Third Ear Dream Houses
Perhaps the new Opera House is literally a house.
The immersive music environment was the last music innovation to emerge from the avant-garde. Heir to the social grandiosity of concert halls & the communal pomp of Wagnerian opera, the immersive music environment in the late 20th century took extra advantage of modern scientific & technical developments to fabricate godly, total artworks that quicken the senses. The two most ambitious examples are La Monte Young's Dream Houses, & Maryanne Amacher's Music for Sound-Joined Rooms. Young theorized that future generations may grow up in these Dream Houses — aka "Composite Sound Wave Form Environments" — which would have a real & profound effect on their emergent character; Amacher staged her installations as spatial operas with visual & conceptual narrative developing via the listener's active movement through musical & visual scenes in adjacent rooms.
Indeed, the very idea of furniture music has become quite a cozy fixture itself as a premier mode of 21st century listening! The inventor of such a form of languid, constant music that augments the sonic landscape and immerses the listener in a euphoric, continuous tonality is perhaps the most successful composer of all time.(1)
I can hear vividly a house whose rooms are carefully curated music installations joined by various thematic & narrative elements. New operas in this dreamy mode may feature storylines that slowly unfold over the course of weeks or months, perhaps spurred by poetic reading materials, cultivating new music forms … and by extension, new forms of consciousness. (2)
Ideally, this new type of music house would gratify new aesthetic needs: 'sound baths' & meditation phenomena that includes brain entrainment (a mere baseline of continuous music forms); the peculiarly modern taste for immersive gesamtkunstwerks (or 'total artworks' that have continued to grow via the convergences of artistic mediums in the 21st century, interactive museums etc. (3)); the ongoing curiosity of phantasmagoria & media shows, (living spectre from 19th century occultism, especially when publicly staged); the transfixing capacities of electronics with capacity for enriched sensuality (that may stimulate the dormant biological capacities of our species (4)); a youth excitedly discovering opera (5); And so on.
Just imagine … a random passersby strolls past the Third Ear Dream House in an otherwise mundane neighborhood … it is aquiver with state-of-the-art vibration, provoking slumbering curiosities of a vaguely spiritual kind. The dream radiates out as it invites in. People come & go as they please, opting to spend hours or days at the Dream House, or merely passing through for a few minutes to witness this strange new sound that has gradually been rising on the horizon of music futures. The many lost musicians of our region may come to engage in monthly music salons, where artists otherwise out to drift are offered rare opportunities for community critique that can stimulate their art practice. Listeners may come for a weekly reading group or class about the history of opera, or come for regular sound therapy sessions.
I have installed Third Ear Dream Houses for nearly 20 years, in art exhibit contexts, & personal, one-on-one situations. To inquire about how to experience a Third Ear Dream House, contact me below.
- Bret Schneider
2.22.22
References:
Erik Satie, arguably the most successful composer of our era
See Catherine Christer-Hennix’s theories of ‘Sonic Psychotropism’, an extension of the phenomenon of brain entrainment
See Alex Ross's Wagnerism book, as well as the reemergence of immersive art: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-rise-and-rise-of-immersive-art
See my Groundwork for a Study of Maryanne Amacher at Caesura Magazine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/style/metropolitan-opera-new-generation.html
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