The Brooklyn Rail

Mikel Rouse is one of the most important and accomplished contemporary American opera composers. Coming to New York out of Kansas City in 1979 with his rock band, Tirez Tirez, Rouse went on to pioneer polyrhythmic, post-minimal chamber music with his Broken Consort ensemble, and his 1984 album Quorum, a set of drum machine studies, was the first of its kind. His operas include Failing Kansas, based on the 1959 murder of the Clutter family; Funding, a set of personal stories about surviving when broke in New York City; The End of Cinematics, a loving critique of the evolution and devolution of film in mass culture; and his magnum opus, Dennis Cleveland, an opera that is also a talk show in the style of notorious ones from Richard Bey, Jerry Springer, and Geraldo Rivera, which had an institutional breakthrough in 2002 when it was staged at Lincoln Center. His operas are often presented as other media—TV or film—and his compositional method twines together complex and supple rhythmic and harmonic patterns with a spoken word and gentle crooning. He’s an avant-gardist with pop and deep humanist appeal. His memoir, The World Got Away, will be published May 21 by the University of Illinois Press. He sat down for coffee with the Rail on a bright, chilly March afternoon in Hell’s Kitchen.

George Grella (Brooklyn Rail): I always ask myself when I see a new opera, why are these people singing?

Mikel Rouse: Yeah, well, you nailed it. It's an interesting question. My operas kind of started what I would call the second half of my career, because I was doing my pop band, and Broken Consort, and absorbing everything you can get in the downtown scene in New York in the late seventies into the eighties. That cross-fertilization of new music, rock music, punk, hip hop coming out of the Bronx, it was a very fortuitous time to have landed here—not the least of which was cheap rent.

But as I was moving into the early, mid-nineties, at this point, I've lived through three major recessions. And the first recession took both bands off the road, and I had to figure out how I was going to stay in the game. By the time I'm getting to the talk show opera, Dennis Cleveland, I've asked myself the same question. The things I'm seeing that are really interesting to me that have singing aren't asking me to believe that these people would actually do that.

With Cleveland, what was so interesting is by staging it as a television show with the audience under camera, and studio lighting—I was watching a lot of the daytime TV talk shows, and especially a couple of them, like the Richard Bey show on WWOR out of New Jersey, it was a three-ring circus. And people actually did get up and sing, they did all sorts of crazy things. And I thought, this is believable to me. This is why all the things were always music driven. This is why I can get away with this. And it doesn't have what I find not believable about musicals.

Nobody questioned it. You saw people who thought they were coming to see an opera. Some people thought, “wait a minute, this looks like a television studio, what's going on?” So there probably were some people who didn't get it, or were disgruntled. But after the Kitchen premiere (1996), a woman came up and asked, “when does it air?” Was it an opera stage as a talk show, or was it a really surreal talk show? And coming out of the downtown scene that made sense to me.

Rail: There's the difference in opera as a way to work with drama and music together on stage, and then there's our culture which is a whole set of people and their social and aesthetic concerns that don't necessarily have anything to do at all with what we're seeing on stage. The social idea is that opera is for people with money to see people with money on stage, but Dennis Cleveland is the melodramatic stories that people loved in and from the nineteenth century.

Rouse: Some critics, like Mark Szwed, got it. They said that this is right for opera. The other thing that was fascinating to me was that because I was coming up from Robert Wilson and Robert Ashley, and non-narrative kind of theater and music at La Mama, seeing Ashley’s work at Danceteria. The productions start, a lot of stuff happens, and they stop. There's really no resolution. By the time I was done with Dennis Cleveland, that's when Jerry Springer was really big, he always had a sort of a BS caption at the end to try to wrap up. It made no sense because it was just something pre-written and had nothing to do with what happened.

But the idea that the shows would just start and stop, I got really philosophical about it. It's like a sunset, that's what happens. When people used to see other non-narrative stuff, they said “I don't get it, there's no story.” I say, “Is there a story to a sunset? Because that's moving to you?” I liked the idea of things that could move you and you don't know why, as opposed to… I never had the skill of a Steven Spielberg where the dog dies, and I pull your heartstrings with the John Williams score. This is the moment where you're really going to be moved. And that's a skill, I’m not dissing it. But I was always fascinated with non-narrative; “why is this knocking me out?” I'm now in charge of figuring out my emotions.

