Michael Peppe’s Actmusikspectakle V, Region I, Looped is a one-man, 45-minute opera in 11 languages, which Peppe performed seated at a desk, without props or technology, and which features 40 characters plus poems, prayers, impressions, songs, and hundreds of other “musical atoms.” These components were set afloat in Peppe’s own invented “Behaviormusik,” described by him as “an idiom founded on the concept that all possible behavior is musically composable.” The piece was followed by “Forty-three Characters,” selected from the other three “regions” of Actmusikspectakle V and presented as the dramatic highlights of those works.
As a critic, Peppe has posited that performance has become identified with boredom and that performers don’t seem to realize that art is a job which requires talent and training. In a speech to the audience before the piece began, Peppe discussed his process, stressing the fact that his opera is not improvised. It takes him a day to memorize one minute of the work. He pointed out a display of a 217-page “eventscore,” a meticulous notation of every sound and motion in Actmusikspectakle V, Region 1, and added that the first sentence of the piece was available typed out, because it was “a little hard to follow”: “Why what is is is what what is asks what is is what what is says to what what is is when what is asks why to and says are said with what says to why asks is and what are.” This is not some New Wave/neo-Dada throwaway, recited deadpan and resting for its merits on nonmeaning opaqued by repetition. On the contrary, it is delivered with force . . . followed by nonchalance, anguish, hesitancy, jollity, and despair. Peppe’s arms wheel, his face draws itself into a knot, his shoulders rise and sag, his chest puffs out, his knuckles and fists rattle on the desk, his eyes stare or close in reverie; his voice croons, halloos, and whispers. His upper body becomes a three-ring circus of dazzling display.
“Behaviormusik,” paradoxically, seems to grind along at breakneck speed. Peppe has called his work music though besides “music cells” it includes conversation, slobber, and everyday noise. Because it is measured, “looped,” notated, and memorized, he sees it as abstract composition, the equivalent of music. It is not possible to make literal sense of Actmusikspectakle V, though one is continually seduced into attempting it. Peppe will take the mere act of ordering a beer, for example, and combine it repeatedly with an incredible display of nervous gesture to reveal it as a neurotic tic, deeply etched in human reactive behavior. He can engage one in horrified empathy with a monologue by a child molester, then jerk one’s attention through an array of routines by, for instance, a torture victim, a schizophrenic mother, and a music hall singer.
Meaning here is not specified. But Peppe may intend the same “message” as that of the character-packed performances of Pons Maar, or of William Farley’s new performance movie Citizen (in which Peppe has a starring part)—or, in fact, of much of the collage-style work in the static art, performance, and music of the past few years. This is the suggestion that as conscious citizens in modern times we are drowning in reportage; we are involuntarily subjected to a constant media panorama of behavior; we are being force-fed nonstop documentation of a world gone mad; and, worse, we are rushing toward some sort of detonation, and there is little time or point in attempting to sort out all this data.
Peppe sets a high standard for those working in audio-visual collage as social commentary. With exposure, his work should at least help clean up the sloppiness he deplores in performance art.
—Linda Frye Burnham
