by Wain Parham, Music Director for Baal
Muses, Musings, and the Hymn of Baal, The Great
Since I began working on Baal a lot of terms have been tossed about when trying to summarize various aspects of the play. Words like opera, truth, integrity, deconstruction, façade, death, mother, and time. Words that have beautiful strange meanings. Words which often have secondary, hidden meanings that perhaps even the designer or artist who is using them has yet to find. One of my main jobs is to find a grounding place for these words...it means the following things have to happen:
1. Zeljko, Josh, and I have a big, beautiful, bizarre conversation about a given bit of music and what it means and what its possible purposes are and where we are trying to come from (if anywhere).
2. I have to decipher that conversation and translate it down into the following: Fast/Slow, Loud/Soft.
This is a much more challenging (and rewarding) internal dialogue than it looks here in print.
When the artists discuss what a scene, gesture, or word is about...the conversation takes place somewhere in the slight, gray middle-ground...between the erudite, learned definitions of words, and the instinctual, impulsive reactions we have to them at a physical level. It's about exploring the discomfort, the human response, the reality of reaction...to put it another way: it's always about the question, the answer is boring.
Reading the script of Baal is like hanging out at the rehearsal space having a conversation with TUTA members...you spend every other moment intrigued with rapt attention (Yes! That's incredible!), alternating with moments of trying to figure out what on earth everybody is talking about (Wait! So did that mean fast or slow? loud or soft? Shoot! Now I'm behind!).
This is clearly not a play of answers.
The conversation is musical in nature. You don't have to know where the composer is taking you so long as you can feel the beat and feel the gesture that is taking place...it keeps you on your toes with anticipation that can be oh-so-incredibly satisfying when you finally reach a cadence and begin to understand what has just transpired...but you often understand it more by feel than you do by technical definitions.
Baal begins with a very, very, very long song entitled 'The Hymn of Baal The Great.' When Zeljko started discussing the relationship of Brecht and Baal to opera it fundamentally changed the show for me. I began to look at the Hymn with the lexicon of opera in addition to musical theater, leaving me with these terms:
Prelude - in many operas it will tell you the entire plot in microcosm.
Overture - In musical theater it typically tells you the primary musical elements in advance. It teaches you the tunes so you look upon them with familiarity when the plot is advancing.
In Baal, the play itself is musical, though there is much more spoken text than there is song...it is evident to me that this is an opera of words. The Hymn introduces the most significant textual elements in its lyrics. It's a system of words and symbols that is unique and must be taught to the audience, not unlike many of the great novels of this time.
An easy example for me to give is how I love Shakespeare but I never can understand the first twenty minutes of any play I see because I can't follow the language. I need time to adapt my listening to that Shakespearean musicality. The hymn provides those very necessary twenty minutes (relax it's a metaphor, the Hymn isn't *THAT* long).
There is another term in opera, one which I am identifying with more and more strongly as rehearsals continue as well...
Intermezzo - a 'second play', or musical, or dramatic interlude that occurs between segments of a greater work.
The Hymn occurs at different points throughout the show...we are attempting to explore that gray middle-ground...the question is the thing...intermezzo...between....Hymn->Play->Hymn->Play->Hymn
It struck me recently that we may in fact have terribly mislabeled all of our brochures and fliers. The headlining show of the evening may in fact be a performance of 'The Hymn of Baal The Great.' The play Baal may in fact be only the intermezzo...the gray area between the erudite, learned definitions of words, and our instinctive gut reactions to them.