Adaptation is at the heart of many things a composer does, whether that be the stylistic pastiche studies they might undertake as a student, the arrangements and orchestrations they might make of their own (or others’) works, or the reimagining and staging of literature and other artworks for the concert hall, stage or screen.
Literary theorist Linda Hutcheon defines adaptation as both process and product:
An acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works
A creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging
An extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work1
This ‘double definition’ of adaptation (as process, as product) reflects composers’ reality as pragmatic practitioners. Hutcheon offers a helpful way past restrictive discussions of fidelity that plague adaptations from conception to reception. Often such discussions focus on adaptations from novels into something else, with a lot of complaining about how much gets cut out. Hutcheon doesn’t hesitate to include music in her case studies (e.g. Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites (1957) and Britten’s Billy Budd (1951)) and I hope to bring additional depth to her discussions of how, exactly, music ‘transcodes’ – how composers think adaptation through. Hutcheon posits that
[i]n many cases, because adaptations are to a different medium, they are re-mediations, that is, specifically translations in the form of intersemiotic transpositions from one sign system (for example, words) to another (for example, images). This is translation but in a very specific sense: as transmutation or transcoding, that is, as necessarily a recoding into a new set of conventions as well as signs.2
In composition that is in some way storytelling (from art song to tone poem to opera to film score, etc.), it is the composer’s job to think through how to tell the story in music; even when adaptational decisions appear to be made by someone else, like a librettist or director, the transcoding into music is the composer’s task. However, adaptation is not a set of skills often discussed as such in compositional training, nor in music criticism and scholarship. Of more than 50,000 studies of adaptation she catalogues, Kamilla Elliott identifies barely 2,000 that so much as mention adaptation into opera or other musical forms.3 Adopting Hutcheon’s focus on adaptation as the retelling of stories,4 I’ll turn to two operas – the ‘Ur-adaptive’ musical art inseparable from adaptation since its sixteenth-century origins.5 Music with text facilitates comparative study of the original source and the resulting adaptation, making it easier to observe adaptational choices. When the story now being told in musical form originates outside that work, the composer is an adapter – even if there are also other adapters involved. This, in turn, points to broader considerations of what the boundaries of adaptation might be.
Why Adapt?
Before thinking about how composers adapt, we should turn briefly to why. Hutcheon discusses the pleasures of adaptation: for a ‘knowing’ audience (that is, familiar with the source material) part of this pleasure comes from ‘repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise’.6 But Hutcheon also notes the paradoxical status of adaptations in the ‘(post-)Romantic valuing of the original creation and of the originating creative genius’: legally, adaptations are ‘derivative works’ – a term which also points to their status in criticism as frequent objects of contempt.7 Though art music adaptations might circumvent that second-class status somewhat,8 musical adaptation is further complicated by the persistent privileging of ‘abstract’ music that does not tell story, use words, or involve singers. (This, of course, intersects with issues of identity, gatekeeping, and participation: who creates what kind of music for whom.)
Hutcheon writes extensively about the financial practicalities of adaptation, familiar to any composer who has had to write a grant application or a pitch sheet. An adaptational approach can make a project catchy (‘Cinderella, but a song cycle!’); similar shorthands for musical language or compositional approach are often incomprehensible to the people making financial decisions – they may be more comfortable evaluating a project on its storytelling. Adaptation into music from source material that has already been adapted into film offers further reassurance that adaptation into a showing medium will ‘work’ – it’s already been done – making it easier to envision for those who may be lacking in musical or theatrical facility. But the pragmatism of a ‘safe’ adaptation-investment risks trivialising a creator’s imagination and drags behind it the baggage of the fidelity conversation: how much interpretive and creative room will the adapters be afforded?
In a scathing review of Mason Bates’s opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs (2017; libretto by Mark Campbell), Anne Midgette criticises the opera industry for its failure to advance innovative storytelling (as film and television have done), and, by implication, she condemns the opera industry’s reliance on the ‘safety’ of adaptations to coax investors to invest and audiences to buy tickets.
