Igor Keller, composer.

• Author: Kounalakis, Markos
• Position: Interview

For most of us, the strange saga of Bill O'Reilly's sexual harassment of a female colleague dragged public discourse to a new low in the fall of 2004. Nobody ever really wanted to hear O'Reilly's. unorthodox suggestions for the amorous use of a loofah--or, as he termed it, a "falafel." But for the Seattle composer Igor Keller, the tawdry revelations held the promise of high art. Last year, Keller wrote an oratorio based on O'Reilly's legal travails for a twenty-eight-piece chamber orchestra, twenty-six-voice chorus, and three soloists. The Washington Monthly's Markos Kounalakis and Peter Laufer spoke recently with Keller about the work, which premiered in Seattle in January.

WM: Can you explain the title of your oratorio, Mackris v. O'Reilly?

IK: Well, it's based on the legal complaint lodged against Bill O'Reilly by one of his producers, Andrea Mackris, in October of 2004.

WM: One excerpt has the lyric, "Next time you'll come up to my hotel room and we'll make this happen." What's that about?

IK: That part is basically the straw that breaks the camel's back. Andrea Mackris has decided to pursue charges against him because he has been so bullying and creepy for so long that she didn't feel she had any other choice. This almost comes at the very end of the work, the thirtieth of thirty-one parts. An oratorio is a musical dramatic work with no scenery, kind of in the vein of the Messiah.

WM: O'Reilly's Messiah?

IK: Yes, indeed. It's two and a half hours long.

WM: And what we hear comes from transcripts?

IK: Directly from the transcript--it's the central charges. I actually set about twelve pages of legal text to music.

WM: As you were researching this, what did you discover about the character of Bill O'Reilly?

IK: The strange thing was, when I began this work I really had no opinion about Bill O'Reilly. I knew that my mom liked him very much, to the point where she named her dog after him. I thought of it more as an interesting character sketch. But as I got deeper into the text, I realized it's kind of indicative of what's going on in this country right now. This is the sort of thing that happens when a person thinks they have almost unlimited power, and is also delusional and...