Anybody who spends about five minutes talking to me knows that I'm a tech nut. I blame my parents: my father, in particular. Though both of them only managed a few post-secondary night school classes in their education, they ended up working in one of the world's centers of high technology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), aka "X-10" (in olden days, along with the "Y-12" weapons facility and the "K-25" gaseous diffusion plant), or just "the Plant." Granted, they were only a secretary and a graphics designer, but they brought a lot of scientific wonderment home to their sons, the oldest of whom would listen to them, enthralled. So, no big surprise, by the age of five I knew what a computer was and how it was going to change the world, and how I wanted in on that.
Of course, back in the 60s, the Cold War space race was driving innovation and even the sky was not, literally, the limit. We'd be on Mars by the mid 70s, they told us, and then we'd mine the asteroids after that. Nobody thought much about "What if our budget dries up or the technology is just too complex for us to master given our current level of knowledge?" Or "What if we get involved in a war and can't get out of it?" (Sounds vaguely familiar...) Reality has a funny way of changing the future.But, regardless, I bought into the biggest dreams back then, hook, line, and sinker. And, quite frankly, I'm still smitten by what the future holds: nanotechnology, quantum computing, gene therapy and cloning, "green" technology to sustain, maintain, and restore our environment.
But then, here's this opera thing that I do. Invented in the 16th century, performing works at least a hundred years old, using instruments that haven't changed in hundreds, even thousands (in the case of the human voice) of years, in a 80+-year-old theater. Quite a dichotomy. Oh, I can marvel at the theater rigging and the automated lighting controls, but those are about as cool as things get backstage.
At least, in Knoxville. A review in the San Jose Mercury News touts San Francisco Opera's new production (with Washington National Opera) of the first opera of the Ring series as "'Das Rheingold' Goes Hollywood," replete with "[George] Lucas" reference. The production apparently is very high-tech. No surprise. After all, the San Fran area is near "Silicon Valley," where the level of technological development is so high and fast-paced, a computer ordered from one of the companies in its environs will be obsolete by the time UPS gets it to your door. ("Oh, 4.5-nanometer processor technology. How absolutely quaint, darling! Are you going to tell me next that its transistors are doped with hafnium? Are you into antiquing? Ha-ha. ")
According to the review, this production uses some very high-tech scenery, including huge video projection screens, to tell the story. Even the story (as if purists out there aren't already howling) has been changed: Wotan is now a 1920s-era American business tycoon, Valhalla a skyscraper, and the giants steelworkers.
"Sigh." I wish that we could do some cool production like that in K-town. We can wistfully remember our brief engagement backing up the Kronos Quartet a couple of years ago, but that's about as far out as we've ever gotten in terms of a real "techie" production. (Granted, that was pretty far out.) Simply by its size, our last Aida in the Civic Coliseum could certainly be counted as high tech, I suppose. Could we count our last Flute, too? The set was designed by a modern artist... and we had those cool Plexiglas and laser pointer flashlights. And we did that a-Strauss-opera-that-wasn't-Fledermaus before Aida. That was pretty far out, musically.
But, other than that, we can count sets that were built in the past five years as being "high tech" as far as we're concerned. Costumes that could not have been worn by Pavarotti when he was first starting out would be pretty progressive for us, too. But, such is our lot in life. The costs of doing really progressive and/or high tech productions are expensive; likewise, the return-on-investment we get for even a tame production of Tosca tells us we can't afford to be too innovative.
I guess there's something to be said for "same ol' same ol'." There are some things that we have in this day and age that are counter intuitive to opera. TV has conditioned us to take in the world in 30-second bites. The Mercury's reviewer, Richard Schein does complain about SFO's Rheingold being too long at 21/2 hours. Even with all the "gee whiz" of the production, the 21st-century attention span makes longer works seem tedious; a century ago, folk would not have minded so much. (I salute the SFO and conductor Donald Runnicles, though, for having the guts to do it sans intermission, no matter how many people I'm sure whined about it.)
And, as I get older, old, familiar things seem more and more, uh... "familiar." My laptop is four years old (Pentium 4 Celeron at 2.4 megahertz [MHz]); my desktop is six or seven (Pentium 4 maxed out to 3.06 MHz). I have recently switched to using Ubuntu Linux (8.04, "Hardy Heron" release) as my primary operating system, though I do still keep Windows XP in dual-boot on my desktop. And I was the first one on my block to get a cable modem.
All these supposed ancient and/or unrefined technologies do what I want them to, albeit slower than an overclocked Core 2 Quad (i.e., 4 processing cores) Q9450 "Nahalem" 2.66 MHz processor with Windows Vista SP2 and two SLI-linked graphics processors with oodles of DDR3 memory connected to Verizon fiber-optic network, all for pwning World of Warcraft newbies, doing HDTV animation compiling, or calculating billions of Mandelbrot sets that... No? Don't see me doing that stuff? OK, uh... I mean, balancing my checkbook every month.
