Beauty Beast was premiered in the spring of 1979 at Symphony Space in New York City. Sally Jo Anderson sang the part of Beauty. Beast was portrayed on the Lyricon performed by Stuart Diamond. An instrumental version of the work can be heard by clicking on the link below.

Listen to the Music

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
Music Tolkien might have written if he'd used a piano instead of a pen
by Bunny McBride

To tell you the truth, I was just sitting there. Suddenly a brigade of knights on horse back came charging toward me. There was no escape. I sat stunned in my seat. A few yards before converging on me, these men in armor were instantly transformed into a troupe of fairies - fairies that spun and danced themselves into streams of light. By the time they surrounded me I was quite pleased.

This sort of thing happens when Stuart Diamond and his Electric Diamond Ensemble throw a concert - as they did recently In Manhattan's Symphony Space and in Little Carnegie Hall.
The composition that sent visions of knights and fairies prancing abut the concert hall was composer Diamond's "Dance of Merlin." It followed "Lyric Images," which moments before had filled the hall with imaginary skeins of yarn tumbling, Unraveling, looping around the audience, passing between our chairs, tying us up in knots, tossing us loose.

Imaginative, visual, linear music is what I'd call it - the kind of stuff Tolkien might have come up with if he'd used a piano instead Of a pen.
Diamond's music happens with keyboards, percussion (Michael Lauren), and a Lyricon. The Lyricon is a still-rare instrument, usually associated with jazz. Physically it looks like a flute fitted with a clarinet mouth piece and wired into synthesizers. Phonically it can sound like just about anything you want It to: harpsichord, flute, bassoon - or beast.

Yes, beast. And beast it was in Diamond's "Beauty and the Beast" which, in its world premiere, crowned the concert in Symphony Space. From Beast's first bellow the piece is established as the most remarkable of the three compositions. It opens with Beast flailing in darkness. His ferocity flies at you from every direction - so madly that you expect Beast to crash into himself and smash piece and audience to smithereens. Somehow, he doesn't. Enter Beauty (soprano Sally Jo Anderson) with her wordless vocabulary that is alternately haunting and soothing, tender and strong. When the unlikely duo moves from solos into duet, Beast's ferocious troubling becomes tremulously gentle. The result is some times heart-wrenching.

Diamond uses the electronic idiom in a way that makes you feel he's taking you home by a new route. And whether you're the type who walks home in wingtips, Adidas, or sandals, it's hard not to believe Diamond can get you there. He's a mediator of sorts, a classical composer who's ushering traditional Western music into the electronic age. And he's been at it for decades.

Back in 1970, the atonal trend established among contemporary classical composers In the '50s continued to cool music scores. But Stuart Diamond, maverick or oblivious, was busily penning romantic, melodic compositions - and plugging them into his synthesizers. The result was a music that was indeed far out ("a wonderful trip into the asteroids," according to Variety), but in no way distant r detached.
Diamond likes being unusual, but not inaccessible. "I don't believe a composer can live in an Ivory tower," the wild-haired composer told me a few days after the concert. "Music must function as entertainment before it can be great art. There's a dynamic relationship between composer and audience, and if the audience isn't involved you don't have a chance to do anything with your music."

It seems Diamond is an elusive nightingale out on a limb, he can't be caged with the classicists, not with the disjointed mechanistic bleeps and bloops still associated with serious electronic music.
The Diamond difference may have some thing to do with the intent behind his composing. We talked about It in his Manhattan music studio - a completely non-classical room spilling with masses of wires, buttons, and levers.

"My concern," says Diamond, pushing back his wire-rims with his thumb and middle finger, "is to bring the audience to a philo ophical position as a result of listening. I'm more concerned with that than with grinding a stylistic ax. Once you've hooked an audience's imagination you can take them on a journey in such a way that creates certain images. You can bring them to various emotional effects, including a feeling of transcendence. To be able to accomplish this is the art, and that's what music is about for me."

While studying music at Haverford and Sarah Lawrence Colleges, Diamond also studied philosophy. The more he talks the more it shows. "There are several levels of what I'm trying to accomplish. The highest level is an epiphanic notion. I'm not pretentious enough to say that I'm touching people with God or that God has to speak through me, but I think of great art very much as a healing thing. I think that some change in perspective is valid and is what audiences seek. Even if you're performing a tragedy, like "Romeo and Juliet," you can help the audience walk away feeling enriched, aware of life.

"I try to be very positive in my statements. I used to write negative pieces, then somewhere along the line I began to write positively - just an expression of what I wish to express in general in my life."
Diamond says he's always been a romantic and melodic person. he started playing wind instruments at age 9, and from that point on was very conscious of line. At age 18 he began composing: "The first thing I wrote was a title page: 'Stuart Diamond, Symphony No. 1. I never got beyond the first movement of that one. It was dreadful, of course. But it did have a strong melodic line."

