Charles Bernstein

interview by phone 11/2/03

James Gardner: How did you get to know Ferneyhough and his music, and were you aware of his music before this project?

Charles Bernstein: I have had an ongoing interest in new music and try to keep my ears open; though, from a New York point of view, Brian’s work is less known than it deserves to be. But the parallels to the poetry with which I have been engaged are striking. Brian had set a piece of Jackson Mac Low, a poet I very much admire, and in one of his interviews talks about his interest in the work of Steve McCaffery and others of us. More specifically a colleague of mine at Buffalo, Jeffrey Stadelman, a composer who teaches in the music department, urged me to contact Brian. And so the next time I was in San Diego, I emailed Brian and suggested we meet. I had won an award and was out there giving a retrospective reading. This was the late Spring of 1999.  After the reading, Brian said I’d like you to do a libretto for an opera I am planning to write concerning Walter Benjamin. I was delighted and immediately agreed. 

What do you think it was about your work which attracted Ferneyhough to you?

Maybe because my own interests in a new complexity in poetry have some connection with his work. Maybe because I am part of an approach to poetry with which he would have a great deal of sympathy. 

Indeed. But a lot of the structural aspects of both your work comes out in Shadowtime, I think.

 It’s been a terrific collaboration in the sense that he is very concrete about what he wants structurally, but also very philosophical. Some of the letters that he wrote about specific sections were really about philosophical and theological issues that were crucial for him about Benjamin’s work. At the same time – I want to say “in the same breath” – he proposed very decisive structural elements – syllable counts and time lengths and forms. I loved the way Brian sees (hears) the structural elements as semantic, as suggestive of philosophical motifs. At the same time, he made clear that I had complete freedom with the libretto. He kept saying throughout that I should just pursue my own work in a way that was parallel to what he was doing, but not really commensurate, in a traditional sense of a mise-en-scène. For example, he never asked me to rewrite anything.

Well, he did ask me to cut by two-thirds one scene that I wrote (for “Seven Tableau Vivants”, but because he had been decided that this movement should be shorter. It had nothing to do with the particular content or even the writing, it was just a question of time. 

So it was, of course, great to have that kind of freedom, but also the enormous sense of collaboration in terms of the themes, the structures, the motifs of the work itself. The meaning of the libretto. Brian was involved at every level, not the actual words I wrote (though he did write on his own the final recitative of the Los Vegas portal), but the background, the approach, the scenes, the concerns; and also of course the overall structure of the opera, what would be happening. All of that was done collaboratively.

So the scenario, effectively, was a joint effort.

That’s right. The scenario was joint.  From the beginning, Brian insisted that my libretto should be able to stand by itself as my work, as poetry. I would be the one to hem and haw about this, because I think a libretto, like any song lyric, needs to be incomplete as text, needs to leave space for the music. But Brian was committed to the integrity of the libretto and a fully realized, perhaps even separable, strand running through the opera. The libretto was to be a poem, not a play; a commitment all the more important when so many contemporary operas have turned away from the libretto as a work of poetry (rather than playwriting or narrative).

I’ll tell you a funny story about the discrepancy between the libretto-as-poem and the libretto within the opera.  Early on I sent Brian a tape—I’d been reading the libretto in poetry readings around the country and in Europe —of my reading of a full section of  the libretto and I asked to him, when we met up a while after, what is the connection between the way I performed the libretto and the way it will sound in the opera?  And he said that there was be none. I love that answer, because, stunning as it is,  it’s true.  As a performer of poetry—and I’m very interested in that—my vocal production is limited to what I can articulate with my voice unaccompanied; it extends somewhat beyond talking, but from a musical point of view, not that far.  For Brian, as a composer who uses textual materials as one stratum within a very complex acoustic environment, that aspect of vocal production is not important, really, and won’t be, in the way in which the opera is produced. So, in fact, anything that I could do in terms of a poet performing the work would be something almost unnecessary for him to be doing in a work of music theatre. So I love that part as well, that these words would really be taking on a whole other acoustic life once they entered into this hypersonic space of Ferneyhough’s music.

