About this work:
MACHUNAS is a Performance Oratorio put together by Lucio Pozzi and Frank J.Oteri. We describe MACHUNAS as a ‘Performance Oratorio’ to indicate that its visual and literary components have the same weight as the musical score. The story of MACHUNAS is blueprinted on the life and death of George Maciunas, an architect, artist and activist of the second half of the Twentieth Century. The name is intentionally misspelled for phonetic reasons as well as to indicate that this narrative is not bound to represent his life exactly nor the significance his actions might or might not have in the minds of those who know of him. Maciunas founded what might well be remembered as the last avant-garde art movement, the immensely influential Fluxus. Some of you might feel that our treatment of the story has nothing to do with Fluxus esthetics. The events of the life of our character, we hope, should reflect the experience of many of us, artists and non-artists alike.
The Oratorio is divided in 4 acts: Yellow, Green, Red, Blue. Each act has 9 parts. In this Oratorio, Machunas is the only character with a name. All others are nameless. Machunas is sung by a man. All other parts, male and female, are sung by women.
Inspired by the four color scheme of red, green, yellow and blue that permeates much of the work of Lucio Pozzi, the music for the performance oratorio MACHUNAS was created in four different colors. That is to say, each of the nine-part four acts is named after one of the colors and features a distinct orchestration and references to distinct musical styles although all four acts of the opera share melodic and harmonic material. The voices for the opera are all-women with the exception of the protagonist. Ideally, an untrained singer should be cast as the protagonist who throughout the opera sings only on one note.
YELLOW, which is inspired by the protagonist's turbulent childhood years in Lithuania, features music scored for an ensemble of toy instruments. Its structural departure points are children's songs, Lithuanian sutartinës (folkloric canons dating back to pagan times), and late Romantic music.
The music for GREEN, which takes place in a refugee camp in Germany run by victorious American soldiers at the end of World War II, is played by a swing jazz band but the music they play has very little in common with jazz from a structural standpoint. Rather, it is a very person application of the twelve-tone method of composition, which was born in German-speaking lands and cast off, reaching its apogee in America as a result of émigrés.
RED, which conveys the birth of SoHo and the New York City art scene, is scored for a Fluxus rock band that combines electric guitars, sax, and synthesizer with a shakuhachi, a radio and a theremin, an early 20th century electronic instrument whose eerie, otherworldly sound was a staple of 1950s sci-fi movies. The music is a response to the various conceptual musics of the 1960s (indeterminacy, process music, experiments with unusual meters, etc.) as well as psychedelic rock and the more primal efforts of garage bands that emerged all over the United States at this time.
Finally, BLUE uses a Baroque period instrument ensemble to perform a sacred Passion with the dying protagonist in Massachusetts serving as a latter-day Christ figure. In the last act, he does not sing at all. Rather, the other singers from time to time "sing in his name," each on a single pitch, but not on his.
In each act, a different keyboard instrument serves as a concertante instrument (toy piano, upright piano, synthesizer, harpsichord), and in each there are instruments that should not belong, i.e. the swing jazz band features an oboe and the Baroque group features an electric guitar. There are also other formal structures and devices linking the nine parts of each act to each other as well as linking all 36 parts, i.e. the very first part (the birth) and the very last (the funeral) are derived from the same melodic cell and are the only two components featuring indetermine text which will vary from performance to performance hence altering rhythms, etc.
The texts, melodies, harmonies and orchestration for MACHUNAS were created over a 4-year period by Frank J. Oteri at various keyboards and computers, always in the presence of Lucio Pozzi.
Donatus Katkus conducted the world premiere performances of MACHUNAS at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania on August 20 and 21, 2005 as part of the Christopher Summer Festival (Kristupo Vasaros Festivalis) in a production directed by Gediminas Petrauskas and choreographed by Edita Stundyte. There is an archival video recording. For more information, please visit the MACHUNAS website. To rental materials, please contact Black Tea Music: www.blackteamusic.com.