Much new opera is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. In opera as in many other fields today, including journalism, ‘telling stories’ has become a buzzword: We exist to tell people the stories that, if you believe the consultant-speak, they are hungrier for than ever. Well and good, but this works only as long as you understand ‘story’ as a metaphoric term for a kind of artistic unity. If you take ‘story’ literally, and think it’s about an opera’s plot, you essentially define opera as a dramatic story that happens to have music appended – and if that’s all it is, other art forms can probably tell that story better.
Yet the opera field continues an almost desperate search for stories that seem sufficiently operatic – only to shoehorn them into relatively crude melodramatic contours, like the librettist Mark Campbell, distilling Steve Jobs’s life into platitudes about creativity and redemption. Many new operas these days are based on films, novels or the lives of real people like Jobs… [b]ut few of them seem to deliver the punch of the original.9
Midgette’s condemnation of this approach to opera creation – which holds up the perceived security of adaptation as insurance against executive jitters, audience disinterest, and creator incompetence – points to profound questions about what, exactly, music can bring to story, and what storytelling in music can be. Thinking about adaptation as ‘safe’ can lead to fundamental problems in creative approach, for the art of adaptation is not to reproduce a story but to imagine that story anew: ‘adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication’; adaptations ‘exist laterally, not vertically’… [suggesting that] ‘one way to think about unsuccessful adaptations is not in terms of infidelity to a prior text, but in terms of a lack of the creativity and skill to make the text one’s own and thus autonomous.’10We might call this a ‘negative test’ for adaptation.
‘Making Plastic’
What music can do, in adaptation, is much more complex than the reproduction or regurgitation of plot. Via Hutcheon, we can understand adaptation into musical forms as transcoding across media and genres, most often from those that tell stories (novels, etc.) to those that show them (including all performance media).11 She introduces a third mode of engagement: interaction (physical, kinaesthetic).12 Musical adaptation involves this mode as well, through sound’s vibrational impact on the body and the kinaesthetic sympathetic response of watching and hearing musical performance – as the field of sound studies illuminates. Depictions and perceptions of time are another area in which music has special transcoding tools. The drive of pulse (or lack thereof), the pacing of rates of change (harmonic, rhythmic, textural, etc.), and the visceral kinaesthetic experience of tempi can manipulate our experience of the passage of time – as Stravinsky explains in his discussion of ontological, psychological, and musical time in his Poetics.13
Recall Carolyn Abbate’s description of Wagner’s decisions in Der junge Siegfried (1876) to ‘mak[e] plastic’ – palpable, visible, auditory, enacted – what was originally told only in narrative.14 Abbate’s ‘making plastic’ is the transcoding into music that Hutcheon’s adaptation requires: not ‘music appended’ but sound enacting. This can be as straightforward as word-painting (twinkling stars, twinkly sounds; the piano figuration in Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade (1814)) or as complex as the ambivalent ironies of Benjamin Britten’s ‘34 chords’ in Act II of Billy Budd (1951).
Compression and Expansion
A frequent theme in Hutcheon’s book is the ‘necessary compression’ of source material in many forms of adaptation: what is selected from the original and what is left out. Adaptations into music (especially opera) are scolded for this regularly in criticism, as the need to compress often produces startlingly short libretti with one-dimensional plots and characters.15 (‘The morally loaded discourse of fidelity’ raises its head.16) This is, of course, because ‘it takes much longer to sing than to say a line of text, much less read one.’17 Thus, musical adaptation generally involves both compression and expansion in the same moment: a Venturi effect. The compression Hutcheon writes about is really in the first step of adaptation: from source material to libretto, song text, and so on. But the second step – the adaptation of that text into music – can expand that text not only in the duration of delivery, but in pulling the text into multiple experiential dimensions through the complexities of musical transcoding. Let us see that at work in two case studies.
