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Programme Note

Musical theater meets the comics in The Carbon Copy Building, a revolutionary collaboration between comic-strip artist Ben Katchor, Bang on a Can's composers/artistic directors Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, and artistic director of the Ridge Theater, Bob McGrath. Architects sometimes build two buildings from the same architectural plans. They refer to these as "Carbon Copy Buildings." Ben Katchor and Red Poppy composers Gordon, Lang, and Wolfe have created an adventurous new interdisciplinary event looking at the lives of a pair of these "Carbon Copy Buildings" -- one stands on a wide, wealthy New York avenue and the other on a forgotten alley of a fringe neighborhood. The buildings and their plans are identical but their uses and the people who use them are quite different. With a dark and challenging sense of humor, the opera explores some of these people in their parallel yet opposite lives.
Katchor is the creator of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer and the best-selling comic strip novel, The Jew of New York. His work has won him awards, national syndication and a huge cult following. The Carbon Copy Building is based on his strips, with projections scripted and drawn by Katchor. The opera's music is scored for four singers and four-piece amplified ensemble. The dramatic shape of the work takes place in the interplay between the live action on stage and the comic projections, with the comics serving multiple functions: story, set, guide, translator, omniscient and/or reliable narrator. The collaboration takes music theater in a revolutionary new direction, combining adventurous new music and virtuosic performances with the stunning and disturbing immediacy of the comics.
Visually stunning, with a stark, line-drawn set by Katchor, and sonically powerful with the jagged angularity of Gordon, Lang, and Wolfe's music, The Carbon Copy Building is an entirely new way to encounter two vital contemporary art forms: new music and comic art. At its core, the work is concerned with how an inherited "high culture" -- literature or music -- becomes transformed by its confrontation with the American urban experience. Katchor's landscape is a city of bizarre pitchmen, loners, failed salesmen, insomniacs, pensioners, members of odd clubs whose missions are either unclear or entirely forgotten. His stories are not narratives. They are snapshots of the disturbed underside of everyday life, minute explorations of the details that city dwellers must ignore in order to live their lives. The basic ordinariness of the people and the absurdity of the details of their lives combine to give these stories a strange and powerful humanity.