Exploring Jobs in techno-opera
AS STREAMLINED AS HIS CREATIONS Orchestral score that combines traditional instrumentation with electronics.
It’s 2007, and Steve Jobs has just finished launching the first iPhone before an enraptured audience when he nearly collapses, exhausted by the illness that will kill him four years later.
At this moment in Mason Bates’ opera, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, a harrowing sound emerges from the orchestra pit, a crushing downward progression that’s described in the score as an “electronic shutdown”.
“It’s a combination of a standalone synthesiser with the actual sound on the old Macs of hard drives turning off – and one in reverse booting up,” Bates explained in an interview last week at the Santa Fe Opera, where his work will have its world premiere on Saturday.
Bates, 40, has a growing reputation for orchestral scores that combine traditional instrumentation with electronics. Appropriately for the subject of the opera, he composes on two Apple computers, which he will “play” during performances to launch sounds and rhythms at just the right moment.
As an innovator in how music communicates, Bates said he became fascinated by the idea of an opera about Jobs, “the man who changed the way we all communicate”.
He approached librettist Mark Campbell and they agreed on a framework for the piece. In 18 scenes, the opera hopscotches back and forth through Jobs’ adult life from 1973 to 2011, with a prologue and epilogue that bookend the story in 1965 in the garage of his boyhood home. Campbell rejected the idea of a straight linear progression because “I wanted to place events the way the mind recalls them. We don’t remember things chronologically, we connect them emotionally.”
He and Bates also agreed the opera would neither glorify nor vilify Jobs, a genius innovator but flawed human being who long refused to acknowledge a daughter born out of wedlock and drove his employees – and himself – ruthlessly.
The opera unfolds in a single act of 90 minutes, in Campbell’s words “as quick and streamlined as the technology Jobs created”. This sense of fleetness is reinforced by the production, directed by Kevin Newbury, which uses rectangular screens with projected images that move about the stage for seamless scene changes.
More performances are planned in Seattle, San Francisco and at Indiana University. A commercial recording will be released by the Dutch label Pentatone. – AP