Digital Booklet C&D

Civilization
and its
Discontents
Michael Sahl & Eric Salzman
“…a brilliant amalgam of jazz, pop, blues and classical ...” - Peter G. Davis, New York Times

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
A Music Theater Comedy by Michael Sahl & Eric Salzman
Civi l ization and its di scontents is the title of a famous essay by Sigmund Freud about the ills
of society. Civilization And Its Discontents is also the title of a ground-breaking music theater piece, a
lively and biting musical satire written and composed jointly by Michael Sahl and Eric Salzman.
It was originally a prize-winning off-off-Broadway music theater comedy, a music-theater recording for
National Public Radio that had one of the largest air plays of any work of its kind, and a Prix Italia winner that
was aired on radio stations around the world.
The recorded form of the work, especially produced for radio and disc by the authors, originally issued by
Nonesuch and now re-issued by Labor, uses the form of a musical radio drama to capture the dark side of the
so-called ‘me’ generation in a whirlwind of ‘break-a-leg’ dance music, pick-ups, one-night stands, frantic phone
calls, egocentric confrontations and mad man hi jinks.
Carlos Arachnid invites us to join him and his friends in Club Bide-a-wee whose motto is “If it feels good, do
it!” Dancing alternates with freeze-frame moments of high anxiety, angry words and sexual come-ons.
Scene II is in Jill Goodheart’s bedroom where a seduction scene is interrupted by a constant string of phone
calls, the arrival of Jill’s boyfriend and the deus ex machina appearance of Arachnid who brings us back to Club
Bide-a-wee for a deconstructed dance orgy and an ironic morality.
Moments of ‘70s or ‘80s retro alternate with stunning sound images, a relentless musical flow, seduction
music of extreme beauty and a social commentary that is as amusing as it is scary and remarkably up-to-date.
—
Heiner Stadler Winter 2012
The following are the original album notes by the creators; written more than a quarter-century
ago. They reflect the temper of the time the piece was written, but are no less relevant today.

What Is Civilization and Its Discontents?
Opera? A musical? Music
theater? Theater Opera? A serious
musical comedy? A contemporary
opera buffa? A musical morality à la Brecht/
Weill? An entertainment with a message? A
modern comedy of manners, a fable with
music, a cabaret opera which tries to deliver
intense musical and emotional experiences
under a light-hearted surface? A revival of the
idea of theater as music – or music as theater
– in modern form?
Of course, everyone knows what opera is.
Opera is an elaborate, high-cultural
entertainment which is expensive, dead
and foreign. Opera is big warbly voices at-tached
to large glamorous singers who face
front and hurl out high C’s in incomprehensi-ble
languages. Opera is overdressed perform-ers
and audiences, alternating somnolence
with screaming. Opera is opinionated con-noisseurs
and camp followers, large ornate
theaters, big orchestras, big voices,
vocal acrobatics, magic, silliness, tre-mendous
passions all scrambled
up with old-fashioned rhetoric,
huge stages filled with soldiers
and peasants, middle-aged lovers, obscure
princes and mythological beasts, palaces and
forests and storms and transformations, duels
and elephants.
If opera can be said to be about any-thing
at all, it concerns matters ancient
and obscure, conflicts, philosophies, politics
and myths long-forgotten, trivialized into a
high-note competition or, as the wit would
have it, “a concert in drag.” Performances
resemble the famous description of war: long
stretches of boredom punctuated by moments
of intense excitement and tears of self-con-gratulation
at the recapture of familiar visual
and aural landscapes.
This is what opera is, isn’t it? There
are those who love opera in spite of all
this and those who love opera because of it.
But it wasn’t always this way. Once, when the
illustrious dead were still alive, opera was
a form of contemporary public entertain-ment—
in fact the highest, greatest, most
ancient, most influential, most aristocratic,
most popular of all the art forms. Music
theater is the universal “natural” theater—of
all the ancient cultures as well as all the non-
Western ones (prose theater is therefore, the
modern interloper). In the West, opera was
The Big Show for more than three-and-a-half
centuries providing spectacle, melody,
tragedy, adventure, satire, comedy, romance,
song-and-dance, sex-and-violence, a mélange
of popular and art styles, social comment, he-roes
and heroines, catharsis, idealism, experi-mentation,
pathos, heightened emotion, the
marvelous, the sublime, the ridiculous—all
larger than life. Opera was in the forefront of
the evolution of the arts and its practitioners
were stars. The sexual irregularities of opera
stars (not to mention opera composers) were
as much on the public tongue as the exploits
of movie or television actors are today. Op-era
singers became diplomats or consorted
with princes of blood or commerce—just as
nowadays film stars become princesses or
presidents.
But when opera died, like Old Blue
in the song, “it died all over”. Musicians,
dancers, choristers and stage hands wanted
to earn a decent living. Movies appeared—
first silent, then talking and singing—with
a spectacle and an emotional intimacy that

