Music: When the Style Is No Style

Throughout musical history, a single compositional style has generally dominated its era. In the fractious late 20th century, however, composers freely draw on myriad influences to create highly personalized idioms. Eclecticism, once a term of opprobrium, has become a virtue, perhaps even a style in itself, as the boundaries of serious music steadily expand.

At the Santa Fe Opera last week, two important premieres demonstrated just how potent eclecticism can be. John Eaton's The Tempest, with a libretto after Shakespeare by Music Critic Andrew Porter of The New Yorker, is a rich blend of Renaissance music, jazz and electronics that is surrounded by an uncompromisingly modernist microtonal framework. Another happily eclectic work, Hans Werner Henze's The English Cat, takes an anthropomorphic tale by English Playwright Edward Bond, based on Balzac, and sets it to music that freely ranges from kitschy consonance to acerbic dissonance. Both operas have the kind of unquestioned stylistic integrity that bespeaks major works.

The Tempest, being performed for the first time, makes fierce demands on listeners but rewards them with an opera of stark beauty. It may be presumptuous for any composer not named Verdi to set Shakespeare, but Eaton's music passes the test, honoring its source while illuminating and transforming it.

Eaton's notion of mixing harpsichords, synthesizers, saxophones and electric guitars with a conventional orchestra may at first seem eccentric. Further, his method of microtonal tuning, which he has long advocated, requires singers and instrumentalists to produce quarter-tone intervals, so that an octave is divided into 24 pitches instead of the conventional twelve. Yet each of the disparate elements in the opera has a dramatic function, giving characters or groups of characters distinct musical personalities.

Electronic sounds are prominent whenever Prospero (Baritone Timothy Noble) works his magic, and the necromancer's spiritual struggle is mirrored in his agonized, atonal music. Alonso's disoriented entourage is aptly symbolized by a raucous chorus of trumpets and trombones, searching for its pitches through a sliding microtonal minefield. A small Renaissance ensemble often accompanies the shadowy, faceless Ariel (Mezzo Susan Quittmeyer) on his spritely missions, and his unaccompanied Where the bee sucks becomes a mock-Elizabethan song. A trio of alto sax, electric guitar and electric bass represents the bestial Caliban (Mezzo Ann Howard), and his drunken revels with Trinculo and Stephano are celebrated with some exquisitely low-down jazzrock that closes the first act in a brilliant theatrical burst. (Eaton, 50, a professor of composition at Indiana University, was a successful jazz pianist in his younger days.)

Indeed, the only serious miscalculation is the awkward, discordant and ungainly love music for Ferdinand and Miranda. Its grating quality is exacerbated by the strangulated tenor of Colenton Freeman, although Soprano Sally Wolf manages to negotiate Eaton's leaps with taste and dignity. A nod in the direction of convention here would not only provide some needed aural respite but characterize the lovers more effectively.