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Doctor Atomic Or: How John Adams Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sound Design

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Doctor Atomic Or: How John Adams Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sound Design Cambridge Opera Journal, 31,1,85–117 © Cambridge University Press, 2019 doi:10.1017/S0954586719000119 Doctor Atomic or: How John Adams Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sound Design RYAN EBRIGHT* Abstract: In his autobiography, John Adams mused that his 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic, chal- lenges directors and conductors owing to its ‘abstracted treatment’ of time and space. This abstraction also challenges scholars. In this article, I bring the cross-disciplinary field of sound studies into the opera house to demonstrate that Adams’s obfuscation of operatic space–time is achieved primarily through the use of a spatialised electroacoustic sound design. Drawing on archival materials and new interviews with director Peter Sellars and sound designer Mark Grey, I outline the dramaturgical, epistemological and hermeneutic ramifications of sound design for opera studies and advocate for disciplinary engagement with the spatial dimensions of electroacoustic music generally, and within opera specifically. Doctor Atomic, John Adams’s 2005 opera about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the first nuclear weapon, culminates in a dense, theatre-shaking wave of sound. Dissonant orchestral clusters crash against thick layers of digital audio sam- ples. All action on stage stops; the only sense of movement comes from sound cours- ing throughout the opera house. The effect is at once powerful and discomforting. Adams and his sound designer, Mark Grey, evoke this epochal detonation using a spatialised electroacoustic sound design, one that destabilises the traditional sonic frame of operatic production and immerses the audience in sound. This article uses the sound design of Doctor Atomic to advocate for an engagement with the spatial dimensions of electroacoustic music generally, and within opera spe- cifically. Sound design originated in cinema, where it most often refers to the post- production process of arranging and situating layers of music, sound effects and speech within a stereo or multichannel sound field. Its dramatic and immersive potential is significant. For Adams, sound design encompasses the acoustic prepar- ation and real-time organisation of singers, instrumentalists, electroacoustic sounds and – most importantly –‘the actual room itself’.1 In opera, film, television and * Ryan Ebright, Bowling Green State University, USA; [email protected] Earlier versions of this research were presented at the autumn meeting of the Southeast chapter of the American Musicological Society, East Carolina University, September 2013; and Left Coast Minimalism: The Fourth International Conference on Minimalist Music, California State University, Long Beach, October 2013. I am grateful for the thoughtful discussions at each, and am particularly indebted to Alice Miller Cotter, Sara Haefeli, Bob Fink, Mark Katz, Will Robin and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their generous feedback and comments. I wish also to thank Thomas Faulds for his assistance with Ableton Live, Carol Ann Cheung at Boosey & Hawkes and my interviewees, who gave generously of their time and thoughts. 1 John Adams, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (New York, 2008), 208. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ISPG/USA, on 18 Mar 2021 at 22:48:05, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954586719000119 86 Ryan Ebright video games, sound design is aimed fundamentally at using sound to activate and make use of the space inhabited by listeners. Opera offers scholars a productive field for examining the social, political and eth- ical spaces constructed by sound.2 Herbert Lindenberger and Jane Fulcher, among others, have explored the political dimensions of opera as a social institution.3 And attention to the mise en scène of opera reveals much about how the visual space of the stage and its signifiers can complement or counterpoint the libretto and music in meaningful ways.4 But the use of electroacoustic sound in opera since at least the 1960s also warrants a Euclidean consideration of sonic space; that is, the physical locations of sound sources as well as sound’s directional move- ment (or seeming movement). The paradigm of sound emanating solely from the stage area is increasingly inapt, and an investigation into sound’s spatial valences, along with its interaction with music and mise en scène, affords critical avenues for understanding how drama and meaning are constructed in many twentieth- and twenty-first-century operas. Sound design marks a significant shift in operatic production, with the sound designer acting as a new and influential creative agent who problematises conventional hierarchies between composer, performer and conductor, and even the distinction between audience and performer. It is a site of productive tension for both artists and scholars. Pamela Rosenberg, the then-general director of the San Francisco Opera (SFO) who commissioned Doctor Atomic,reflected, ‘Probably the most tense part of the whole production process was trying to get the sound design right. It was the thing that various people felt the most upset about.’5 For scholars, sound design can complicate the conventional distinctions between opera’s multimedial ele- ments. Is sound design best understood as a component of scenography, akin to light- ing, set or costume design, and therefore part of an opera’s production history and changeable?6 Or is it more closely allied with opera’s music and libretto, (ideally) fixed and immutable? 