interview with tod machover (composer of the opera valis)

8/6/2019 Interview With Tod Machover (Composer of the Opera VALIS)

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Interview w ith Tod Machover

(Composer of the opera VALIS)By Peter Stenshoel

Transcribed and edited

by Frank C. Bertrand

This is Peter Stenshoel. Philip K. Dick's work hasbeen made into movies, plays and radio plays. Butperhaps one of the more astonishing Dick mutationsis the opera Valiscomposed by Tod Machover. It received its premier in Franceat the Pompidou Center the first week of December 1987.

Tod Machover is the Director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's

Media Lab and he's also an Associate Professor of Music and Media at thatinstitution. Dick's fascination with the human potential of robotics and vice versaare echoed in Machover's invention known as the "Conductor's Glove" or"dexterous hand mastered" which, fitted onto one's hand, allows one to assumecontrol of an entire music studio. I spoke recently with Machover about hisopera Valisand about Philip K. Dick. Persons mentioned in this interview includeCatherine Ikam, the French installation artist, and Mabou Mines and ZBS actorand producer, Bill Raymond. Both of these individuals were involved in theoriginal production. Here then is Tod Machover.

TM: I'm not a big science fiction reader but when I was a kid the one sciencefiction writer I did read a certain amount of was Philip K. Dick. And when I was ateenager the book that had impressed me the most was Man in the High Castle;

that really stuck with me. So pretty early on in the project I decided to go to anEnglish bookstore in Paris and look through the Philip K. Dick section justbecause I had always admired his stuff. I hadn't read any in a long time. And itwas totally by accident I'd never heard of Valis they happened to have apaperback copy of the first edition. Again, this was probably '83. And it was oneof those things, I picked it up and I saw Philip K. Dick and it was this kind of atacky cover but it was interesting because it was a cover with I think the originalone had Christ on the cross built into a rocket or something like that...

PS:...Big gantry.

TM: I just opened it up and started reading the beginning and after about it'sone of those funny things that happens after about two or three pages, the

combination of what it was about, the mixture of humor and real depth and pain,the fact that it was realistic but also about some very complex things, all of thattogether I said certainly I have to read the whole book but I knew almostimmediately that it was what I wanted to work on. So that's exactly whathappened.

PS: In the whole process of right from the beginning and through the staging ofdid you notice any synchronistic occurrences happening at all in regard to this?


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TM: Well, let's see, there were a lot of actually kind of interesting things. And Iwon't say why or what. In fact I'm not even sure I can remember all of them rightnow. But the one I remember the strongest was actually pretty funny which wasCatherine Ikam and I had been talking about the project. I had already decidedon Valisand we're starting work on it, and I was still living in Paris. Bill Raymondcame to Paris. There's a place in Paris called The American Center which is asort of performance center. And Bill Raymond came to do a theater piece. It wasactually a theater piece where he plays Ulysses S. Grant; it's a kind ofmonologue. I'm not a big theater fan myself but I went to this and was absolutely,I thought it was just great. So it impressed me a great deal. And I had no ideawho he was, never had met him before. About a couple of weeks after that it allof a sudden occurred to me, you know, my god this guy would be fantastic towork on this project because there was something about his presence on stagethat reminded me a little bit of the Philip K. Dick Horselover Fat character - justsomething about it resonated. And I said, look he lived in New York and I decidedto call him up. So I just called him out of the blue, he didn't know who I was at all.And I said I was going to be in New York, could we sit down and talk. I wasworking on a kind of nutty project and wanted to tell him about it. So we metpretty soon after that in New York and it was one of these really weird thingswhen I said, you know this is a kind of strange project. I'm working on this thing,

you probably don't know Philip K. Dick, or have you heard of him? And he said,Philip K. Dick, my god, not only have I heard of him but I'm working on a Philip K.Dick project right now. In fact he was working on an adaptation of Flow MyTearsfor theater right at that time. And he said, not only that my wife was one ofPhilip K. Dick's best friends and I knew Philip K. Dick. And this whole thingunraveled where he was even more involved in Philip K. Dick at that point than Iwas and knew all about it and was involved in a theater project. And that wasreally odd because it was totally out of the blue that I'd picked him.

