Medium Needs a Massage

Technology, in this age of Bill Gates, is something we feel certain we can control. And so we dream on. But listen to Morton Subotnick, the electronic music composer whose “media poem” “Intimate Immensity” was performed, in a studio version, last weekend at the Center for Contemporary Arts here. In October, it travels to the Japan America Theatre in Los Angeles and to the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

In a talk to the audience before the performance, Subotnick mentioned the clock. The clock was not invented to tell time precisely; no one in the Middle Ages saw much need for that. It was merely a helpful device to call monks to worship. But once we had the clock, it changed mankind and its relation to nature entirely.

Subotnick, who has been the electronic music guru at the California Institute of the Arts for more than a quarter century (but who now commutes there from his home in Santa Fe), has spent a long career grappling with synthesizers and computers. Electronic tone-generating devices were invented to expand the sonic possibilities of instruments. But, like the clock, they have instead changed the way we hear music and think about multimedia.

And Subotnick has come up with one technique after another, each more sophisticated and theatrical, to force this multimedia issue. He has altered the sound of live instruments as they play, calling the result ghost music. He has used magic wands that, when waved in the air, generate music.

“Intimate Immensity”--a 75-minute work for two singers, a Balinese dancer, video and two “playerless” pianos--is the next step in this kind of remote-control magical mystery media tour. Now a dancer in wired body suit can wave his hands in the air and generate fabulous virtuosic music from a couple of pianos a couple of yards away. And the same gestures can also manipulate visual music from an interactive laser-disc player loaded with thousands of fluid images.

This is a new world. And it is one that we may not be ready for. The initial reactions to “Intimate Immensity”--it had its premiere at the 1997 Lincoln Center Festival two weeks ago--were, frankly, derisive.

And, yes, in its attempts to bring together so many worlds, “Intimate Immensity” can seem theatrically naive, a penalty for trying to see and hear in so many ways at once.

At the center of the work, for instance, the two singers, He (sung by Thomas Buckner) and She (sung by Joan La Barbara), seated on platforms, revive the old ‘60s debate between Marshall McLuhan (technology is changing us as radically as the clock did) and Lewis Mumford (no, we can control the technological beast if only we try).

Meanwhile, the Cyber Angel (dancer I Nyoman Wenten) is in full motion. When not setting the keyboards off into a kind of cyber Rachmaninoff, he is singing a Monkey Chant, its rhythms spasmodically infecting the singers in their solemn debate. On a large video screen above, the world spins aflame, a globe made of burning pages.

Ultimately, these singers merge (without moving and without sex) into one being, their alluring long vocal phrases melding together with the help of a computer. Sometimes liquid visual imagery becomes the singers’ only accompaniment. The eye is expected to become a third ear.

This is stunning music, as is just about all of what one hears in “Intimate Immensity.” So why the derision? Well, there is the sentiment. Although the text comes from sophisticated sources (Franz Kafka and French philosopher Gaston Bachelard join McLuhan and Mumford), the sung or spoken lines, out of their literary context, sound simplistic. This is the kind of thing that has long been a major aspect of the visual arts--Jenny Holzer and all her imitators--but the music world can get awfully stuck in old conventions.

The visual imagery is by Woody and Steina Vasulka. And though they are accomplished video artists, their effects here seem primitive compared with experimental film, the whole last section being a pale video reflection of “2001.”

And then there is the theatrical solemnity. Subotnick has always been our most corporeal electronic music composer, and never more so than here. But as theater, “Intimate Immensity” lacks intimacy, although that’s nothing that a good director and a little cyber sex couldn’t readily supply.

* OPERA’S NEW TWIST: F3