directory  |  sites  |  press        Submit Site  |  Submit Press Release

By Robert Wilder Blue

Mikel Rouse

Mikel Rouse has been on a mission the past decade: his quest has been to combine music and visual arts in a manner that carries forward the tradition of opera and places it in the current time zone. His musical influences encompass the various popular music genres of the past forty-some years, jazz, world music and, finally, classical. One might be tempted to label him self-taught - in the sense that no institution really teaches how to do what he does. He has combined his small-town Missouri background with a more-or-less formal college education, added twenty-odd years' of experiences, diversions and stimuli that come with living in New York City, put it all through the creative mechanism that is his mind and come up with operas for and about today.

Mr. Rouse's second opera, Dennis Cleveland, premiered in 1996 at Lincoln Center and has been presented at the Eclectic Orange Festival (Orange Country, California) and the Perth International Arts Festival (Perth, Australia). It returns to Lincoln Center May 1-5, 2002. USOPERAWEB talked to Mikel about this operas and his beginnings, which might not have indicated that he would eventually end up at Lincoln Center. "I was born in St. Louis in 1957 and grew up Poplar Bluff, a small town in the boot heel of Missouri, so it was considered a southern town while the rest of Missouri is sort of considered the Midwest. [In fact, he says 'Missourah.'] There wasn't much in the way of the arts - it was a small rural community. If you saw any visual art it was in Time magazine or something like that. I had an uncle who ran a music store and played in a jazz band and my mother had visual art and music training in college but she didn't pursue either. Radio was probably my biggest influence. The local stations were mostly country-western and some pop, but when they shut down at about 10:00 at night you'd get this mysterious wave coming from outer space which was WLS-Chicago and you could hear all the great Motown stuff and the most current popular music. I had access to jazz through records, but there was very little else until I went to college.

"I played piano from a very young age. They tried to give me lessons but I didn't like the teacher and I wanted to stay home and watch cartoons on Saturday mornings. She was always upset because I wouldn't rehearse. She would lie on the couch eating bon-bons and say, 'well, if you're not going to do this at home, you'll have to do it here.' So it was kind of a drag. Finally after six months or so, my parents realized there was no future in it and they let me stop. And then I started playing piano by ear five hours a day. I was writing stuff from the beginning using these little hieroglyphic figures. When I was in high school, the band teacher saw that the kids weren't really learning much about music - in band you just learned to play your instrument (barely) and march. So he started a theory course and I learned to read and write music there. It was because I had taken those courses that I was able to pass the test to get into the University of Missouri Conservatory of Music.

Dennis Cleveland

"I always knew I wanted to be an artist, but that doesn't mean I knew it was going to be professional and it certainly didn't mean I expected to get out of that small town. But by the time I enrolled in college I had a game plan. I didn't know exactly how it would happen but I knew I was going to combine music composition with visual techniques and I knew I wanted to get a background in both these things. The Kansas City Art Institute and the Conservatory of Music were across the street from each other and they had a program that allowed me to take a double major. So I studied theory and composition at the Conservatory and filmmaking and painting at the Art Institute. My first year was really this embarrassing crash course. At the Conservatory there were people who had strong backgrounds in music and had played in orchestras all their lives, and at the Art Institute there were students from all over the world who had grown up with art. I was lacking in any kind of cultural or historical perspective. I spent the first year in the library reading books on aesthetics and history and just catching up.

"The Art Institute and the Conservatory were so different each other. The Art Institute didn't allow you to concentrate on anything specifically your first year; you had to go through every department to learn about all the different visual arts. You might come in as a painter but then discover photography and realize that was where your visual sense was. That was great, except that it was possible to go there for four years and not learn a single thing, although they really emphasized people thinking for themselves and the creative approach. The Conservatory was a performance-oriented school, so the composition department was not their strongest suit. You had to do these silly assignments in composition class to write sonatas and so forth, but there was no emphasis on creativity. (Remember, this was happening in Kansas City, Missouri which is one of the great jazz capitals in the world.) But the theory department was incredible and that's probably where I learned the most, and the structure and discipline I learned at the Conservatory served me well in later years. I feel lucky to have gone both places and been able to combine both approaches. If I had gone to only one, I would have had a very flawed education."

