Research Context
In the past few decades, we have seen opera engage with very diverse topics. We can find works about politics, physics, pop culture icons, entomology, fashion, video games, or beer, amongst many others[3]. The development of many different disciplines in the last century has widened the possibilities for music-theatre composers: a nuclear science opera could not have been composed in the XVII century simply because that discipline of study and its knowledge were not yet developed.
The dynamic development of many disciplines and streams of thought, alongside the proliferation of small companies that defy the traditional conservatism and conventions of the genre[4], inspire new works that tackle current issues, discoveries, trends, and debates. Festivals such as Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival (London)[5], PROTOTYPE (New York), or NOA (Vilnius), and organisations such as Indie Opera Toronto, show this very well. This contrasts with the general programming of major opera houses, which still mostly rely on old repertoire[6] or on new works that respond to literature or cultural products of the past[7], even if they occasionally engage with current topics in the public debate, such as ecologism[8] or immigration[9].
Many of these new works, especially those from small-scale companies such as my own, Infinite Opera[10], are created using collaborative processes, interdisciplinary practice, and the mixed media applied to the genre. This is highlighted by NOA Festival (2022) in their “About the Festival” section:
Crossing the borders of traditional opera and searching for interdisciplinary crossings, the festival declares freedom, collective creation, openness to diverse ideas and forms of cooperation. Uninhibited by any framework and unwilling to restrict itself via topical, temporal or format references, the festival mostly presents world premieres of diverse productions[11].
In this line, the composer Jennifer Walshe proposed in 2016 the term “New Discipline” to connect compositions with “disparate interests”, sharing the “concern of being rooted in the physical, theatrical and visual, as well as musical; pieces which often invoke the extra-musical” (Walshe, 2016).
Concepts such as the “openness to diverse ideas and forms of cooperation” or the invocation of the “extra-musical”, are at the core of this research, and are explored through practice. The strategies and techniques presented in the portfolio are the distillation of interdisciplinary collaborative processes with practitioners from diverse disciplines[12]. The practitioners actively contributed by bringing “disparate interests” that became subject matters for the works, but also new perspectives and possibilities of engagement and hybridisation between disciplines, which informed the compositions[13].
In opera, however, the engagement with a subject matter can easily be superficial on a music composition level[14], relying mainly on the text or the dramaturgy to embed it in the piece. Composers will mostly create the music to accompany or respond aesthetically to a certain narrative based on their personal musical craft and taste, not necessarily having an interest in integrating the subject matter within the composition. We can see this, for example, in Philip Glass’ third physics-related opera about the eponymous astronomer, Kepler (2009). According to Jay M. Pasachoff and Naomi Pasachoff (2009: 724), in the opera, “Glass has resisted the temptation to assign the six anonymous soloists to each of the six planets known in Kepler's time, or to try to translate the planetary orbital periods directly into the musical notes or harmonies that they imply”[15]. They continue stressing Glass’ craft rather than considering the interrelation of the music with the subject matter: “instead, swelling arpeggios in the extensive string section, together with varied use of percussion from a maraca to gongs and drums, make for a stimulating and engrossing work”. This applies as well to his first physics-related opera, Einstein on the Beach (1975), which he regarded as a portrait opera alongside Satyagraha (1979) and Akhnaten(1983). He describes them as “musical/dramatic portraits of powerful personalities who have engaged my attention at particular times” (Glass, 2008: 723). Einstein on the Beach creates a compelling aesthetic with the dialogue between the music and Robert Wilson’s formalist dramaturgy; however, as in Kepler, the music is heavily based on Glass’ stylistic choices, and the interrelation of the music with the subject matter becomes secondary, operating tangentially. This formula of portrait opera would be similarly used in his Galileo Galilei (2002).
To explore options to engage deeply with a subject matter in music composition, my research questions focus on the integration and the communication of a subject matter on different compositional levels in a music-theatre setting, looking to intertwine the disciplines involved in the creation of the work within the composition. We can consider this as an evolution of the idea of programme music. Programme music, according to Grove Music Online, is “music of a narrative or descriptive kind; (…) often extended to all music that attempts to represent extra-musical concepts without resort to sung words” (Scruton, 2001). If we take the idea of “attempting to represent extra-musical concepts” without having to rely on a “musical narration” or “description”, we can access very exciting possibilities.
For example, Michael Wolters' opera Ava’s Wedding (2015) depicts the problems and tragedies that result from the characters’ Englishness. They are “burdened by lies and misunderstandings. If they all told the truth, their problems would disappear - but of course they don’t. They’re English!” (Wolters and Taylor, 2015). The compositional strategy to engage with Englishness on a different level to the narrative was to compose each scene following a different musical style from renowned English composers. Therefore, each scene would be composed using the technique of pastiche in the style of composers such as Henry Purcell, Vaughan Williams, or Andrew Lloyd Webber, achieving to deliver directly within the music the concept of Englishness. This approach of linking the concept on a macrostructural level helps settling the subject matter and gives unity and cohesion to the eclecticism of the score, allowing for playfulness on other levels.
Another example would be Jennifer Walshe and Timothy Morton’s opera TIME TIME TIME (2019), in which they engage with the subject matter of time in different ways. One of them is the use of the concept of entropy, which is related to the concept of time by the second law of thermodynamics. As entropy can be measured in a defined system, they monitor the audience with heat-sensitive cameras during the performance, varying the length of the piece “dependent on the level of entropy present in the room” (Serpentine, 2019). This compositional decision engages with the concept of entropy not just with the music composition itself, but also with the space and the audience, being integrated on different levels of the piece.
