The Gallbladder Sonata : Transmission Time on the Internet

The article discusses The Gallbladder Sonata, a work performed in real time on the Internet—a work in which the uncontrollable speed of Internet transmission is a second-by-second co-determinant of the music's own tempo. The traditional order of events—namely composition, then performance, then transmission—becomes one single event. The performance is the act of composition; and the order in which the improvised responses among performers are uploaded and displayed depends on the eddying currents of transmission time on the Internet.

The audience, whether logged on at their individual computers or gathered in a live "concert" space, sees a slowly scrolling text improvised by several performers logged on in the United States and Europe. The text creates a strange and abstract concert hall, in which, for example, characters named "Stage.Hand" and "sound" drag around furniture and hand out programs to late arrivals "John.Cage" and "Beethoven." Within this text, a character named "stay (tuned)" sits down at an imaginary piano to perform the sonata within the sonata.

At the anchoring location, the live audience watches the text projected in very large format. The author, costumed as the character "stay (tuned)," sits at a computer as one would at a piano (Fig. 2). The computer is presented as a keyboard instrument. A microphone lies close to the keyboard, and the sound of composition is carried over loudspeakers. One hears stay (tuned) typing at different speeds and levels of passion. These sounds do not correlate with the speed at which one reads the resulting text, due to the varying lag factor of the Internet.

This décollage makes attending The Gallbladder Sonata unlike going to traditional concerts, whose visual and auditory dimensions are so well integrated as to be indistinguishable: the pianist hits a key, and the audience immediately hears that note. The delay in Internet transmission results in discordant timing of the visual and auditory levels of the performance. The disruption of synchronicity exposes the voyeuristic expectations of concert performance. Furthermore, the projected text provides a level of lyrics that also are uncoupled from both the sight and sound of the live performer.

The displacements occasioned by transmission sometimes segue into frank failure; and this too is incorporated improvisationally into the sonata. Such complexities of form are echoed in the content. Lines from Keats and Goethe that speak to silent music and halted time haunt The Gallbladder Sonata.

Why play with time, and let the time of transmission play with us? Human beings desperately need the practice. Playing in all seriousness with poetry and music, sight and sound, The Gallbladder Sonata is a comic musical rehearsal for the ultimate experience in time that cannot be controlled: the hour of our death.

Fig. 2.

Marlena Corcoran, The Gallbladder Sonata, performance, Mainz Intermediale, 2001. The Gallbladder Sonata premiered on the Internet show "Here's Pangloss!" (New York, 1998) and was performed for live audiences in Munich (2000) and Mainz (2001).

(Photo: © Marlena Corcoran)