After six years at Haverford and Sarah Lawrence, Diamond plunged into New York's Lower East Side and took it by - well not exactly by storm. In fact, his first two years were touch and go. "I played bassoon professionally, and wrote music textbooks and magazine articles to support my composing. What a way to spend my youth!" he chuckles, slapping his forehead, crooking the wire-rims. "But things got better. There I was, struggling to squeeze in a couple of hours of composing a day when, out of the blue, I was discovered by the Criterion Foundation. Criterion had been looking for composers different from the academic tradition. A friend of mine played a tape of my music for some foundation people and as a result they offered me total financial support or several years. The grant came to me out of the sky. I hadn't even applied for it. A little Cinderella experience."
Anybody who can take music and work fairy-godmother-type magic with it like Stuart Diamond can deserves a little Cinderella experience.

 

Darkness vibrates,
In the shadows, blackness throbs.
From the void there is a royal trumpet call,
Distant fanfares that vanish into night.
The whisperings,
Formless words that yearn to speak.
The blackened pit bellows --
A massive creature --
Somewhere but nowhere --
A hollow soul that stalks forever
For the company of just one other.
It calls,
Knowing It is what It is.
Too monstrous for the human world.
Too Divine for its own.
Someone had heard the call.
A final anguished cry --
And It retreats -- to hide,
to wait, to prepare, to see -
Is this the one...
To unlock the cage of loneliness?

*******

Beauty -- all that she is suppose to be,
Enchanted by the castle that only she can see,
Entering through an imaginary gate of light,
To a place of beauty so absolute
It can only be seen by vision of purist sight.
At first too dim for even her to see,
One by one each translucent sight
Takes on form and substance,
Matter made of mirrors,
Reflections of but one Beauty,
Who enters her own vision of light.
The creature disguises Itself as the eyelight bird
To watch Beauty dance within this prison of prism light,
Beast sends to her his servants (fragments always of itself) to say,
"All that you have ever wished will be yours,
Only never ask what we be behind this shadow mask."

Rainbowed bird-like lights,
Who with but a thought
Fulfill every dream and fancy free,
Lift Beauty aloft
To soar through clouds and misty whorls,
To touch the outer edge
Of what once had been her one and only ancient dream.
Unleashed from imagination's shell,
She sees
All there is, was, and will ever be.

******

Beauty asleep,
Embraced by the soft wafting scent
Of her own sensual sex,
Tosses and turns,
The Beast's desires - awakening - in her.
And on its throne the Creature - waits
Wondering if the womanhood will find its flower.
Beast approaches
As Beauty in her restless dreaming
Feels the Beast that is there,
Hovering, wordlessly.
Wrapping covers around herself,
She caress a secret lover thought.
Beast watches...
As covers drift away
Naked...

*****

Flying through the chamber.
Night thoughts come to life.
Stepping forth from the shadow mare
The powered horror that is the Beast.
Beauty has glimpsed the face
As it truly is.
She has broken her promise not to see.
The creature must attack...
That is the creed --
Expose the true terror of Beast's outer shell.
Screams and bellows ...
Beauty runs
But Hobgoblin's beauty birds,
Transformed to primordial monster masks
Follow Beauty to be bind and bound
Rips her
tearing,
leaving nothing,
She -- more entangled --
Caught in the giant spider net.                           

*****

Beast alone
All its hopes and prayers
Are no more.
Beauty broke her word
Looked into the pit of where it lived
House of its own despair.
A tired yearning that begins again
The same eternal round of desiring.
Beast snarls at God Himself
For having damned it
To this cave of never ending hollowness.

*****

 A thread of light.
Beauty has returned.
A single tear she found upon her cheek
Has turned her fear to love.
Beast hesitates.
With a tremulous hope it reaches out to her
Tentative, tenderly Beauty tries to touch
Such an enigmatic light creatured race.
At first Beast is still unsure.
It has been so long.
But with her hand
They begin their dance.
Light Beast expands in the first rapture of love returned,
Circling back upon itself.
The creature that is beast swirls out of reach   
and disappears.

 Beauty is alone
Behind her there is a brilliant light
...Her Prince
Beckons that she follow him.

*****

 Prince and his Beauty vanish
To the far side of a galaxied starry night
The rainbowed birds,
The ones who were but the last facets

Of what was the Beast
Now begin to disappear
Their work is long last done.

As Beauty Beast lingers in the milkied way,
The colored plumaged birds softly leave their trace
Relinquishing their hold on light
Returning to their homing nest of ancient Nothingness.

 Such is the tale that is told and told again
Of Love wrapped in cold embrace
That given but its chance
Finds behind every mask
Both Beauty and the Beast.