Opera: Spinning the Dial

As a youngster in The Bronx, Composer Stanley Silverman was fascinated by the blur of sounds he got from spinning a radio dial. Pop tunes, speeches, symphonies, soap operas—all jostled each other in a way that struck Silverman as symbolic. "I decided," he says, "that life itself is like switching the dial of a radio."

Last week Silverman's experimental "pop opera," Elephant Steps, had its premiere at Tanglewood in Massachusetts, and it sounded—well, like a giant radio with its dials spinning crazily. Dissonant 12-tone textures melted into a gypsy air. A rock beat crashed into Renaissance madrigals. Ragtime, ragas, taped noises and electronic bleeps tumbled together in a swirl of sound that satirized serious music as much as schmalz. Silverman says it was all meant to be "fun, like raping the styles."

The libretto by Playwright-Film Maker Richard Foreman bristled with the same anarchic spirit. Against a background of film strips and flashing lights, it unfolded a plotless jumble of scenes that might have resulted from a collaboration by Brecht, Beckett and Buster Keaton. "Nobody looks at me," sang one character in a typically enigmatic line, "therefore I retrace my steps." In another episode, a scruffy charwoman incongruously trilled out an aria while brandishing a three-foot wooden spoon at the other characters.

Although the work baffled some and bemused others, it had a cohesive rhythm of its own, and it succeeded in gripping the attention of the Tanglewood audience through its sheer theatrical flair. Silverman, 30, is music director of Manhattan's Lincoln Center Repertory Theater and an evangelist for a new form of music-theater. As a former student of Leon Kirchner and Darius Milhaud, he has a solid background in "pure" classical composition. But, he says, "I wanted to get into pop music and rock. I can do this much better than the other stuff. Musical comedy is the great American sound, but most of its composers haven't had the technique to carry it further. They write as if Mozart and Weill had never lived. Only Gershwin and Bernstein have gone on to higher musical theater." Elephant Steps indicates that Silverman hopes someday to add his name to that list.