Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 44

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Popular Culture Review

vaguely familiar, and yet indistinct, featureless, as if waiting for a final stroke of
definition to individuate them. Because of this, the dreamlike locale of the visuals
in Monsters o f Grace is simultaneously universal and distant, becoming to us even
as it withholds from us the final seal of significatory identification.
This is entirely in keeping with Glass’s score ior Monster o f Grace, which,
as Glass notes,
incorporates samples of Persian and other Middle-Eastern or simi
lar-sounding string and percussion instruments in the design of
the keyboard sounds. Among the stringed instruments sampled
are: jubus, saz, tzouras, baglamas, Ethiopian double harp, psal
tery, ukelin, renaissance lute, archlute, and Chinese zheng; per
cussion instruments include the dumbeq (Persian drum), gome
(African drum), and Iranian zill (finger cymbal) . . . [computer]
samples have also been created of Persian instruments of ancient
origin including: the santur, a hammered dulcimer with a lovely
ringing tone; the tar, a banjo-type instrument with a skin head and
adjustable gut frets; its relative, the sitar, a lute with a small oval
laminated wood body, also with moveable gut frets; and the oud, a
large lute with a teardrop-shaped laminated wood body, more
closely resembling a Western lute, with an unfretted neck and a
tuning peg block at a 90 degree angle to the neck. (MOG website)
These “samples” are fed through a complex variety of Macintosh com
puters utilizing sample cell II playback cards, although all the “samples” used are
manually performed by members in the ensemble during each performance — no
automatic sequencing is used. Yamaha synthesizers power the entire performance
of Monsters o f Grace, and so the resultant sound mix is simultaneously electronicedged, and yet derived from natural sound sources. The musical score, grounded
in the past, and in the humanist concerns of Jalauddin Rumi’s poetry, is neverthe
less very much a contemporary electronic construct, just as the images that accom
pany the score are entirely the product of CEI digital imaging processor. Once
Robert Wilson has storyboarded one of the sections of Monsters o f Grace, Jeff
Kleiser and Diana Walczak are faced with the formidable task of concretizing
these images into real-time 70mm film for 3-D stereoscopic projection, a task that
is significantly more difficult than merely enhancing existing imagery in a con
ventional theatrical motion picture. In Monsters o f Grace, each scene must be
created from the drawings alone, as in a conventional animated cartoon, but with
considerable additional difficulty.