2 Georgina Born divides scholarship on space and music into three camps: studies of musical ‘pitch space’, those that interrogate in ‘Euclidean terms’ the spatialisation of sound via multichannel technologies, and ‘postformalist’ approaches that engage with the notion of space on a more abstract level. See Born, ‘Introduction’,inMusic, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, ed. Georgina Born (Cambridge, 2013), 9–20. For a brief history of spatial music, see Holly Rogers, Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (New York, 2013), 82–97. 3 See especially Victoria Johnson, Jane F. Fulcher and Thomas Ertman, eds., Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu (Cambridge, 2007). 4 See, for instance, David J. Levin, Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago, 2007). 5 Pamela Rosenberg, Donald Runnicles, Clifford A. Cranna, Jr., Ian Robertson and John Adams, Doctor Atomic: The Making of an American Opera, interviews conducted by Caroline Crawford and Jon Else, 2005–6 (Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2008), 22. 6 I am sympathetic to theatre historian Ross Brown’s argument that sound design ‘can only be discerned and judged in situ and in the moment of performance’, and thus fits uncomfortably in the category of scenography. Ross Brown, Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice (New York, 2010), 127. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ISPG/USA, on 18 Mar 2021 at 22:48:05, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954586719000119 Doctor Atomic 87 I will argue here for the latter, and also suggest that sound design as a new element of the operatic text has particularly significant ramifications for the study of opera’s other media, especially the performance space and the performing body. Doing so will highlight the epistemological limitations of the traditional score, as well as the conventional methodologies used to study it. The orchestral score for Doctor Atomic, for instance, indicates only when digital audio samples – specified by a generic descriptor – begin and end, and reveals little or nothing about dynamics, rhythmic or pitch features, timbre or spatial placement and trajectory.7 To help make the case for a disciplinary turn towards sound design in opera stud- ies, I draw on interviews with director Peter Sellars and sound designer Mark Grey, as well as close listening and an examination of what I refer to as the ‘digital score’ of Doctor Atomic: the opera’s electronic components, including digital sound files and the software that indicates their spatial placement and dynamics. In analysing the relation- ships between the orchestral score, digital score and mise en scène, I aim to reveal how sound design participates in the more ‘drastic’ qualities of performance – what Nina Sun Eidsheim has identified as the ‘tactile, spatial, physical, material, and vibrational sensations … at the core of all music’.8 With several productions in the United States and Europe since its premiere, as well as multiple video and sound recordings, Doctor Atomic has become one of the more enduring operas of the new millennium.9 This, despite an ambivalent critical reception and continued concerns over the viability of its libretto, a ‘cut-and-paste’ assemblage of poetry and historical documents compiled and arranged by the dir- ector and Adams’s long-time collaborator Peter Sellars.10 Although Doctor Atomic serves as a useful subject for a case study of sound design’s place in contemporary opera, my intent is neither to canonise nor idealise. Rather, this article attends to the technicity of opera, uncovering the ‘host of media and materialities’ that Gundula Kreuzer has shown lie embedded within opera’s musical, verbal and visual signifying systems.11 7 John Adams, Doctor Atomic: Opera in Two Acts, Full Score (New York, 2012). Examples 1 and 3, although in reduced score format, approximate how the sound design elements are indicated in the full score. 8 Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham, NC, 2015), 8. See also Carolyn Abbate, ‘Music—Drastic or Gnostic?’ Critical Inquiry 30 (2004), 505–36. 9 Two DVD recordings of Doctor Atomic have been commercially released, along with one audio recording. John Adams, Doctor Atomic (DVD), dir. Peter Sellars (East Sussex, UK: Opus Arte, 2008); John Adams, Doctor Atomic (DVD), dir. Penny Woolcock (New York: Sony Music Entertainment, 2011); John Adams, Doctor Atomic (CD) (New York: Nonesuch, 2018).
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