I certainly wasn't an advocate for trash TV. But at that particular moment, there were certain experimental artists that I respected downtown, you know, playing for maybe two-hundred people. And here’s Richard Bey’s syndicated show, he’s playing to millions. And I know what I'm getting out of it probably isn't what the general public is getting out of it. But it's there. It was a fascinating moment in TV culture.

Rail: Your sound and style are close to Ashley in key ways. Did you have exposure to his work before you started doing this? Or were you kind of going in parallel?

Rouse: When I got to Kansas City, I studied at the Kansas City Art Institute. I studied painting and filmmaking there. And at the time, across the street was the Conservatory of Music. And I discovered Source magazine in the Conservatory library. And that's how I discovered Robert, actually, and I found a record [Extended Voices]. This is way before coming to New York and seeing him perform. He had a piece on there called She Was a Visitor. And I'm listening to that, and punk is on its way, and it's like, how can all this amazing stuff exist on vinyl? I wanted to find out more about him, and then I get to New York, and I'm living on 14th Street, and just absorbing all this stuff. And then all of a sudden, he's everywhere, he's doing these 12-inch singles from Perfect Lives that were just so amazing.

When I was first learning about Ashley, I wasn't thinking about theater. But there was a moment when the 1987 recession hit, I couldn't put bands on the road, I needed to stay in the game. But I also thought, I was fortunate enough for one semester to study with Stan Brakhage; is there a way to bring that stuff back? I think my timing was good, because of where people were going with visual stuff.

Rail: Can you conceive of something like Dennis Cleveland being a repertory piece, the way that is slowly happening with Ashley’s operas?

Rouse: I could. And I think it also could be modernized for today. The song “In Cold Blood” from Failing Kansas was performed by mezzo-soprano Olivia Currier for Marshall Opera’s oral history project concert. [April 27] I was talking to Olivia about it, and didn't know about this—she thought people in her generation would love to see that.

I guess there was a part of me that thought because Dennis Cleveland was so specific to the talk show era, that it would be harder to adapt now. But you never know. And it was going to go Off-Broadway. But then Jonathan Larson's Rent hit and was triple-booked. So it didn't happen. But now I'm thinking about going back to some of these people because Olivia, all she could think about was how much fun it would be to be an audience member.

Traditional opera has no problem with really interesting directors doing interesting stagings. Baritone Nathan Gunn told me that when he came to see The End of Cinematics in 2005, he said “this is the future of opera.” He was talking about the film staging. So the interesting thing about this whole conversation is they seem to be okay with the staging. You know, but will they bring that level to performance? I still think Ashley is too far out for the mainstream.

Rail: Yeah. Not Ashley, but do see your own work as adaptable to a more technical or virtuosic singing style?

Rouse: I'm happy with the non-vibrato thing you get in those pieces. But on the other hand, I really think the music is strong enough to support it, and I think that would be fun. That would be a really interesting thing to do. Even Olivia was asking me for some direction for doing “In Cold Blood,” I said, “this is how I did it and this is what I think, but I don't want to constrain you in terms of how you can think about it.”

Rail: The other side of that, though, is there's an argument to be made that this is baseline American opera style, American culture and vernacular language. We’ve had one hundred years of film, for example, and then TV talk shows, this is the contemporary world, we can have our own style.

Rouse: You know, everybody has this problem, it's not just opera, it's museums; how do they stay relevant? How does MoMA stay relevant when there's galleries and, especially in the eighties and nineties, when there were really hit galleries downtown, and when there were a lot more opportunities. It’s the dilemma of a tradition surviving while trying to figure out how to bring in younger audiences, and trying to figure out how do we stay valid?

Rail: I know that discovering the Schillinger method created by New School teacher Joseph Schillinger method was very important to you. That was essential for Gershwin also, and Gershwin is the famous example of, is he classical or pop? You also put those together in one thing.

Rouse: Gershwin is probably the best example because there were some people who thought Schillinger is mathematics, it's a system, right? And what, because of the word system, it turns it into something. But it's basically supplying you with so much variation material. And that's why it got a bad rap, because people like the Tin Pan Alley composers who had to churn out hours and hours of music, you're not going to have hours and hours of inspiration. We don't have to turn out music that quickly. So the theme and variation stuff alone is important. And of course the first book is the book of rhythm.

