Subotnick’s ‘Intimate Immensity’ Whets Appetite for the Next Wave

For nearly four decades, Morton Subotnick has pushed the technology envelope in music. With “Intimate Immensity”--a 70-minute multimedia work for two vocalists, a Balinese dancer, video and the latest whiz-bang innovations in computer music--Subotnick has now attempted to create a new kind of theatrical experience that he calls a “media poem,” meant to serve as an interdisciplinary media model for the end of our century and into the next.

This is no small ambition or easy task, as has been evident from the troubled production that has worked its way across the country, from its premiere at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York last summer to its first West Coast performance Saturday night at the Japan America Theatre under the auspices of CalArts, where Subotnick teaches and developed the project.

Subotnick not only hopes to bring the whole way we might view theater and listen to music into a new realm with this work, but he also puts it in perspective. Though relatively brief, “Intimate Immensity” views the history of modern relation with technology by revisiting Marshall McLuhan and puts our current preoccupation with technology into a global context.

The imagery is impossibly intimate and immense. The work opens with humankind’s first concept of technology: “In the beginning was the hand” is the first line as a green blob becomes a hand on the central of five video screens. That leads to Kafka, Indonesian monkey chant and creation myth and the debate about the machine that McLuhan and Lewis Mumford had during the ‘60s. It concludes with a contemplation of the infinite.

Whew!

When seen last summer in Santa Fe, N.M., in a gallery space, “Intimate Immensity” seemed, not surprisingly, all a jumble, its points so deep and serious that they could only be treated with artificial superficiality or with too subtle shorthand, and much of the new media proved not very striking. The music, however, impressed greatly.

Now in a proper theater, and with the most blatantly banal-sounding parts of the text toned down, the piece feels slicker and less theatrically annoying. Woody and Steina Vasulka’s video imagery, however, still looks flatter than typical of these inventive artists. I Nyoman Wenten’s dancing remains pleasing but as irrelevant as ever. Soprano Joan La Barbara and baritone Thomas Buckner remain dramatically underused.

But Subotnick’s lush score, sung with great beauty by La Barbara and Buckner and featuring breathtaking computer-controlled upright pianos on the opposite sides of the stage playing what sounds like 21st century Bach and Liszt, is, in fact, music of arresting originality and maturity.

Indeed, Subotnick has reached the point as a composer that his music now so seamlessly and effectively integrates old and new technology, the voice and pianos with computer, that video and lighting and all the rest of the multimedia experience seem creaky in comparison. Multimedia theater is still, I fear, for the future, but Subotnick has shown the way in music exciting enough to make us impatient for the rest of the media to catch up.