DPO presents a musical metaphor for our technology-dependent world

When I was a kid, it wasn’t all that unusual for one kid to call down his or her wrath on another. If you were really P-O’d at Bobby or Suzy, you might say something like, “I hope you fall down a deep well full of spiders that crawl in your ears and up your nose and suck your brains right out of your skull.”

Talk about spite.

And before you think such curses are child’s play, consider this: folklore is crammed with stories of people who actually did things as bad as that…and worse. For example….

In Greek mythology, there was a god named Prometheus, who committed an unpardonable crime – he brought fire to the world. For his crime, he was bound to a rock, where a giant bird picked away at his vitals in perpetuity. (They were eternally renewed and eternally destroyed each day.) Yeeeech!

After all, what was there for the gods to be so upset about? It was fire, for Pete’s sake. It heats homes, cooks food, melts metal. All good things. But obviously the gods had a different take on it.

And a brilliant American musical composer had a different take on it as well. He saw fire as representing technology, technology that has expanded for the last 500 years and drastically changed our society. Need an example?

Not quite 50 years ago, most businesses hired top- and middle-management personnel (mostly men) and supplied each with a secretary (mostly women), who performed all the clerical duties for the manager. Then technology, in the form of room-sized computers with all their support machinery (keypunch machines, optical character readers) changed the nature of the secretaries’ clerical duties to mostly those of a data entry clerk.

Not long after, managers found computer terminals on their desks replete with word processing and spreadsheet software. And looked up to see their secretaries were no longer there. An entire segment of the country’s workforce had disappeared; the company retained one secretary in each department, gave her the title of Administrative Assistant, and tasked her with hassling the various managers’ travel itineraries. In a short while, even she would disappear.

And the managers, both male and female now and armed with the new technology, became quasi-secretaries. As time passed and computer technology became infinitely smaller and more powerful it became all too prevalent for companies to dismiss large portions of their managerial staff and double the workload of those remaining. Why? To save money and increase profits.

And because they could.

Their managerial staff each had computers of their own so small that, if the managers couldn’t get all their work done in the 60-80 hours they spent in the office each week, they could simply take their computers (and their smart phones and tablets) home with them and do their work there. On their “free” time.

The American composer to whom I referred earlier is William Bolcom, a professor of composition at the University of Michigan. And his musical portrayal of the story of Prometheus follows in the footsteps of such other brilliant composers as Ludwig von Beethoven and Franz Liszt. But with a decidedly 21-st Century twist.

“We in the West have brought ourselves to a level of technical sophistication unknown to any other era,” Bolcom wrote in 2010. “We’ve wedged our way into almost-divine capability, unlike Prometheus who as a god was born with it – but at a price. We are now all Prometheus, chained to our rock of technological dependency; there is no question that our unprecedented advance has given the world enormous benefits we have no desire of relinquishing – nor should we – but we are enjoined to see the dark side of this bounty.”

And Bolcom’s Prometheus is a dark, and challenging, work.

Its musical materials are twisted, dissonant, uneven. The pianist represents Prometheus, and the chorus sings the text of Lord Byron’s poem of the same name. The orchestra is frenzied and explosive. The music gradually becomes more poetic, a salute to the spirit of mankind. Colorful. Peaceful.

Hopeful.

Promethean Exploits
11/18 & 11/19 at 8 pm
Schuster Center
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On Friday and Saturday, November 18 and 19 at 8pm in the Schuster Center, the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra presents Promethean Exploits, a program that features Beethoven’s Prometheus Overture, Bolcom’s Prometheus, Liszt’s Prometheus Symphonic Poem, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8. Guest pianist Jeffrey Biegel and the 120-plus members of the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra Chorus, selected from singers from all over the Miami Valley, join Music Director Neal Gittleman and the DPO.

“When I was requested to write the present work for the same forces as Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy,” Bolcom writes, “I felt the piano part would be ideal in portraying Prometheus’ eternal agony; my Prometheus is perhaps the antithesis of the joyous mood of the Beethoven but is not devoid of hope, particularly if it points us to begin to understand our situation. This piece is dedicated to that hope.”

DPO presents Three Dog Night in season kick-off of Rockin’ Orchestra Series

Exactly how does someone go about starting a rock band?