The book of rhythm is the foundation of everything he talks about. I was hooked because I was studying African music, I was studying world music; this is the way you're already thinking, and now you're not alone. But there's also a lot of people who think that everything I wrote was under the Schillinger system. And it wasn't, it became so intuitive that I probably put those books away in the late eighties

Rail: You have that technique of multiple circular patterns that work together, but also they kind of have an independence, and you build musical tension and release that way, different than a straight timeline.

Rouse: One of the things I thought a lot about with Broken Consort and the operas was what I called “harmonic rhythm.” It was basically rotating meters, as they started to move together, like planets, you could get away with dissonances that you normally couldn’t. It’s because you can intrinsically feel them coming together. And that blew me away. It’s the foundation of pretty much everything I still do now. Even in the more pop-song based records.

Rail: And you have found this same way to work with text…

Rouse: … Which can have multiple meanings, how the words land right now…

Rail: Was that hard-earned?

Rouse: Certainly at times it was really hard, hard to make it clear. I'd never wanted to do it just to say, “Look how clever I am. I can do all these rhythmic things.” It always has to relate to the listener. But it was always intuitive, because I was listening to world music. And I was exposed to a lot of stuff, those King Sunny Adé concerts in New York City back in the day. So all of that was kind of in the works. There was a time where it really just felt like research and work.

It's so funny to think about this, because I haven't talked about this in years. If there was five against four against three, I was writing in that way. I wanted the player to have the feeling of the downbeat of five if he was in five. And we did that for a number of pieces until it just got so fricking frustrating that I just had to say, I know the right way to do this is to bar it all together, but I wanted them to really feel the rhythm that they were responsible for. I literally forgot about that! That must have been incredibly frustrating for some people.

Rail: You’re the main, and usually sole, performer in your operas. Do you ever think in terms of another performing voice?

Rouse: That's happened more instrumentally than it has vocally. But a lot has to do with money. Think about the loft days with Morton Feldman, those people. Why am I going to write an orchestral piece? No one's going to perform it. I just came out of that DIY thing so much.

I love working with musicians, I love working with singers. I always liked the idea of being able to bring in a wide variety of performers and I didn't want style, or lack of being able to read music to be completely prohibitive. With Dennis Cleveland, we had hip hop artists, we had traditional opera singers. I've got it tiered in three sections; fully scored, that's one one type; then another scored but with improvisation around pitch centers, and then the other one is just free.

Rail: Giving people musical voice is inherently humanist. In Failing Kansas and Dennis Cleveland, even the ridiculous movie producers and screenwriters in The End of Cinematics, these are all people, they have their own human thoughts, they're around us. The talk shows, they’re supposed to be entertaining us with damaged people, but you give them a voice.

Rouse: Absolutely. I do remember thinking with Dennis Cleveland—you know, intellectuals can be such snobs. I remember calling some of my artist friends when I was getting this idea. One friend of mine, who was a painter, in his studio, I said “What are you doing?”

“What do you think I'm doing? I'm working.”

“Just turn on the television for one second!”

“I’m not doing it again!”

“You just got to see this!” I didn't come from a talking-down point, I could still be frightened and repulsed by it, but I wasn’t talking down to it.

Rail: You seem to be kind of outlining a real fundamental divide between, for lack of a better term, high culture and low culture. That’s a difference between opera that composers make and the social opera culture. Who is a worthy subject, who's presented on stage? A lot of Americans seem to think that the most operatic characters are the English royal family. But look at all these amazing, fascinating people around you. But at the same time, is exploitation a danger? The talk shows were based around exploitation. But you managed to stay away from that.

Rouse: I think it's because of the music. It advocates for people, who are the guests of the talk show. I told the cast, I want you to actually think if you were going on Geraldo or something. But it's the music that I think humanizes it, it’s not humiliating to be on the stage. I came up with taglines for Dennis Cleveland, and one of them was “Finally, real opera for real people.” And it was meant to be funny, but it also was this idea of, it's for us.

Rail: The music allows them to be seen in a different way.

Rouse: I would think so. I was reading about a new book out on Billie Holiday, and it struck me, the dignity that she achieved through singing. She had her problems but there's something about that voice and about how she approached it.