Mr. Rouse moved to New York in 1979 and dove into the downtown scene. He studied various World Musics as well as the Schillinger Method of Composition. We asked him to explain the method to us. "It was a system created by Joseph Schillinger who was head of the mathematics, visual arts and music departments at the New School for Social Research in New York - he was the only person ever to hold all three positions. Schillinger's method of composition is based on mathematics. He came up with a theory of permutation built on a set of principles from his Encyclopaedia of Rhythms. He postulated that he could show through mathematical permutation every rhythm that had happened on the planet in the past and present or would happen in the future. It was very interesting because I had studied only the western European tradition, the Hindemith method, which deals almost solely with the evolving complexity of harmony through the history of western music and hardly at all with rhythm. With Schillinger, I began to realize that this was not how the rest of the world thought. I was coming out of a jazz and rock-and-roll background and world music was starting to creep into the U.S. about this time. All of a sudden here comes this guy with a 96-page book based just on rhythm and I found that very exciting and, more to the point, I found it was how I thought about rhythm.

"His system becomes relevant to all music - western European classical music, African music, Indian music, microtonal music - because it's basically a series of measurements. He doesn't take anything away from any tradition; it's a way of pointing out the commonality between all the different kinds of music. Rhythm was a very big part of what the American style of composition was about - going back to experimental composers like Charles Ives and Henry Cowell. Gershwin studied by correspondence with Schillinger. But, his method was almost completely panned in its day because so many Tin Pan Alley composers seized upon it. They had deadlines and had to write very quickly so they couldn't sit around in an Ivory Tower and wait for inspiration. Through Schillinger's permutation and theme and development techniques you could write things very quickly and efficiently when you needed to develop large amounts of music based on only one or too good ideas you had that day."

The Modern Operas

"In 1987 I read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. I wasn't interested in doing it as a story so much as I was interested in Capote's craft. In his preface to Music for Chameleons Capote explained how he was trying to create a new art form, which was the nonfiction novel. He tried to figure out how a writer skilled in any number of separate crafts - short stories, novels, reportage - could combine all of them to realize his full potential. I found that to be incredibly exciting because I was having the same dilemma. I had been touring with my chamber ensemble, Broken Consort, and we had a pretty good career going. But I was never completely happy and convinced that we were achieving what I wanted to with the music. In addition to that, I wasn't really exploring my potential to merge musical and visual structures to form one synthesized whole. Many people say the goal of opera is to achieve that, but more times than not, especially in the grant-driven world, you put together a composer, a librettist, a director and a scenic designer and sometimes it works but more often it doesn't. For me it feels like there's no marriage there.

"The other thing was that at about age 32 I was feeling something was missing in the work I had done and I came to realize that I wasn't coming to terms with my own history, meaning my own limitations in terms of what I had been exposed to as a child. A lot of artists spend a great deal of time denying their pasts, wishing they had been brought up in Europe or that they had studied with this composer or that teacher. We all lament what could have been, but the fact is we're all saddled with what and who we are. So I had to embrace my history and say, 'these are my tools and they are what I have to work with.' I was very proud that I was developing my own contrapuntal style working with the rhythm systems and a new sense of harmony through the rotation and convergence of metric structures, but it still wasn't acknowledging the fact that I had grown up listening to all sorts of vernacular music; it was never synthesized in such a way that reflected an honest assessment of who I was. So, you really start to see the acknowledgement of that in the work that has happened since: Failing Kansas, Dennis Cleveland and The End of Cinematics. This is the work that really defines where I have been over the past ten or twelve years and the work I find more relevant to the world I live in.

