I've started, so I'll finish... synopsis

message to scriptorium [Richard Gaskell] to pen:

PROLOGUE - Mon fin est mon commencement

piano doodlings, resonances of bells, themes to come; Machaut (aged 77?), practically on his deathbed, plus cronies gathered round large mediaeval volume - manuscript/last will & testament - speaking of things unfinished, things left to a future generation, a love story that must be told. An almost chaotic build-up of words - fragments of sentences, all confined to one small spot on the stage.

ACT I - THE REHEARSAL/The true story begins

On first chord of Kyrie I whole stage lights up; the bedsit - Péronne asleep in front of a computer terminal via which a rehearsal is about to begin, David at the piano, temporarily drinking coffee (?) having ceased to play as the Kyrie began. At end of first segment, guitarist arrives on-line from Tokyo for the rehearsal and starts tuning up etc.

D then plays second segment of Kyrie (i.e. Kyrie I again), but with embellishments, as if it has just come into his head. By now the 14th-century characters have disappeared or transformed into their own selves some fifteen years or so earlier, and gather as if rehearsing a new manuscript. The sax player also arrives on-line from California and warms up.

The sax, electric guitar play the top two parts of the Christe over the lower two voices (cronies: who appear to be trying out the easiest bits together first). P awakens (perhaps with resonances of Anna's REM - telephones, bells etc) and gets herself together as bassist arrives on-line from Iceland.

All four mediævalists sing Kyrie II, with accompanying bass riffs, then narrate the beginnings of Machaut & Péronne's story (from this point action of C20 and C14 become entirely independent for remainder of Act I). P logs in to the Internet and starts sending out messages into the ether.

The final segment of the Kyrie (Kyrie III) is performed by P and the virtual band, but now it changes into something very much theirs - chunks are repeated and embellished and the final chord is extended by repeated rhythmic patterns on the piano which turn out to be the basis of the "song" which the band (still searching for a name - WHITE NOISE?; perhaps they could come up with and adopt a whole sequence of different names during the opera [V I R T U A L - S T R A N G E R S]) put together in this Act.

Meanwhile, M is beginning his correspondence with a certain young lady and composing songs and poetry which I think can happen, i.e. be performed at the same time as the band are playing (with the result that we - rather perversely - only hear snatches of M's material at this point). What is happening dramatically is that P, is dividing her time fairly equally between singing with the band (+ composing her "lyrics" for the song) and sitting at the computer responding to the cryptic messages she's getting from some nutter on the Internet.

So, by the end of Act I, we have a "song" for the band and a (real/virtual?) tour to Rheims lined up, a 14th-century composer pouring out "opera" (inspired by his growing love for a girl he's never seen), a teenage singer with dreams of stardom dominating the stage (and the band) with her charismatic, but slightly unbalanced personality, and her boyfriend D who helps the band write songs, but is also working on his more immediate bread and butter - jingles/commercials - as well as occasionally relapsing into the serious composition he's always having to put to the back of his mind.

INTERLUDE THE FIRST - Postcard from Mars

D's serious music becomes the travel music for the C20 world (although I don't think they should be on stage) while one character describes his feelings of wonder and also loneliness on arriving on Mars to spend the foreseeable future there (obviously set some unspecified gap into the future - a sort of quantum episode, i.e. a potential, if not real future), perhaps drawing on some of Dante's imagery?

ACT II - THE CONCERT/The meeting of two souls

The band (with another new name by now? - WORLDS APART? [V I R T U A L - S T R A N G E R S]) arrive and set up for the gig in the square in front of the cathedral in Rheims. Some sort of interaction needed with the audience now, I think: the theatre audience ARE the band's live audience. C14 characters in a line at the back of the stage, directly in front of the cathedral backdrop, all looking very two-dimensional. In this Act, the action is shared between the two worlds in a very strict way: whenever one world is happening, the other freezes, or is silent, at least. I think I'd like to impose a pattern, a structure on this "sharing", analogous with mediæval "hocketing" technique. I'm not sure, but I think in the C14, there is a tension between M's apprehension of his meeting with P in the Tavern and omens of death, and recurrence of the Black Death (if this fits in historically). In the C20 we have a version of a Machaut ballade De toutes fleurs (which we'll have heard in the first Act), the "song", and perhaps another song of some kind (I've got some ideas, including a reworking of some Purcell from My beloved spake). I think we need strutting about from P and the band, and perhaps spacewalking out into the audience; also I think we need multi-media stuff (in the way that U2 do concerts), i.e. a mobile phone for P - so that she can communicate with D who wants to know what's going on etc - even a hand-held video-camera being relayed live onto onstage computer screens?? The words are all about love, obviously, and the gradual idolisation of P. Suddenly it becomes all too much for P and she disappears, at least as far as the C20 is concerned, and the Act ends radiantly, but mysteriously with M & P in the Tavern, perhaps with chaperone.

INTERLUDE THE SECOND - Message in a bottle

With D's pastiche Renaissance/early Baroque commercial mood music in background we have another quantum episode (a possible past, historically quite different from the real past, i.e. the Spanish Armada is not defeated with the religious consequences for England). We have a character stranded on a desert island from a shipwreck, who is composing his message to be carried to a rescue ship, he hopes, by a bottle. The person might be someone else historical, but perhaps alive at a time he shouldn't be, or summat.

ACT III - THE SESSION/The Coronation preparations

begins with a rest, a silence. The band (BLACK HOLE? [V I R T U A L - S T R A N G E R S]) are at a loss: P never reappeared after the Rheims gig, but they have become a cult group with an enormous following overnight. Against their better judgment, the band have been persuaded by their record company to record a single using bootleg recordings of P's vocals from their one concert. And so they are wired up from home via the Internet to the studio (being produced by D? behind a glass partition) gradually laying down tracks for the "song" in a mournful, ritual way. Meanwhile the C14 characters are practising the plainchant and M's polyphony for the great coronation of ?Charles V?? tomorrow. All the action in the C20 is somehow echoed both verbally and musically by the C14, analogous to the technique of canon. At some point, P appears invisible except to D with whom she communicates with a (satellite-phonecall) time delay (a microcosm of the slower-moving canonic structure of the whole Act), and he implores her to return to him. She agrees to sing one last time for him but she can only sing mediæval French, and every so often she's interrupted by harsh German commentary on loudspeakers. At the end of the Act D is left literally holding the baby that he's midwifed: the CD, and M is left by himself late at night in the cathedral contemplating the great events and the crowds of tomorrow.

POSTLUDE - The Music Police [musicpolice]

D is still contemplating the CD of his beloved some forty years later when he is a famous and state-approved serious composer. The Music Police arrive (and dispel the tragic atmosphere somewhat with a darkly comic ending) and first accuse D of using old, non-recyclable technology (i.e. the CD); nowadays everything is stored digitally on a constantly transmitted and always accessible network of radio waves (QUANTUM RADIO - the radio of the future [Q U A N T U M - R A D I O]) and then they come to their real reason for coming to him: he's being charged with the far more serious crime of squandering notes ("there aren't many left, you know; many combinations of notes, that is: we have to think of future generations of composers). The punishment: he may not write any more music. As they leave, he sits down at the piano and plays his last music; a young girl's voice interrupts him from the computer - it's a fan who's hacked her way through security codes to talk to him, but as she ?praises his music and tells her how much she loves him, the power goes.

C'est tout.