the old-fashioned stage could not rival (and
with a new, mass-media economy of scale).
Highbrow composers after Wagner stopped
writing lyric music and popular idioms were
gradually banished from high-culture art
music. The musical comedy—especially the
American variety which accepted the influ-ence
of jazz and pop—took the big public
away leaving opera, like some abandoned
great city overrun by the jungle, to dreamers,
social climbers, archeologists and connois-seurs.
In the meanwhile, a strange hybrid
was born: modern opera, a kind of mu-sic
theater that is committed to give us the
feeling of what is traditional and past while
keeping the appearance of life and contem-poraneity.
The seriousness and formality of
old opera is preserved through a neo-classi-cism—
a re-creation of classical elegance and
form—or with an emphasis on philosophical
or psychological tragedy. Much as furniture
makers in Florence or Madrid bore worm
holes into new wood, modern opera tries to
create a patina of greatness, of masterpiece,
in order to line up contemporary alienation
and anxiety with the greatness of the past.
This quality of being “antiqued”, this nos-talgia
for vanished European greatness, has
dominated opera since Wagner not only in
neo-classic operas like Stravinsky’s The Rake’s
Progress but in the post-Wagnerian works of
Strauss, Berg and Schoenberg, in the post-
Puccini operas of Menotti and his followers
and, curiously, even in the meta-operas of the
avant-garde.
But this is not all. Against the big opera
there is the little opera—the popular musical
theater of operettas and musical comedies
and its various artistic offspring. This is not
such a minor matter if we realize that the his-tory
of the popular musical theater includes
The Beggar’s Opera, Mozart, Beethoven (Fide-lio
is a serious musical comedy), Offenbach,
Bizet, Gilbert and Sullivan, Kurt Weill (with
and without Brecht) and the American mu-sical.
Our musical comedy, the offspring or
successor to minstrel shows, revues and mu-sic
hall entertainment, has periodically been
influenced by the European operetta and,
occasionally, opera. The genius of the popular
musical play of any age lies in the closed form,
the inner moment, the suspension of dramat-ic
time, the song, the set number. American
musical theater has remained live and lively
by absorbing ideas form the contemporary
development of jazz and pop and the musical
level has been consistently high.
The American music theater (in this
way not so unlike the European opera
that preceded it) is schizophrenic: a vehicle
of popular entertainment with a recurrent
commitment to a higher artistic and social
purpose. The history of the musical is a se-ries
of zig-zags between revue entertainment
(with or without any slight pretext at story,
characters or message) and the more serious
“book” musical which comes close to operetta
(the literary and dramatic content is more im-portant
but the music stays within the closed
popular forms). But sometimes musical the-ater
goes beyond the closed forms and inner
moments (not necessarily rejecting them
but putting them in a larger frame) to create
a musical expression of character, climate,
dramatic movement and conflict; whatever
the incorporated styles of music and singing

