Scenes from Huxley’s Last Trip, live at REDCAT, June 2024

Notes

“LSD: Huxley’s Last Trip,” an opera with music by Anne LeBaron and a libretto by Gerd Stern, Ed Rosenfeld, and Anne LeBaron, charts the powerful cultural, political, and spiritual forces ignited by Albert Hofmann’s discovery of lysergic acid diethylamide. Represented by three sopranos, the LSD Trio (Love, Sex, and Death) embarks on a journey, encountering a diverse cast of characters influential in science, literature, entertainment, national security, and politics. The four scenes on this video represent about half of the opera. (For the remaining scenes, see “LSD: The Opera” on this YouTube channel.)

Performances took place at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles on June 14-15, 2024.

Librettists: Gerd Stern, Ed Rosenfeld, and Anne LeBaron

  • Scene 1: Huxley’s Last Trip—Part 1
  • Scene 3: Double Helix: Soliloquy No. 1 (a twisted example…)
  • Scene 6: Three Lunches: Soliloquy No. 2 (Finnegan’s Wake)
  • Scene 8: Mary Meyer and JFK

The Cast (in order of appearance)

  • Aldous Huxley SCOTT GRAFF
  • Laura Huxley; LSD Trio (Death) AUBREY BABCOCK
  • LSD Trio (Love); Jackie Kennedy ANNA SCHUBERT
  • LSD Trio (Sex); Marilyn Monroe NELLE ANDERSON
  • James Watson; John F. Kennedy DOMINIC DELZOMPO
  • Francis Crick; Timothy Leary TODD STRANGE
  • Albert Hofmann; Marshall McLuhan JON KEENAN
  • Anita Hofmann; Mary Meyer MARIA ELENA ALTANY

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PARTCH Ensemble and Del Sol Quartet premiere “One-Footed” by Taylor Brook

Notes

Live at REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles on June 17, 2022.

Program note by Taylor Brook:

The title of this work refers to a fascinating chart in Harry Partch’s Genesis of a Music: “The One-footed Bride.” Resembling the outline of a foot, this chart marks out just intervals and their inversions along either side of a central axis. In this chart, one finds diatonic interval regions associated with expressive qualities; seconds and sevenths with “approach,” thirds and sixths with “emotion,” perfect fourths and fifths with “power,” and the tritone region with “suspense.” While highly subjective, there’s a certain intuitive sense to these pairings. Even more fascinating for me was how Partch fits his 43-note scale into a diatonic structure. What this suggests is that we might understand the many intervals of Partch’s scale as shadings within each region. This became the foundation of my piece, One-footed: an exploration of the expressive potential of thinking about pitch and interval in this way. The instrumentation for One-footed combines a string quartet with many of Partch’s famous instruments. As a composer writing in 2021 I enjoy the legacy of composers like Partch and Ben Johnston, where performers like the Del Sol Quartet now deeply understand just intonation, and I see the PARTCH ENSEMBLE as a whole new type of orchestra that can finally be bridged to as a result. One-footed was written for the combined forces of Del Sol Quartet and PARTCH Ensemble in 2020-2021.

This performance was made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

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