No source: created in electronic format.
When Jonathan Larson, author of the hit Broadway musical RENT, died in 1996 just before his work opened off-Broadway, he left
behind about 180 floppy disks containing, among other things, drafts of the
musical composed over a period of about six years. These disks, which were
donated to the Library of Congress and are now held there, represent one of the
earliest examples of a "hybrid archive" - a collection of both paper
and inextricably digital artifacts. Along with a series of timestamped Microsoft
Word 5.1 documents, the disks also preserve early and transitional versions of
the music in MIDI and MOTU Performer format that could not easily be transferred
to a more traditional medium without significant loss. In this poster I show
some of what I found on these disks, what it reveals about the creative
processes that shaped RENT, and, more generally, how the
lessons learned in my experience might be applied by others working with hybrid
archives.
The earliest file on the Library of Congress disks relating to RENT is a version of the music for the title song timestamped 1:37
p.m. on December 21, 1989 and created with the musical editing program Performer
(now called Digital Performer). Accessing this file was not an easy matter. I
had planned to create an image of the disks using the "dd" disk
imaging command built into most versions of Linux, but, unfortunately, the disks
were formatted in the 800K HFS disk format and could not be natively read by a
"modern" floppy drive. I therefore used a live CD install of Ubuntu
5.02 running on a Powerbook G3 to create the image. Of course, if I had not had
access to this Powerbook, things would have been slightly more complicated. I
could, perhaps, have brought a desktop with a third party floppy controller card
(such as the Catweasel PCI card manufactured by Individual Computers), but
getting such a bulky machine to the Library of Congress and through the airport
level security would have been difficult. The Powerbook was an indispensible
tool and well worth an eBay purchase for those doing similar work. Once the disk
image was created I made a second working copy, mounted it on Mac OS X (the
current version of the operating system still supports disk images in legacy
formats) and used a modern version of Digital Performer to open the file.
Note, however, that this digital file is not the earliest draft of RENT in the Library of Congress collection. There is a
paper copy of the script that was probably written in mid-1989 by Larson's
collaborator Billy Aronson. The draft is an 11 page, typescript that appears to
have been produced on Aronson's letter-quality NEC printer. The draft is
labeled "pre-lyric" and, true to this label, contains no songs but
does include some relatively lyrical language (especially by Mimi who has lines
like: "I embroider sunsets onto pillowcases. Well, now you know...").
The second draft in the collection, again paper and probably produced by the
same typewriter used to produce the pre-lyric draft is labeled
"Boheme" and dated 9/22/89. It assigns sole responsibility for the
book and lyrics to Billy Aronson and the music to Larson and was, again, likely
typed by Aronson. Most of the songs in this draft did not make it to the final
version of the show, however the draft does contain versions of the songs
"Rent" and "I Should Tell You" and, in more or less the form
it is now known, "Santa Fe" (indeed, the program notes for RENT always credit Aronson for his work on these songs).
Although the broad details of the narrative that begins to emerge from this
archive are well known (Billy Aronson and Jonathan Larson decided to collaborate
on the musical, Larson initially only as composer, and together wrote three
songs before going their separate ways), the digital and paper artifacts
together fill out the story with precise and fascinating detail. For instance,
although Larson probably received a script from Aronson by September (based on
the date on the first script in the collection) and by November at latest
(interleaved into the second draft is a letter from Aronson to Larson dated 12/1
which Aronson begins with the words "Here's the new last chorus for
SANTA FE that you asked for"), Larson did not commit any work on the show
to disk until December 21. The letter from Aronson indicates that Larson was
probably working on the show before then, but likely recording his work, if at
all, to analog media (perhaps, as he certainly did in other cases, to a cassette
tape). However, in order to transcribe the music to digital format Larson
required technology he did not have at home. Another Word Document on the disks
dated 1/31/90 and named "STUDIO COSTS" appears to have been a kind of
invoice to Aronson. It lists three studio visits, one for 6 hours on December 21
to create "Music Trax for SANTA FE & RENT," one for 4.5 hours on
January 16 to create "Music Trax for I SHOULD TELL YOU" and one for
7.5 hours on January 30 to "Record Vocals for ALL SONGS" and to create
"Mix Trax for ALL SONGS." That Larson sought out a digital studio so
early in the creative process (and was willing to pay about $300 per session at
a time when his primary source of income was part-time work at a diner) suggests
how important Larson saw digital technology for his creative process. To truly
understand RENT, then, the scholar must understand the
digital technologies and processes used to create it. The textual critic of RENT and other born digital musicals must therefore be
skilled in recovering, reading, and analyzing digital artifacts - the processes
I hope to demonstrate in this introduction to my work with RENT.