may be, this is really opera. A musical which
is defined by its music (i.e. Porgy and Bess) is
really an opera just as an opera made up of
songs and dialogue (i.e. The Abduction from
the Seraglio or even The Magic Flute) is really
an operetta or a musical.
It is not in the opera house but in the
theater that the history of American op-era—
music theater, theater opera—has been
and continues to be written: by Gershwin,
by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, by
Kurt Weill and his various collaborators, by
Giancarlo Menotti and Frank Loesser, by
Blitzstein, Bernstein and Sondheim, by the
composers, authors, directors and producers
of all the serious musicals and opera, rock
and non-rock, who had the vision to see and
hear the theater as a place for the evolution
of a serious, entertaining, artistic, socially
meaningful music theater. If opera is only
the traditional fossilized formulation of stage
manners, musical structure, vocal production
and class distinction, then it is only a museum
piece. But if it is any true form of theater in
music—dramma per musica as Monteverdi
baptized it in the early days—then opera is
alive, rejuvenated through a new rapproche-ment
between theater, musical, pop, the old
avant-garde, a new public and an emerging
view of music theater as serious theater.
Civilization and its Discontents is
the third in a series of music theater or
theater opera works which we have written,
composed and produced. It is the shortest of
these works and the only one (to date) writ-ten
specifically as a comedy. We sat down
originally to write an operetta with a bite to
it—something like Offenbach or Lecoq’s Fille
de Madame Angot or Gilbert and Sullivan or
Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro but without pre-tending
to any part of the past. If you follow
the true inspiration of an eighteenth-century
opera buffa or a nineteenth-century comedy
of manners and morals, you may find yourself
in Club Bide-a-Wee. Certain kinds of subjects
require certain kinds of language which lead
to certain kinds of music and to the amalga-mation
of popular speech and musical dia-lects
with the techniques of classical music
and the seriousness of intention of classical
music theater.
Civilization & its Discontents is like
an opera buffa or operetta with mistaken
identities, farcical turns of plot, burlesques
of serious emotional scenes, ensembles in
which different people sing opposite points
of view. As in the traditional comic opera,
sex and social relationships are the main
subjects although the situations and language
are those of characteristically modern sexual
encounters. The problems are the trivial ones
of contemporary life—but any time you think
about the trivial ones, you are immediately
thinking about the momentous ones; and
there is a serious side to all this reminiscent
of operatic opera. This underlying subject is
something very real and distressing: empti-ness
and the way in which people attempt to
fill it up or ignore it. The reference to Freud
in the title is intentional; however Freud does
not actually appear in the work.
—Eric Salzman and Michael Sahl (1981)

A Brief History of Civilization
And its Discontents
Civilization & Its Discontents was the third in the
series of six music-theater collaborations between Michael
Sahl and Eric Salzman and the only one in a single act. 
It was written and composed in early 1977 and produced on
May 19th of that year at the American Musical and Dramatic
Academy in New York on a double bill with Anne Sahl’s dance
drama An Old-Fashioned Girl (after Dreiser’s Sister Carrie)
with music by Michael Sahl. It was well reviewed and received
an award as the best off-Broadway show of the year.  In the
fall of 1978, this production—with one cast change, William
Parry replacing the unavailable Tim Jerome—was performed
at the Citicorp Atrium in New York City and then recorded for
National Public Radio.  It received a nationwide broadcast on
National Public Radio in early 1980, won the RAI Music Prize
of the Prix Italia (the major international radio award of the
European Broadcasting Union) and was subsequently broadcast
by the British Broadcasting Company’s Radio 2 and a dozen
other national radio networks around the world.  That same
production was the basis of the current recording, originally
released by Nonesuch in 1981.  In 1999, a new production
directed by Valeria Vasilevski was produced in Amsterdam
and toured with a mixed European and American cast.

