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 Contemporary Opera in Flux

Everett, Yayoi U. Contemporary Opera In Flux.

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Everett, Yayoi U. Contemporary Opera In Flux.
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 Contemporary Opera
in Flux
Edited by Yayoi U. Everett

with a Foreword by Susan McClary

University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor

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 Copyright © 2024 by Yayoi U. Everett
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Names: Everett, Yayoi Uno, editor. | McClary, Susan, author of foreword. |

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.
Title: Contemporary opera in flux / edited by Yayoi U. Everett ; with a foreword by
Susan McClary.
Description: Ann Arbor [ Michigan] : University of Michigan Press, 2024. | Includes
bibliographical references (pages 287–­313) and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2024021594 (print) | lccn 2024021595 (ebook) | isbn 9780472076260
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Subjects: LCSH: Opera—­20th century. | Opera—­21st century. | Opera—­Production and
direction—­History—­20th century. | Opera—­Production and direction—­History—­21st
century. | Opera—­Political aspects—­History—­20th century. | Opera—­Political aspects—­
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to additional funding from the University of Michigan Office of the Provost and the generous
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Cover photograph: Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things (2016). Photograph © Marina Leviskaya,
used by permission.

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 Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix
Foreword xi
Susan McClary

Introduction 1
Yayoi Uno Everett and Nicholas David Stevens
1 Fear of an Envoiced Planet: Speculative Arias of the
Operatic Hyperobject 21
Nicholas David Stevens
2 Posthuman Voice Beyond Opera: Songful Practice of
Holograms, Robots, Machines, and Vocaloids 45
Jelena Novak
3 Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave, Theater of Testimony,
and the Documentary Turn in America Opera 67
Ryan Ebright
4 ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Only the Truth!):
Camelia la Tejana’s Many Truths 89
Amy Bauer
5 Techniques and Dramaturgy of the Avatar in George Lewis’s
Afterword 109
Alexander K. Rothe
6 Dramaturgies of Trauma: Chaya Czernowin’s Infinite Now 131
Joy H. Calico
7 Inter-­Asia Sensibility: Vocality and Materiality
in Tan Dun’s Tea: A Mirror of Soul 152
Nancy Yunhwa Rao

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 vi Contents

8 Of Sense and Sirens: Ana Sokolović’s Svadba

and Six Voix Pour Sirènes 176
Colleen Renihan
9 Sex, Myth, and Power: Reclaiming the “Dark Feminine”
in Anthony Davis’s Lilith 198
Jane Forner
10 Narratives of the Self in Thomas Hyde’s That Man Stephen Ward 221
Edward Venn
11 Narrative Agencies in Annie Proulx and Charles Wuorinen’s
Brokeback Mountain 245
Yayoi Uno Everett
12 From Subjectivity to Biopolitics: The Dream in Salvatore
Sciarrino’s Music Theater 266
Mauro Fosco Bertola

Bibliography 287
Contributors 315
Index 319

Digital materials related to this title can be found on

the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL:
[Link]

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 Illustrations

Figures

1.1 Hari (Simona Eisinger) and Kelvin (Timothy Connor) in

Neue Oper Wien’s 2021 Solaris 30
1.2 Atalla Ayan (Rodolfo) and Nicole Car (Mimì) in
Opéra national de Paris’s 2017 La bohème 31
2.1 Martin Riches, the Singing Machine (2010–­13), with the score
of “The Audition” (2019) by Tom Johnson 52
2.2 Tom Johnson, “The Audition” 54
2.3 ABB Robot IRB 1400 in “The Lamentations of Orpheus” 57
2.4 Hatsune Miku singing in The End 58
3.1 The Cave, act 1, scene 13—­Sarah Casts Hagar and Ishmael Out 74
3.2 The Cave, act 1, scene 12—­Genesis XXI 80
3.3 The Cave, act 2, scene 4—­Sacrifice: Ismael and Ishak 82
4.1 Transcription of “Contrabando y Traición” (mm. 1–­28) 93
4.2 The coda of El Tigre’s aria, scene 3 100
5.1 Arch Map of Afterword, scene 4 117
5.2 Tempo Proportions in Afterword, scene 4 117
5.3 Initial chord and transformations in Afterword, scene 4 119
5.4 Musical styles, motives, and gestures in Afterword, scene 4 120
5.5 Afterword, scene 4 (October 16, 2015, Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago) 123
6.1 Production photo of Infinite Now (2017) 140
6.2 Czernowin’s Infinite Now, act III (mm. 689–­694) 142
6.3 Infinite Now, act IV (mm. 885–­889) 146
7.1 Gesture of longing in Tea: A Mirror of Soul 167
7.2 Gesture of filial piety in Tea: A Mirror of Soul 167
7.3 Gesture of filial piety varied in Tea: A Mirror of Soul 168
7.4 Gesture of roguish in Tea: A Mirror of Soul 168

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 viii Illustrations

7.5 Gesture of doom in Tea: A Mirror of Soul 169

8.1a Ana Sokolović, Svadba (mm. 1–­6) 182
8.1b Ana Sokolović, Six Voix Pour Sirènes (mm. 1–­4) 183
8.2a Ana Sokolović, Six Voix Pour Sirènes (mm. 45–­49) 190
8.2b Ana Sokolović, Svadba (mm. 355–­364) 191
9.1 Lilith pronounces the Ineffable Name (scene 2, mm. 301–­309) 204
9.2 Lilith’s aria, scene 3, Lilith (mm. 205–­212) 208
9.3 Video projections and mirrors emphasizing Eve-­Lilith duality,
scene 5 in [Re]Creating Lilith (2015) 213
10.1a That Man Stephen Ward (scene 1, reh. D–­E) 232
10.1b Continuation of scene 1 from That Man Stephen Ward 233
10.2 That Man Stephen Ward (scene 4, reh. P–­Q )237-­1

