Considering Wesleyan’s recent copyright scandal (henceforth to be known as “Black Snake Moan”-gate, or “How I Learned to Stop Publicizing On the Internet, and Love Intellectual Property Laws”), it’s a bold move for the University to host a piece of theater that is utterly and unabashedly premised on the gray areas of Internet ownership.
Yet on Thursday, Oct. 16, the ’92 Theater will unveil “Patterns of Inheritance,” a student opera knitted entirely from material lifted off the Internet. “Patterns,” which was written and directed by Ben Bernstein ’10, is, to be fair, without a plagiaristic bone in its unconventional body. The opera, rather, is more like an epic expansion of found poetry—a conglomeration of blog posts, Wikipedia entries and other public content spliced together to form a complex and potentially incisive portrait of modern texts, meanings and media.
Perhaps most intriguing is the weird pairing of the prosaic world of Livejournal and what most perceive as the high-falutin’ culture of opera—a dissonance that magnifies the themes “Patterns” will explore on Thursday night.
Although the production has been whipped up in a mere five-and-a-half weeks, Bernstein first conceived the idea for his opera more than three years ago.
“I had written a bunch of music, but I really wanted to write something substantial,” he said.
Like a lot of composers, Bernstein decided to riff on a pre-existing text—but unlike his predecessors, he veered away from the kind of epic narratives we usually associate with opera. Instead, Bernstein set his sights on a more democratic muse, a text as enormous as it is varied: the Internet.
“I spend, as we all do, so much of my life on the Internet,” Bernstein said. “And as an English major, I’m really interested especially in the way that the medium of text changes the meaning of it. So I was reading a lot of blogs and thinking about, why does this only work on a blog?”
Bernstein pored through hundreds of blogs and websites, lifting passages directly from their sources and splicing them together to form a master text.
“All the lyrics—like all of the libretto is taken from different blogs online,” he said.
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