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) presents fifty-five short prose episodes: descriptions of imaginary cities recounted to Kublai Khan by Marco Polo. The book – that ‘unstageable work’18 – presents little in the way of conventionally ‘novelistic’ plotting or characterisation, offering instead an extended meditation on history, architecture, empire, the passage of time, the nature of cities and humankind, memory, and imagination. Working as his own librettist (from William Weaver’s translation),19 composer Christopher Cerrone chose nine episodes from the book – barely one in six, and only fractions of those – to create a seventy-minute chamber opera that was subsequently selected as a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Cerrone says that he wanted to ‘recreate [his] personal experience of reading [the book]’;20 rather than write ‘an opera’, Cerrone says he sought to create a landscape in which the opera could exist.21 These statements echo Hutcheon’s discussion of the challenges to adaptation to screen and stage media of depicting res cogitans, the space of the mind or ‘psychic reality’ of a character or story.22 In this opera, music creates an aural experience that transcodes two imaginative acts: first, the act of reading; second, the act of imagination whilst reading, that ‘making space’ amongst the inferno of daily life that Calvino’s Polo describes in the final moments of the narrative.
Hutcheon describes the representation or thematisation of the unfolding of time (a central theme of Calvino’s book) as ‘a special adaptation problem’.23 The most ‘canonical’ of minimalist and postminimalist operas have been postdramatic, postmodern operas (some of them ‘postoperas,’24 many of them ‘portrait operas’) which have stepped far from the recitative-aria binary and the representation of ‘unified’ chronological plot to focus on monologues and apostrophes, to the exclusion of much action at all (e.g. Glass’s Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Akhnaten (1983)). Facing similar dramatic challenges in his adaptation, Cerrone uses a postminimal musical language anchored in ostinato. His gentle evocations of historical musical styles (e.g. the vocal hocketing of ‘Marco’ in the scene ‘Venice’) and a hint of exoticism in his modal harmonic language and orchestration push the opera out of specific historical time or place and into a timeless limbo of uncertain geography. He arranges the chamber orchestra into two antiphonal groups and detunes one of the two pianos (prepared with screws for ‘a gong-like sound’25) to create an impression of physical distance – almost a Doppler effect. Indeed, Cerrone has spoken of his entire approach to the score as orchestrating the piano’s resonance,26 extending its decay in the listening imagination beyond ‘real’ time. In the opera’s final scene (‘Epilogue’), for example, the pianos guide the quaver-ostinati and the other instrumentalists join those ostinati, colouring the attacks and then resonating behind – colouring the pianos’ decay – or quietly sustaining select pitches from the ostinati, again colouring the decay. The effect is of a continuously tolling bell, its sound wavering and echoing as though heard from very far away.
In Calvino’s book, this final passage is just 375 words; the scene in the opera runs approximately thirteen minutes. This is a good moment to remember that in this instance of a composer acting as his own librettist, the ‘libretto’ is even more process than product. If we compare the final passage of narration concluding the novel (end of §927) to the text in the score of the Epilogue, we witness a clear priority of textual compression. Not only does Cerrone compress the 375 words of this final passage, he begins his scene with text taken from the third-person narration that opens §9 (twenty-nine pages earlier in Weaver’s translation), and then elides the remainder of §9: a significant volume of material. He also interpolates ‘outside’ textual material – a quotation from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, from the final stanza of the Four Quartets (1943): ‘We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.’28 It is tempting to dwell, here, on Cerrone’s sophisticated infolding of Calvino’s ‘inferno of the living’ with Eliot’s ‘crowned knot of fire’, but the adaptational point is that in the midst of intense compression, we find expansion – expansion by textual addition and musical repetition.
