Cascando

Charles Dodge - Cascando

Realization of Samuel Beckett's Radio Play by Charles Dodge

Realization made at the computer centers of Columbia University and the City University of New York and the Center for Computer Music at Brooklyn College.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Opener - John Nesci
Voice - Computer synthesis based on a reading by Steven Gilborn
Music - Computer synthesis based on Voice

Excerpted from the liner notes:

CASCANDO is Charles Dodge's realization of Samuel Beckett's radio play of 1963. Like Beckett's "Words and Music", CASCANDO has three characters: Opener ("Dry as dust"), Voice ("low, panting"), and Music. "Music" is not characterized by Beckett, but he indicates very precisely in the published play (with rows of dots) where it is to "speak" alone, sound together with Voice, or be overlaid with a comment from Opener. Thus, as Vivian Mercer has remarked in her "Beckett/Beckett", CASCANDO, but could be described as a kind of libretto, and it and "Words and Music" "inaugurate a new genre - invisible opera."

This "libretto" attracted Dodge when, finishing his "Speech Songs" in 1972, he began looking for other material for his "pitched speech" composition. At first the Beckett play seemed too long for the purpose, but Dodge ended up using it entirely, word for word, (plus, of course, music for Music). He worked at it, off and on, for more than five years. Beckett gave Dodge permission to "musicalize" CASCANDO, but initially withheld rights to public presentation. However, on receiving a copy of the finished tape in the spring of 1978, he wrote, "Dear Mr. Dodge: Thank you for your letter of April with the tape of your CASCANDO. Okay for public performance." (Dodge finds the "your" flattering, and we shall see presently how accurate it is.)

There are about as many interpretations of the meaning of Beckett's drama as there have been interpreters of it. Perhaps the narrative Voice is that of Opener himself, the former trying desperately to tell the very last story - to "finish it...then sleep... no more stories... no more words" - while the latter (austere, confident, presiding) opens and closes the bits of story and music, aware (as Hugh Kenner says in "A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett") that he is "incomprehensible to censorious folk called 'they'":

They say, That is not his life, he does not live on that. They
don't see me, they don't see what my life is, they don't
see what I live on, and they say, That is not his life, he
does not live on that.
Pause.
I have lived on it... pretty long.

The story that Voice tries to tell is about a man called Woburn, going out at night on a familiar search ("same old coat... same old stick"), who keeps falling (=cascando) "...on purpose or not...can't see...he's down...that's what counts," in mud, in sand, in stones, finally in the bilge of an oarless, tillerless boat "heading out...vast deep...no more land." Voice breathlessly follows Woburn, dying to end his story ("...to see him...say him"), hoping that "this time...it's the right one." Music is with Voice in this quest; Opener comments, perhaps with wonderment, "From one world to another, it's as though they drew together." But, at the close, although Woburn clings on (to the boat? to the narrating Voice which cries "come on...come on" together with Music?), there is only extinction. (The last word of the play, a direction, is "Silence.")

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Tracklisting:

1. Cascando {32:03}

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