Word: eaton
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...Santa Fe Opera last week, two important premieres demonstrated just how potent eclecticism can be. John Eaton's The Tempest, with a libretto after Shakespeare by Music Critic Andrew Porter of The New Yorker, is a rich blend of Renaissance music, jazz and electronics that is surrounded by an uncompromisingly modernist microtonal framework. Another happily eclectic work, Hans Werner Henze's The English Cat, takes an anthropomorphic tale by English Playwright Edward Bond, based on Balzac, and sets it to music that freely ranges from kitschy consonance to acerbic dissonance. Both operas have the kind of unquestioned stylistic integrity that...
...Tempest, being performed for the first time, makes fierce demands on listeners but rewards them with an opera of stark beauty. It may be presumptuous for any composer not named Verdi to set Shakespeare, but Eaton's music passes the test, honoring its source while illuminating and transforming...
...Eaton's notion of mixing harpsichords, synthesizers, saxophones and electric guitars with a conventional orchestra may at first seem eccentric. Further, his method of microtonal tuning, which he has long advocated, requires singers and instrumentalists to produce quarter-tone intervals, so that an octave is divided into 24 pitches instead of the conventional twelve. Yet each of the disparate elements in the opera has a dramatic function, giving characters or groups of characters distinct musical personalities...
...sucks becomes a mock-Elizabethan song. A trio of alto sax, electric guitar and electric bass represents the bestial Caliban (Mezzo Ann Howard), and his drunken revels with Trinculo and Stephano are celebrated with some exquisitely low-down jazzrock that closes the first act in a brilliant theatrical burst. (Eaton, 50, a professor of composition at Indiana University, was a successful jazz pianist in his younger days...
...Robert H. Bates, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government...