11.1 Brokeback Mountain theme and twelve-­tone row structure 253

11.2 Formal plan of Brokeback Mountain 254
11.3 “Freedom” theme (Act I, mm. 544–­545, mm. 553–­555) 255
11.4a Ennis’s response to Jack’s death (act II) 257
11.4b Closing scene (act II) 258
12.1 Beginning of Lohengrin, music by Salvatore Sciarrino 274

Tables

3.1 The structure of The Cave, act 1, showing the interweaving of

narrative and interview sections 70
7.1 Summary of The Book Tea by Lu Yu 160
7.2 Overall design of Tea: A Mirror of Soul 161
10.1 Overall scene analysis of That Man Stephen Ward 228

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 Acknowledgments

The past two decades of the twenty-­first century have been a watershed
moment for operagoers. Not only has the subject matter for opera expanded
in scope and range to reflect contemporary social issues, but new site-­
specific venues and technologies (live and virtual) have radically changed
our modes of attendance. Amidst the global pandemic, people drove around
in their vehicles underground to hear Yuval Sharon’s Twilight: Gods (2020),
watched White Snake’s virtual/real-­time production of Death by Life (2021),
and attended livestreaming of new operas from the comfort of their homes.
Scholarship on opera kept up with the emerging trends. Organizations such
as Yale Opera Study Today (YOST), University of Michigan, and Opera
America hosted virtual conferences on new operas by female and BIPOC
composers, engaging practitioners and scholars in dialogue with one another.
At the Midwest chapter of AMS conference in 2018, after hearing Nicholas D.
Stevens’s cutting-­edge presentation on Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things and
Liza Lim’s Tree of Codes, I approached him about the idea of collaborating on
a publication of essays that document new opera as an artistic incubator for
innovative experimentation with media, technology, and site-­specific perfor-
mances. After successfully pitching the collection of essays to Sara Cohen at
the University of Michigan Press in 2020, in the fall Nicholas and I organized
a virtual conference called Opera in Flux with fifteen presenters, which led
to a robust exchange of ideas about contemporary opera’s engagement with
issues of agency (human versus nonhuman), media and technology, gender,
sexuality, cultural identity, subjectivity, and so forth. Since then, the volume
has gone through several reviews and reassignment of contributors prior to
settling on the twelve essays presented here. In the end, we are fortunate to
have garnered seasoned scholars who offer distinctive insights into contem-
porary opera from the perspectives of musicology, media studies, drama-
turgy, philosophy, and music theory.
While Stevens stepped down from his role as coeditor in January 2023,

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 x Acknowledgments

I’d like to acknowledge that the publication of this volume would not have
been possible without his stewardship and enthusiasm for all things operatic.
I cherish the collaborative spirit that guided numerous Zoom sessions we
held over the course of three years to get through editorial rough patches.
Special thanks go to Joy Calico and Colleen Renihan for their editorial assis-
tance along the way. And last, but not least in importance, we are grateful
to Sara Cohen for shepherding us through negotiations at every stage of the
review process.
The publication of Contemporary Opera in Flux is also made possible by
the Creativity in the Arts award I received from the Vice Chancellor’s Office
at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2020, which covered the costs of
proofreading and copyright permission of musical examples, as well as con-
tributing to open-­access and indexing fees at University of Michigan Press.
I thank the head of music, Louis Bergonzi, and the director of the School of
Theatre and Music at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Christine M. Dun-
ford, for sponsoring the virtual conference in 2020. At the Graduate Center
at CUNY, I thank Benjamin Schweitzer for proofreading the manuscript and
finalizing the bibliography during March of 2023.

Yayoi U. Everett

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 Foreword

For years I have directed a seminar titled “Opera After Einstein.” But as I gear
up to teach it in fall 2023, I have had to realize that Philip Glass and Rob-
ert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (1975) now qualifies as “early music.” After
several decades during which many composers shunned theatrical work,
opera has returned with a vengeance. To be sure, the late twentieth century
witnessed a renewed interest, with pioneering contributions by Philip Glass,
John Adams, and Kaija Saariaho. But no one could have anticipated the explo-
sion of new work or the increased demand by audiences for performances of
something other than the canonic staples that had ruled the stage for so long.
Even the Metropolitan Opera—­in the post-­pandemic, post–­George Floyd
era—­has sought out and produced operas by Anthony Davis and Terrance
Blanchard (the first two works by African American composers in the insti-
tution’s history). A belated presentation of Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin in 2016
was only the second opera by a woman at the Met, more than a century after
the production of Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald in 1913. But commissions from
Missy Mazzoli and others promise to add others to their roster.
European aficionados have long had access to operas by György Ligeti,
Salvatore Sciarrino, George Benjamin, Thomas Adès, Olga Neuwirth, Chaya
Czernowin, and many others who have radicalized the traditional premises
underlying plot, vocal production, and staging. Although several of the new
works mounted by the Met and other established US venues adhere to famil-
iar conventions, commissioning programs such as Beth Morrison Projects,
Opera Philadelphia, and the Los Angeles Opera actively encourage experi-
mentation. During the pandemic lockdown in 2020–­21, they explored new
media, first as a way of conveying music to their isolated patrons, but then as
new ways of imagining music drama. It’s safe to say that opera—­like teaching,
dining, the status of cash purchase—­will never be the same again.
Responding to this exciting moment in history, Yayoi Uno Everett and
Nicholas David Stevens have compiled this collection of essays on new opera.

