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| Hydrogen Jukebox | |
|---|---|
| Chamber opera by Philip Glass | |
 The composer in 1993 | |
| Premiere | May 26, 1990 |
Hydrogen Jukebox is a 1990 chamber opera featuring the music of Philip Glass and the work of beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Its name is taken from a phrase coined by Ginsberg, from his 1955 poem Howl.
Of the project, Glass said:
In 1988...I happened to run into Allen Ginsberg at St. Mark's Bookshop in New York City and asked him if he would perform with me. We were in the poetry section, and he grabbed a book from the shelf and pointed out Wichita Vortex Sutra . The poem, written in 1966 and reflecting the anti-war mood of the times, seemed highly appropriate for the occasion. I composed a piano piece to accompany Allen's reading, which took place at the Schubert Theater on Broadway.
Allen and I so thoroughly enjoyed the collaboration that we soon began talking about expanding our performance into an evening-length music-theater work. It was right after the 1988 presidential election, and neither Bush nor Dukakis seemed to talk about anything that was going on. I remember saying to Allen, if these guys aren't going to talk about the issues then we should.
The piece was intended to form a portrait of America covering the 1950s through the late 1980s. Glass and Ginsberg sought to incorporate the personal poems of Ginsberg, reflecting on social issues: the anti-war movement, the sexual revolution, drugs, eastern philosophy, environmental issues. The six vocal parts were thought to represent six archetypal American characters- a waitress, a policeman, a businessman, a cheerleader, a priest, and a mechanic.
Ginsberg said:
Ultimately, the motif of Hydrogen Jukebox, the underpinning, the secret message, secret activity, is to relieve human suffering by communicating some kind of enlightened awareness of various themes, topics, obsessions, neuroses, difficulties, problems, perplexities that we encounter as we end the millennium.
The title Hydrogen Jukebox comes from a verse in the poem Howl : '...listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox...' It signifies a state of hypertrophic high-tech, a psychological state in which people are at the limit of their sensory input with civilization's military jukebox, a loud industrial roar, or a music that begins to shake the bones and penetrate the nervous system as a hydrogen bomb may do someday, reminder of apocalypse.
The work formally premiered May 26, 1990 at the Spoleto Music Festival in Charleston, SC. However, the workshop staged version had premiered one month earlier at the American Music Theater Festival held in the Plays and Players theater, 1714 Delancey Place, Philadelphia, PA on April 26. It ran there until May 6, followed on that closing night by an invitation-only reception attended by Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg and other members of the company was held nearby.
The Australasian premiere was given on April 17, 2003 at the Mount Nelson Theatre (Hobart, Tasmania) by the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music, conducted by Douglas Knehans and directed by Robert Jarman.
World Premiere (Spoleto festivals)
Recording
Stephen Colbert met his wife, Evelyn McGee-Colbert, at the premiere of Hydrogen Jukebox at the Spoleto Music Festival in 1990. [1] While interviewing Josh Brolin during an episode of the Late Show with Stephen Colbert originally telecast April 15, 2022, Colbert admitted that when Evelyn asked for his address, he didn't have a pen, so he borrowed one from the person behind him, which happened to be Ginsberg. [2]
Hydrogen Jukebox is a Detroit rock'n'roll band formed in 2019.
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
Philip Glass is an American composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. Glass's work has been associated with minimalism, being built up from repetitive phrases and shifting layers. Glass describes himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures", which he has helped to evolve stylistically.
"Howl", also known as "Howl for Carl Solomon", is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954–1955 and published in his 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems. The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon.
Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, is one of America's major performing arts festivals. It was founded in 1977 by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Gian Carlo Menotti, who sought to establish a counterpart to the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy.
The Philip Glass Ensemble is an American musical group founded by composer Philip Glass in 1968 to serve as a performance outlet for his experimental minimalist music. The ensemble continues to perform and record to this day, under the musical direction of keyboardist Michael Riesman.
1000 Airplanes on the Roof is a melodrama in one act by Philip Glass which featured text by David Henry Hwang and projections by Jerome Sirlin. It is described by Glass as "a science fiction music drama".
Daniel Steven Crafts is an American composer. He was born in Detroit, Michigan, but has spent most of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Solo Piano (1989) is an album of piano music composed and performed by Philip Glass. It was produced by Kurt Munkacsi.