Cerrone has the Chorus begin the Epilogue with their ‘Kublai Khan’ motive, heard throughout the opera, but recalled here on a single pitch: flattened into an intonation that gives ceremonial importance to this final scene. (During this Epilogue, the motive expands back to the now-familiar octave leap in the women’s voices, which is also the last sung utterance of the opera.) Polo sings the lines from Eliot, and the ostinato that opened Scene 1 returns. Per Eliot, we’re arriving where we started, but we hear it anew: not only resonant with everything that has come between, but also orchestrated differently. Then Cerrone rewrites the conditional rhetoric of Calvino’s Polo into an imperative of preservation. His Polo sings a four-measure melody (‘Kublai Khan / Seek and Find / Who and What / In the Midst’) and the other voices join in canon and ostinato (through repetition, preservation), with Polo’s statement functioning as a ground bass as the texture thickens. Polo then sings ‘in the midst of the inferno / are not the inferno’, with ‘the inferno’ set to a rising seventh that cuts through the texture. But as the rest of the ensemble takes up this new gesture, adding it to the ‘seek and find’ ostinato, the ‘inferno’ leap-gesture becomes indistinguishable in the counterpoint. Cerrone continues in the imperative, and Polo sings ‘Make them endure / Give them space.’ The other singers take up this statement, and then the ostinato layers begin to simplify rhythmically and coalesce into homophony (an acoustic analogue for making space) in a long, composed-out ritardando. Music enacting.
Peter Grimes
George Crabbe’s 1810 poem is quite short, at just 375 lines; running roughly two-and-a-half hours, Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes (libretto by Montagu Slater) offers a rich example of adaptation-as-expansion, in every sense.
The opera presents an inversion of Crabbe’s story: not Crabbe’s focus on Grimes-the-hermit, but instead on the interactions of Grimes and the townspeople. The opera’s Peter Grimes is a complex character – not simply the violent, brutal caricature in the poem. Also inverted: the certainty that Grimes murders the boy. The opera’s audience doesn’t see Grimes murder the boy; we see him accused of that. It’s not that we know he’s innocent; it’s that we don’t know he’s guilty. But the poem is unambiguous: Grimes is a brute, and the figures of his guilt haunt him until he dies. In the opera, the role of the poem’s judgmental narrator is subsumed into the townspeople, and the opera’s opening courtroom scene (an addition by the adapters) sets the stage for a narrative in which different accounts and multiple versions of events will be integral.
The creators’ decision to ironise Crabbe’s original, imbuing it with ambiguity, uncertainty, and equivocality – what is said is not what is meant; the same facts can tell very different stories – expands the source material into a complex psychological portrait that bears little resemblance to the original. One of the most striking of these ironising moves is the insertion of Grimes’s Act I Scene 2 aria ‘The Great Bear and Pleiades’: the adapters’ construction of Grimes’s interiority in this scene transforms Crabbe’s uncommunicative brute into what has been conventionally described as a ‘Byronic’ visionary poet,29 though he sings lines that sound less like they come from Childe Harold than from a modernist revision of Job,30 with poetic diction far beyond the capacity of Crabbe’s Grimes, ‘the savage master’, who ‘grinn’d in horrid glee’.31
Why take a simple scene – Grimes looks at the stars – and have the character extemporise apocalyptic poetry of such literary complexity? Indeed, why have Grimes look up at all? In Crabbe’s poem, the closest to any contemplation of nature is a bleak and rather disgusting description of an oppressive and uninspiring landscape.32 (How neatly the opera’s Sea Interludes invert that!) But beyond this there are no similarities, nothing that comes close to this aria. In Crabbe, Grimes is alone and there’s no interiority, no thinking or reflection, no questioning. Grimes ‘hang[s] his head’ and the only description – of his immediate physical surroundings – isn’t of the sky, but of the mud.33
In the opera, the Chorus of townspeople dismiss Grimes as ‘mad or drunk’ because his speech is so incongruous: in the world of the opera, it’s neither the time nor the place for visionary utterance, and his is not the mouth they would accept it from. Incongruity often flags an irony to be observed, a hint that what is meant is not what is said, that multiple meanings may exist simultaneously.34 Not only is Britten’s Grimes’s declaration within the dramatic framework incongruous, so is the quality of his speech. The ‘Great Bear’ aria-soliloquy is a statement followed by two questions, and this too works to make the scene more complex. If we sympathise with Peter-as-Job it’s an uneasy sympathy; as ironic utterance, the passage resists attempts to reduce it to a single answer or interpretation. It’s foregrounded by a joke, itself uneasy: ‘Everybody’s very quiet!’ sings Ned Keene after a long pause, the only sound in the orchestra a low pianississimo tremolo. This often gets a chuckle from the audience, recognising themselves complicit in that ‘everybody’ – the meta-theatrical moment reaching across the orchestra pit to remind us that we too are a great mob of townsfolk collected in a public space, listening uneasily to Grimes-the-unexpected-visionary.