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 xii Foreword

The publication of Contemporary Opera in Flux could not have come at a

more perfect time, as composers, audiences, presenters, and scholars are
striving to catch up. Of the nine composers in the chapters of this book, per-
haps only Steve Reich and Tan Dun have widespread name recognition in
North America. Three women—­Chaya Czernowin (Israel), Gabriela Ortiz
(Mexico), and Ana Sokolovic (Serbia/Quebec)—­have studies dedicated to
them in this volume. The collection also features chapters on Anthony Davis
and George Lewis, pathbreaking musicians who have become increasingly
prominent as activists in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Even a
telenovela, Camelia le Tejana, comes up for serious consideration due to an
adaptation in opera, cheek by jowl with the likes of Sciarrino, Charles Wuo-
rinen, and Thomas Hyde.
To paraphrase the Bard, O brave new world, that has such operas in it!
This genre has revolutionized musical practices repeatedly over the centu-
ries, from Monteverdi to Mozart and Wagner, and we are now witnessing
another such moment. The collection offers expert guidance to anyone seek-
ing basic orientation and penetrating analyses for those who wish to delve far
more deeply into the innovative strategies now available in such stage works.
In short, Contemporary Opera in Flux qualifies as a potential gateway drug,
inviting the reader to plunge into new music with abandon and to imagine yet
other possibilities. The future of opera looks very bright indeed.

Susan McClary
Case Western Reserve University

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 Introduction
Yayoi Uno Everett and Nicholas David Stevens

Prologue

We open underground. In April 2021, Chicago’s Millennium Parking Garage

hosts the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s site-­specific operatic production Twilight:
Gods. Seated in her Prius, Yayoi Uno Everett and a companion tune to differ-
ent FM stations from scene to scene, watching live musicians and actors as
recording and transmitting equipment routes their sounds through their car
radios. Skeptical of the production’s premise of collapsing Wagner’s monu-
mental Götterdämmerung into six brief excerpts, Everett has come in expect-
ing a visual spectacle and a postmodern mishmash of sounds. When Chicago
poet and musician avery r. young appears on screen as one of the Norns
and begins his rap retelling of the downfall of the Gods, the skeptic in her
fears that the performance will contain little of Wagner’s music and poetry
from here on. But subsequent scenes prove her wrong, and singers portray-
ing Wagner’s characters soon appear steps from audience vehicles. A funeral
procession leads driver/viewers along a candlelit route with the “tragic hero”
leitmotif blasting through the radio to a Motown dance beat. young delivers a
fire-­and-­brimstone sermon in the manner of an African American preacher,
lamenting Siegfried’s premature death as if he had been a Black youth felled
by gun violence. By the end, stage director Yuval Sharon and the company’s
hyperreal juxtapositions of contemporary U.S. culture with Wagner’s heroic
Romanticism cease to seem merely kitschy, but rather illuminating.
What can a staging such as Twilight: Gods tell us about opera as of the
second decade of the twenty-­first century? Following the production’s world
premiere in the multilevel parking structure of the Michigan Opera The-
atre (since renamed the Detroit Opera) in October 2020, at which the local

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 2 contemporary opera in flux

poet Marsha Music emceed in character as Erda, the Goddess of Nature and
mother of the Norns, Sharon shared some thoughts on this question:

It’s the part of the Ring [Götterdämmerung] I’ve had the hardest time with,
but I think about it in relation to COVID and Black Lives Matter, and this
call for all these structures that are no longer serving us to be torn apart. This
notion that Brünnhilde is this powerful woman, who is the one to dismantle
that system so something new can arise, is an incredibly apt and inspiring
story for right now.1

At the 2021 Yale Opera Studies Today conference, Sharon further advocated
“embracing indeterminacy by pairing two seemingly incongruous vocabular-
ies to create something new.”2
In narratological terms, Sharon’s production disrupts the notion that
opera should remain situated in a monolithic cultural moment. Twilight:
Gods is not a retelling of a music drama, but rather a prismatic, multisensory
experience in which audiences wrestle with incongruities at many registers.
The narrator role, for instance, which varies from city to city, adds aesthetic
and narrative frictions as well as textual indeterminacy. In the Michigan
Opera Theatre production, which Nicholas David Stevens attended, Marsha
Music performed weary wisdom as the goddess of a world aflame, in con-
trast to young’s fiery intensity as a narrating Norn in Chicago. By rewriting
the libretto in a way unique to each city and the poet invited to represent it,
Sharon, echoing David Levin, remarks that he aims to “unsettle” established
artistic hierarchies and return opera to its “jumbled” origin.3
Beyond music and sound, Sharon and company introduce profound
changes in the way an audience encounters and interacts with a site of perfor-
mance and the artists working there. Today’s audiences wrestle with broader
questions raised by the startling incongruities and gaps between the opera’s
historical source material and the mise-­en-­scène. As Megan Steigerwald
remarks, Sharon’s remaking of Wagner invites us to “rethink what it means
to access and engage with the operatic genre and indeed, to reckon with its
complex history.”4 One might say the same of any likewise radical staging,
even when both the opera text and the performance text are new, and the
only historical vestige remaining is the ghost of convention attending the
label opera. Long staged by and for elites, opera transforms when it becomes
a means for rhetorical and symbolic resistance to power.
Moreover, Twilight: Gods moves beyond the familiar by transforming the

