Cascando: Realization of Samuel Beckett's radio play

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
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Charles Dodge

1973

Music/Sound

The Listening Room

Description

Charles Dodge began to experiment with computerized voice synthesis, a technology still in its infancy, in his musical compositions in the early 1970s. For lyrics he often drew on the work of contemporary writers; Cascando is his interpretation of Samuel Beckett’s enigmatic 1963 enigmatic radio play of the same name. Dodge spent five years on the piece,_ _working at computer centers at various universities in New York.

The play has three characters: Opener, Voice, and Music. Opener’s lines are spoken by the unprocessed human voice of actor John Nesci. Voice’s lines are synthesized speech based on a reading by actor Steven Gilborn. Music—whose part in Beckett’s script is represented only by rows of dots, leaving it radically open to interpretation—is a mix of electronic sounds derived from Voice’s speech.

“It is a great tribute to Dodge’s artistic insight,” wrote the composer Frances White in a 2010 essay, “that he was able to use the limitations of the technology as an asset, to form a perfect expression of the content of the text.”

The LP from Composers Recordings, Inc., pairs Dodge’s piece with John Harbison’s opera Full Moon in March.