Proposal
The Dream of John Logie Baird Aged 10
Music Theatre
A dream of 1930 imagined in 1890, and as we imagine it now… a future which did not in fact happen, but is intriguingly like what did.
Rooted visually in an historic world (1898,) this imagines the inside of Baird’s mind – but as a child (b. 1888,) dreaming a future which contains what the audience is experiencing – musicians, graphical displays, other audience members, TV, other devices, a version of an auto-cue, a ventriloquistʼs dummy (‘Stooky Bill’ – the first televised object) – a futuristic history / historic future / HG Wells quality.
There is a childhood story arc to this experience – innocence, adventure, jeopardy, rescue – but the ideal audience could be any age. Baird’s mother was a keen musician.
Three episodes:
1 mostly warm, candlelit in feel, scéance-like
2 still rich, cooler, anxious, premonitory, strip-lit, nightmarish
3 calming, ethereal, (like waking from a nightmare to find a consoling parent.)
Music supports these thematically/atmospherically:
1 positive, curious, utopian; 2 apprehensive, absurd, dystopian; 3 reconciled, reborn
Across these, live and recorded music might include
1
Archaic media hosting historic materials, e.g.:
Edison cylinders of:
Brahms playing the piano;
Mahler conducting Tchaikovsky V
(composed 1888);
player-piano playing Debussy piano rolls;
78s or LPs play Mosolovʼs Iron Foundry – assertive machine music;
Varese Ameriques
Honegger Pacific 231 or Chants de Joie
2
Eislerʼs / Brechtʼs song ʻto a radioʼ – (written as he fled the Nazis) –ʻ you
little box that trouble with me brings …ʼ introducing a troubled atmosphere
A theramin
Audio clips of Luigi Russolo
Charles Ives Adeste Fidelis (on organ)
Antheilʼs aeroplane sonata for violin and piano
3
Satieʼs 3 Gymnopédies (1888) like 3 views of an object from different angles,
introducing a calmer experimental voice. (Satieʼs mother was, by the by, Scottish.)
Meanwhile, an endoscope (camera on a probe) explores the cavities of a redundant
cathode ray TV. With the perimeter
projections, we (the audience) are now also inside a TV (or a womb, waiting to be reborn…?)
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