One of the most intriguing things about a spectacle is that it draws attention from people who wouldn’t otherwise care.  This fact is a consistent moneymaker for mainstream movies, music and other media — you saw Titanic, didn’t you? But for avant garde artists whose audiences are sometimes confined to cult enthusiasts and students, or students who are cult enthusiasts, such a phenomenon is much rarer and certainly cause for glee.

It doesn’t necessarily mean financial success — after all, the fine arts are used to scraping by with the government’s lukewarm assistance — but it does mean that it is possible for a contemporary, genre-blurring event like Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth’s music theater piece Lost Highway to bushwhack an innocent first year biology major at Oberlin.  

The piece, inspired by the 1997 David Lynch film of the same name, marked its American premiere in Finney Chapel last weekend.  Next week, it will move, actor for actor and cable for cable, to New York, where it will play to an already sold-out house at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre. 

The film’s story, which is more or less preserved by the piece, is admittedly confusing to viewers. 

Jazz musician Fred Madison (Barry Bryan, OC ’07) mysteriously transforms into a young car mechanic, Pete Dayton (Michael Weyandt, OC ’05), after perhaps murdering his wife, Renee (Alice Teyssier, OC ’07).  The name of the film may have been the initial draw for much of the Oberlin audience, but those expecting a direct translation from screen to stage were in for a surprise. 

“[It was not possible] to make a mirror image [of the film], because music theatre is three-dimensional,” said Neuwirth in a guest lecture on Monday. 

Indeed, the “three-dimensionality” of the piece — provided not only by its live staging, but also by the incorporation of pre-recorded music projected through speakers positioned throughout the chapel — served to transplant the audience within the aural and visual space of the production, intensifying the mysterious and terrifying emotional experience that the film provides. 

Neuwirth had little or no contact with Lynch or Barry Gifford, co-writers of the screenplay, while composing the opera.  She did, however, keep the film in mind, although without feeling that she had to replicate it. 

About the different types of audience members the music theatre piece was likely to attract, she said, “I really think it depends on [someone’s] personality.  There is a…type of person who has seen the film, but still lets their brain be open…I think the most problematic part is for the director, because he has to compete with Lynch.  I don’t have to compete, because I’ve transferred it to another type of media, which is sound.”

Oberlin director Jonathon Field had his own personal vision for the production as well, occasionally deviating from Neuwirth’s instructions, but musical director Timothy Weiss says there were no ego clashes during the last week of rehearsals, when Neuwirth arrived in Oberlin to speak to students and participate in the last stages of production.  

Among the core of directors and producers, which included Weiss, Field, Professor and Chair of Composition Lewis Nielson, and Associate Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts Tom Lopez. Weiss says there was almost no production-related tension.   “It was a great collaboration,” he said.  “We’ve worked together many times before…there was really no artistic difference.”

Not all stages of the piece required a unified artistic vision.  In composition, Neuwirth was quite strict about the ways in which she would not “mirror” Lynch’s film.  For instance, the opera makes generous use of video throughout the production, but none of those clips came from the film itself.

Where the film makes frequent use of uncomfortable silences to convey the tension between characters or in situations, Neuwirth’s interpretation pushes sound throughout, although she emphasized that there exists a great dynamic range depending on how the sound is mixed. 

“[Lost Highway is] almost film music,” said Weiss.  “[The music] creates an atmosphere.  I don’t say this as criticism of the music at all, but [it] does not stand alone, nor does the visual aspect function without the music.” 

The comparison is not accidental. Neuwirth was a student of the visual arts, including film, at the Art College of San Francisco and a student of music at the Vienna Academy of Music and Performing Arts, where she wrote her master’s thesis on film music. Both Weiss and Neuwirth agreed that the strong visual aspect presented alongside the music prompted the audience to listen more closely. 

Certainly the transformation of Finney Chapel, with video projected onto a full scrim and almost any other surface possible, was enough to perk up even the sleepiest chamber music concertgoer.  And closer listening revealed not only the atmospheric, tangling layers of sound consisting of vocals, instrumentation and electronics, but also Neuwirth’s occasional use of what she calls “consumed material,” or sound quotations. 

One chilling example of such material is the use of a Monteverdi madrigal during a love scene between seemingly doomed characters Pete and Alice.  The madrigal was pre-recorded by Oberlin’s Collegium Musicum and is played back alongside the orchestra’s continuation of Neuwirth’s own music.  

One of the advantages of a piece that is inspired by another medium yet departs from it, is that it does not predetermine the audience’s response nor the character of the audience itself. 

A Disney cartoon transferred to the Broadway stage with the intent of replicating the film’s experience is likely to attract the same audience and disappoint if it fails to be “faithful.”  A work such as Lost Highway, however, rides on the multiplicity of expectations with which its audience enters the performance space, and on the confounding of such expectations.  This is a great thing for new music, according to Weiss. 

Although Oberlin in general has a lot of enthusiasm for contemporary music, many concerts are still attended mainly only by those with an active interest.  Lost Highway’s appeal was amplified not only by its spectacle, but by the diverse makeup of its cast, drawn from all areas of the student body of the College and the Conservatory. 

Weiss believes that the pre-sold-out New York performances indicate that there does exist an enthusiasm for brand-new, unfamiliar musical events in areas outside academia — and outside the cozy Oberlin artistic support system. 

The range of audience members was duly reflected in the range of expectations and responses. 

One student informed a friend of her Friday night plans: “We’re going to see Lost Highway the musical!” 

After last week’s opening night, one man in the Oberlin Inn lobby last week chattered enthusiastically to the concierge about it.

“I’m a townie, you know, I’m not associated with the College,” he said.  “But you should really see it if you get the chance.  I wouldn’t call it entertainment — but it was great.” 

By the end of the show, the audience seemed to realize that although Dick Laurent might be dead, music theater still lives.