To the list:
I sent Mike Gurstein, and a couple of others, a "graphic" cover to my
company brochure, that the list server won't support
>Hello folks,
>
>I hope this doesn't load up your memory too much. It is the front
>of a new brochure that I have done for my company. Being an
>individual entrepreneur is not so easy some time and I hope that
>this will serve as a note on what has been happening with the
>company and the various facets of the company as they move out into
>the International arena. The projects are either company projects
>or projects prepared in company for outside work. Let me know if
>you have a problem with it or if you like it. Yes that is me in
>the lower RH corner with the stick.
>
>REH
>
and he replied with a question.
>It looks good Ray...
>
>It sure makes me want to look inside to find out what the connection is
>between all the items...
Hopefully this reply will illuminate the graphic that is missing. Anyone
whose computer would support a GIF or JPEG graphic and would like
to see it, just let me know and I will send it to you.
Ray Evans Harrell,
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the comment on my brochure. The cover graphic is an
illustration of the work that we do in production, private study and
group workshop. It is a visual sketch of the work that I have developed
since I founded the company 21 years ago in New York City. The
through line for the graphic is that we either:
1) directly produced the work, (e.g. Carmen, City of Gypsies, the CDs etc.);
2) served as subsidiary function by providing talent and training them
directly to complete their job (e.g. Pocahontas, King Island Christmas,
Juan Darian, CDs etc.);
3) or we are training/managing them (e.g. Beverly Hill, Darcy Dunn,
Elaine St. George) in both private and workshop situations.
4) Many of the people also received Magic Circle grants for upkeep
study on these projects when their salaries were insufficient to pay
those expenses.
Some of the new and marvelous works, like the Juan Darien at Lincoln
Center and the Serban Greek Trilogy at LaMama have been, and still
are, under such insufficient contracts and have had such radical new
vocal techniques requirements that we have, over the 21 years of our
existence, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in work grants just to
keep the singers from being damaged by the work requirements and
poor pay. That is our (the Magic Circle Opera) commitment to the Art
and to the preservation of the singer's abilities.
Even in the 19th century great composers like Wagner and the Varismo
composers in Italy left ruined lives, for a couple of generations, in the
wake of their compositional breakthroughs. Adequate salaries at the
time, and much study, eventually led to techniques that included the works
of these musical giants in the vocal skills of the average trained singer.
But the cost was great and the ruined voices littered the administrations of
the opera houses of Europe. The blame was usually placed on the singer
and his "gifts" rather than the composer, the singer's fiscal resources and
the teaching of the day.
John Warfield lists these three necessities for success in complex
situations: the performer must have the TIME, the RESOURCES and
ACCESS to the technical Information before even the most simple task
will lose it's complexity. These poor singers of the past were well
paid and they certainly had more time available to them than the jet-plane
sopranos of today. But their access to the information was inadaquate
and so the physical failure rate was high. Today the reverse is true.
New works suffer in the present from little rehearsal time and poor
fiscal resources but have the finest information access of all.
Unfortunately, the inadequate time and fiscal resources usually
preclude the ability to use that information in an efficient manner.
Compositionally, the technical problems for the performer of complex
works, is still true today. However, unlike the past, modern economic
issues of "Productivity" ("profit" not "relationship to quality"), require
that labor costs be reduced, and kept at many times less the real dollar
value of salaries of the past, for these practitioners of modern culture.
As economist Robert Frank pointed out in last week's Op-Ed NYTimes,
even the middle class which is ahead in real dollars can't keep up
because of the subsidiary costs around quality of life issues. For the
performing artist these issues have grown as well. This precludes their
being able to have families and a normal life and still pay for the requisite
work study to protect their voices. The normal factory worker's
response to low pay dangerous work is to be conservative and protective
in their actions; however, the addition of the element of a constant
audience, with the requisite need for second by second approval, precludes
any such conservatism on the part of performing artists.
On the other hand successful, highly paid traditional operatic artists stay
away from modern composers because they see it as a danger to their
seventeen year professional investment in their valuable (in the economic
sense) capital resource (their voices). As a company MCORE is
committed to the development of a genuine modern American operatic
art form while developing and maintaining the skills and work life of our
performers. As a company, the Magic Circle and our teachers are
committed to not repeating the destructive processes of the past, in the
present.
To combat this sorry state of affairs, with terrible inadequate pay, that
simply gobbles up performers while they are young and destroys them
before they can become mature artists, making them move on to what
the economists and there minions call "more valuable work," we, the
staff of the Magic Circle Opera, are absorbing the costs of artist
preservation ourselves. It is incredible to me that the priests of supply
and demand and of "cost analysis as value", have so little regard for
history's judgement that they would fail to realize that the gross ugliness
of their vision of the future, manifest in the present, is so bereft of
humanity, so self destructive, that it makes even the religion during
the Dark Ages look like a lighthouse to this ship of humanity. Is it any
wonder that there is a rise in fundamentalism that is world wide?
Every picture on the brochure flows out of the Magic Circle Company
and Artistic ideal. A language of beauty, the value of human potential
and the belief that our environment is the one possibility that we have in
designing our destiny. We care about that and using the language of the
futurist I would also say that it is our identity as a community culture
that makes us do it as well.
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Michael Gurstein wrote:
>
>
> M
>
> >
>
> Michael Gurstein, Ph.D.
> ECBC/NSERC/SSHRC Associate Chair in the Management of Technological Change
> Director: Centre for Community and Enterprise Networking (C\CEN)
> University College of Cape Breton, POBox 5300, Sydney, NS, CANADA B1P 6L2
> Tel. 902-563-1369 (o) 902-562-1055 (h) 902-562-0119 (fax)
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ccen.uccb.ns.ca ICQ: 7388855