Actually another thing that struck me was when I went to try to find out how toget the rights to base an opera on Valis. And it took me a while, but I finally got toRussell Galen who, as you probably know, is Philip K. Dick's, was his agent andis now in charge of the literary estate. It was really hard to get an appointment

and again they usually handle movie rights. I was sort of expecting him to saywell, you know, for an opera I don't know. Anyway, I went in and just said to him Ithink this is a fantastic book and I'm interested in writing an opera on Valisandit's going to sort of take this form, blah, blah, blah. And I totally expected him tosay, well, it's a nice idea but we're not really interested. Instead he said well, youknow you probably don't know this but I wasn't only Philip K. Dick's executor andhis agent but we were really close friends. And not only that when he waswriting Valishe was quite depressed a lot of the time and he use to call me abouttwice a day for a year and a half when he was working on it. And well I had tokeep stopping working and I sort of talked to him every day while he was workingon that book. Not only that Valisat that point in '82, '83 wasn't really all thatpopular, certainly not outside of fairly small Philip K. Dick circles. And he said youknow a lot of people have mixed feelings about Valis. But you know I agree with

you, I think it's his masterpiece and I'd love to see a treatment of it. And youprobably don't realize this, or you didn't notice, but Valiswas dedicated to me.Then all of a sudden I made the connections between who this guy was. Therewere a lot of things like that, a lot of people especially, who I kind of got in touchwith without having any idea who they were, who had somehow been touched bythis particular book and the whole project meant something to them. So I couldgo on and on but there were actually a lot of things, more than any project I'veever worked on.


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PS: Is there a reason why maybe we might want to start paying more attention toDick in your opinion?

TM: I think one of the interesting things about Dick is that actually there are somany things that he felt and expressed in his books that are not so muchmessages as really clear pictures of where the world is going, often frighteningly

so. I think he is probably one of the most visionary authors that's been around inthe last fifty years or so. The part of his message I think that resonated most withme, and I think is very important, is one I think he struggles with in Valisand allthose books at the end of his life, is how is it possible to keep some sense ofhope when the world and most of our personal situations are in such an extremestate of pain. And the particular situation that I think he describes in Valis, I meanto me it's what the whole pink light experience and his reaction to it means, is welive in a world that is becoming in fact more and more fragmented, more andmore complex. I mean you don't have to have a pink light experience to realizethat there is too much information to not only be aware of but to make any kind ofsense out of. What we've seen nobody really would have expected like three orfour years ago - that the kinds of thing we're seeing in eastern Europe now - theworld, instead of moving towards some kind of greater communication actually, isagain breaking up into little pieces where nobody seems to understand eachother. There's an incredible amount of hatred and really bad feeling is surfacing.There's this incredible feeling of the world being not only too complex for any oneperson to make sense out of but also dangerously complex, to the point wherepeople will not only not understand each other but end up hating each other andbeing absolutely crushed under the burden of just trying to make sense with howmuch there is to know. And to me that's kind of what being bombarded with thispink light and too much information means.

I think that Dick had the courage and either the real seriousness of purposeand also the sense of humor - that's what I love so much about his work - to saythat even though it seems like a hopeless situation to figure out - to say that thereis in fact some deep spiritual or human reason to try to find what makes humanexperience more similar than dissimilar, both in different historical periods butbetween different kinds of people. You know this idea that what you see on thesurface, which is basically the difference, is not the greatest truth. I think that'sactually not a very fashionable idea right now and I think that ever more than tenyears ago - I think there's a period in the 80s where it sort of seemed like throughour media and communications there'd be a kind of facile way of connectingpeople, a sort of passivity and turning on your cable TV and seeing what's goingon today in Tokyo or in Europe and you sort of feel like you can take all this stuffin. But in fact I think what we're seeing now is exactly what Dick predicted, whichis that it ain't that easy, that if you look below the surface there's this incrediblesense of horror and pain and panic that you sense when you get hit with this pinklight. And I think the pink light is realizing how deep the fragmentation is. I thinkthat what Dick's whole life work represents is the courage to keep looking for howthings stick together. And I do believe that that is the task of our times and will be

for the future, to not give up that search. I think that is his late books what heexpressed so beautifully was the little glimpses of what makes it worth keepinglooking and the courage to keep looking even when, kind of the way HorseloverFat ends up at the end of Valis, his whole, he had enough of a glimpse of Sophiaand some kind of truth that he doesn't give up. On the other hand he hasn't founda way to sustain that level of realization. To me I don't think anybody's expressedit better.

PS: Very good. Thank you so much.


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TM: Good to talk with you.

PS: Yes, good to talk to you too.

TM: Bye, bye.

PS: You just heard Tod Machover speaking of his opera Valisbased on Philip K.Dick's stunning work Valis. I'm Peter Stenshoel and my thanks to Mr. Machoverfor taking some time during his busy schedule to speak about these things.

interview with tod machover (composer of the opera valis)

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