Orphic Mysteries

O,D,E

By Sage J. Harlow

Tone List

The Blue Room Theatre

Boorloo/Perth

26 August–6 September

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After returning to Vienna from Cambridge, where I had completed my doctoral thesis on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games, I became involved in the Viennese underground music scene as front man/lead vocalist/flugelhorn player with prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). My research at Cambridge had led me down the rabbit hole of ritual language in Ancient Greek and Roman mystery cults, and their medieval, Renaissance, 19^th and 20^th century successors, such as Orphism, Hermeticism, occultism and magick; and these investigations influenced my ongoing contributions to the lyrics, music and evolving theatricality of the Flaming Squirrels, including the use of esoteric language and nonsense, arcane rhythms and harmonies, and increasingly elaborate staging, lighting, costumes and dance routines.

Consequently I felt a warm inner glow when I entered The Blue Room Theatre last Friday to see Sage J. Harlow’s experimental chamber opera O,D,E and learned from the program that the initials in the title stand for ‘Orpheus’, ‘Death’ and ‘Eurydice’, a myth that has always been close to my heart. My soul was further kindled when I sat down in the front row and was greeted by the sight of the six instrumentalists sitting motionless on the floor against the back wall between the Theatre Space and the Mural Room with their eyes closed in an attitude of meditation, while two of the vocalists sat on the floor downstage at the feet of the audience in a similarly motionless and meditative posture, all softly illuminated by beeswax candles and the lambent glow of traditional halogen theatre lights (not an LED in sight).

Dedicated to the Mexican folk deity Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte (Our Lady of the Holy Death – ‘may all beings find peace with Her’, as the composer says in the program), O,D,E has an ‘open’ score, meaning that it consists of a series of loosely prescriptive written instructions for an unspecified ensemble of instrumentalists to respond to using improvisation. Basically, each of the characters in the Iibretto has a ‘theme’ which is broadly described in terms of sonic texture, pitch-range, dynamics, tempo, duration or emotional quality. In this case, the ensemble comprised a zither and electronics player (Eduardo Cossio), saxophone player (Naoko Uemoto), flautist (Saskia Willinge), percussionist (Jane Stark), trumpet and bass player (Craig Pedersen), and laptop ‘player’ (Michael Terren, who was presumably ‘playing’ pre-recorded tracks and perhaps also doing some sound mixing).

The libretto is also by the composer and written in English, such that it forms a continuum with the text of the score and stage directions, almost like the text of a play or screenplay. However, the singers are instructed to respond to it by improvising not only the notes but also the phonemes or sounds of the words themselves, as if they were translating them into another hermetically sealed private language.

Wittgenstein of course argued that the latter was a contradiction in terms, but he failed to acknowledge the underlying emotional content, expressiveness and communicability of even the most fleeting gibberish when it is sung; not for nothing did Rousseau believe that the human mimicry of birdsong was the origin of language itself.

The result is a structured yet improvised vocal and instrumental sound-continuum which is all the more emotionally immediate because of its singularity and evanescence. (The performers are free to notate their themes or phrases, or to improvise freely each night, or choose some combination of both, as in jazz.)

This sense of immediacy is heightened by the mythological and archetypally familiar contours of the story and characters. As mentioned, O,E,D is based on the Ancient Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice; yet even here the libretto and score permit a series of ‘open’ variations, inventions and inversions on a given set of mythological as well as more strictly musical themes. (A musical ‘invention’ for example is a short didactic piece in two-part counterpoint, as in Bach’s so-called Two Part Inventions, while an ‘inversion’ refers to the syntactic reversal of a sequence of notes or intervals. Both of these are apt descriptions of Harlow’s ‘queering’ of the characters and her strategic ‘inversion’ of their familiar narrative functions and psychological qualities.)

For here it is ‘E’ (Eurydice) who takes on the traditional characteristics of Orpheus (namely his prowess with music and its ‘magickal’ capacity to charm and transform); while ‘O’ on the other hand resembles the original Eurydice, in her attitude of surrender to the dictates of death, fate or the Gods. In the language of psychology, one might even say that ‘E’ embodies the ego, and ‘O’ the psyche, Self or soul – as the libretto tells us: ‘I am / An O through which experiences flow.’