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 Introduction 3

nature of collaboration and modes of audience participation. Sharon trans-

plants the event from grand halls to the private listening cocoons that many
North Americans take for granted as a means to get around. The perfor-
mances made these cities feel enchanted for hours afterwards, each respec-
tive urban waterway something like the Rhine, each everyday Detroiter or
Chicagoan a potential hero, and the operatic event in turn permeated by the
serendipity—­a glance, a plane, a pop station briefly caught during interscene
turns of the radio dial—­of everyday life in the banal environment of a car
interior. Under such conditions, one’s sense of reality could easily end up in
flux, to say nothing of one’s definition of opera.
Opera in Flux: Prior to the seventeenth century, little meaning would have
inhered in the joining of the Latin plural noun opera, or work, to the verb fluere,
to flow, works in waves, effluvious efforts. Yet Seicento musicians singularized
the former word as it became a name for a growing genre. The latter verb gave
rise to the noun flux, metaphorically suggesting instability, unpredictability,
and successive arrivals of the new. We, the contributors of this volume, aim to
preserve something of the original senses of both words submerged in our title,
addressing wavelike recurrences of history, the tendency of stable definitions
to slip through fingers, the art form’s reflection of the conditions from which
it emerges, and the directorial and performer-­chosen strategies that promote
absorption in or alienation from streams of narrative.
Twilight: Gods flooded into a vacuum of live opera performance as we
wrote, and Everett edited, this volume amid a global pandemic. Rending the
stillness of quarantine and helping clarify what this phrase opera in flux could
mean, Twilight: Gods relied on musical and textual tradition (as well as lit-
eral texts, such as Wagner’s score and libretto) while also revising the kinds
of dramaturgy by which old musical deeds could be made newly visible. In
Detroit, its mediation of the voice and general reliance on automobiles led
Stevens to thoughts of posthumanism; in Chicago, the narrator’s hip-­hop-­
inflected framing led Everett to reflect on the subject position by which she
interpreted the impassioned sermon following Siegfried’s funeral march and
to ask if Siegfried’s death was meant to conjure Black lives lost to gun violence.
The shifts that we and our colleagues document across the volume are, in our
view, exciting and worthy of multidisciplinary analysis precisely because the
means of staging and storytelling that Wagner gathered under the term Ges-
amtkunstwerk merit renewed attention. Opera has come to sound, look, and
feel different from the centuries’ worth of proscenium-­stage productions that
defined this multisensory art form.5

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 4 contemporary opera in flux

In this volume we aim to push the boundaries of contemporary opera

scholarship by examining works that disrupt past operatic conventions
through innovative deployments of media, technology, dramaturgy, and
vocal techniques. Our inclusive aim extends to people, issues, and venues.
Our contributors bring attention to groundbreaking operas that engage with
relevant sociopolitical issues (racial justice, drug trafficking, homophobia,
cultural trauma, hegemonic masculinity) and advance underrepresented
works by female (Chaya Czernowin, Ana Sokolović, Gabriela Ortiz), Afri-
can American (George Lewis, Anthony Davis), Asian (Tan Dun, Dai Fujik-
ura), and experimental or avant-­garde composers around the globe (Michel
Van der Aa, Steve Reich, Charles Wuorinen, Thomas Hyde, Salvatore Scia-
rrino). Rather than focusing exclusively on mainstream operas produced at
major houses in North America, we include international venues in which
new operas have been produced, be it TENT, Rotterdam (Riches’s Singing
Machine), Théâtre des Champs-­Elysées (Fujikura’s Solaris), Museum of Con-
temporary Arts in Chicago (Lewis’s Afterword), Suntory Hall in Tokyo (Tan
Dun’s Tea: Mirror of Soul), Teatro Reale de Madrid (Wuorinen’s Brokeback
Mountain), and Cheltanham Music Festival in England (Hyde’s That Man
Stephen Ward).
Focusing on productions involving late twentieth-­and twenty-­first cen-
tury scores and libretti (borrowed source material aside), our twelve contrib-
utors draw on conversations with members of operatic creative teams and
studies of archival material, dipping into a historical record that remains itself
in flux as composers, librettists, directors, and designers revisit existing work
and create anew. We engage critically with the recent past out of a conviction
that, amid scholarly arguments regarding the obsolescence or death of the
genre and general public perceptions of the art form as anachronistic or elite,
contemporary opera is worthy of study.6 Whether examined as a convergence
of technological and artistic media (or, as Tereza Havelková puts it, a hyper-
medium), as a set of formal traits and conventions to be de-­or reconstructed
according to innovative principles, or as a genre laden with historical prec-
edents and audience expectations, opera increasingly encompasses mul-
titudes.7 It has always appropriated formal, mediatic, and generic elements
from beyond itself, from cinematic temporalities to Romantic phantasmago-
ria, and including the Greek tragedies that inspired Florentine composers to
mount through-­sung theatrical performances around 1600. We aim to honor
the imagination and ambition with which opera creators have approached
this incorporative project in recent decades.

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 Introduction 5

Our title may suggest a rare or novel state of fluidity in the twenty-­first
century, but it is with historiographic humility that we name this book for
the ever-­flowing collective work of reimagining opera’s nature and prac-
tices. Sharon’s production seemed, in our encounters with it, to crystallize
the issues that we and our collaborators gather around in this volume, all
the more remarkable given the lack of live opera performance in the United
States and around the globe at the time. Now we turn to particular discourses
and methodologies that shed light on the approaches that, we argue, have
redefined opera in and for the twenty-­first century.

