The Sound of Silence in Two of Jacob's Rooms

Jacob's Room (1922), though Virginia Woolf's third novel, is usually considered the first work of her maturity. This may be so; however, it has little of the consistent characterization or remarkable "interiority" of Woolf's subsequent "modernist" novels, such as To the Lighthouse, or Mrs. Dalloway. Written in the aftermath of the First World War, Jacob's Room seems rather an excursion into the historical composition of character as such, and indeed, into the making of a set of beliefs and world views which could plausibly have led to war.¹Jacob's Room undertakes to "predict," from the position of an ambiguous future, what has not yet taken place in the time frame of most of the novel; it displaces that setting, that past, into the darkness of a post-war future in which the narrator hides and from which she asserts herself. The narrator plays with time as though it were history, making Jacob's "creation" a kind of historical necessity which must be played out in his final and irrevocable disappearance. This writing of the future-past points beyond World War I as a catastrophic anomaly; indeed, the war's omission from any direct treatment in the novel suggests that its conditions are at once unspeakable and also mundane. As such, it is therefore deeply implicated in the stratifications and ideologies of the ordinary western world. Even catastrophe cannot end, or easily change, such a world, as Woolf and her narrator would know. Such knowledge is perhaps what composer Morton Subotnick recognizes as being partly the point of Woolf's novel. His recognition manifests itself in a singular operatic composition, also titled Jacob's Room (1986), which sets to music not just the prediction of disaster, but also the sense of history which creates such catastrophes, such waste.

Morton Subotnick is an American composer, long associated with experimental compositions involving tape, synthesizers, and computer music. During the 1960s, Subotnick composed for the synthesizer, the Buchla 100 (created especially for him by Donald Buchla), Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) and The Wild Bull (1968). At the time, Subotnick saw these pieces, since they were created specifically for record format and thus were not a transcription of an otherwise performable piece, as the beginnings of a new kind of "chamber music."² However, as time went on, Subotnick turned his compositional skills toward the intermingling of electronic and acoustic instruments, including voice. Subotnick's Jacob's Room is in fact a work of many different phases and versions. Originally, it was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet; a later 1993 version sees the work developed into "a chamber opera for live soprano, recorded baritone voice, live cello, video projections . . . and loudspeakers placed around the performance space . . ."³ The performance was also enhanced with special technology which, true to Subotnick's ideal of acoustic and electronic interaction, allowed the technology to "respond to the soprano's and cellist's performances and control video and laser disks . . . accordingly"⁴. This specific technique of interaction, where the technology follows the acoustic performer, Subotnick refers to as a "Ghost" piece.⁵

The term seems appropriate in several ways. Indeed, there is only one real audible trace of Subotnick's Jacob's Room, and that is the 1986 Wergo recording of the mono-drama to which I will refer here.⁶ This version is for soprano, cello, and pre-programmed computer. At the time of this writing, I was unable to acquire a copy of the score; in fact, a complete copy does not seem to exist. Scores for any version of the opera, either in its monodrama form or in the full-blown manifestation have not yet been published, and I do not know if they ever will be. Though the Wergo CD does not use the "ghosting" technique to which I have alluded above, the metaphor of a ghost score seems apt: the piece exists, restlessly, only as collection of versions of itself, so to speak, as a kind of "ghost" which keeps appearing on its way to somewhere or to something like a...