Rail: So before you put a character onstage, what is your driving impulse? You came out of a rock band, and there’s that impulse for young people to sing about themselves and the world to an audience. It goes back to the first question, why do you want people singing in front of an audience? What makes you communicate that way?

Rouse: I think just the idea of singing for an audience goes all the way back to growing up in a small town and seeing country and western artists, seeing and then learning about rock and roll. And seeing bands coming to New York during the punk era. But that is a slightly different question. Because that is just a tradition of people singing in front of each other. You know, St. Patrick’s Day, you can go to an Irish pub. And if you're lucky, you get to see really traditional Irish musicians playing music and singing. All that's awesome. But that's a different question—the believability of stage and singing? Well, now I'm going to get up and I'm going to sing this part about whatever I'm acting out, or whatever is going on?

Rail: Maybe the question is, what do you need these other characters for? You could go up on stage and sing songs as Mikel Rouse. What does Mikel Rouse the composer need these characters for?

Rouse: When I cast Dennis Cleveland, I was looking for variety. I was definitely looking for personalities, and people that could inhabit this role in a way that wasn't foolishly acting, you know, that was committed to the music and also kind of trying to find who they might be if they were really put in a situation. And when we go on tour we always cast some local people. And in that sense, I think that the variety of personalities was very important to how how the piece was perceived.

And even in Cinematics, kind of staged as a three dimensional film, you have three guys, including me, playing myself. And you have three women playing the role that my wife at the time, Lisa Boudreau, played. And that to me was interesting, because even though they're dressed alike or wearing the same wigs, they're still inhabiting very individual things, especially if the camera is on one, a closeup on one. It's clear that they look different than the others than when you're just seeing it from a distance. So there's something about that, that pulls you in and out of the piece in a way I thought was really fun and fascinating.

Rail: Is that what you yourself have in your mind, you want people to hear this thought that you have, do you feel you need more than one character to do that?

Rouse: I guess it depends on the piece. Definitely for Dennis Cleveland. I needed it and I needed it for Cinematics. It actually goes back to money. People really liked the idea with Failing Kansas that I was basically performing to my multitrack voice. In fact, there was a woman at one point who I met who was so blown away, it dawned on me that she thought all those voices were actually coming out of me. I actually thought it would be so awesome to have all those voices done by multiple people. So if it’s a thing where Perry Smith is speaking or singing, to have three or four Perry Smiths doing it. That would have been a goal, like, beyond belief. Couldn't afford it! Now, if something crazy happened that I could see the piece coming back in that way, I'd love it.

Rail: Yeah, that would be …

Rouse: … just be so amazingly interesting! I’m in Cleveland with singers, and everybody's important; singers, cue cards, cameras, whatever. Every time we took pictures when we toured this all over the world, we took a picture on stage, it looked like a small high school. Yeah, it was like thirty-five people. So it had the forces of a traditional opera, just not not staged—efficient.

Rail: With the possibility of other performers and other voices, you have the possibility of surprises? For yourself, too. The whole Dennis Cleveland cast on stage, all those things look like high school, so you don't have control over every element. But things can surprise you, is that possible? Is that a good thing for you?

Rouse: I really liked the aspect that there could be that. I like the aspect that as the talk show host character, when I went up to somebody, they might forget their lines. And that we'd have to improvise or have to, you know, coax them along. This is not exactly what your question is—predictability. And I also liked the fact that—I only learned this afterward—so many people in the audience were petrified. Because they didn't get, until maybe halfway through the piece, that [the other performers] were audience plants. So if I could choose them to stand up and speak or sing, why wouldn't I choose you? Oh, that's fine! And there was one person who came up to me after the piece and said, “Oh, my God, I had my whole speech ready, if you came up to me,” and again, that was really, really gratifying, because it means what we did felt seamless. It felt real.

I mean, these people are telling very poetic stories. It's not like somebody getting up and saying this or whatever. But there was also enough improvisation from the audience members, where they can yell at somebody or just react like at a talk show. Yeah, I don't know, the optical illusion was probably better than I expected.

Mikel Rouse appears in conversation with Brent Reidy, Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries at NYPL, at the Bruno Walter Auditorium, for a listening party for his new album, Language Barrier, and to talk about The World Got Away, June 13, 5p.m.