Grimes sings his first phrase on a sustained high E – the single pitch echoing plainchant, foregrounding the Biblical allusions of the text. It’s hard not to hold one’s breath with the singer (kinaesthetic transcoding); the music asks us to listen closely. Long, slow, descending lines in the orchestra, followed by an arpeggio from the orchestra’s lowest pitch in the aria thus far to its highest (as Grimes sings ‘Breathing solemnity’) creates word-painting of a great inhalation, and opens acoustic space – the wide registers illustrating (transcoding) the sense of space that Grimes experiences, looking up at the sky as the universe opens before his mind. Then, at last, the vocal line descends like an exhalation, a great sigh. There are similar word-painting gestures later in the aria, for example the ‘flashing turmoil of a shoal of herring’ set in little triplets of semiquavers. Then the aria’s first question returns to that high, sustained E; its final question (its final line) begins again on that high E, marked tranquillo, pianissimo: ‘Who?’ Grimes asks, repeating the word five times. And though it’s a question, the melodic line descends again, step by step (with a little turn, around ‘begin again’) – the melodic contour suggesting not so much a question, but a statement.
This is followed by the fugal chorus on ‘he’s mad or drunk’ (nothing like a tightly organised number to make clear the social cohesion of a group), then Boles’s accusation (‘His exercise is not with men but killing boys!’), and then the extended round on ‘Old Joe has gone fishing’. The music is merry and dancing, but the violence described in the sung words undercuts the folksiness, and the score instructions read ‘Peter’s entry upsets the course of the round.’ Grimes can’t or won’t conform to the round’s tidy social order and deliberately or accidentally upsets it. (His contributions could be understood as mockery.) In this raucous aftermath Grimes’s aria lingers in the ear as the quietest moment – an enactment of something transcendent for the character (and perhaps for the listener) that cannot be easily reconciled. Should we mutter ‘he’s mad or drunk’, like the other townspeople? ‘Who can decipher… the written character?’ Grimes asks in that aria. Who indeed.
Boundaries
Grimes’s vision is also revision: the opera’s creators substantially rewriting and reconceiving the source material to make space for new meanings, for irony and ambiguity, for complexity that endures. (One can imagine the workshop: ‘It’s a question, Ben! It has to go up at the end!’) But Grimes is such a substantial re-vision of Crabbe’s original that we could ask if, at some point during its creation, it ceased to be an adaptation and became – at most – ‘inspired by’, with Crabbe’s poem retreating to a point of scholarly archeology. We would be hard-pressed to find a direct quotation of four lines or two dozen words from Crabbe’s ‘Peter Grimes’ in Britten’s. Conversely, it feels unreasonable to argue that Cerrone’s quotation from Eliot qualifies as an adaptation of ‘Little Gidding’, let alone of Four Quartets – yet his adaptation of Calvino does qualify, though he directly adapts just one-sixth of Calvino’s original, and includes only a fraction of that fraction.