Decentering Human Agency: Posthuman Conditions

Like many operas written, composed, and staged since the 1990s, Twilight:
Gods troubles lines between human performing forces, multimedia ele-
ments, and technologies of staging via both its mise-­en-­scène and a blending
of prosthetically amplified, manipulated, recorded, and broadcast voices. Its
elevation of nonhuman actors such as cars and radios to positions of promi-
nence, even centrality, confirms the continuity of the opera world’s founding
preoccupations with staging technologies and the extensibility of the voice,
in place since the late sixteenth-­century spectacles that gave rise to the genre.
An advocate of self-­effacing stagecraft and concealed sound sources, Wagner
thus returned to, rather than introduced, technical wizardry as a central artis-
tic concern, as Gundula Kreuzer observes.8 Twilight: Gods at once flouts and
flirts with Wagnerian aesthetics of immersion and invisible labor, its musi-
cians often tucked around a corner only to appear when cars roll forward.
But it also decenters human performers by fixating on the car in promotional
materials and performance alike, triple-­cast as pandemic safety enclosure,
distinct visual hook for promotion, and aesthetic object all at once.9
Opera has brought humans together with gods, ghosts, monsters, and
other nonhumans from its inception. Orpheus, one of its earliest and most
oft-­revived characters, emerges as a distinctive figure in the genre’s history
in part through his perpetual crossing of human/nonhuman boundaries,
in his adventures, his charming of people, animals, and rocks alike with
his music, and, in some tellings, his very identity as half-­muse or half-­god.
After 2000, however, nonsentient entities have joined some productions’
dramatis personae in a more literal sense. Kreuzer describes My Square
Lady, a theater piece by the performance collective Gob Squad (who call

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 6 contemporary opera in flux

it a “robot-­reality-­opera”), as a case study in the inversion of the Gesamt-

kunstwerk ideal. Here singers attempt to teach a real android—­the main
character—­ about humanity via music theater.10 Nonhuman machinery,
rather than a character or a singer in such a role, becomes a fellow per-
former and the piece’s defining figure.
In contrast, Tod Machover’s Death and the Powers (2010) depicts a man
who uploads a digitized version of his mind into a computer system; in the
latter portion of the opera, the singing actor remains offstage as robotic set
pieces—­new vessels for his character’s consciousness—­sing and act as a dig-
itized, mechanized, distributed “self.” Michel van der Aa’s Upload (2019–­20)
offers a nearly identical premise, with baritone Roderick Williams playing
an “uploaded” human consciousness who appears via screens. His daugh-
ter struggles to acknowledge her father as human when he uploads his con-
sciousness to a digital environment to escape the pain of loss. In both pieces,
one discerns a tension between opera’s longstanding fascination with human
psychology and subjectivity on one hand, and the experience and agency
of things beyond humanity on the other. Few contemporary operas make
this tension a defining theme in the way Machover’s and van der Aa’s do.
Across this volume, however, we examine opera creators’ efforts to break new
ground in heightening the tension between human and nonhuman agencies.
In so doing, we suggest that opera in the twenty-­first century often betrays a
certain self-­consciousness around questions of human identity, uniqueness,
and bounded subjectivity, whether disavowing or doubling down on human
selfhood as the genre’s primary concern.
Twilight: Gods only goes so far down this path, replacing Brünnhilde’s
steed Grane with a Ford Mustang and transmitting sound live via electron-
ics. In our analysis, however, it exists on a spectrum alongside other operas
suggestive of posthumanism and post-­anthropocentrism, a pair of related
conceptual lenses developed to push beyond, respectively, the humanist
intellectual tradition and its assumptions of human dominion of the actual
and intellectual landscapes. This thematic drift from tradition often accom-
panies radicalism in the form, mediatic configuration, and vocal strategies
of such works. As Jelena Novak writes (chapter 2), many of the nonhuman
protagonists she examines—­automata modeled on human vocal tracts, holo-
gram/vocaloid characters, screens displaying doubles of fleshly singers, etc.—­
appear not in traditional dramas, but in postoperas, performed or installed
artworks that are operatic to varying extents.11 Novak’s coinage riffs on Hans-­
Thies Lehmann’s concept of the postdramatic, a term to which we return

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below. It also, however, resonates with posthumanism, which in turn helped

precipitate a turn from language and semiosis toward ontology, affect, and
materiality beyond the human in twenty-­first-­century academic discourse.
Novak takes as case studies pieces in which the human element in opera falls
away almost entirely, in the span of performance if not in the attribution of
authorship.
Other contributors to this volume raise related questions, asking how
screens, audio arrays, live and fixed electronic elements, and ideas borrowed
from virtual reality mediate, complicate, or obviate the human in opera. Con-
tributors also examine what happens when composers decenter the human
and how even “documentary” opera subverts traditional ideas of singular
human identity. Stevens, adopting Novak’s notion of postopera, investigates
how composers interested in moving beyond anthropocentrism give voice
to nonhuman protagonists at an unthinkably vast scale and in alien forms of
communication. The performances that Stevens considers (chapter 1), which
draw on works of science fiction and speculative philosophy that foreground
nonhuman forms of intelligence and agency, differ in their approaches to
vocality for human characters. Each opera in question, though, gives a kind
(or many kinds) of voice to an entity that, in its objecthood, collectivity, and
spatiotemporal vastness, strains typical understandings of life and conscious-
ness, more ecosystem than character. Such works represent a rising number
of postapocalyptic and posthumanist operas amid concerns about the cli-
mate crisis and imaginings of an actual future world without humans.
In their own contrasting ways, chapters across the volume reconsider the
stability of the human as idea, identity, and central concern of opera. Even
with questions of humanity at the heart of a given opera, character remains
an optional formal construct, and singing performers may remain anony-
mous or overshadowed by screen media. Novak writes eloquently of perfor-
mances that led her to coin the term postopera, many of which have arisen at
the intersection of minimalist music and screen media, such as the live/video
hybrid works of Philip Glass and Steve Reich.12 Ryan Ebright’s essay (chapter
3) revisits the roots of one such work in multimedia theater, Reich and Beryl
Korot’s The Cave. Ebright enumerates the project’s debts to documentary
aesthetics, arguing that its creators situate singers as a uniquely human (and
operatic) element in a performance that otherwise draws attention toward
manipulated video and audio, away from the cast. Plotless and focused on
interviewee testimony rather than characters or their emotions, The Cave
and similar works shift opera’s emphasis a degree further from tradition and

