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Reviewed by:
  • James Dashow: 60th Birthday USA Concert Tour
  • Larry Heyl
James Dashow: 60th Birthday USA Concert Tour College Park, Maryland; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Champaign, Illinois; Seattle, Washington; Eugene, Oregon; Berkeley, California; Dominguez Hills, California; Albuquerque, New Mexico; 14–20 October 2004

James Dashow, a computer music composer well known to readers of Computer Music Journal, was on tour in the United States during late October 2004, giving concerts (and seminars and master classes) at the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Washington, Seattle, the University of Oregon, Eugene, the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, Berkeley, California, California State University, Dominguez Hills, and the LodeStar Planetarium in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The theme for this series of concerts was music with words and images, but, as anyone familiar with Mr. Dashow's work will readily agree, the relation between music, words, and images is complex, in a constant state of flux—ironic, dramatic, lyrical, and even funny.

The two works presented in the concert at the University of Illinois that I attended were Media Survival Kit and four scenes from Archimedes, a planetarium opera. Although this made for a rather brief evening (about an hour), the richness of the work more than compensated. Although quite independent in many ways, these two works share a common subject in the relation of technology and society. This is treated as a suite in the first piece, and the manifold of the relation is viewed in a different manner in each movement. The second piece, excerpts from a large scale opera, treats this problem through the lens of one character, Archimedes, and our identification with him works to open an examination of the relation of a man, his technology, and his society. With profound irony, Mr. Dashow uses the cutting edge of audio and video technology to explore these thoughts. Both works were presented by means of superb multi-channel audio and widescreen video projection.

Media Survival Kit (1996), originally a commission from RAI (Italian National Radio) Radio 3, with text in Italian by Bruno Ballardini and performed by an appropriately virtual ensemble, was given an additional video track by Cristopher Ewing using an English translation of the text. In the three movements of this piece, Mr. Dashow and Mr. Ballardini examine our growing relationship, infatuation, consumption, and digestion by our various screen-oriented media: cinema, television, and especially the computer. As the various lingual quanta scintillate between the spoken and visible word, the music acts as a wonderful dialogical moderator between the sounds of the words, the meanings of the words, and their meaning as a text. The mood of the piece varies in its three movements from a kind of free-spirited philosophical inquiry to a humorous romp to a personal tragedy. The last section portrays the sad assumption where, stripped bare of our humanity, we have become mere virtual beings. The second movement, Crema, is one of the most jocose in recent music, portraying our inundation by the advertising media and the market culture it represents. We are first apprised of the coming of a cream and secondly of its arrival, but, rather than just enjoy the cream as such, we are instructed to think of the cream, this cream, not just as a cream, but creamier, and creamier, and . . . the whole becoming dizzier and dizzier. The creators make their point with such eloquence that I laughed out loud, as did others in the audience.

As much as Media Survival Kit examines our relationship with contemporary culture, Mr. Dashow's opera Archimedes is posited on a grander scale of looking at the human predicament and the potential for the good, the noble, and the creative as epitomized by mathematical thought. To realize such a vision in an evening of theater, Mr. Dashow's vision is to have Archimedes performed in a planetarium with a live ensemble; singing, acting, dancing, and immersive electronic sounds and images are to fuse in forming a profound multimedia discourse. On this tour, the only planetarium presentation was at the LodeStar Planetarium at the New Mexico Museum of Natural...

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