A Structure Opera (eBook by Plain Editions)

A Structure Opera.

Washington, DC: Plain Editions, 2010.

A Structure Opera offers a full-length literary work that is structured like an opera, from Prologue to the fifth and final act of its drama. This drama, however, rather than the ups and downs of individuals like nineteenth-century operas, is the discovery--that the reader makes as the opera plays out--of the nature of art.

A Structure Opera opens with a fictional manifesto of an imagined group of Modernist artists, called Structurists, writing from the Black Forest just after World War I; its five acts show the structure implicit, and avoided, in scenes, words, phrases, clock hands, number series, and other things. Like the best twentieth- and now twenty-first century music, it is both intellectual and serene, classical and fresh.