul Griffiths (George Braziller, New York, 1981).

19 Non-Profit Org. BAm U.S. Postage The Brooklyn Academy of Music PAID 30 Lafayette Avenue Brooklyn. N.Y. Brooklyn, New York 11217 Permit No. 819

Brooklyn .. .it's a big slice of The Big Apple ... and a metropolis in its own right. Brooklyn ... the largest seaboard on the East Coast, and the second largest retail shopping area in the nation. Manufacturers Hanover is firmly tied into the future of Brooklyn. T he proof? We have more branch offices there th ~n any other bank - serving the banking needs of Brooklyn from Montague Street to Surf Avenue. Brooklyn is growing, and we intend to grow with it. MANUFACTURERS HANOVER Mem~FOIC