W.H. Auden (and Internet, too?)

Last night, I attended an event at the 92nd St. Y. The event honored poet W.H. Auden through photography, readings, anedotes, and music. It was a lovely event; it had just the right combination of humor, thoughtfulness, and nostaligia.

I couldn't help but look at it through the lens of our work, and I was pleased to see the extent to which multi-media, though only in a small way, was incorporated. As presenters took the stage to make brief remarks or to read poems, a large screen behind them almost impreceptibly changed photographs of Auden from different periods of his life.

The music was settings of his poetry by Ned Rorem, performed live by Ned Rorem and tenor Scott Murphree, a friend of mine who teaches here at NYU. Again, behind the performance were the pictures of Auden.

Most interestingly, at the end of the performance, they played a recording of W.H. Auden reading at the Poetry Center in 1966. It was both beautiful and somewhat arresting-the feeling of being transported to another time as both his voice and his poetry filled the room.

Would the performance have been better served with more advanced media or the involvement of other sites? It's hard to say. Because the evening was organized in such a sensitive and interesting manner, I did not feel that anything was missing from the experience. I wonder if it would have felt somehow anachronistic to honor someone from an earlier generation with advanced media techniques, but then I wonder if it depends on the work that is being honored. An evening honoring John Cage, for example, or Milton Babbitt, or even Andy Warhol, might seem unsatisfying without the use of new, cutting-age technology.

However, in this setting, the easy transition from readings to reminiscings, to song and finally, to Auden himself, was quietly exciting, in the same way that reading his poetry is.

I think this experience proves what we have been saying all along, that I2 is a new media, a new tool with which to communicate or experiment, and while it opens so many doors for us as researchers and artists, it is nice sometimes to attend "old-fashioned" performances, and retain something of the feeling of artistic development before the advent of such technologies.

It was not so long ago, really, and remembering it can only give depth to our work now.