"With Failing Kansas I had to decide how I was going to write music that would convey Capote's ideas in In Cold Blood in a nonnarrative way that was going to be believable. I didn't want to have singers traipsing through the fields of Kansas singing, 'Oh, we're off to kill the Clutters,' you know. And that is what led to the counterpoetry - strict metric counterpoint of multiple voices speaking - which I think puts you inside the characters' heads. That was a real breakthrough for me - to use my love of music and knowledge of structure to create something that didn't fall into any kind of traditional approach. It was a different kind of soundscape."

The Talk Show Opera

Dennis Cleveland

"Dennis Cleveland was inspired by a book called Voltaire's Bastards written by a Canadian author named John Ralston Saul. In general, the book is about Western culture's reliance on reason over other more humanistic ways of looking at things and how that's gotten us into a lot of trouble. He explores the nature and ritual of television and says that if you're looking for content on television you're missing the point, which is to fulfill the need for that ritual and repetition - the kind of repetition we find in the Catholic mass or a Chinese religious ceremony. People create rituals to give them a sense of grounding; from the first cup of coffee in the morning through the entire day we create these events we can look forward to and rely on. Television fulfills that need for many people. They may complain about it and say there is nothing on worth watching but they are basically looking for the same show to be there at the same time and in some weird way that provides consistency in their lives. I took that idea to heart and applied it to talk shows. It's so easy to say that the people who watch them are stupid and the people on them are stupid. But I thought it was much more interesting to ask the question, 'why are they there?' That allowed me to make an intrinsic connection between a nonnarrative form and repetition in the music and to incorporate the visual elements into the structure of the music. My theory is that even if people don't read or understand music they will perceive in a subliminal way that these things are happening in concert.

"At the start people thought, 'okay, a talk show opera,' and kind of rolled their eyes thinking it was going to be kitsch or parody. But, when we did it in New York in 1996, the straight classical guys who wouldn't even review a downtown concert came along with the new music people and the pop music people and they all flipped because they realized it had all the stuff they expected to see in opera, but it wasn't square. The overblown tragedy and the different character manipulation of traditional opera all exists in Dennis Cleveland, but it is current, it is what is happening in the society we live in."

Uptown/Downtown

"I knew when I came to New York that I fit more into the downtown scene. The uptown/downtown thing exists because uptown you have these institutions that have subscriptions holders and to keep them feeling better about themselves they keep programming the traditional classical repertory. But, the western European classical music tradition makes up a pretty small piece of the artistic pie. Opera is a very limited tradition and the presentation of traditional opera simply isn't believable any more. The only real answer is for new artists to bring in new work that appeals to different audiences. For the most part you see much more openness to new ideas in dance, film, video, painting - quite frankly in all the other art forms - and certainly in pop music.

"My work is coming from a different tradition - from John Cage and Merce Cunningham through Robert Wilson and Philip Glass. A lot of people probably think my work is like performance art, which I disdain. I have been very lucky with my pieces, but to be honest they could be much more successful if I didn't call them operas. Opera is a four-letter word. It's the hardest thing for presenters to sell. I make a comparison to children and vegetables. They just know they hate them without even tasting them. People know they hate opera even though they've never gone to one. So why would I put myself in the position of making it ten times harder to sell the show? The answer is that if you think of opera in its truest sense in terms of scale and the goal to merge all the arts together, my pieces are operas. I am not just playing around with the word - it's what comes closest to describing what these pieces are.

"I don't think we really look to opera any more for realistic dramas. We have movies and television for that. This is one of the reasons Dennis Cleveland has attracted so much attention. It is something that makes the theater stay relevant and if we don't start presenting things like this then the theaters will become museums where you only go to see history. There are a lot of different options now, particularly because of computer and DVD technology and television. So large institutions have to look to new ways to do things. I don't think the way to do it is to dumb down the pieces. The history of music is wonderful and needs to be kept alive but the answer isn't to try to find new and trashier and cleverer ways to present Rigoletto. It's more interesting to keep presenting those pieces in a natural way and at the same time to support new work and new visions."

More on Mikel Rouse
http://www.mikelrouse.com