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toward audiovisual media saturation. Consider, for comparison, ¡Unicamente

la verdad! (2008), which hews closest to the raw material of a human life of any
opera considered in the volume’s first half, at least on paper. Yet as Amy Bauer
demonstrates (chapter 4) via this work by Gabriela Ortiz and Rubén Ortiz Tor-
res, even a quasi-­biographical “videopera” such as this raises profound ques-
tions about the nature of personhood by depicting a “person” who may never
have existed and who only comes to exist through media. Camelia la Tejana,
best known as the subject of a well-­known corrido, has become a real-­world
legend in the press, popular fiction, and televisual and cinematic depictions
despite it remaining unclear whether “she” bears any ties to the corporeal real-
ity of any actual person, living or dead. Ortiz and Ortiz Torres match this inde-
terminacy of referent and proliferation of mass-­media representations with an
array of sounds, images, design elements, and mockumentary conventions that
strain the boundaries of opera as much as the figure of Camelia challenges the
notion of stable human existence beyond our mediated representations.

Dramaturgies of Space, Movement, and Materiality of Voice

With such fundamental questions of humanity and its fictional representa-

tion simmering on a back burner, we ask how twenty-­first-­century operas
have transformed approaches to dramaturgy, the study of dramatic compo-
sition and the representation of the main elements of drama. Our concerns
include libretto and music/sound design, but also aspects of performance
such as lighting, props, makeup, movement, costumes, choreography, video
projection, and film editing. Many dramaturgical innovations have taken root
in theater since the 1960s, including the constellation of elements that char-
acterize postdramatic theater, as described by Hans-­Thies Lehmann. First
among these is language, no longer wedded to the character’s speech, but
rather given to assuming an “autonomous theatricality” of its own through,
for example, projecting words as moving images in Peter Greenaway and
Louis Andriessen’s Writing to Vermeer (1999).13 Second: in lieu of traditional
narrative’s chain of events, an atmosphere may dominate through “a kaleido-
scopic succession of images and scenes of dream,” following Robert Wilson
and Philip Glass’s iconic nonlinear opera Einstein on the Beach (1975).14 Third,
ritualistic movement or ceremony-­like actions, inspired by forms of Asian
theater, often replace dialogue and dramatic acting, an approach exempli-
fied by Wilson’s Noh-­inspired aesthetics of slow motion.15 Fourth, prewar

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 Introduction 9

expressionism’s play with the psychological blossoms into a postwar collision

of realism with the worlds of the unconscious through dream play, broken
syntax, and symbolism.16 Finally, postdramatic theater intersects with post-
modern theater, the latter characterized by ambiguity, process, discontinuity,
heterogeneity, pluralism, and deconstruction, by simultaneously including
and distancing itself from older aesthetics and norms.17 Opera’s dramaturgi-
cal field of possibility has expanded along these dimensions since the 1990s
as well. In this volume, we call particular attention to composers who have
engaged with the concept of the avatar, composite libretti, unconventional
vocalizations, and the spatiality and materiality of sound, including feminist
approaches to interpreting vocality.
Alexander K. Rothe (chapter 5) argues that in George Lewis’s chamber
opera Afterword (2015), the singers and dancers become avatars of members
of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a
collective of African American musicians founded on the South Side of Chi-
cago in 1965. Following Uri McMillan’s (2015) notion of the embodied ava-
tar, Rothe claims that singers and dancers perform objecthood in a way that
rejects stereotypical depictions of Blackness in the mass media, extending
the agency of these performers. Afterword’s singers and dancers shift fluidly
between historical characters, eschewing the individual character and psy-
chological development of traditional dramatic theater in favor of a consid-
eration of the community as a whole. Through such means, Lewis disrupts
the very notions of character and diegetic “reality” itself, from individual and
actual to collective and virtual. Rothe focuses on how this destabilization of
identity and other postdramatic qualities of Afterword exert an influence on
the work’s dramaturgy and gestural vocabulary as staged to date.
Virtual representation of collective history also plays a key role in Joy H.
Calico’s essay on the music theater of composer Chaya Czernowin (chap-
ter 6). Czernowin’s experimental opera Infinite Now (2017) offers a distinct
yet radical audiovisual experience of cultural trauma during World War I
through spatial dramaturgy and a composite libretto. Luigi Nono coined the
former term in reference to the spatial distribution of mobile sounds through
electronic means in Prometeo (1981–­84), by now a common and essential
strategy in many contemporary operas, as Ebright has argued elsewhere.18
Calico (chapter 6) illustrates how Czernowin creates immersive opera by
drawing the audience into the inner workings of a person facing a hopeless
situation. Here spatialized sounds take center stage as performers re-­enact
traumas from World War I by speaking or singing alternately in French, Ger-

