Margaret Anne Schedel:
Ferociously Interactive Multimedia
Margaret Anne Schedel packs the brio of an entire orchestra into a life built around music and computers. Even as she applies the final polish to “A King Listens,” the multimedia opera she created for her doctoral thesis in interactive music composition, Schedel keeps spinning a dozen other plates: serving on music association boards, playing cello in ensembles, teaching MIDI and computer music, consulting as an audio engineer, organizing concerts and festivals, writing for music journals and planning an artist-in-residence sojourn to China.
“I felt like a drug dealer, going around Cincinnati and stopping people on the street, saying, ‘Hey, ya wanna make some art?’”
Still, it’s easy to get her to stop and talk about her passion for music. “I call the music I create and perform ‘ferociously interactive,’” she says. “It’s interactive between the performer and the composer, the computer, the audience. I’m fascinated by collaboration with other creative people and connecting with listeners.”
To create “A King Listens,” which premiers in June at Cincinnati’s stunning new Contemporary Arts Center, Schedel interacted ferociously with her team of six colleagues (director, videographer, stage manager and designers of set, lighting and costumes) and her suite of Apple technologies, including PowerBooks and Power Macs running Logic, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, iDisk, iChat and iTunes. “The Mac has been the dominant platform for musicians for a long time,” says Schedel, “and now, with Mac OS X, the number of Macs you see at international computer music conferences has skyrocketed.”
Musical Soundscapes
Schedel calls her project, which was inspired by a short story of Italian author Italo Calvino, “an existential examination of success and succession.” She’s quick to point out that “while it’s not what most people think of as opera, it’s closer to opera than to any other form. We bring together multiple arts. Sounds weave shapes, which are illustrated through live and electronic performances and influence each other in real time through technology.”
The opera features a Cubist-style set in shades of gray, black and white. Eight chorus members are dressed in white, while the king (played by Schedel’s real-life boyfriend, Berkeley-trained tenor John Paul Young), all in black, perches on a throne. “The costumes are amorphous,” explains Schedel; “sometimes they open up and become part of the set and we project images on them.”
“A King Listens” doesn’t use dialog or libretto to tell its story. Instead, what Schedel calls “musical soundscapes and sonified gestures” reveal the inner life of the monarch.
“I asked eight composers to write 50-minute soundtracks,” says Schedel, “and to manipulate the sounds so that, as the king goes mad, the whole reality becomes distorted.”
Teaching Audiences to Listen
To create her soundscapes, says Schedel, “I took the first sentence of each paragraph in the Calvino story, in Italian and English, and randomized them. I enjoy the human voice, but when audiences try to understand words, it gets in the way of the music. So I created a kind of nonsense language that transmits emotion.”
The meaning is not lost, she says. “When I read four of my nonsense librettos to the chorus, they could easily identify which was the song about sedition, which was the love song, and so on — even without words. So it ends up, for the audience, being more about feeling than cognition.” While the opera does contain “some traditional beautiful songs,” Schedel concedes that “a lot of the rest is noise — but it’s organized noise.”
For this composer, that’s not a self-critique, but an exploration. “The audience sees that the king is actively listening,” she continues, “and they’re swept along with him.” That, ultimately, is Schedel’s goal as a musician. “I find it so rewarding,” she says, “to help people learn to listen in a new way.”
Wanna Make Some Art?
Schedel laughs as she remembers recruiting her team. “When I picked the Calvino story to be my thesis project,” she recalls, “I went around campus trying to convince people to help me mount it. I felt like a drug dealer, going around Cincinnati and stopping people on the street, saying, ‘Hey, ya wanna make some art?’”
The composer soon found her dream team. “I ended up working with a bunch of Mac heads!” she says. “And not one of these people is getting paid.” From the outset, the Mac platform was central to Schedel’s ambitious undertaking. “When I found out my whole production team uses Macs,” she says, “it became a first level of bonding between us. I thought, ‘Oh, we will get along. This brands us.’”
Schedel relied on her new PowerBook for almost everything. “It blows my mind that we can do this show on laptops,” she says, “because our applications are so processor-intensive. A year ago we would have needed a desktop machine. Now it’s so convenient, especially for rehearsals, to not have to lug some huge thing around.” On performance day, they’ll run the show on two PowerBooks: one for audio and one for video.