Hutcheon describes a difference between fleeting and sustained engagement, which draws a boundary around adaptation:
[D]efining an adaptation as an extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of a particular work of art does manage to provide some limits: short intertextual allusions to other works or bits of sampled music would not be included.35
J. Peter Burkholder – scholar of twentieth-century music, and particularly of Charles Ives –who has written extensively on the subject of collage, quotation, borrowing, intertextuality, and so on, has also consistently separated these concepts from adaptation per se.36 In our ‘postmodern age of cultural recycling’ as Hutcheon calls it, quotation, collage, parody, pastiche, and similar practices are tools that creators use in works that exist in some relation to prior works.37 An artist may use these tools, and found sound, sampling and other intermedial borrowings, in the process of adaptation – of that source material or other source material – but the product of any of these borrowings is not necessarily an adaptation, nor are all examples of such borrowings adaptations in themselves. But, implicitly differing with Burkholder, Hutcheon goes on to argue that parodies would be included, as an ironic subset of adaptation:38 see, for example, composer David Buckley’s ‘neoBaroque’ scoring (Buckley’s term) of the TV drama The Good Wife, which seems (to me) adaptational in being an extended engagement with prior art (both style and particular works) and a complex comment on contemporary scoring clichés.39
In considering boundaries (and scoring for media), I’m brought back to Hutcheon’s ‘negative test’ for adaptational success: autonomy. Yet she also argues that the audience must experience the adaptation as an adaptation.40 Who in the red velvet seats is experiencing the multi-layered ‘palimpsestuous’ pleasure of ‘the oscillation between a past image and a present one’, ‘the conceptual flipping back and forth’ between Crabbe and Britten?41 Readings of Crabbe are not selling out Covent Garden; his poem is a curiosity for what it sparked in Britten’s imagination. (Adaptations can eclipse their originals, and eclipse other adaptations: pity poor Manfred Gurlitt, who also decided Büchner’s unfinished Woyzeck would make a great opera.) Britten’s Grimes might indeed have moved outside adaptation’s boundaries; perhaps other excluded works might tread inside boundaries more often than we thought. Consider the uncertain status of opera productions as potential adaptations.42 We could also ask if a libretto is an adaptation per se (i.e. autonomous).
The libretto published after the creation of the opera is really the text that is in the score. ‘The libretto’ is itself both process and product: the writer writes it (process), and gives it (product) to the composer, who sets it (process again) and almost always changes it (product anew). Composer John Oswald, creator of Plunderphonics (1988), an album of recompositions by sampling (notoriously, of Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’ into the track ‘Dab’), talks about the ‘threshold of recognisability’ – how a small ‘plunderphone’ can prompt recognition of its source work so that ‘the whole song rolls out in your mind’ in a play of recognisability that Hutcheon’s definition of adaptation also turns upon.43 Despite being created of many bits of sampled music, Oswald’s Dab offers the very palimpsest and extended engagement with a particular work that could let us call it adaptation.
All adaptations are derivative works (their legal status); not all derivative or dependent works are adaptations. Arranging and adaptation are both, legally, ‘derivative works’ and extended revisitations of particular works: arranging re-distributes performance tasks that express another composer’s creative decisions, though as soon as that redistribution involves timbral choices (i.e. which instrument does what when) the arranger makes interpretive, creative decisions, and the boundary blurs. Hutcheon concludes that all ‘adapters are first interpreters and then creators.’44 In setting text – transcoding, not ‘appending’ – a composer acts as an interpreter and dramaturg of that text, for the composer’s decisions shape not only the delivery of text (its language) but the story itself: from conventional elements like plot and character to more nebulous concerns like atmosphere. For example, it’s a commonplace in composition that repetition of text is not an alteration of the text, but merely serves intelligibility. But of course, repetition shapes how that text is received and understood (‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’). Such compositional decisions are interpretive and creative, shaping meaning and storytelling; even if a librettist has already performed an adaptation role, the composer enters the process as an adapter in their own right. Thus we could argue that a composer setting any text is an adapter, even if the text itself is original: an understanding that dates to the earliest uses of the term ‘adaptation’ in the English language.45
*
For students of composition, adaptation offers useful opportunities to think not only about granularities of compositional technique and about larger-scale concerns of musical structure, pacing, and dramaturgy, but also about music history, the musics of different cultures, and music’s place amongst a culture’s art forms. Much as we can learn a lot about orchestration through arranging, or about musical styles through parody, adaptation can give an emerging composer something to push against, a way to define their voice as both similar and different. If all art is made of other art46 and ‘storytelling is always the art of repeating stories’47 – if there is nothing new under the sun – adaptation can be a deliberate, even provocative way to position one’s work, a way to negotiate the burden of ‘the canon’ (whatever that means in the moment). Hutcheon closes her study of adaptation with a reminder of the underlying biological metaphor of adaptation: ‘Adaptation is how stories evolve and mutate to fit new times and different places.’48
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from…49