B IOGRAPHIES
Candice Earley is best-known for her portrayal of Donna Beck Tyler from 1976-1992 on the soap
opera All My Children. Her Broadway credits included Sandy Dumbrowski in Grease, as well as the Broadway and
national tour productions of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar (Mary Magdalene). She was in Sahl/Salzman’s The Con-jurer
at the Public Theater and created the role of Jill Goodheart in Civilization & Its Discontents.
Paul Binotto played on Broadway in King of Schnorrers, It’s So Nice to Be Civilized, Hair and One Night
Stand. He performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. in Swing. Other New York credits included Shindig,
Helen, Broadway Soul, Us at Lincoln Center as well as the Sahl/Salzman Noah. He also plays bass guitar and writes songs.
Karl Patrick Krause (full name Karl Patrick Krause von Kasischke), a self-described metaphy-sician
and Theosophist, brought to the role of Carlos Arachnid his philosophical insights as well his unique voice and imposing
presence. He died in 2008 at 67 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. He made his New York debut with the Opera Orchestra of New York as
Monastatos in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. He was a member of the New York City Opera and the Cincinnati Zoo Opera
and appeared with the Saint Paul Opera, Opera Theater of New Jersey, Venezuelan National Opera, Kansas City Lyric
Theater, Opera Theater of Rochester, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Connecticut Opera Association, Long Island Lyric
Opera and American Savoyards. He created the role of Vernon in Lee Hoiby’s setting of Tennessee Williams’ Summer
and Smoke and the roles of Herod and Pilate in the first American professional production of Jesus Christ Superstar.
William Parry made his Broadway debut in Jesus Christ Superstar. He worked with Tom O’Horgan
(Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Leaf People), at the New York Shakespeare Festival (notably with
Elisabeth Swados, including Agamemnon and Dispatches) and with Andrew Lloyd Webber (Joseph and His Amazing
Technicolor Dreamcoat). He created the title roles in the Sahl/Salzman productions of Stauf and Noah and was also in
The Conjurer at the Public Theater. He was Sir Dinaden and Richard Burton’s understudy in the Broadway revival and
national tour of Camelot and subsequently appeared in Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George and Passion.

B I O G R A P H I E S , C O N T I N U E D
Quog Music Theater was founded in 1970 to further the development of new music theater and theater opera. Quog performed for a dozen
years or so in many of the leading performances spaces and off-off-Broadway theaters in New York City, on PBS (WNET in New York City, WCNY, Syracuse,
NY), on public radio (WBAI-FM, NY; National Public Radio); on tour in Europe and in North and South America. Quog recorded for Finnadar and Nonesuch.
Cleve Pozar is a drummer and percussionist with an extensive background and experience in jazz, rock and contem-porary
music.  A former member of the Studio C Free Band with Michael Sahl, he has recorded and concertized extensively.
Michael Sahl was born in Boston in 1934, studied with Israel Citkowitz, at Princeton with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt,
at Tanglewood with Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss and in Europe. His music is a self-described cross-breed of classical and popular music
which he calls ‘funk/romantic’ and includes symphonic, chamber, electronic and tape music, film and dance scores, as well as songs and music for the theater.
He has performed with Judy Collins and recorded “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” for Elektra Records with her; she also recorded his “Prothelamium” on a
subsequent Elektra album. Sahl has performed as a pianist with the Buffalo Ensemble for New Music, the Studio C Free Band, for dance companies and on tour;
he was also pianist and arranger for The Tango Project.  His recordings include A Mitzvah for the Dead with violinist Paul Zukofsky, Tropes on
the Salve Regina and String Quartet 1969. Other works in various media include Dances of Glass, commissioned by the New Corning Museum,
Corning, NY, Saltimbocca for the Louis Falco Dance Company and Flamingoes for Sara Rudner; several chamber pieces combining romantic and
jazz or rock elements (Symphony 78, Doina, Fantasia); a score arranged for Chris Stein of Blondie for the film Union City with Deborah Harry;
and the score for Boxes, the sixth of the theater opera series with Eric Salzman. Dinner and Delusion with Nancy Manocherian was produced by
the Center for Contemporary Opera and his series of operas with Margaret Yard includes John Grace Ranter, Katrina: Voices of the Lost, Legacy,
and Love in the Face of Death. Other works include Music for Band and Strings and Symphony 09 for 10 instruments. Included on a recent Albany
CD were Jungles for mixed ensemble and Serenades for solo piano. For more information see www.michaelsahl.com.
Eric Salzman was born in New York City in 1933 and studied at Columbia, Princeton (Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt) and in Europe. He is one of
the founders of the new music theater and has created or co-created over two dozen music-theater pieces for stage and media. His work is innovative, involving
new vocal techniques, electronic extensions, pluralistic styles and forms, as well as new media technologies. His earliest music theater works, Foxes and Hedge-hogs
and The Nude Paper Sermon date from the 1960s and he has continued to work in this field over the years since, collaborating with major artists like dancer/
choreographer Daniel Nagrin, filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek, video artist Jackie Cassen, stage directors Tom O’Horgan, Rhoda Levine, Michel Rostain, Yuri
Rasovsky, Antoine Laprise and Lee Nagrin, poets John Ashbery and Steven Wade; his work has been performed by Pierre Boulez, Dennis Russell
Davies, Lukas Foss, Victoria Bond, William Schimmel, Rinde Eckert, Kristin Norderval,Quog Music Theater, American Music Theater Festival,
Center for Contemporary Opera, La Mama, Theater for a New City, the Théâtre National du Cornouaille (Quimper, France), Théâtre du Trident
(Québec), NPR, BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Company, NewOp, etc.  Recent work includes The True Last Words of Dutch Schultz, text by Valeria
Vasilevski (premiered in Amsterdam and at Symphony Space, NYC), Jukebox in the Tavern of Love with Ms Vasilevski (commissioned by the West-ern
Wind; performed at New York’s Flea Theater and Bargemusic in Brooklyn) and “Accord/Discord” for mezzo-soprano and tango ensemble;
texts by Bertholt Brecht (Center for Contemporary Opera; toured in Eastern Europe with Laila Salins). Big Jim & the Small-time Investors with
librettist Ned Jackson, is scheduled for performance in late 2010. Salzman’s“The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body”,
with Viennese composer/director Thomas Desi, was published by Oxford in 2008.