Were you happy to leave that aspect of things to him even though you had actually taken some of the libretto out on the road, as it were, and performed it yourself? Were you happy to leave him to find a way of incorporating the text in the opera musically?

I’m happy at every stage working with him. I took that as a given, so I think that anyone who would say that they’re not happy with that is really not a very good collaborator with a composer. Opera is, finally, the composer’s medium. The libretto is determining, yes, the words are there, of course, the libretto is the base of the whole structure, without doubt; but in the opera, it is the composer who is the auteur, as everyone knows. The composer creates the overall acoustic environment of the work and for the opera that is of paramount significance, as important as is the staging, the story, the costumes, the lights … or the libretto. And that’s one of the pleasures of writing a libretto and working with a composer like Ferneyhough, who you can count on to utterly transform whatever material you provide him.

I  went into this with the idea that I’d be giving him things that, hopefully, he would want to use, to include within the composition. Also, just in the temporal frame, it took me a certain amount of time, a number of months, to write my libretto, but for every month of mine it’s taken him a year, let’s say. So they’re really very different kinds of role. And my hope in creating my libretto was that it would be usable and useful and appealing to Brian, and it seems to be. So that’s what made me happy; that he was happy.

What excites me about working with Brian is that it allows my work to enter into a whole different context than I can create myself. I still have my text, can still read it and publish as a poem or a libretto, and will, and have. Already, all the sections have been published in magazines. So that still exists, but what’s really thrilling is this additional life which is otherwise unavailable to me working on my own as a solo act performing with my voice and producing alphabetic text versions of it.

Poetry’s generally an intimate medium, though, isn’t it? I mean even when performed it tends to be in very small venues, while opera—even contemporary opera—takes place in a much larger public space...

That’s right.

Did that change your approach to the text, or did you see that as the composer’s problem? 

No. It changed my approach to the text. That certainly is one of the things that interests me about poetry, and here I’m also talking as a performer of poetry, not just as a writer of it; it is a little bit like giving a singing recital in a sense, or a chamber concert.  Typically an audience is 50 people or 100 at maximum—a 300-person audience is gigantic for a poetry reading. And beyond that number I think it’s hard to sustain the kind of intimacy and response that the work is geared toward. There’s also no production value, typically, in a poetry reading. It’s very acoustically simple; the range, the tempos are within a limited range. So I think the very fact of adding multiple characters, performers creating the theatrical part of it, a scenario at all, costumes and then a whole range of instruments itself makes it more suitable to a large audience. But that of course is a given, and something that would be Brian’s domain to deal with specifically.

I would not have written this opera, I would not have written on this subject, and I would not have written as broadly as I sometimes have in it,if it wasn’t done as a libretto. So in other words, of the poems that I write I wouldn’t really have approached the material in a way that was like what I did. I think the fact that it was going to be put into this context gave me a kind of freedom to do things that I probably wouldn’t have done in my own poems.

And the fact that Ferneyhough wanted the libretto to be published separately, as a separate entity, presumably made up for the fact that in performance a lot of the text would be lost through fragmentation or layering.

Right. That’s true, although, that’s a given too.  I wasn’t too concerned about that—anything that you write as a writer, you can always publish. It was interesting to me that it existed in this separate way, but I wasn’t so much thinking about that when I was writing it.  When I was writing it I was thinking of it as the libretto primarily—and almost exclusively—in terms of giving something for Brian to set, and I was completely absorbed by—I wouldn’t say I was obsessed, but I certainly was aware of—the fact that the words were going to be illegible. So one of the things that I had in my mind was—it’s like getting around this machine that’s going to make it almost impossible to hear the words. And what could I do to create a work which would be able to be heard in my terms while at the same time being illegible acoustically at any given point in the system. I found that fascinating as a project. And that’s of course something that I share with Brian—we’re both interested in that in general. I create illegibility in my own poems for myself, so I didn’t need Brian to do it, but it was going to be at a different level, and that was of course fascinating to me. I knew that he was not going to follow the Virgil Thompson approach which for example Ben Yarmolinsky, who I work with, did, in which you can actually hear every single word, and where the stuff is set syllable by syllable, which is also something that interests me a lot. This was going to be the opposite. But that was of course closer to my own sense of art composition anyway. So that became a kind of fascinating sort of subtext for me. And it also of course relates to one of the principal themes in Benjamin of translation and transposition on the one hand, because you’re really translating certain kinds of verbal language into other contexts in which they’re changed—they’re misheard they’re echoed. But I think even more importantly—and in the name of one of the main sections of the opera, The Doctrine of Similarity, because I created to some degree the structure and the language upon which the music is based—it is a base structure that runs throughout the whole opera. Whether you can hear the individual words or not, it does nonetheless create structural homologies, echoes, analogies, resonances throughout...

