Ghosts in the Machine: A Virtual Choral Performance as Hauntological Praxis During the COVID-19 Pandemic

An interwoven reading of the issues surrounding a performance – rehearsed and recorded remotely and hosted virtually – of Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol’s The Gauntlet: Far Away, Together, for 15 voices and electronics (given at New York University Abu Dhabi in March 2021, in which I was choral director), and Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993/2006). I examine the impact that COVID-19 had on realising this performance – which had originally been intended for a ‘live’ and fully immersive and interactive presentation – and consider how earlier models of hauntological praxis in works by Karlheinz Stockhausen have parallels with performing during the pandemic. I explore the ways in which working in isolation, with little sense of time or location, foster a sense of ‘aporia’ or perplexity, overturning the binary opposition of time and space, and how the use of the SPAT immersive audio mixing tool to electronically process single voices into multiple, spatially realised echoes (ghosts) of themselves, truly gives us ‘ghosts’ in the machine.

From the Ranch to the Drawing Room

In story and production, Duel in the Sun and The Paradine Case have little in common, but it is precisely their contrasts that show how music served both a more elaborate and experimental function in Selznick’s postwar films. For Duel, Selznick construed a genre-bending western of operatic proportions, striving for “an equivalent of [Wagner’s] Tristan.” Inspired and intimidated by the comparison, composer Dimitri Tiomkin churned out music, much of it rejected. From film to soundtrack album, Tiomkin relied upon choral director Jester Hairston and editor Audray Granville to realize the film’s musical program. As Selznick conceded, The Paradine Case sought to make amends for Duel’s lapses of taste. In this emotionally chilled mystery of a piano-playing murder suspect, Franz Waxman’s music both conceals and discloses characters’ motivations. In adapting musical scenes from the source novel for the screen, Selznick and Hitchcock cast music as the hinge upon which deception swings.

“Drama Rising like Mighty Music”

Selznick’s move to RKO in 1931 brought the producer in contact with music director Max Steiner. Through their collaborative relationship they defined and directed the role of symphonic underscore in Hollywood. This chapter charts their systematic expansion of background scoring within individual films and the extension of this music beyond films in sheet music and concert performances. Special emphasis is placed on Symphony of Six Million (1932) and the “island-adventure trilogy” of Bird of Paradise (1932), The Most Dangerous Game (1932), and King Kong (1933). Tracking music’s role across these four films reveals how Steiner and Selznick’s experimental use of background scoring creatively reworked silent-era musical practices to produce a widely influential scoring model. Selznick’s RKO productions also feature critical but overlooked contributions from orchestrator Bernhard Kaun, sound engineer Murray Spivack, and African-American choral director Clarence Muse.