Sahl and Salzman collaborated in writing,
composing and producing a series of music-theater or theater-opera
works beginning with The Conjurer (Public Theater 1975; produced
by Joseph Papp, directed by Tom O’Horgan) and continuing with
Stauf (“an American Faust”; Cubicolo 1976), Civilization & Its
Discontents, Noah (Pratt Institute, Washington Square Methodist
Church, N.Y.C. 1978, The Passion of Simple Simon (Theater for the
New City, 1979; National Public Radio, 1980) and Boxes (a radio opera,
commissioned by KCRW-FM, Santa Monica; words by Salzman, music
by Sahl).  They co-authored Making Changes: A Practical
Guide to Vernacular Harmony (G. Schirmer/Hal Leonard).
REVIEWS
of Civilization
and its
Discontents
“…a brilliant amalgam of jazz, pop, blues and classicaL
forms, cleverly developed and timed to make the satiric points stand out in the
most vivid musical and theatrical terms.” — Peter G. Davis, New York Times
“…a work that builds up its own undulating momentum and sustains it so
thoroughly that the audience boogies long after the music stops. A skillful,
rhythmic integration of words, music and movement is responsible for the
compelling power of this stunning show.” — Show Business.
“…jazz and pop elements in an understandable idiom, in addition to avant
garde traits originating in the New York experimental scene…swinging
melodies that seem to stem from Gershwin, combined with strong,
somewhat abrupt but exciting harmonies and surprising rhythmical accents
that are reminiscent of Thelonious Monk…Kurt Weill for our time.”
— Doron Nagan, Algemeen Dagblad (The Netherlands).
“…a delightful, tuneful satire…not everything is funny [because] the
underlying subject is something very real…This is a wonderful work.”
— Rita H. Mead, Newsletter of the Institute for Studies in American Music.