Because that’s what’s there...

 That’s what’s there, and also by the kind of Benjaminian concept of resonance and similarity, it actually creates constant, metonymic, refractory bouncing echoes of the verbal layer that’s produced. 

How familiar were you with Benjamin’s life and work when you started the project?

I was very familiar, and that of course might have been a reason that Brian approached me, because he would have known, or assumed, that I did have that familiarity. 

So there was a naturalness about that.

Yeah. Benjamin was somebody who’s always been a crucial figure for me  in multiple ways. Certainly as a poet, as a writer, as a thinker, as a philosopher, in terms of his own particular story as a European, mid-century, in a culture that ended, effectively, with his death, and the death of his fellow Jews in Europe. So his story has always been a kind of shadow to my own. There’s a lot about Benjamin—I could talk at great length about him of course—that has fascinated me.  I read him early on, when I was a teenager, and continued to. Fortunately, at the time that I was writing the opera, the wonderful Harvard University Press translations of Benjamin started to come out, and what I hadn’t read were the early pieces of Benjamin, his very earliest work, because they hadn’t been translated before. And I incorporate some of that into the opera. So that was very good. It was fresh for me to actually read this stuff while I was writing it. Brian will have read Benjamin in German of course, but I’m pretty much stuck with my English as far as Benjamin goes.

Something that Brian mentioned was that as a fluent German speaker, he was able to come to terms with Benjamin on a linguistic level, whereas you could perhaps explore Benjamin’s Jewishness. Were you happy to take on that role—if that’s a role you were taking on—and what did you discover there?

Well I read that comment in the interview that you sent me in the e-mail yesterday. It was obvious to me, although actually we never talked about it, but still it was apparent. Yeah, I’m very interested in secular Jewish modernism, and for me Benjamin is a figure among a number of others who’s very important—quintessential—in the determination of what that is. And it’s something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Certainly the opera has a lot to do with that in the libretto, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to work on that and establish that. I think the greater irony is that here is a British composer and an American poet—so both sharing English—writing an opera about a German writer, German speaker, to be premièred and commissioned by a German opera company in Munich, which is going to be presented in English. And to me there’s something marvellous about that fact, that in Germany they’ll be listening to an opera in English about Benjamin. And surely the fact that I’m Jewish has an additional resonance. One of the things that I realised as I got older, in terms of that European Jewish secular tradition was “where exactly would that continue?” You know for me, that was one of the most compelling intellectual traditions that existed in Europe, but where would it continue? How could it continue? And I think in the end you realise that it devolves upon us here in America in part to continue it, because it was wiped out there. So in a sense, I think it’s almost like our Walter Benjamin. For me, I want to reclaim Benjamin for an American social and intellectual and poetic context—transplant him here and see what happens, so that he continues to have followers and successors of which I would hope that I’m one, rather than imagine that it just completely ends, which I don’t think it does. Now I don’t mean to appropriate him in some way as an American, I’m talking about a conceptual America in which many people can participate; an imaginary America, and many Americans would choose to opt out of the imaginary space that I’m talking about as well.

One of the great things about the libretto is that—while there are indeed elegiac moments and so forth,—despite Benjamin’s saturnine character and rather tragic life, you’ve actually injected a lot of fun and humour into the text, and I think that’s going to be reflected to some extent in the music too. And in particular, coming back to what you were saying about an imaginary America, you’ve got Benjamin, in the guise of a singer in a Las Vegas piano bar, descending into Hades and then being interrogated by various historical figures. Could you say a little bit more about that, because I think it’s a wonderful invention.