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 10 contemporary opera in flux

man, Flemish, and English from Luc Perceval’s 2014 play Front, intercut with
Can Xue’s poetry from post–­Cultural Revolution–­era China, all against a
muted tapestry of electronically manipulated sounds. The dual libretti, linked
by physical and psychological accounts of displacement and trauma, alter-
nate in the first half, then increasingly converge later. The spatial mobiliza-
tion of prerecorded sounds and misdirected voices meld together and disrupt
one’s perceived sense of time and space. Calico deftly analyzes the effects of
amplified breath, whispering, and gasps, among other breathy vocalizations,
as integral features of the spatial dramaturgy in this opera. The staging she
considers responds to Czernowin’s composite libretto, score, and spatialized
sound with movement dominated by an aesthetic of slowness, reminiscent of
Wilson’s “theater of images.”19
The line of inquiry into sonic materiality that Calico highlights next takes
us to Tan Dun’s world of intercultural theater and opera. Aiming to under-
score “ritual” in concert performances, Tan Dun has deployed unconventional
vocalizations and extended instrumental techniques, incorporating organic
elements such as water, paper, ceramic, and stone in works such as Orches-
tral Theatre I-­IV (1990–­99), Water Passion (2000), Paper Concerto (2003),
and the opera The First Emperor (2005–­6). Nancy Yunhwa Rao (chapter 7)
uncovers Tan’s ritualistic dramaturgy in Tea: Mirror of Soul (2002), focus-
ing on the materiality of organic elements and what they symbolize in this
inter-­Asian tale of love and despair. Rao argues that the sounds generated by
water, paper, and the human voice lend material presence to different aspects
of spirituality associated with Zen Buddhism and Taoism; for example, the
rhythms produced by percussionists in amplified water basins symbolize
water’s connotation of purity and healing power on the one hand, while the
array of physically produced sounds of paper gesture to the fragility of life on
the other. The orchestral musicians who flip pages loudly, vocalize, and blow
paper bags to simulate the sounds of wind and rustling trees further attest
to Tan’s human-­body-­as-­instrument approach to consecrating sounds with
symbolic meaning. In such manners, Tan, in his dramaturgy of ritualized
sounds, levels the playing field between pitched and nonpitched sounds and
accesses the ceremonial tendencies of much postdramatic theater.20
Feminist writings on materiality and vocality have contributed to the
interpretation of dramaturgical innovations in opera. Michelle Duncan, a
feminist scholar, elevates the material effects of operatic singing as central
to analytic inquiry, often overlooked by hermeneutic readings in which the
operatic voice is constructed as either synonymous with the authorial voice
or as an excessive force that lies outside the interpretive domain.21 Referring

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 Introduction 11

to Ruth Berghaus’s 1991 production of Pelléas et Mélisande, Duncan claims

that the deferral of linguistic reference gives additional weight to gesture
and bodily comportment, “embodying the material fluidity of Debussy’s lush
score.”22 Indeed, in recent years, composers, many of them women, have con-
structed subject positions that aim to empower women by engaging with
the materiality of voice/sound in distinctive ways. Kaija Saariaho deploys a
wordless choir and electronic soundscape in her opera L’amour de loin (2000)
to create a circular wash of sounds, which simulates the vastness of the ocean
that separates lovers while the circularity and ruptures in the music set the
stage for a distinctly feminine expression of desire.23
Colleen Renihan (chapter 8) reads Ana Sokolović’s opera Svadba (2011)
from a similar perspective, writing that the opera celebrates the vocality of
the six singers through extended techniques that include guttural, onomato-
poetic, and nonsense syllables. Spread across the stage, the singers engage in
a ritual celebration loosely modeled after a Balkan wedding. Quoting Adriana
Cavarero, Renihan argues that the voices become endowed with “a reality and
a communicative power that precedes and exceeds the linguistic elements.”24
Infused with humor and playfulness, and at other times somber and contem-
plative, the women’s collective singing builds to a climactic height through
sheer volume and intensity. By situating the physicality of bodies and vocal
expressions as primary (over reliance on words), Sokolović’s opera presents
itself as an exemplar of Cavarero’s “interrelational plurality,” which, according
to Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin, introduces pleasure into the body/
language and, in turn, “constitutes a utopian feminist space that accommo-
dates difference.”25 On a slightly different note, Jane Forner (chapter 9) reads
Lilith in Anthony Davis’s Lilith as an embodiment of the “dark feminine”:
speaking back to patriarchy, she surpasses Adam in strength and raw emo-
tional power by adopting fluid styles of vocalization and sonic utterances
enhanced at times through electronic amplification. In this comic opera, the
biblical Lilith is rehabilitated into a political symbol of feminist liberation
movements of the 1960s, as an altogether different instantiation of feminine
empowerment that figures into Cavarero’s “interrelational plurality.”