I guess that's what we have with KO: It does everything local music fans want, it balances the budget every month... well, mostly every month, and it plugs along with its 80+-year-old theater, 1,000-year-old voices, 10-year-old rented props/set/costumes, and 16th-century art form realized by at least 100-year-old operas/composers.
Of course, back in the 60s, the Cold War space race was driving innovation and even the sky was not, literally, the limit. We'd be on Mars by the mid 70s, they told us, and then we'd mine the asteroids after that. Nobody thought much about "What if our budget dries up or the technology is just too complex for us to master given our current level of knowledge?" Or "What if we get involved in a war and can't get out of it?" (Sounds vaguely familiar...) Reality has a funny way of changing the future.But, regardless, I bought into the biggest dreams back then, hook, line, and sinker. And, quite frankly, I'm still smitten by what the future holds: nanotechnology, quantum computing, gene therapy and cloning, "green" technology to sustain, maintain, and restore our environment.
But then, here's this opera thing that I do. Invented in the 16th century, performing works at least a hundred years old, using instruments that haven't changed in hundreds, even thousands (in the case of the human voice) of years, in a 80+-year-old theater. Quite a dichotomy. Oh, I can marvel at the theater rigging and the automated lighting controls, but those are about as cool as things get backstage.
At least, in Knoxville. A review in the San Jose Mercury News touts San Francisco Opera's new production (with Washington National Opera) of the first opera of the Ring series as "'Das Rheingold' Goes Hollywood," replete with "[George] Lucas" reference. The production apparently is very high-tech. No surprise. After all, the San Fran area is near "Silicon Valley," where the level of technological development is so high and fast-paced, a computer ordered from one of the companies in its environs will be obsolete by the time UPS gets it to your door. ("Oh, 4.5-nanometer processor technology. How absolutely quaint, darling! Are you going to tell me next that its transistors are doped with hafnium? Are you into antiquing? Ha-ha. ")
According to the review, this production uses some very high-tech scenery, including huge video projection screens, to tell the story. Even the story (as if purists out there aren't already howling) has been changed: Wotan is now a 1920s-era American business tycoon, Valhalla a skyscraper, and the giants steelworkers.
"Sigh." I wish that we could do some cool production like that in K-town. We can wistfully remember our brief engagement backing up the Kronos Quartet a couple of years ago, but that's about as far out as we've ever gotten in terms of a real "techie" production. (Granted, that was pretty far out.) Simply by its size, our last Aida in the Civic Coliseum could certainly be counted as high tech, I suppose. Could we count our last Flute, too? The set was designed by a modern artist... and we had those cool Plexiglas and laser pointer flashlights. And we did that a-Strauss-opera-that-wasn't-Fledermaus before Aida. That was pretty far out, musically.
But, other than that, we can count sets that were built in the past five years as being "high tech" as far as we're concerned. Costumes that could not have been worn by Pavarotti when he was first starting out would be pretty progressive for us, too. But, such is our lot in life. The costs of doing really progressive and/or high tech productions are expensive; likewise, the return-on-investment we get for even a tame production of Tosca tells us we can't afford to be too innovative.
I guess there's something to be said for "same ol' same ol'." There are some things that we have in this day and age that are counter intuitive to opera. TV has conditioned us to take in the world in 30-second bites. The Mercury's reviewer, Richard Schein does complain about SFO's Rheingold being too long at 21/2 hours. Even with all the "gee whiz" of the production, the 21st-century attention span makes longer works seem tedious; a century ago, folk would not have minded so much. (I salute the SFO and conductor Donald Runnicles, though, for having the guts to do it sans intermission, no matter how many people I'm sure whined about it.)
And, as I get older, old, familiar things seem more and more, uh... "familiar." My laptop is four years old (Pentium 4 Celeron at 2.4 megahertz [MHz]); my desktop is six or seven (Pentium 4 maxed out to 3.06 MHz). I have recently switched to using Ubuntu Linux (8.04, "Hardy Heron" release) as my primary operating system, though I do still keep Windows XP in dual-boot on my desktop. And I was the first one on my block to get a cable modem.
All these supposed ancient and/or unrefined technologies do what I want them to, albeit slower than an overclocked Core 2 Quad (i.e., 4 processing cores) Q9450 "Nahalem" 2.66 MHz processor with Windows Vista SP2 and two SLI-linked graphics processors with oodles of DDR3 memory connected to Verizon fiber-optic network, all for pwning World of Warcraft newbies, doing HDTV animation compiling, or calculating billions of Mandelbrot sets that... No? Don't see me doing that stuff? OK, uh... I mean, balancing my checkbook every month.
I guess that's what we have with KO: It does everything local music fans want, it balances the budget every month... well, mostly every month, and it plugs along with its 80+-year-old theater, 1,000-year-old voices, 10-year-old rented props/set/costumes, and 16th-century art form realized by at least 100-year-old operas/composers.
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