``Flowers and Wreaths'': Radio theater and surround

Originally produced in late 1992, ``Flowers and Wreaths'' is a setting for poems by Jacques Prvert (paroles Prvert) in French and in English translations by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and me. Prvert's success in France after World War II was largely due to his unabashed use of street language and his staunch antiwar, antirational political stance. The performance featured much original instrumentation: an amplified skull-resonator dental floss violone, a 35-ft.-long infrasonic electric monochord, a naval signal lamp, mechanized moving audience seating, the amplified electrocution of vegetables, unconventional speaker placement, etc. Mari Novotny-Jones and I continued to perform the piece through 1993. ``Flowers and Wreaths'' was decidedly a kind of live radio theater, but far too contingent, too phenomenological to expect that it could actually be recorded and distributed in any satisfactory way. Nevertheless, this work continued to be pursued through the mid-nineties, finally producing Radio Etudes (with Sarah Hickler and technical help from the late Robert Moog), which addressed directly the issues of reproduction before being given up entirely. Now, on the brink of a new era in broadcast technology, imagine a radio theater renaissance.