The full “Memory Palace” (the imaginal technique that O’Keefe and Nadel refer to as the “method of loci”) that is Orson Rehearsed consists of 52 scenes or “beats” organized by “emotional suit” like the cards in a magician’s deck. Every iteration of the piece can be configured differently, drawing different beats from the deck and in any order.
Some cards / scenes / beats are instrumental, others feature singers. The iteration that I staged in Chicago featured only three Orsons—other cards in the deck feature Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Marc Blitzstein, and others. Once I determined that Orson in Chicago would have three male singers, I discarded for the moment all the cards that included other characters, which took the deck down to about 30 cards. From those 30 I chose the 16 that make up the live recording on Naxos and the film iteration.
Each card explores a different emotion, event, or relationship inspired by events in the life of Orson Welles in order to create a work whose purpose is to probe the meaning and purpose of life itself—as Socrates reminds us, an unexamined life is deprived of the meaning and purpose of existence.
If the moment (I use the term “beat” interchangeably with “moment”) could be explored repurposing texts from various public domain sources, then I reached for those. (Another essay about that another time.) If I couldn’t find any, I wrote my own. If the beat was to be instrumental (no singing), then I proceeded to the next step. Then, I threw a title up in the air that encapsulated the moment—usually one that had a poetic subtext to it. For example, the Overture was at first called “Regrets and Catch 22’s,” as I imagined the film beginning (as it still does) with Welles remembering looking out the window of a jet on his way to the movie set of the film version of Heller’s novel.
Next, I sketched on pencil and paper a collection of motives and harmonic progressions that could carry the emotions in play. I knew that every musical idea in the score would be associated with a visual image or images. At this point I roughed out rudimentary line drawings (storyboards) of these images and set them aside in a file with their musical partners for use later.
Recontextualization (and thematic transformation) are the essential unifying forces in Orson—the “edit, edit, edit” in the score serves as the sound of his heart attack, but also as the reflexive shuffling and reshuffling of the man’s thoughts—for who can resist editing their memories? These motives keep resurfacing like flotsam around a whirlpool, or like a Möbius strip—a chain of thoughts that are all associated musically and with visual images, but not in a traditional through narrative. What we know as audience members is that Welles has just had a heart attack and is launched into a “life review,” which, as we all know, is a phenomenon widely reported as occurring during near-death experiences, in which a person rapidly sees much or the totality of their life history. In every iteration of the work, how Welles gets to his end, how he comes to terms with what anthropologist Victor Turner describes as being between “no longer and not yet” is what “happens” in Orson Rehearsed.
Next, I sketched with pencil and paper as much of a traditional partitura as I needed to in order to feel as though I had all the ideas solidly in my head. This step could last an hour or so, or a few days; it could be filled with particulars, or consist of broad sweeps, depending on how clearly the ideas were already formulated. This step was important to me not only because I began, forty years ago, as a pencil-and-paper fellow, but because I wanted the musical skeleton of the piece to be so clear that subsequent versions (and instrumentations) of the piece could be easily crafted—whether for large instrumental forces or chamber ensemble, strictly electro-acoustic playback or a combination of the two.
I then entered my hand-written sketches into Sibelius, a music notation software, using as the core template the instrumentation of Chicago’s Fifth House Ensemble (a chamber group consisting of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello, bass, and piano) and adding, as necessary, as many staves as required to accommodate a “Dream Orchestra” of notated Midi samples as they occurred to me. This allowed me to work as a film composer might, adding five celestas for three bars, and sixteen horns for another five, untethered by practical (“real world”) instrumentation concerns. If there was singing involved, I shall have sketched the vocal lines on paper at the front end and included them with the acoustic instrumental mockup. Then, leaving ample room for electro-acoustic sounds in the form of empty bars and ranges, I exported a rudimentary Midi performance to Logic Pro (a DAW, or digital audio workspace), where it served the same purpose that a cartoon does for frescoes.
Most composers have favorite melodic gestures—one of mine, for example, is a falling minor second followed by a falling major third and falling fourth—that have ended up in work after work. (From the start, the opera’s core melodic cell is a falling minor third followed by a falling fourth.) I was able to utilize these to contextualize the motives I chose for Orson, the way I imagined Welles’ mind might have recontextualized his favorite (or most stubbornly recalled) turns of phrase or thoughts. While in Logic, I overlaid very short musical samples—motivic gestures, really—culled from live archival recordings of my entire instrumental catalogue of works (over 40 years’ worth), choosing, in particular, those gestures that fell outside of the rhythmic grid of the Sibelius export. At this point I also included numerous “found sounds,” heavily manipulated acoustic instrumental sounds (particularly bells of all kinds, which play a big role in Orson, culminating in the “Chimes at Midnight” beat) and “sound effects,” all of which were treated as musical ideas in themselves. Together, all of these served as the electro-acoustic component of the eventual live performance.
There are three simultaneously projected films within the opera during live performance. Each one mirrors the interior thoughts of one of the three Orson Welles as they sing and strictly synchronized with the playback of the soundtrack. I used timings to affix the visual sketches crafted earlier to their corresponding music. The films would speak to one another, handing images back and forth, and also to the singers; but they would also have their own purely visual storyline. As it happened, these images became associated in my mind with Welles’ id—scraps of film leader, the wing of a jet flying through the night, playing cards, waves, hands at a manual typewriter or a piano keyboard, a boy’s hand tracing letters etched into a gravestone, candles on a birthday cake being blown out, a woman running her hands through her hair, waves transforming into clouds transforming into white static, an eye superimposed over the lens of a camera, a spastic puppet dancing, a red satin scarf that transformed into Rita Hayworth’s tossing hair, and so on.
I then imported the Logic Pro file into Final Cut Pro ( film editing software), where I began grafting the visual footage that I had collected over the past year or so into the timeline as storyboarded in the previous step, leaving space for missing shots. As I finished them, I began posting them at www.orsonrehearsed.art, assembling what would grow into a web installation of 32 short films accompanied by electro-acoustic soundscapes consisting of the score minus voices and acoustic instruments. As different iterations of the work are manifested, new “beats” will be added to the website.
The web installation iteration of Orson Rehearsed is a Memory Palace of the images, sounds, and words from whence all of the various iterations of the work are drawn. As such, it is a complete artistic statement in its own right. The collection of “beats” that it contains is in itself an immersive experience that enables a film viewer or audio auditor to drill down into the otherwise obscured—sometimes hidden—layers of sound and imagery that, by necessity, exist, but had to be left out of the filmic and audio recording iterations. One may wander around Orson’s Memory Palace and derive a deeper understanding of its implications. Visit www.orsonrehearsed.art/beats to see the result.
The three films which, shown simultaneously, accompany the overture.