20th-century Theatre Pieces series


In this series -- which began in January 2001, and ran every second Thursday morning of the month -- we heard some sort of performance piece in its entirety. This was sometimes more or less traditional in form (an opera, a cantata, or the like), an updated version of a traditional form, or a hybrid/multimedia form from which the audio elements could be successfully extracted.

This series was emphatically not intended to represent some canonical list of the best theatre pieces of the century. Aside from the fact that it would be impossible for most people, including me, to narrow down all the choices to the small number we heard over the course of this series, programs were crafted mostly in order to sample a highly varied selection of large-scale works from throughout the century, especially where these could be linked with some key date (e.g., the twenty-fifth anniversary of the premiere of Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach), connection with some aspect of the calendar (e.g., Anthony Davis' X was a natural for Black History month), or extensions of programs in other series (e.g., my two-program [December 2000, January 2001] look at faith motifs in the music of Leonard Bernstein). Naturally, the idiosyncrasies of my musical and narrative tastes were also part of the selection criteria, as well.

As of the beginning of 2003, the 20th-century Theatre Pieces series per se will cease to exist. There will definitely still be programs featuring such works, but I will no longer schedule them according to any recurring pattern, such as described above -- and to my mind, that means there is no longer a "series". (Programs centered on such works will still be grouped together in the appropriate section of the page that lists installments of Prisms by theme.) I decided to end the series because of a general rethinking of the Prisms format that culminated while the program was on hiatus in August and September 2002 -- essentially, I wanted to retain the Prisms format while making it more flexible, and consistently holding open specific dates increasingly seemed to be working against other goals, such as the ability to schedule guests on short notice, whip together programs in response to current events, or decide that my spotlight program on opera So-and-so could use another week's work before putting it on the air.

After the hiatus, I did go ahead and do one more 20th-century Theatre Pieces program according to the pattern, both because I already had it in mind as an overlap with the Harnessings of the Sacred limited series that I wanted to finish up, as well as to give the series one last fond go. But henceforth, I will only schedule programs centered on works of this type in an opportunistic manner.

The following programs were, in one way or another, part of the 20th-century Theatre Pieces series. Note that the originally scheduled May 2002 installment was rescheduled in favor of a special membership drive program, so there was no installment that month.