CIVILIZATION & ITS DISCONTENTS
ONE ACT, THREE SCENES
Club Bide-a-Wee / Jill’s apartment / Club Bide-a-Wee
CAST
in orde r of appearance
Carlos Arachnid……………………Karl Patrick Krause
Jill Goodheart…………………………..Candice Earley
Derek Dude……………………………...William Parry
Jeremy Jive………………………………..Paul Binotto
MUSICIANS
Michael Sahl…………………..keyboards (piano, organ)
Cleve Pozar…………………………...drums, percussion
Written, composed, and directed by
Michael Sahl and Eric Salzman
Produced by Steve Rathe and the authors for WXXI-FM Rochester, N.Y. National Public Radio, and Quog Music Theater as part of the Soundscape artists-in-residence
program of WXXI-FM, and was funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts. • Final master production for radio by Steve Rathe with the authors at
Magnagraphics Studios, New York City, ZBS Media, Fort Edward, New York, and at the National Public Radio studios in Washington, D.C.
Recorded by Steve Galasso for WXXI-FM, Rochester, Tom Bartunek, Station Manager. • Engineering: Robert Prewitt, Magnagraphics, N.Y.C./Bob Bielecki, ZBS Media,
Fort Edward, N.Y. • NPR mastering by Skip Pizzi • Disc mastering by Bob Ludwig, Masterdisc, New York • Nonesuch Coordinator: Keith Holzman

Cover Artists
Titian Danaë and Eros (1545 version)
Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.
Caravaggio Salome with the Head of John
the Baptist, National Gallery, London
Goya Saturn Devours His Son
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Branwell Brontë The Brontë Sisters
National Portrait Gallery, London
John Ruskin Self-Portrait, 1861
Morgan Library, New York
Edvard Munch Puberty c. 1891
National Gallery, Oslo
John Marin Brooklyn Bridge, 1912
Metropolitan Museum, New York
Morton Sacks Self-Portrait ,1969
Private Collection, Newport
Lucien Freud Night Portrait Face Down,
1999 Private Collection
Van Howell Wanna Buy a Bridge?
New York Times Sunday Business 31 Dec 00
Joyce Finlayson Brooklyn Bridge & Twin
Towers © Joyce Finlayson.
NASA Europa
Haysville Community Library, Haysville, Kansas
Palm Desert Chamber of Commerce
45th Annual Golf Cart Parade 2010
Gathered and assembled, along with photos
from family albums, etc., Titian was the
source of our two main figures, as well as
any vestiges of grace and rhythm iin the final
composition., which attempts to apply the
retrocubist theories of all-encompassing space
promoted at the New York Studio School c.
1969—whose then dean, composer Morton
Feldman, generously contributed the head of
Carlos Arachnid. Thanks also to Sarah Maher
for lending her lovely left eye to Charlotte
Bronte and Miss Chicken—and to Heiner
Stadler of Labor Records for his patience and
tolerance during the completion of this project,
on which I started work in 1981. —Van Howell

“…A work that builds up its own undulating momentum and sustains
it so thoroughly that the audience boogies long after the music stops. A
skillful, rhythmic integration of words, music and movement is responsible
for the compelling power of this stunning show.” Show Business
Recorded In 1978 for WXXI-FM, Rochester, NY Engineer: Steve Galasso
Produced by Steve Rathe, Michael Sahl and Eric Salzman
Cast:
Karl Patrick Krause as Carlos Arachnid
Candice Earley as Jill Goodheart
William Parry as Derek Dude
Paul Binotto as Jeremy Jive
 & © 2012
Mastered for CD Release by Malcolm Addey.
Reissue Produced by Heiner Stadler
Labor Records
www.laborrecords.com
Under exclusive license
from Nonesuch Records
Unauthorized duplication is a
violation of applicable laws.
Made in U.S.A.
Analog Tape Transfer: Bob Wolff
1. Club Bide-a-Wee 12:41
2. Jill’s apartment; Club Bide-a Wee 31:37
D ESI G N B Y V A N H OW E L L N OTES O N OT H ER C O N TRI B U TI N G A RTISTS I N SI D E

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