BILLIARDS Work In Progress August 2014

Billiards, Billiards, Billiards

Greetings from the end of the universe. "Billiards", an essay-opera, will be an immense puzzle, and the world's first ever inter-dimensional opera.

It is not an opera that will ever be digested in one sitting by anybody, unless they are adept at time-travel or interdimensional projections.

The "Books" of "Billiards" float about above our heads. It will be an essay opera without a final, set form, where the chapters exist fleetingly, permanently, or semi-permanently.

Equally the process of making "Billiards" itself is part of the opera. Here I am singing now.

To you, just to you, my beauty, mon amour, I shower you with kisses and the stray flecks of spit that fly about in every aria.

It is intended that "Billiards" will be an essay-opera created almost entirely "in public". This blog will document as far as possible the entire process of the work. 

You have been warned.

For today, we leave the last word to Raymond Scott, one of the superstars of "Billiards".

Ergo Phizmiz introduces "Billiards"

Around the tender age of 13 my bedroom walls were covered with pencil and charcoal drawings I had made of composers: Schubert, Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven, all copied from an old edition of The Oxford Companion to Music that had turned up in my house.

My favourite etching in the book was on a small article on Mozart’s playing of Billiards – when stuck for ideas, he would listen for new rhythmic combinations in the bashes and trickles that come from the interplay of billiard balls.

Twenty years later, I have spent much of that time discovering that the computer can render music into a constant state of limitless transformation, that the randomness of clanking billiard balls can be sampled, repeated, fragmented, making the nature of sound and therefore the nature of music / composition something completely malleable.

My embedding in the belly of The Opera Group will be leading towards the creation of “Billiards”: An opera to draw a line across history between Mozart’s billiard balls and the internet-instant-metamorphic-music-vortex.

Exploding the nature of composition, collage, technology, and the voice, through the format of the “Essay Opera” – a kind of opera where voice, performance, collage, animation, puppetry, automata, and electronics interweave with one another to explore subjects and ideas.

“Billiards” will imagine a metamorphic billiards table, through a narrative that progresses through the gradual creation of a themed Pinball machine on the nature of chance, games, and composition. We will delve into the world of early electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott and his “Rhythm Generators”, fall down the rabbit-hole of Lewis Carroll’s logic-games and proposed (pre-Dada) chance-operation poems, we will look at stars with Omar Khayyam then trace the lines to John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis, and end in the seemingly eternal rabbit-hole of the internet where all music disappears without trace into the jumble.

If you are interested in delving into the world of my theatrical misadventures (AND why not?), you could do worse than dip into this “The Theatre and Opera of Ergo Phizmiz”

Chinchin.

Ergo Phizmiz is Sound and Music’s Embedded Composer-in-Residence with The Opera Group. Find out more information and read his biography here. 

Georges Méliès - Le Mélomane (1903)