This chapter will be about promoting a play on my own with a lot of help from my friends. A website as good as or better than most in its day was the «face» of Set in Venice. A short video greeted visitors. The Wayback Machine enabled the retrieval of incomplete versions of two pages, The Way to Venice and Setting the Scene, see links. Hovering the cursor over the main menu shows other content, now gone. The Mint, for example, was a projected budget.
The Way to Venice
It is a dark and stormy night in «Venice». The scene is a costume party, the sure-fire antidote to human frailties like darkness and storminess. «Gentile», the host dressed as painter Gentile Bellini, wishes to test the love of «Caterina», his wife as Venetian icon Caterina Cornaro. «Caterina» is of two minds about «Gentile», especially after setting eyes on party guest «Paolo», the painter Veronese. After Venice-appropriate entertainments and refreshments are served at «Gran Teatro la Fenice» (The Phoenix), notably prosecco, the dry bubbly beloved by true Venetians, «Gentile» and «Caterina» reveal their dark secret: They have not been to Venice. Lights out.
Music (Randy Chiurazzi)
My goal as a composer is to create musical patterns modeled after natural sound forms (rain, lightning, molecular motions, etc). Many of my compositions have a pulse, but no preconceived keys, time signatures, or harmonies. These elements can be heard, but they arise incidentally as the musical «sketch» is made.
These approaches to sound are a result of music composition studies with Leonardo Balada and guitar studies with Robert Fripp. Both taught «extended» techniques like improvisation and encouraged unconventional use of instruments and musical patterns.
The Overture (hear music samples at the Music page) uses repeating note textures (centered on the notes E#C#B#) into which fragments of the pieces are woven. (To the enigmatic «hero» of the book The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, set in Venice, the trio of notes is «uniquely Venetian».) For the opening sequence, high registers evoke the arrival of the party guests. A crescendoing drum pattern provides an accelerating effect. The second section is composed of a driving pattern of notes in the middle register of the strings anchored by a flood sound sample from the piece Acqua Granda. A textural build-up of melodic elements from Prosecco Bubbles releases into a casino crowd sound sample. (Venice has a long gaming history. Casinò di Venezia, which opened in 1638, currently occupies Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, a palazzo built in 1509 on the Grand Canal.) The sound of slot machines and gamblers provides rhythmic drive and melodic color over bass figures taken from Acqua Granda. Fragments of Death and Resurrection of the Phoenix thicken over descending melodic sequences, ending in a silent moment; bell tones (E#C#B#) decrescendo over a bubbling water sample. Scene One begins.
Many of the parts in the score should be doubled with live musicians. The sounds thus far are sample-based; the addition of players recorded over them would greatly enhance them. My goal is for the music to be mastered in stereo and surround formats. I will also orchestrate some of the pieces for large ensemble.
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My landmark visit to Venice happened in the spring of 2000 with my soon-to-be ex, where, involuntarily, I followed in the footsteps of John Ruskin, not Casanova. From that point on, I returned in imagination to the place where Love and Death are trademarked.
The writing would not have been possible without infringing upon other territories. Two names, working behind the scenes, deserve special introductions, Judith Butler: «…the mask is part of the incorporative strategy of melancholy, the taking on of attributes of the object/Other that is lost, where loss is the consequence of a refusal of love. That the mask ‘dominates’ as well as ‘resolves’ these refusals suggests that appropriation is the strategy through which those refusals are themselves refused, a double negation that redoubles the structure of identity through the melancholic absorption of the one who is, in effect, twice lost.» And Jacques Lacan: «Is not the dream essentially, one might say, an act of homage to the missed reality–the reality that can no longer produce itself except by repeating itself endlessly, in some never attained awakening?»
The paintings Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo (1500) by Gentile Bellini and Triumph of Venice (1588) by Paolo Veronese emerged early as dramaturgical backgrounds. (Eventually, other images joined them to form «The Tour». See «Mission Statement» at the Support Us page.) Their atmospherics tie the contemporary world to the past. Host «Gentile», in his self-styled role as Bellini, translates his neurotic «inner Venice» (loosely based on the paintings) to the world of his party. «Caterina» and «Paolo» resist his depictions.
The masterpieces also can be seen as representative of artistic necessity/effrontery: I rob from the riches of Venice. As backdrops, their digitalized images play the role of tour guide for playgoers. Elements of each have counterparts in the action. The religious procession in Miracle has its complement in the party; both are forms of public display or theater. Water in the canal is likened to wine in a glass: carriers of buoyant life, yet potentially dangerous, subject to spills. A sword, gold umbrella or even an instrument of torture can be taken for the holy cross, and held reverently or dropped. A community of motifs holds the stage; none gets the hook or is privileged. Costumes are not privileged either. The personalities underneath are necessarily absent – and necessarily present.
Prosecco, the dry bubbly of Italy’s Veneto region beloved by Venetians, is a constant stage presence as the sacred and essential oil in the play’s machinery. Randy’s laptop interventions, popping in with opera buffa effervescence or the menace of ruin, unbalance, buoy up and echo the action at «Gran Teatro La Fenice», aka the hosts’ living room. Despite healthy doses of prosecco, there are no ugly scenes, which would be breaks with solid Venetian decorum. Instead, prosecco highs heighten the contrast with emotions below the surface/on the horizon, as exemplified by the dance of the tipsy revelers being shadowed by digital scenography, including «La Fenice» in flames. The after-party in messy detail behind the scenes is closed to the public.