The most common approach involves amateurs with a burning desire to get into the music business, who meet at someone’s garage or rec room, set up their equipment, and begin by practicing cover songs, popular hits that most know by ear and for which few ever see any written music. Somewhere in the process, one or more of these aspiring rock stars will compose a song or two, and the group will practice performing its new, original music.

I don’t have access to the actual statistics, but I’m willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of these ventures end in years of mutually fond memories and little else. The music business is a hard taskmaster (this said from the perspective of personal experience).

Does it help if those involved in the startup of a rock band have some actual music industry experience? Definitely. A caveat here: there’s music industry experience, and then there’s music industry experience. Here’s a case in point….

It was the ‘60s. A young vocalist named Cory Wells was touring with Sonny and Cher, (music industry experience) when he met Danny Hutton, who had been loading and unloading records at the Disney studio (music industry experience, sort of…) before recording as a solo artist (music industry experience). See my point?

In 1968, they decide to pool their money and their talent and start a rock band of their own. But what to call the group? Hutton and Wells? Wells and Hutton? In the ‘60s, the conventional naming technique of referring to a group’s principal talent in its name had all but disappeared. While such groups as Loggins and Messina; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young still followed the convention, the practice began to revert to one of picking highly unusual and often extremely esoteric names for rock bands, e.g., Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane, Crystal Harp, Steely Dan.

Not to be outdone, Hutton and Wells came up with a name that – while suitably cryptic to comply with the governing fashion – actually had a basis in conventional usage. Well, sort of…. It’s reputed that, on cold nights, Australian aborigines in the outback sleep with their dogs for warmth. The coldest evenings are known as three-dog nights….

Armed with a name that could stand toe-to-toe with the most enigmatic of band names, Three Dog Night went about ensuring that its name would not only be suitably mysterious, but it would also become a hallmark in the world of rock music for outstanding harmonies and arrangements. Virtually unknown itself, Three Dog Night threw in its lot with new and mostly undiscovered songwriters, recording music to the words and melodies of Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Elton John, Laura Nyro, Paul Williams, and Hoyt Axton.

And, man, did the evenings ever get warm.

Not to date myself, but I can remember water skiing at Lake Cumberland and Lake Herrington during summer days and joining my Ski Club buddies at night in our campground or in the lodge to enjoy a variety of refreshing liquid beverages and dance to the music of Three Dog Night. I found it amazing how upwards of sixty men and women could dance and – at one and the exact same time, with little or no direction – sing Jeremiah was a bullfrog; he was a good friend of mine completely in tune! Hey, this is my flashback; I can remember it the way I want, right?

Three Dog Night: Live with Orchestra at The Schuster Performing Arts Center
Saturday 11/12/2011 8pm
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Joy to the World wasn’t the only one of Three Dog Night’s hits we and the rest of the world danced and sang to. After all, the group has had twenty-one consecutive Top 40 hits and twelve straight gold LPs, selling nearly 50 million records by the mid-‘70s. And the group continues to top the list of artists with the best Billboard Top 100 Chart average.

Still as good as ever, the 2011 version of Three Dog Night appears to be tireless. Beside founding members Cory Wells and Danny Hutton on lead vocals and original keyboardist Jimmy Greenspoon, the group now includes guitarist Michael Allsup, with Paul Kingery on bass and vocals and Pat Bautz on drums.

Their concert schedule is, to say the very least, formidable. In the last 25 years, the group has performed over 2,000 shows, including two Super Bowls. They were so busy, in fact, that it wasn’t until 2009 that the group released its first single in all that time, Heart Of Blues backed by the ballad Prayer of the Children. Face it; you rest, you rust.

43 years after it started, Three Dog Night looks back on a career that resulted in a body of work with 21 songs that became Top 40 hits. Reading the names of some of those titles, I can hear the music in my head: Mama Told Me, Joy to The World, Black And White, Shambala, Easy To Be Hard, An Old Fashioned Love Song, One, Eli’s Coming, and Celebrate.

If you want to hear them again, go to the Schuster Center on Saturday, Nov­ember 12 at 8 pm for Three Dog Night: Live with Orchestra. Experience Three Dog Night, backed by Music Director Neal Gittleman and the DPO. It might be cold outside, but don’t worry.

They’ve got the dogs to keep you warm.