OYSTER, An Experimental Opera Explores Alan Lomax's Contribution To The 'algorithmizing' Of Our Modern World

What might the singing style in folk music from "Arctic Asia" or "Insular Pacific" say about these regions' respective cultural levels of...sexual repression? Such was one type of question monumental blues and folk music archivist Alan Lomax sought to answer with Cantometrics. Introduced in the mid-1960s, and harnessing some of the earliest computer technologies (like the IBM360), Cantometrics was Lomax's little-known, yet astronomically ambitious-and widely dismissed-system of coding all forms of sung music. oyster, a humorous and probing new experimental opera from composer and multidisciplinary artist Joe Diebes begs the question: how much can we really know of people and culture through computer profiling? Embedded in this 1966-set performance are nascent hints at a culture careening towards the slicker algorithmizing of all facets of life.

Diebes' opera projects have bent and expanded the meaning of "opera," drawing on the theatricality of the form while eschewing operatic vocal conventions. In oyster, over a hypnotic, propulsive score for modified piano, Alan Lomax (played by John Rose) sing-speaks a lecture on his social and musical findings, bringing the audience on a "world tour." This musical globe-trotting, through which Lomax was chasing the grandiose, almost spiritual idea of finding the "song-in-itself," is evoked through brightly color-coded videos, in which a vocal ensemble performs a song for each of the nine regions into which he divided the world. To compose these pieces, Diebes reversed Lomax's process of turning songs into numbers by turning Lomax's numbers back into songs-a "data vocalization" he compares to using Google Translate to get back something that, often very amusingly, bears little resemblance to the original.

Meanwhile on stage, a three-person ensemble (Christina Campanella, Michael Chinworth, and Saori Tsukada) pry into and piece together Lomax's life, parsing and scanning the extensive, recently declassified FBI file on Lomax (who was surveyed by the government among many influential leftists in the midst of the Red Scare). They vocally create a collaged and data-distorted version of something as full, unwieldy, and resistant to classification as a person.Theater director Phil Soltanoff, a longtime collaborator with Diebes, stages the live ensemble with his signature physical language of everyday movements and geometric patterns.

"Most of the works I've done have been a meditation on technology, and its role in society," says Diebes, whose high-concept yet sly 2014 opera WOW (made in collaboration with Christian Hawkey and David Levine),centered on the CD-skipping scandal of the scorned 80s duo Milli Vanilli, with a live-generated score that was itself something of an information processing system.Now, he turns his interests towards how brands like Pandora and LastFM use algorithms that are designed to analyze music based on parameters and then tell you what you want, just as corporations and the government use big data to profile the population. "oyster is like getting at those issues through the back door, through the seemingly innocuous story of a folk music collector more known for archiving Americana."

Credits

Music, video, and libretto by Joe Diebes
Featuring: John Rose, Christina Campanella, Michael Chinworth, and Saori Tsukada
Piano: Melinda Faylor
Live Staging: Phil Soltanoff
Lighting Design: Poe Saegusa
Cinematography for video: Damian Calvo
Make-Up/Costumes for video: Naomi Raddatz

oyster was developed through Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

About Joe Diebes

Joe Diebes combines sound, visual media, and the human voice in multifarious ways. Recent performance projects include his broken-word opera BOTCH (HERE Arts Center 2013) and WOW (with Christian Hawkey and David Levine, BRIC Arts | Media 2014). With Phil Soltanoff he created the sound-theatre work I/O (2008), commissioned by Fusebox Festival and Theatre Garonne (Toulouse). His opera environment STRANGE BIRDS (2003) premiered at Tramway (Glasgow) in the New Territories International Festival of Live Art. Prior to developing his own performance projects he composed the scores for the Brooklyn based GAle GAtes et al (1996 - 2003), a company described by the New York Times as "an adventurous troupe with one foot in the world of postmodern art and the other in downtown performance." His sound installations, video, performances and works on paper have been exhibited in numerous galleries, museums, and public spaces including Paul Rodgers/9W (New York), The Hammer Museum, the Torino Winter Olympics, David Winton Bell Gallery (Brown University), Yuanfen Gallery (Beijing), Prix Ars Electronica and the Liverpool Biennial. He has been awarded grants from the NYSCA Individual Artists Program, The MAP Fund, LMCC, Franklin Furnace, and The Jerome Foundation. Residencies / fellowships include Yaddo, Djerassi, HERE, LMCC, BRIC Media Arts, STEIM (Amsterdam), and the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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