NEW MUSIC AMERICA ’85 : MICRO-OPERAS, FROM THE MINIMAL TO THE ABSURD

It all seemed so daring, so bold, so exciting, so mod, so with it, so now. On paper.

New Music America in conjunction with the Music Center Opera Assn. in conjunction with the Mark Taper Forum was going operatic. Well, micro-operatic.

Three fearless masterminds of the avant-garde were going to show us a revolutionary--well, quasi-experimental--vision of how new music music could enhance drama and vice versa.

Move over, Mozart. Sit down, Verdi. Shut up, Strauss. Carla Bley, Philip Glass and Paul Dresher promised to pump fresh blood into the corpse of an outmoded art form.

Forget it. A funny thing happened at the Forum on Friday night. Inaugurating an optimistic eight-performance run, the three would-be saviors of the lyric muse stumbled and bumbled, bludgeoned and bored. To varying degrees, each became a victim of self-indulgence, expressive limitations and/or disfunctioning mechanics.

“Don’t hunt for a hit tune,” warned a rather naive, safely anonymous program annotator. “Expect instead to see a glimpse of future possibilities for collaboration between the arts of music and theater.”

One actually did hear a simplistic tune or two during the evening, though the hit potential seemed slim. As for a glimpse of the future--no, thanks. At least one potential adventurer will stick with comfy memories of yesterday--the yesterday of Berg and Bartok, Stravinsky and Krenek, Maxwell Davies and Nono, Henze and Penderecki, Reimann and Zimmermann. I must be getting old.

The vaunted collaboration between music and theater didn’t even surface in Carla Bley’s “For Under the Volcano.” According to the program, it is a “haunting evocation of a mind and spirit in decay.” The mind in question belongs to the late poet Malcolm Lowry. As portrayed by Jack Bruce, he wears a white suit, drinks tequila in a mock-Mexican cafe, conveys anguish by covering his eyes with his hands, spends a lot of time playing the bass guitar and snare drum, and sometimes roars unintelligible lyrics into a handy microphone.

Loitering nearby are a skinny waitress (Bley) who sweeps the floor and plays the piano; a peon (Steve Swallow) who squats on the floor, wears a sombrero and plays another guitar; and a bartender (Don Preston) who hides a synthesizer behind his bottles and--gosh--puts on a scary mask of death when things threaten to get serious.

But they never really get serious. There are long stretches when the “characters” just sit around and grind out aimless jazzy-punky-popsy, over-amplified music. There are short stretches when they try, pitifully, to act out bits of high-school dialogue (John Cumming served as the undirector). There is no development here, no attempt to make sound project and focus sight. This is a work in regress.

“A Madrigal Opera,” which followed, unites an ancient (1981) score by the ever- and over-popular Philip Glass with a modern (1985) text by Len Jenkins. The text has something to do with a dazed urbanite (Kelsey Grammer) following a strange blonde to a motel where he finds ambiguous psychosymbolic non-fulfillment.

The unifying factor is a network of arpeggios played heroically and stoically on the viola by Mary Rowell. The minimalist doodles provide a constant, irritating accompaniment first for the hero’s monologue, then for intricate clusters of repetitive nonsense-syllable chirps and drones virtuosically articulated by the Western Wind Ensemble.

At least it wasn’t loud. One must be grateful for that. And it wasn’t performed like a helpless charade. Robert Woodruff staged the thing with telling economy and imaginative use of light props. Still, the appeal to the emotions had to be superficial because the mini-drama bore no organic relationship to the micro-music.

Under the circumstances, it was easy for Paul Dresher’s “Slow Fire” to be the most interesting item on the bill. Here, tender ears are assaulted by what the composer calls a “pre-maximalist” vocabulary. Ambitiously and aggressively, it unites “Sprechgesang” and electronic distortion and ornamentation thereof with rocky guitar and percussion rituals and electronic distortion and ornamentation thereof.

The music may not be subtle, but it does play knowingly with a variety of primary colors. More important, it does connect with a dramatic narrative--in this instance, a meandering and exhausting, unabashedly old-fashioned mad scene. The bravura protagonist, who happens to be his own librettist and choreographer, is Rinde Eckert. Call him Bob.

Watch him squirm and crawl and dance and agonize and change costumes and swim through stagey mist. Listen to him sing and yell and hallucinate and scramble aphorisms. Marvel at the way Dresher processes his anti-heldentenor tones into electronic splinters and echoes and self-stimulating duets.

With suave stage direction by Richard E.T. White, dazzling lighting by Jeremy Hamm and linguistic dramaturgy (whatever that is) by George Lakoff, Dresher and Eckert go to exhausting lengths to tell us that banal man is confused and neurotic in the awful ‘80s. Too bad we knew that already.

Too bad, too, that audio difficulties caused an additional nightmare. Dresher had to halt the performance after 10 minutes, call for a microphone doctor while his amiable tenor vamped a little improvisatory dialogue with the sympathetic audience, pause for an extra intermission and then start again from the top.

That’s what happens when tomorrow’s deathless art has to rely upon today’s fickle technology.