Well I think you’re certainly right; there are a lot of ways in which the hagiography of Benjamin—another figure about whom I’d say something similar in this respect, much younger than Benjamin, is Paul Celan. There’s a way in which their exceptionalism can be so emphasized, and their particular story and their ending, their deaths, that it takes away from the actual vitality of their work. So one of the things that would imagine...this imaginary transplanting...would be to treat them just as other artists and thinkers without this kind of awe and...

...aura?...

Well, the aura is OK, but—right—it’s a particular kind of aura. But alright, without the kind of aura that’s been attached to them which makes them somehow untouchable or saint-like or inviolable. Or tragic, even. Because what’s more interesting to me about Benjamin is his writing. That’s why I like the early work also, because it’s just a brilliantly engaged, multi-planed thinking that is unexpected from one sentence to another, it just follows thought patterns that constantly return to where they started, but keep going out in directions that you wouldn’t expect. He’s not an artist who is interested in fragmentation in the sense of discontinuous ideas that are put together and juxtaposed—as we sometimes think of modernist art as being—it’s more like layers of thought or improvisation which are woven together to make a very rich chordal connection, one to the other, even though the chords are dissonant, they wouldn’t seem to go together, but you hear them together.

And that layering is something that comes out in Brian’s music, and your texts too, isn’t it?

That’s right. And I think that that’s where we’re trying to create structural continuations of approaches that Benjamin takes in his own work. I think that that’s my primary interest. As far as the Las Vegas portal, it’s very funny—we came up with the interrogations...I would have thought I would have—I mean I have a greater interest in American popular song, as far as I can tell, anyway [laughs]—which might be represented by Las Vegas—than I was aware Brian had. So it was amusing to have that particular section which he came up with, the night-club scene, which is something that I might have come up with on my own, but I wouldn’t have expected him to have. So that’s a wonderful example of the way the collaboration worked.  He pushed his contributions in a direction that I would have liked to have seen, but he did it, so...and I was going in the other direction sometimes.

You’ve got this wonderful figure of Cerberus/Kerberos as Groucho Marx and Karl Marx.

Right. Groucho and Karl Marx, and the combining of those two is a long-standing interest of mine. But you know, that is another example of secular, Jewish thought, represented in that particular beast. So while it’s a funny comparison—although there’s a lot of connection, and I really am just as interested in Groucho as Karl—I love Groucho Marx—I think it also suggests a kind of cultural context for Benjamin. And the stuff about Benjamin as a student activist that we have here which is interesting as well, in the early part. So it brings out different aspects than are sometimes imagined. And to some degree aspects of earlier Benjamin.

It’s certainly a way of alleviating the potential for heaviness about the whole project.

Yeah, you’re right to call it heaviness, because that’s why I wouldn’t have approached Benjamin in the first place. Sometimes when people mention Benjamin or certain kinds of other thinkers, it’s not that I don’t like them, but I think it can be so pretentious, so overbearing, so already-sanctified, that I don’t want to even talk about it. So as a result, I cut it out of my references. Whereas here, being liberated to do it, and finding it was the perfect subject for me, I nonetheless didn’t feel that I needed to be heavy about it, nor did I want to—I wanted in fact to get away from exactly that heaviness. I think once again that was a good point of contact between Brian and myself.

I got the impression, talking to Brian, that he was relishing the opportunity for stretching out, and moving into areas which he otherwise wouldn’t have moved into although he did concede that you were able to change vernacular more quickly as a poet. But it did seem to me that you were both able to have a bit of fun with this thing.

Absolutely. It was a lot of fun. For Brian it’s a huge undertaking to write a vocal piece of this length, it’s a very ambitious thing for him to take on, given the incredibly rich variety of things that he’s done, but he hasn’t really done this before, at this scale.

And he’s never used—as far as I’m aware—anything even approaching popular musics...

