Tarrytown 1 / Scenario
| February 22, 2000 Lynn and All, Here is a scenario for the first episode of Tarrytown, or whatever we may come finally to call it. As often, it would be a good idea to revisit the "Overall Summary" that Ben has put up on the web. You will see that I have tried to keep this opening closely analogous to the openings for Vienna and the Amazon. In fact, of course, all the parallel episodes, as the user moves down the narrative, should be analogous. So, the schematic relationship in episode one is this: the oppositional friend of the artist's potential paramour opposes the union between the artist and the potential paramour. Earlier Bettina (oppositional friend) opposed Eva's (potential paramour) union with Jakob (artist); Smiley (oppositional friend) opposed Rothman's (potential paramour) union with Essella (artist). Here Ruth Elliott (oppositional friend) opposes Helene Wedekind's (potential paramour) union with Eric Nordquist (artist). It is some time in the fifties or early sixties or our own version of the post-war years (serialism, synthesizers, radical experiments, etc.-Jose knows this stuff). The composer Eric Nordquist is a radical experimenter. The war and the Holocaust have filled him with revulsion. It is his goal to create a new music utterly without debt to the great traditions of western music because he holds all euro-centric art complicitous in the horrors of the war, especially the German tradition. So, sort of like a mad scientist or Captain Nemo, he has sequestered himself and two of the war-wounded (Helene Wedekind and Berndt Stauber) in a labyrinthine castle-like mansion high on a promontory above the Hudson. (You can see such promontories and some impressive manses if you take the train between Albany and Penn Station.) This edifice is parallel to the temple that Franz is planning in Vienna (Secession House) and the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus. Out of the wounded bodies of Helene and Berndt, especially Helene, and his own revulsion and musical genius he will create a music that will wipe the slate clean. Both Helene and Berndt were acculturated Jews during the rich artistic period in Berlin between the two world wars-Helene a singer of great talent, Berndt already beginning to move decisively in his painting from German expressionism toward abstraction. (Jose, Lynn, this is all suggestive. As we begin to move from image to sound to text in the process we have agreed on, I am perfectly happy to work with visual and musical materials that may lead in somewhat different directions. I'm hoping that within the geometries of the overall structure you will find both stimulus and enough freedom to work.) [...] Connections: There are obvious ways in which all this returns to
many of our key motifs. (Refer again to the "Overall Summary" on
the web.) The Holocaust. The human body. Spirits or mythic characters.
Temple, in this case Nordquist House. Animals, e.g., the half-bull of the
Minotaur, the Phoenix, another of Lynn's birds maybe. I notice that we
haven't been doing much with the three rivers-Danube, Amazon, and Hudson.
Well, maybe that's just one motif too many. |