A continuation of information about Uncle Dave Lewis' operas:
Japchix (1977)
"Japchix" was not an opera, but a spoken play with sung excerpts. It was written in an invented language which I called "arfdog", a sort psudo esperanto-cum-etruscan lingua franca where familiar words and syllables were recombined into words which meant wholly something else. In fact the word "Japchix" has nothing to do with Japanese women, but so much time has passed that I have no idea what it
did mean (perhaps "drama"?) Japchix was never finshed, only ran to about three pages (on standard notebook paper, with the notanted partions given in freehand staves) and is most certainly lost now. But some of the arfdog phrases were carried over into my extant percussion piece Trash Music (1977) - they are shouted by the percussionists during short breaks in the music.
Faust (1982)
For some reason, I know not why, I started jotting notation into the margins of my 1910 copy of Bayard Taylor's English translation of Goethe's Faust. Within a week I had moved the jottings out of the book and onto several six-stave pages. The result was the entire prologue of "Faust" set for male chorus, with a short overture written for a renaissance-style brass consort. There were some additional ideas for motives relating to both God and Mephistopheles. Probably if all this material were scored out it take about ten minutes to perform - all of it is extant, although I'm not able to lay my hands on the sketch at the moment.
My intention was to score Goethe's play exactly as is in English (Taylor's translation is really very good). I did not go forward simply as it appeared to me that this would make for one hell of a long and boring opera, and there are so many operatic versions of "Faust" already. No matter - the completed sketch is a work in itself, and the motivic material I'll probably work into something else.
You (1982)
This is a "punk" opera, performed by three actors, a singer and an electric guitarist. The score is entirely verbal, extant, and takes up both sides of a single sheet of typing paper. You don't even need that to perform it - you probably could do so from this summary (hence the copyright info given at the end). A woman, dressed in a fancy 19-century style dress and a parasol enters from stage left and stands in the center of the stage. She is regaled by a man with a microphone who enters from stage right, who screams, howls, sobs, shouts etc. the word "YOU" at her repeatedly for about five minutes, with appropriate dramatic gestures etc (though he never touches her). As he "sings", an electric guitarist provides a loud, atonal, ad lib accompaniment. The man drops "dead" from exhaustion and the guitarist goes into a feedback solo. Two medics enter from stage right and bear the man off on a stretcher, also stage right. The guitarist shuts off his amp at this point and likewise departs. All is silence again, and the woman remains standing where she has been all along, at center stage. She turns up her nose with a "hmmph!", and steps off noisily, stage left.
(copyright 1982 Uncle Dave Lewis. Performance rights reserved.)
This was slated for a premiere at an event held at the C.A.G.E Gallery in Cincinnati on October 5, 1983. However, I was unable to raise an appropriate costume budget for it, and instead staged my street-clothes reconstruction of Antonin Artaud's lost 1927 play "Acid Stomach and the Mad Mother", a work that likewise survives only in a description of the action (from a Parisian critic, who hated it). Actually, the Artaud was a lot more challenging to stage than "You" would've been - perhaps I should've given it after all. Nonetheless the Artaud was very well received, and is remembered fondly by those who were present and sober enough to enjoy it for what it was.
Assault Box (1983)
"Assault Box", like Japchix, was not an opera, but a play with some musical elements. A gigantic box, decorated with pieces of junk that are designed to scatter once it hits, drops from above the curtain onto the stage with a loud crash. Out of it jumps two low-rent clowns dressed like Grimaldi (actually, they would come from behind it, giving the impression that they have come from inside the box) who perform lame acrobatic tricks, sing bad songs, and exchange incomprehensible dialogue in shrill, screechy voices. One of them plays a busted and horribly out of tune hurdy-gurdy, hence the pun in the title "Assault Box", i.e. "A Salt Box".
This was written to be staged by a high-school drama class. The two desultory pages of notebook paper on which this idea was started and never completed are long gone, but it would be no problem just to start over and write it out anew. The only thing that stops me, other than a mere lack of time in the undertaking, is the unlikeliness that such an obviously European play could ever find a stateside stage willing to go through the trouble of mounting a performance of it.
The Adding Machine (1984)
In the spring of 1984 I read Elmer Rice's 1928 play "The Adding Machine" and got all excited, as it is obviously the perfect vehicle on which to build a good modern American opera. Unfortunately I'm not the only person to have discovered this quality about The Adding Machine, as it has been set as an opera twice already by other composers. Discovering this, naturally, proved the factor that led me to abandon its composition after one two-minute sketch had been achieved. But it is extant, and is a really good sketch, therefore I hope to have the opportunity in the future to adapt it into something else, perhaps a song setting for voice & orchestra of something else from Rice.
Before I continue further, I need to review my worklists, as I'm fairly certain I undertook something between "The Adding Machine" and the so-called "Naomi Opera" of 1987. But I'm not sure, so we'll leave it at that for the moment.
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com