Right. Popular musics interest me, I’m sort of obsessed with popular music, so I wondered about that in a funny way, how we would intersect. One of the things that had to be radically cut down, by either 60% or 70%—but it still exists in the uncut libretto—is that I have a couple of Heine pieces, but especially Lorelei. I do a semi-homophonic translation of Lorelei, and then in some footnotes and so on, give a whole discussion of the history of Lorelei, and its many many different versions, which is fascinating. And I note there that Benjamin would not have liked Heine for one thing. But Heine’s a very interesting figure, Benjamin-like figure for me, in my reading of European romanticism through the post-romantic period that encompasses Benjamin. Heine was probably distantly related to Benjamin as well, so those are some peripheral facts that might justify its inclusion, but to me the thing—which I’m still curious to see—is that anything related to die Lorelei by Brian Ferneyhough, that this would be a great kind of set piece... 

To see how he would do it.

 ...because I don’t imagine that lieder is his great area of interest in opera. Although I like lieder very much and have listened to it constantly. I like vocal music, and I like a range of vocal music that I don’t think he is interested in. You know, he will say about opera that he likes opera from before that period, and not 19th century opera at all.

It stops after Monteverdi and restarts with Schoenberg.

That’s right, and I like when it restarts too, but I really like 19th century opera, and listen to it a lot. And I like Schubert and Schumann and so on enormously. So I just thought it would be interesting to take this, the most famous, most set poem and just put it in as a kind of reference, that floats through this whole thing.  And again it has to do with translation as well, and transposition and resonance.

But presumably it was partly to throw Brian a curve ball, as it were.

Well yes [laughs], I guess a curve ball just to see what the discrepancy would be in terms of something that was such a set piece. The other quick question—how much would that actually end up being audible or understandable within the experience of watching the opera in 90 minutes, and after a while you realise, as I would always say with poetry, that that’s not the sum total of this opera.

Indeed.

Or any Ferneyhough piece of music, or of a poem. There’ll be things that you’ll get in watching it, but we’re also creating something that will have a text that’s attached to it, some of which will not even be in the opera, and musical ideas and structures which you’ll only be able to determine by looking at the score—which is extraordinary, just to look at one of his scores. So there’s a whole lot of other kinds of material that will surround the experience of the opera that will allow interested people to go back into it in different ways and get different things out of it, depending on how they’re approaching it. And that also seems to me a fundamental interest. You don’t want something that’s really just there and able to be consumed in the real time in which you’re experiencing it; there are many other sort of hidden things that you’d have to go back to and find through multiple kinds of readings and research. 

So that rather than being shrink-wrapped, all kinds of things radiate out from it.

That’s right. And it also allows you to plunge in and look in detail at any number of things in it, so that you can dive into this piece and swim around in it for quite a bit of time, because there are lots of little nuggets that strand out to whole kinds of other things.

What aspects of Benjamin’s work do you see as being most important and relevant to the world as it is today. It might be tempting to see him as something that finished in 1940 and the project is over, but what for you are the strands radiating out from his work?

Well, you know I think the interest in Benjamin is much greater now than it was in his lifetime...

His work is more available, for a start...

 Well he’s more available...well yeah of course “availability” is such an interesting term—“available” in what sense? I like the term “availability” more than the term “accessibility” because it partly has to do with what the reader or listener brings to it, what’s available to you, what you can actually come to terms with. I see Benjamin within a context that would include also Wittgenstein, who was a kind of contemporary of his, although the two of them didn’t have that much in common. There are also great figures—this is probably of secondary interest to most people—but there is a particular generation of artists, what I call second wave modernists. The kind of major modernists that you often think about—or many of us do—Pound and Eliot and Gertrude Stein and so on, were really born up through the end of the 1890s, whereas the generation born between 1889—a funny starting date—and 1909, which would include Groucho Marx, Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Louis Zukofsky, and many other vaudevillians, blues singers, the important Mississippi delta blues singers would be from that period, most of the major writers of popular song like George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II, Cole Porter. I’m very interested in this moment of people a little bit after modernism, who were able to reflect and in a sense refine and deepen some of the great radical insights of the modernists. And in some ways, you could understand Benjamin as being one of the...a key, I don’t want to say the, because one of the kind of crucial distinctions would be—in a Benjaminian sense—that one wouldn’t want to ever say the, but only a; there isn’t the main thinker—but he’s certainly a key thinker in making more complex and making more articulate certain kinds of insights that we associate with the modernist moment. Now one of the things he’s most famous for is his ability to deal with paradox. And this goes back to what I’m saying about layering. I think his understanding of layering and folding and how one theme can almost transform itself into something that looks very different without ever kind of breaking stride. It’s a very writerly texture. 

