There are three characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Play, one for each of the three points on the lover’s triangle. Dave Seidel is preparing a score for a live performance of Beckett’s Play (something he announced back in January), and the first taste matches the characters’ geometry with a kind of existential precision. That is, the work is both intellectually diagrammatic and eternally open-ended. The piece, titled “Threefold Soliloquy,” is comprised of three sine waves — three groups of three, actually. They’re set to intersect in a generative manner, the waves overlapping, intersecting, creating resulting new patterns. No two performances of Seidel’s composition will play out the same way — well, not statistically speaking. Presumably these overlaps are intended to reference not only the varying connections between the characters, but the cacophony of voices with which the play opens and closes. At the start and end of Play, the three characters are directed to speak “altogether.” The script notes the intended effect: “Voices faint, largely unintelligible.”
For reference, here is a version of the play directed by Anthony Minghella back in 2001, featuring Alan Rickman, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Juliet Stevenson. Minghella elects to echo their voices to a purgatorial extreme afforded him by staging this for highly edited video rather than live performance:
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/mysterybear. More from Seidel at his website, mysterybear.net.
Thanks for the write-up, Marc! Another detail you may find interesting: for the production, the plan is to run the Csound code for this piece in real time on a Raspberry Pi 2. Thus, it will indeed be a different “performance” every time. And it will do so without my interference (except to start it up at the beginning and stop it at the end).
That is super cool. Let me know if it happens. When is the production?
No dates yet. We’ll be working on it this summer, hopefully ready by fall/winter.
Let us know.