“Opera Is a Closed Book”: A Conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum

The following pages present fragments of a written correspondence between Qui Parle and the poet, thinker, and artist Wayne Koestenbaum that took place in the first few months of 2012. The transcript published here has no claim to phonographic or documentary verisimilitude: the questions and answers are not necessarily presented in the right order, and they have been variously worked over so that the reader ought not to presume that the words necessarily correspond to the bodies or editorial bodies to which they are attributed. We hope that you enjoy this partial, improvisational, and provisory palimpsest (or fantasy) of an “interview.”

simon porzak:

One of the things I very much admire in your work is your attention to the particular and peculiar material forms that surround your subjects ostensibly as supplements—Jackie’s hair, for instance, or the exact color palettes that are found in hotels. In the case of music, of course, this materiality is somewhat different. With opera, as you show so wonderfully in The Queen’s Throat, all these strange objects (“the body of the record”¹ as well as the other more or less dismembered forms of Opera News, the scrapbook, and the autograph book) are necessary for the creation both of the “shut-in fan” as a subject-position, and the specific kind of opera or music that resonates in and through that fan’s experience. Of course, things have very much changed in the last few decades, notably through the sublimation of these physical supports for musical experience into purely electronic streams of sound, thus creating a whole new array of fetish-objects that interact with the body differently (wires that plug directly into the ears, for instance). Do you think the rise of electrified songs and the shift from a record paradigm to the “streaming” of music has significantly altered the subjectivity of the music listener or of the music itself?

wayne koestenbaum:

I’ll speak personally. (As usual.) Most of my opera-listening, these days, takes place in the car. I subscribe to Sirius XM, which means I can listen to the Metropolitan Opera radio network whenever I’m in the car. (I can’t figure out how to make Sirius XM connect to my computer, and I don’t use an iPod, or any other contraption that sticks a bud into my ear.) The formerly barred, foreclosed resources of the Met’s archive—lost performances that were, to me, solely phantoms—now spill their gold into my car, and the gold is a strange, mediated substance, composed of suppositions made flesh: e.g., Leonie Rysanek singing Salomé sometime in the 1960s, in my car in 2012. Obviously, music has been in cars for decades: nothing new. But: the Met, storehouse of the missing and the forfeited, of the once-present and now vanished, has disseminated its improbabilities and hypotheses electronically and virtually, with an easy, promiscuous fluidity. (As if, all along, Leonie Rysanek’s 1960-something Salomé had been waiting for its release.) In the car, I attend to the auditory spectacle of compressed time, of eras cross-cut and rhizomatically (like inter-species sex?) crammed into concurrence.

Back to the earbud issue: I can’t abide headphones, either. I don’t want music infused or injected into my system. I don’t want music to seem to emerge from within my cochlea. I don’t want to be raped by sound. (I’m overstating the case.) When I’m not listening to the Met, I’m listening to traffic sounds. I rarely play music in my apartment. I prefer to hear the opera of footsteps in the apartment above me (I hear them right now); I prefer the Morton Feldman–esque melisma of rain falling on my air-conditioner, or the chunky clatter of dinner plates bumping against each other in the dishwasher. What does this preference for ambient sound—for nonscripted sound—say about the death of the record paradigm and the birth of the streamed? A lot. Sometimes it is important to turn away from...