Following the concept of entropy, I already started exploring the idea of communicating a subject matter on different compositional levels in the physics opera[16], Entanglement! An Entropic Tale (2018). Here, for example, the thickness of the texture depends on the position in time of the story. From the beginning to the end, the dropping number of energetic interactions in the universe[17] is depicted with a decrease in the number of pitches available to compose. This results in an entropic climactic point composed with a single pitch[18]. This strategy is also useful, especially for the physics dissemination character of the piece when, for example, depicting the quantum entanglement between two particles in a different position in space and time. In this case, the thickness of the texture determines the position of the characters in their own timelines. In this opera, the integration of the subject matter responds to a compositional process that encompasses the whole work, helping to generate, in this case, harmonic cohesion on a macrostructural level. However, by focusing the integration of subject matter only on the musical discourse, it misses on having a direct impact on other layers of the composition. This results in the opera relying heavily on the sung text to communicate the subject matter.
As mentioned in the abstract, and building on previous work such as the aforementioned physics dissemination opera, Entanglement! An Entropic Tale (2018), the framework for this practice-based research is art and science.
Research in the connections between arts and science has been recently prolific. Academic discussion about influence, interdisciplinary collaboration, and aesthetics in this topic is available in several published books (Barry and Born, 2014; Ede, 2000; 2005; Kemp, 2000; Reichle, 2009; Strosberg, 2015) and articles in journals such as Nature (Eldred, 2016; Lehmann and Gaskins, 2019). Many of them provide examples of artists working in this field, critically discussing several artworks in relation to the issues that art-science presents. Furthermore, publications that document activities and projects under the art and science umbrella are available on paper (Arends and Thackara, 2003; Wilson, 2010) and digitally (e.g., NATUREVOLVE, or HOLO).
Although most of the academic discussion around art and science has been focused on the visual arts, most of its criticism can also be applied to the performing arts. Martin Kemp (2000:v) complained that “too many of the increasingly fashionable art-science initiatives seemed to be operating at a surface level, in which obvious points of contact (e.g., artists using scientific imagery) were simply narrated or in which objects from art and science were juxtaposed without really interpenetrating”. On this issue, Siân Ede exposed that “while ‘Sci-Art’ sometimes seems to be all the rage, not all of it is interesting as art. Indeed, I do not believe that art can be directly about science” (Ede, 2005:3).
This issue can be juxtaposed to music-theatre. By looking at titles such as Philip Glass’ Galileo Galilei (2002) and Kepler (2009), Constantine Koukias’ Tesla - Lighting in His Hand (2003), John Adam’s Doctor Atomic (2005), Jonathan Dove’s Man on the Moon (2006), or Elżbieta Sikora’s Madame Curie (2011), we can see that many science-related operas are, in reality, biopics of people related to science, where the scientific element is embedded mostly through their personal lives or their ideas. Despite the artistic quality of these operas, which is not discussed here, this fact brings back the idea of the “fashionable art-science initiatives (…) operating at a surface level” (Kemp, 2000:v)[19].
Music-theatre, however, is an excellent medium to explore the connections between art and science. Its non-realistic quality, based primarily on the dialogue between music and dramaturgy (through the sung voice in opera) and its relationship with other artistic disciplines, can be used to engage with abstract ideas and subject matters. It is as “realistic” to have the Wagnerian god Wotan singing while surrounding Brünnhilde with a circle of fire than to have an anthropomorphised electron (or any other scientific concept) singing on stage.
In other non-realistic performing arts disciplines, such as dance, this idea has already been explored. Ede (200:56) mentions, for example, the case of a piece by Nikky Smedley (Talking of the Sex of Angels, 1995), in which, at a point, the choreography follows the tracks made by a pair of positron-electron in a cloud chamber, representing the double slit experiment. Despite its representational quality, the piece presents a phenomenon difficult to communicate: the indeterminacy of quantum physics. Ede reflects that “contemporary dance was a particularly good medium for this as it represents ideas and feeling through abstract movement conveyed through the concrete limitations of the human body”, and that the performance stressed on a different level the influence of the observer in quantum physics.
Similarly, music-theatre, through its multi-layered artistic nature, can achieve the communication of a subject matter on different levels, generating meaningful connections between different ideas. This is especially relevant when we consider the collaborative aspect. On collaboration in art and science projects, Ede stresses that “the potential for profound levels of engagement should be acknowledged” (2000:65), with the artists exploring the connections with the human perspective.
With interdisciplinary collaboration as part of the creative process, there are operatic pieces that engage deeper with a subject matter, similarly to Siân Ede’s artistic idea of creating “images which suggest alternative ways of seeing [science]” (Ede, 2005:3). Other pieces, however, engage deeper with Siân Ede’s artistic idea of creating “images which suggest alternative ways of seeing [science]” (Ede, 2005:3). This is the case of Héctor Parras’ Hypermusic Prologue (2010), which is the result of a collaboration with Harvard’s theoretical physicist Lisa Randall. In the piece, according to Parra in an article about the work, the music “expresses the ideas of physics”, and represents "the four basic forces of nature" (Powell, 2009). Ede's ideas can apply as well to my work Entanglement! An Entropic Tale (2018) and to Walshe and Morton’s TIME TIME TIME (2019), with different integrated uses of entropy and time in the pieces (described above) and interdisciplinary collaboration at the core of their creation.
The strategies and techniques presented in the research have been developed through interdisciplinary collaboration to generate a deep engagement between the subject matter and its artistic outcome[20], looking for the “interpenetration” of the art and science objects. In section 2[21], I present and analyse in context the application of a series of these strategies and techniques used to integrate a subject matter within the musical discourse. In section 3[22], I present and analyse how different strategies and techniques can be used to communicate a subject matter on different compositional levels.