The Manson Family: An Opera is the debut album by American composer John Moran, released in March 1992 by Point Music as one of the label's first albums. It adapted from the opera he staged at Alice Tully Hall in New York City in July 1990, as part of a festival at the Lincoln Center. The work explores the American criminal Charles Manson, the murders carried out by the cult he led, known as the Manson Family, the media circus surrounding Manson's trial and his charismatic personality. The 1990 production was Moran's second opera, though first to be adapted into a recording.
Produced by Clifford Lane and Roger Greenawalt, with Moran's mentor Philip Glass as executive producer, the recording stars Moran himself as Manson, alongside contributors like Iggy Pop and Terre Roche, the latter of whom using her soprano to portray Squeaky Fromme. Split into three acts, The Manson Family is a subjective and impressionistic work that, according to Moran, uses its characters to express wider textural, musical and philosophical matters. Unusually for an opera, there is no traditional narrative and little singing. Instead, much of the work is spoken word or orchestral music, based around vignettes. Moran uses sampling technology and sound effects to create the album's disturbing, avant-garde soundscape of sound collages, noise, dialogue, quotes from the cult, snippets of Hawaii Five-O, off-key pop music and pastiches of the Beatles.
The Manson Family was released with a Parental Advisory sticker for profanity, becoming the first example on an opera recording and one of the only in classical music. As with the 1990 production, the recording drew controversy due to its subject matter, but received critical acclaim for its courageous content. The opera has been cited one of several such contemporary American examples to explore real-life headline stories, alongside works by John Adams and Anthony Davis.
Background The Nebraska-born Moran launched on the avant-garde opera scene with Jack Benny! (1989), a somewhat vaudevillian collaboration with director Bob McGrath and the Ridge Street Theater company in which the composer cut, looped and manipulated recordings of The Jack Benny Show and wove them into a quirky, electronic composition. For The Manson Family, Moran's second major operatic work, the composer sought to peer into "the peculiar relationship" between criminal Charles Manson and those in his murderous cult, known as the Manson Family. Manson was in prison for organizing the Tate–LaBianca murders in August 1969, in which the cult assassinated six people in Hollywood, including actress Sharon Tate. Though Manson and three of the executioners, all young women, were sentenced to death, a change in Californian law instead saw them serve life sentences. In their feature on the opera, The Rutland Daily Herald wrote that Manson remained a fascination in the United States, "[his] legacy, a troubling and complex contrast of statements about love, freedom, society and environmental warnings and countercultural ideas gone mad persists."
Even before composing the opera, Moran considered the Manson Family's murders of Tate and Leno LaBianca to be a modern Greek tragedy, the "reflection of an era, and the ideals of a drug-induced '60s Summer of Love doomed to end in violence", according to the Times Leader. The composer was inspired to compose the work by the "musical nature" of Manson's control and the rhythmic, song-like quality of his speech, as well as his use of repetition to inspire his followers. "In the way of a revivalist preacher, it's not really what he says but the way he says it that's so captivating." Moran found parallel between Manson's use of repetition and the digital sampling technology used by the composer to create music out of everyday sounds.
Although the composer's use of tape granted him the ability to repeatedly play identical sections of the Jack Benny! score, it limited him to using radio and television sounds and restricted the acting parts. For The Mason Family, he wished to further develop his use of tape and sampling, as "you can't just do lip-synched operas for the rest of your career." By using digital sampling, Moran was able to sequence found sounds musically and combine them with the acoustic instrumentation of the live performance, while still being able to repeat individual sections as he wished. To allow the singers to keep up with his sampling, Moran introduced 'rhythmic acting', in which the performers were able to memorise an intricate array of text, music and related information, including pitch and inflection, which they were able to reproduce at each instance of the musical phrase.
1990 stage production
Commissioned by the Serious Fun! festival at the Lincoln Centre in New York City, The Manson Family opera debuted on July 17 and 18, 1990, at the Alice Tully Hall, performed by the Ridge Street Theater company. According to the journalist Joseph C. Koenenn, it was the most ambitious project that Serious Fun! had commissioned. Considered a collage-style multimedia production, and one of several musical docudramas of the era, it marked the operatic debut of Manson's persona. It was directed by Bob McGrath, a member of the Ridge Theater, and included at least eleven actors, including Daniel Harnett, Fred Tietz, Ann Shea and Amy Kowallis. As with the later album recording, Manson was portrayed by Moran himself. Alan Johnson was the music director. Two weeks of preliminary workshopping took place at Performance Space 122.