Howl and Other Poems is a collection of poetry by Allen Ginsberg published November 1, 1956. It contains Ginsberg's most famous poem, "Howl", which is considered to be one of the principal works of the Beat Generation as well as "A Supermarket in California", "Transcription of Organ Music", "Sunflower Sutra", "America", "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound", and some of his earlier works. For printing the collection, the publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another well-known poet, was arrested and charged with obscenity. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn found Ferlinghetti not guilty of the obscenity charge, and 5,000 more copies of the text were printed to meet the public demand, which had risen in response to the publicity surrounding the trial. Howl and Other Poems contains two of the most well-known poems from the Beat Generation, "Howl" and "A Supermarket in California", which have been reprinted in other collections, including the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
The Prince Theater is a non-profit theatrical producing organization located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and specializing in music theatre, including opera, music drama, musical comedy and experimental forms. Founded in 1984 as the American Music Theater Festival by Marjorie Samoff, Eric Salzman and Ron Kaiserman, for the first 15 years AMTF performed in various venues throughout Philadelphia. In March 1999, AMTF moved into the renovated Midtown Theater and changed its name in honor of Broadway producer and director Harold Prince. AMTF/Prince Theater has produced 92 world premieres and has sent 81 productions to theaters in New York and worldwide.
Mark Grey is an American classical music composer, sound designer and sound engineer.
Songfest: A Cycle of American Poems for Six Singers and Orchestra is a 1977 song cycle by Leonard Bernstein. The cycle consists of 12 settings of 13 American poems, performed by six singers in solos, duets, a trio, and three sextets.
"A Supermarket in California" is a poem by American poet Allen Ginsberg first published in Howl and Other Poems in 1956. In the poem, the narrator visits a supermarket in California and imagines finding Federico García Lorca and Walt Whitman shopping. Whitman, who is also discussed in "Howl", is a character common in Ginsberg's poems, and is often referred to as Ginsberg's poetic model. "A Supermarket in California", written in Berkeley about a market at University Avenue and Grove Street in that city and published in 1956, was intended to be a tribute to Whitman in the centennial year of the first edition of Leaves of Grass.
"Wichita Vortex Sutra" is an anti-war poem by Allen Ginsberg, written in 1966. It appears in his collection Planet News and has also been published in Collected Poems 1947-1995 and Collected Poems 1947-1980. The poem presents Ginsberg as speaker, focusing on his condemnation of the Vietnam War. It features imagery of the war and America's Heartland interspersed with news reports and cultural references. It is also written in Ginsberg's distinctive Whitman-like long-prose style.
Symphony No. 6, also known as the Plutonian Ode Symphony, is a symphony composed by Philip Glass. It is based on the poem Plutonian Ode by Allen Ginsberg; parts of which are sung by the soprano soloist in the work. The symphony was commissioned by Carnegie Hall in honor of Glass' 65th birthday and as a vehicle for the talents of soprano Lauren Flanigan. The symphony premiered on February 2, 2002, at Carnegie Hall with Dennis Russell Davies conducting the American Composers Orchestra. The symphony is in three movements, based on the three parts of the poem itself.
The Texas Early Music Project is a performing arts ensemble based in Austin, Texas, that focuses on bringing audiences a closer knowledge and appreciation of Baroque music, Medieval music, Renaissance music, and early Classical-period music. The group uses historical instruments in keeping with historically informed performance practice. The ensemble was founded in 1987 by Daniel Johnson, who remains the group's artistic director. The group is classified as a non-profit organization and operates primarily on grant money and donations for individual and corporate supporters. Income is supplemented by ticket sales and merchandise sales. Texas Early Music Project is a member of Early Music America. Performers are primarily professional musicians from the Austin area, although performers visit from Texas at large, from all over the United States, and occasionally internationally.
Charles Clement Fussell is an American composer and conductor of contemporary classical music. He has composed six symphonies and three operas. His symphony Wilde for solo baritone and orchestra, based on the life of Oscar Wilde and premiered by the Newton Symphony Orchestra and the baritone Sanford Sylvan in 1990, was a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Music. He received a citation and award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992.
Julian Philips is a British composer. Philips' works have been performed at major music festivals, including The Proms, Tanglewood, Three Choirs Festival, at the Wigmore Hall, South Bank Centre and Berlin Philharmonic Chamber Music Hall and by international artists such as Gerald Finley, Dawn Upshaw, Sir Thomas Allen, the Vertavo String Quartet, the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, the BBC orchestras and the Aurora Orchestra.
Juliana Hall is an American composer of art songs, monodramas, and vocal chamber music. She has been described by the NATS Journal of Singing as "one of our country’s most able and prolific art song composers for almost three decades" and, in discussing her 1989 song cycle Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush, the Journal went on to assert that "Even at this very early stage in her life and career, Hall knew something about crafting music whose beauty could enhance the text at hand without drawing attention away from that text. This is masterful writing in every respect."