It’s almost poetry in itself, isn’t it?

Well it is poetry in terms of the writing, and one of the things that people find...it’s a certain way of understanding what paradox is. There’s a way in which you can see paradox is...in a very blatant modernist way is just to put two things that seem contradictory down next to one another. And then the reader can try to confront these two things that don’t seem to go together. Ambiguities of another type. But what Benjamin does is to create very complex webs of relationship between the apparently contradictory things. So that contradiction really doesn’t exist in Benjamin. And it confuses people because it’s very hard to know what exactly is his position. Is he a Marxist or is he a mystic? Most mystics or people interested in a spiritual dimension find it very hard to reconcile that with historical materialism and vice versa. And so you’ll see Benjamin put forward by people who advocate very opposite kinds of things, but for him these were not opposites. One had to be able to think through the contradictions in a Marxist sense, or think through what seemed to be oppositions and show how they had an intimate connection, so that in a way you couldn’t even think one without thinking the other. So this interests me very much. Certain kinds of contradictions between a certain kind of materialism and a certain kind of immanent connectivism. I don’t want to call it transcendentalism, because that would be already to take it out of a thinking sphere. But his sense of a connection between everything that occurs. So I think that’s one absolutely crucial thing. Other kinds of things are very important for his work—the moment, or the very conception—which he’s very famous for—of translation and what translation is. That translation goes on at every given moment—in a sense in my describing this process of writing it, I’m doing a kind of translation of another process. And the importance of marking the translation, that translation isn’t something that should disappear, but itself distorts and changes that which is being translated. So really translation is more like a conversation with an accent than a value-free transposition from one thing to another.

And that extends to using Benjamin as the peg to hang an opera on, too.

Well of course that’s crucial to the opera. We used the concept of translation all the time in the opera. That became a fundamental concern. Then there’s just his actual writing style itself, which is enormously compelling in terms of the way in which he deals with that. He’s been very influential with the Arcades project, just being influenced in a sense in inaugurating what people now call cultural studies, or dealing with things that wouldn’t seem to be of the order of the great masterpieces of literature, and treating them as being absolutely as significant as the greatest works of art. So the Arcades, for example, and his great work on Baudelaire; the idea of the way in which one walks through a city; the urban landscape itself; children’s books and juvenile literature; collecting. All of the activity of acquiring things and collecting them. 

It’s like studying the B-sides of Culture.

Right. Well in a way the whole conception of what the B-side of Culture is, as being the underpinning of both high and low culture is a fundamentally Benjaminian...I wouldn’t say it’s an invention, but he certainly had one of the earliest, and one of the most full-scale understandings of that, and of course within a context in which he was talking about ideology. A context in which he was talking about the ways in which economic and other kinds of interests tend to distort knowledge. So in this sense, the Left critique that’s in his work is fundamental, but his Left critique really extends out toward popular culture, toward local culture and toward the approach of the reader to the culture in such a profound and resonant way that reading any of his essays is like entering into this incredibly rich, dense echo chamber in which all of a sudden you start to see relationships that you couldn’t see before, that you didn’t know existed before, but once you experience it, you can’t look at those things again in the same way. So the experience of reading his work is incredibly transformative. 

I’m not suggesting that Shadowtime is a “left-wing opera”, but it does deal with Leftist themes. How do you reconcile that subject being presented in what is in some senses the most hide-bound and bourgeois of forms.