In an interview, Moran wrote that although people expected to be "freaked out" by the opera, "that's not what happens, because of the way the material is handled"; chiefly, he wanted to show that the Manson Family members represented "the same archetypes you find in Greek tragedy", and wished to make the point "that television has replaced myth telling. Television has all of the same components and serves the same purpose as verbal storytelling used to." McGrath likened the opera to The Bacchae, noting similarities between Manson and Dionysus, and the women in Manson's cult and the women of Thebes. Moran and McGrath both believed the opera neither glorified nor condemned the Manson cult. Instead of the case's original prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, the equivalent character in the opera was Steve Pentheus, based on Steve McGarrett, a detective from the television series Hawaii Five-O. The character was originally intended to be McGarrett himself, but after protests from CBS, owners of the series, Moran removed all references to the program, including the opera's original subtitle, Helter Five-0.
The 70-minute performance alternated between speech and songs, backed by live electronic accompaniment, films and slide projections. Moran continued to base his work on a repetitive layering that, according to John Rockwell, was comparable to "the sampling techniques of a rap group like Public Enemy", but unlike Jack Benny!, where the characters lip-synched to the taped samples, there was more live vocals and speech from the actors in The Manson Family. Combined with the use of live music, this made it relatively more conventional. The majority of the text was sourced from interviews with Manson, with the rest being written by Moran in the criminal's style. The largely electronic score featured Moran on synths, samplers and piano, as well as viola and keyboard parts; a minute of Manson's voice was also incorporated into the score, which was compared to the atmospheric style of Angelo Badalamenti. The slides and film, the latter by Film Crash, were incorporated into the set by designer Laurie Olinder. Film Crash's visuals were described as provocative and lurid. Projected text snippets were designed by Candy Jernigan.
Response After its Alice Tully Hall premiere, critics from all the major New York newspapers printed reviews, one of which approvingly observed that the opera depicts Manson as the "creep he really is" rather than a folk hero, but the decision to make him the subject of an opera offended some parties, with one critic remarking that Moran himself should be jailed. John Rockwell of The New York Times considered Moran to be at the vanguard of American musical theater but found that, aside from a partial debt to Harry Partch's Revelation in the Courthouse Park, the opera was flawed for being "morally muddled and musically thin", questioning its equivalation between Manson's cult and American society itself being a form of cult, but finding more issue with its dominance on speech. Rockwell felt the often unaccompanied orating showed Moran "abnegate his role as an opera composer", and that the singing parts were unintelligible." Peter G. Davis of New York Magazine felt the opera could have been an intelligent, effective musical drama, but instead was underdeveloped and "clumsily worked out", a "shabby collection of shreds and patches" with an "unredeemably dull" electronic score.
Album production
The album, The Manson Family: An Opera, is adapted from the 1990 Lincoln Center production, and was recorded at New York's Looking Glass Studios in 1991, with production from by Clifford Lane and Roger Greenawalt. Though the opera was Moran's fourth theatrical work, it was his first to be recorded. The avant-garde musician Philip Glass acts as executive producer, though some credit him as producer. Glass, who had inspired the use of repetition in the 1990 production, met Moran in 1986 when the latter handed Glass a tape of his work. Glass was impressed and encouraged the composer to pursue composing as a career, leading to Moran moving to New York for Jack Benny!. By the time of the recording, Moran was established as Glass' protégé.
Themes and characters The Mason Family recording is split into three acts: "The Murders", "The Family" and "The Hall of Justice", with each character being positioned in different sets of environments. A graphic reflection of the titular cult, the opera is less focused on the murders than the media circus surrounding Manson's criminal trial and his popular reification. Moran calls the opera "an impressionistic portrait" of Manson, and emphasized that it is "not actually about the murders. The violence of the case doesn't interest me at all. What does interest me is the nature of Manson's charismatic personality." Moran himself had been in a cult as a teenager, and said he understood what it is like "to be so under the influence of someone so charismatic that you have trouble distinguishing what's their idea and what's yours."
The work is subjective and avoids a documentary focus or attempts at historical accuracy, utilising an ambiguous setting that, according to Kurt Loft, prevents it seeming voyeuristic. Moran commented that he used the majority of the Manson Family's leading figures "to express something larger than the events of 1969. They are represented in form and basic character only, to serve as empty vessels for this new material, textural, musical and philosophical." Moran himself stars at Charles Manson, delivering an eerie performance. The recording also stars Terre Roche as then-current family head Squeaky Fromme, Paige Snell as head killer Susan Atkins, Iggy Pop as the Prosecutor Jack Lord (based on deputy district attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who later authored a book about the case, Helter Skelter), viola player Robert Sortomme as Catherine Share, and Lane, McGrath and Greenawalt as the Courtroom Host, judge and Voice of Defence, respectively.