Pursuing the Great White

Herman Melville has had a profound influence on American art and culture, high and low, but he has been a curious problem for composers. Somehow, unlike with a number of other great 19th century American writers--Poe, Whitman, Thoreau--music just can’t quite seem to capture the scope of Melville.

Many have tried, but only a Brit, Benjamin Britten, has written an important Melville opera, “Billy Budd.” John Cage and Lou Harrison were particularly drawn to Melville as young composers and talked often with each other about Melville projects but never took the plunge. Peter Mennin’s “Moby Dick” is a stormy, dour, 10-minute concertato for orchestra. George Rochberg’s opera “The Confidence Man,” in Santa Fe in 1982, seemed defeated by the complexities of Melville’s narrative and language.

Now comes Laurie Anderson.

“Some say that books are the way the dead talk to the living,” she notes early on in her imposing two-hour multimedia opera, “Songs and Stories From ‘Moby-Dick,’ ” which was given its West Coast premiere at Royce Hall, UCLA, Wednesday night. And while hers is an imperfect work, too, it does accomplish that tricky and fascinating task of bringing an audience not so much inside Melville’s novel but to it instead. She does not invite us to relive “Moby-Dick” as, say, John Huston’s famous film does. She does not bother with an audience-friendly alternate universe as does Sena Jeter Naslund’s popular new novel, “Ahab’s Wife,” a Melville-sized yarn based upon a single allusion in “Moby-Dick.” She does not fall into the trap that too much modern American opera has, of trying to be literal in underscoring classic literature. Anderson walks up to the door of “Moby-Dick” and sometimes opens it to peer in, but she also spends a lot of time checking out the neighborhood.

“Songs and Stories” has all the hallmarks of a Laurie Anderson production writ large. It begins with Anderson standing in front of video projections of lapping waves, playing an electric violin that, amplified and sonically enhanced, sounds big and ferocious as the sea itself. It is, as Anderson is at her best, an image--visual and aural--that is extraordinarily right in identifying her and the work, a way of calling herself Ishmael.

What Anderson then does is apply, from a late 20th century, Postmodernist perspective, Melville’s own techniques to “Moby-Dick.” Like Melville, she both gets inside a character’s head and steps out and looks at the world from various perspectives, scientific and sociological. Along with Anderson as performance artist, narrator and observer, there is a four-man cast moving in and out of individual characters. Ahab is recognizable by his crutches, tall hat and crazed manner, but others are simply Running Man, Standing Man and Falling Man. The staging, in collaboration with Anne Bogart, includes stylized movement, dance and song. Robert Wilson’s influence is obvious. Images projected on the set, say the night sky or a library, are reminiscent of the opera-set projections popularized by Jerome Sirlin a decade ago. A thicket of visual imagery, including the complex projections of layers of text, seems a simplification of Peter Greenaway’s stage works.

All of these influences Anderson turns into her own, and much of it is dazzling. Yet Anderson’s greatest strength has always been the telling anecdote, the ability to capture a big theme in a small, ironic tale, and so it is here. She moves with spectacular smoothness between storytelling about Melville and whales, and illuminating Melville’s text. For instance, her striking observation that “Moby-Dick,” in its emphasis on monstrous, disembodied heads floating out of nowhere, reminds us of humanity’s mind-body dilemma. She searches for modern language to evoke Melville’s. She makes big themes feel very manageable yet important.

But the music can be deadening. In the past 15 years, Anderson has moved away from her Minimalist roots into conventional and loud pop music. Music for her was once one element, and usually a simple but apt component, in a larger vision. Anderson can still be an appealing musician, on violin or with her rudimentary keyboard playing. She hasn’t lost her joy in musical toys, the latest is a harpoon that makes electronic music. And she has a style of speech/song that is all her own.

But pop predominates in “Songs and Stories From ‘Moby-Dick.’ ” She collaborates with good musicians; bass player Skuli Sverrisson is an impressive virtuoso and often on stage. Tom Nelis (Ahab) is a powerful performer. But the more conventional the rock songs, the blander the vision seems. Her show is loud, and by being loud for two hours, the sound design becomes pushy. The bass is an energy force all its own--I felt it blowing like a hostile wind against my clothes. And the body, absorbing all the energy, tires. Perhaps that is Anderson’s way of preventing our heads from becoming disembodied during her performance, but it eventually made me want to stop listening altogether.

Those conventional rock songs are the ones in which Anderson tries to actually dramatize “Moby-Dick,” and here, once more, Melville has defeated a musician. But, at her best, Anderson has demonstrated that opera can be--and should be--more than functional drama. It is strange to suggest that an opera should have less music, but in this case, less really is more.

* “Songs and Stories From ‘Moby-Dick,’ ” tonight at 8; Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Royce Hall, UCLA, $13-$40, (310) 825-2101.