I don’t feel that about the opera. I think to me the most hide-bound and bourgeois forms in many ways is the mass entertainment industry and mass culture, as articulated by Benjamin’s immediate colleagues in the Frankfurt School—Adorno and Horkheimer. I’m more in that school—my critique would be of a culture industry. I think the constant repetition of the same repertoire in the main opera houses in the city I live in, New York, is a problem. My son, by the way, is in the New York City Opera chorus, so he’s going to be in Carmen, and he’s probably going to be in a Mozart next year. So I’m constantly walking in and out of the production studios of a fairly mainstream opera company.

I deplore the conservativeness of the American opera houses, which are so traditional and so afraid of their audience, and so bound to narrative and mise-en-scène that an opera like ours, or any innovative opera will never get seen. The only way in which an opera gets shown in the United States is if it’s based on a Henry Miller novel or F. Scott Fitzgerald novel that everybody already knows. And they know the name, and playwrights, of course, typically write the libretto, so the idea of opera as being a collaboration between a composer and a poet...this to me cannot be thought of as a hide-bound bourgeois form, this is one of the oldest cultural genres that we have in the West and exists in other cultures too. So I think in this Benjaminian sense we’re actually refusing to accept that what has become a kind of a thinning out of the opera in the main opera houses is, in fact, what music theatre is.

And that’s one of the things you’re bringing in, an almost vaudevillian sense in some of the scenes.

Yeah—one does of course have models closer to Benjamin as well, obviously Brecht, who was a crucial figure for Benjamin, and a crucial figure for me. Certainly Benjamin’s collaborations with Kurt Weill. Weill’s a very different kind of composer, obviously, than Brian, but a wonderful composer; I love Kurt Weill’s music. Still, if you wanted to put it in that light, you could think of what Brian and I are doing more in that way, although of course in The Threepenny Opera, say, Brecht is using the melodrama as the basis both to pull the audience into the story as well as to mock that very absorption process. We are not doing that, we are dispensing with that particular technique and critique, but it is to some degree, as you say, a large-scale form which will allow people to enter into it in a different way. So to some degree it has to address a scale of audience, but of course the audience for new music in the United States is small. People are not attuned to listening to things that are not already familiar, so the minute you try to do anything that’s unfamiliar it enters into a kind of political critique of dominant forms and styles. To do that within the context of opera, or poetry, for that matter.

Poetry is also as conservative and hide-bound as opera is, at least what gets presented to a larger public, but to intervene and critique that to me always has a political dimension. You’re always talking about critiquing modes of perception, modes of fetishizing, modes of commodification, kinds of listening, all of which I say as examples of the legacy—still—of Benjamin’s thinking in the 21st century, because those are all topics that he writes about with enormous insight.

Indeed. So to some extent do you feel that you and Ferneyhough—despite holding prestigious academic positions—are still fighting the same battles on behalf of your respective art forms?

Yeah. Well that’s a good question, and I couldn’t speak for Brian about that, because he has a very different set of opportunities and circumstances . It’s a question that confronts me a lot, and...things do change.  And I think that a lot of the interventions that I was making in the 70s along with some of the people that I worked with, have been quite successful among poetry readers. There is actually less intolerance within the poetry community for sorts of approaches to writing and poetry that I’ve been drawn to and have advocated. At the same time, the mediocracy—official verse culture, the kind of way poetry is represented in the major national newspapers in the United States—is, if anything, worse, or more conservative. There’s virtually no attention or coverage or intelligent commentary on poetry at all. So the poetry world as a detached entity, with its own infrastructure, abetted by the internet and small press, has become more tolerant. And there’s an enormous amount of very creative and interesting practitioners, but more than ever that’s split off from what people who don’t enter into that subculture find out about.  The situation for contemporary music that is difficult or complex or non-traditional, is somewhat different, for a number of reasons. And I’m not sure that I have particularly become an expert on that, any more than you or other people that you’ll talk to just because I worked on this. I have a lot of ideas about it, but my information about that isn’t as intense. But I would say that it’s quite different. For example while the audience is still constrained, and the representation minimal, nonetheless the acknowledgement of this work is actually greater in contemporary music, in some way. For a number of different reasons.

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Thanks to Charles Bernstein for providing me with a corrected version of this text, which I’d misplaced.

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