There are however at least two more characters who appear through the twin doorways to the Mural Room in the course of the opera – I say, ‘at least two more’ because all four singers and characters also shift from one state of being to another, in keeping with the spiritual and one might even say ‘metempsychotic’ dimensions of a work that also speaks of reincarnation and the transmigration of the soul. These two additional characters are ‘D’ (who appears as Death but also transcends this role to become the latter’s underlying Self or soul) and ‘O2’, who represents the re-born Eurydice, but who inhabits another body when she returns from the underworld.

Here what might be called the queer mythological cosmology of the work is also revealed to be ‘inverted’, insofar as the underworld now becomes the realm of eternal life or truth beyond the veil of illusion, while the temporal world over which Death rules is nothing more or less than the transient realm of earthly reality, which we mistakenly believe ourselves to live in and take to be true.

However, in a further plot-twist or narrative inversion, ‘E’ rejects the newborn ‘O’ for being no longer ‘the same’ (somewhat like James Stewart rejecting Kim Novak when she re-appears as Judy but fails to resemble her original blonde disguise as Madeleine in the final Act of Vertigo). In a desperate effort to reverse time and re-find the ‘O’ she loved, ‘E’ transforms herself into Death (‘O Death! I shall become! O Death! I shall / Become! O Death!’) – ironically echoing Oppenheimer when he misquotes the Bhagvad Gita (‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds’) after witnessing the first atomic bomb test at Los Alamos (a certain ‘queer’ political and ecological critique is also present in the opera for those sufficiently attuned to it).

In doing so however, ‘O’ paradoxically releases ‘D’ from her own earthly role as Death into the realm of eternal life (‘I live again! I am no longer Death.’) Thus, in a final twist of fate, ‘E’ becomes the involuntary agent for the most profound reversal of all, between death and life itself: ‘I see the threads of life woven by Death. / By me. I now accept my fate. And serve.’

Confused? Just let it all flow over and through you, surrender to the experience like ‘O’ herself, and adopt an attitude of witness-consciousness, like every good audience member should, especially in the presence of a religious rite or cultic ceremony like this one. Such an attitude of surrender is more than facilitated by the artistry of the staging and performers, who become psychopomps ushering us across the threshold that separates the conscious and unconscious realms and dimensions of being.

Suggestively penumbral lighting and minimal or non-existent set or props – basically the architecture of the room, the candles and the musical instruments – illuminate, frame and equip the gorgeously costumed performers, whose outfits are appropriately arcane, restrained and camp in equal measure. However, ultimate praise is due to the performers themselves, including the finely judged and consummately executed work of the musicians (the plangent chords of D’s theme in particular penetrated the soul of this listener) and, even more crucially for any opera, the transcendent expressiveness of the singing, acting, movement and gestures on the part of the vocalists – soprano Charis Postmus (‘E’), Tiffany Ha (‘O’), Michael Banting (‘D’) and Lara Dorling (‘O2’) – each of whom has their own distinctive vocal and physical performance style. Plaudits are also due to co-directors Harper Nguyen and Liam Longley, dramaturg Jeremy Niedeck, and producer Josten Myburg at Tone List, which for some years now has played a vital role in Perth’s artistic and cultural ecosystem, especially in the field of exploratory and experimental music.

In short: this is the kind of local independent work that state opera companies and festivals (I’m looking at you, WA Opera and Perth Festival) should have on their radar and be diverting resources to programming, developing and remounting. Meanwhile, the Blue Room website informs me that the rest of the season is sold out. Get on the waitlist and see it if you can.

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Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Walyalup/Fremantle, Western Australia. He was born in Lower Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he was the lead singer and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen), in which capacity he was notorious for his eclectic musical improvisations and eccentric dance moves. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. Professor von Flügelhorn is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a remote chair in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), some of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.