Subjecthood and Subjectivity: Trauma, Irony, Dream

With this we turn to the idea of subjecthood and changing conceptions of

subjectivity. Subjecthood has long been tied to an anthropocentric view—­
that is to say, centered around the identity of human subjects—­and subjec-

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 12 contemporary opera in flux

tivity to the perception of who they are and their relationship to the world
around them. In the context of globalization, various scholars have argued
that the human subject no longer constitutes the locus of thought and action
and that subjecthood can be interpreted from multiple lenses of subjectiv-
ity.26 Félix Guattari, in Three Ecologies (2000), goes so far as to invert the rela-
tionship between subjecthood and subjectivity: rather than the former con-
stituting the latter, subjecthood is seen as an outcome of endpoint processes
of subjectification based on social, mental, and environmental ecologies.27
As a case in point, Tamara Katz argues that the formulation of subjectivity in
modernist literature operates on contradictory impulses, marked by a “rep-
resentational opposition” between realism and abstraction, often giving rise
to a fractured narrative style that alternates between different points of view.
In The Waves (1931), for example, Virginia Woolf jettisons the conventional
notion of subjectivity (focusing on the characters’ points of view) in favor of a
formal structure in which the cyclical description of waves frames the stories
told through multiple narrators.28 The dramaturgical approaches based on
posthumanism and postdramatic theater addressed earlier in this introduc-
tion likewise move from realism toward abstraction; in Lewis’s Afterword,
for example, Rothe argues that the individual and actual zooms outward into
the collective and virtual realm through the device of the avatar (chapter 5).
Rothe further argues that Lewis’s opera introduces a new historical subject,
those groups that dominant culture had previously treated as not-­human or
not-­quite-­human (African Americans, Asian Americans, Indigenous peoples,
women, the LGBTQ+ community). Similarly, in writing about Davis’s Lilith,
Forner claims that blues, free jazz, video game music, Cuban jazz, rap, and
hip-­hop are brought together in the opera in a manner that moves beyond
racial coding of stylistic mobility; that is to say, slippage into jazz and blues
does not serve as a marker of Blackness, but rather of Lilith’s “dark feminine”
subjectivity (chapter 9).
Moreover, in operas that engage with issues of sociopolitical and racial
inequities within more traditional formal and narrative frameworks, the sub-
jectivity of an individual is often fractured; a protagonist typically bears the
burden of internalizing the source of oppression, which leads to the forma-
tion of what Lacan calls a “barred” or split subject. From a Lacanian perspec-
tive, the subject suppresses his or her desire in order to cope with societal
norms or expectations.29 In such contexts, music, libretto, and staging often
create collisions between realism and fantasy. In Terence Blanchard’s Fire
Shut Up in My Bones (2019), the protagonist, Charles, expresses his repressed

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 Introduction 13

homosexual desire in a dream ballet at the opening of Act II and later in

a soliloquy entitled “A boy of peculiar grace” as his younger self is courted
by male dancers on stage.30 In the operas we consider in the volume’s final
chapters, trauma, irony, and dream shape fractured subjectivities; we draw
on discourses of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, postmodern irony, and
oneiricism to make sense of these reimagined forms of operatic character
subjectivity. Edward Venn (chapter 10) argues that Stephen Ward turns to
the popular musical style of Dennis Potter to perform his internal narrations
of self as a countermeasure to other musical styles he assumes in conforming
to the hegemonic masculinity in postwar Britain’s high society. Yayoi Everett
(chapter 11) then discusses how the oppressive mountain theme in Charles
Wuorinen’s Brokeback Mountain subjectivizes Ennis’s traumatic response
to the homophobic society around him. Finally, Mauro Bertola (chapter 12)
argues that Salvatore Sciarrino, in the monodrama Lohengrin (1982), intro-
duces a dreamlike logic of an open-­ended non sequitur in which the mentally
ill Elsa dwells, unable to achieve the process of subjectivization that will make
her whole. As a barred Lacanian subject, she can only exist within her dream
world, where she mimics natural and mechanical sounds that include the
rushing of the wind, the chirping of a bird, and the ticking of a clock.

Expanding the Topical Scope: Social Politics,

Race, Gender, and Operatic Tropes

In Opera in a Multicultural World: Coloniality, Culture, Performance, Mary

Ingraham, Joseph So, and Roy Moodley claim that “opera can be grand, elitist,
and formal, or comical, quotidian, and flexible, but it is eminently adaptable
to the values and belief systems of its creators, producers, performers, and
audiences.”31 Indeed, opera has lately emerged as a prominent medium for
reflections on social inequity and injustice, often confronting issues of migra-
tion, race, gender, and colonialism. Most often, however, the specter of colo-
nialist values and constructions haunt new productions of historical operas;
for example, whether to continue with the practice of blackface in Verdi’s
Aida or yellowface in Puccini’s Turandot is no longer a trivial matter.32 Not-
withstanding recent efforts to confront racial inequities, Naomi André writes
of Black operas premiered between 1986 and 2005 as forming a “shadow cul-
ture” against the mainstream American and South African operas produced
during this time.33

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 14 contemporary opera in flux

In the 2010s, American opera houses began to commission African

American composers to produce operas in response to the Black Lives Mat-
ter movement. “Opera doesn’t have to be European, opera can be made in
our image,” remarks Anthony Davis, the composer awarded the Pulitzer Prize
in 2020 for Central Park Five, an opera about the struggles of five Black and
Latino youths wrongfully convicted of assault circa 1989. (The young Donald
J. Trump appears as a bogeyman urging the death penalty for the young men,
as in real life; by the time Davis wrote the opera, the real Trump was the U.S.
president.) A new production of Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm
X (1985), which covers the lifespan of the civil rights activist, was also fea-
tured at the Detroit Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Metropolitan
Opera during 2022–­23 after a long absence from the stage. Jeanine Tesori and
Tazewell Thompson’s Blue (2019), a story that revolves around the killing of a
young Black man by a police officer at a protest, is a direct reflection of how
American opera has grappled with racism in the wake of Black Lives Mat-
ter protests.34 Previously marginalized experiences of Black Americans are
now entering the mainstream of operatic productions. Blanchard’s Fire Shut
Up in My Bones, about a Black youth’s trauma growing up in Louisiana, was
featured in both the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Metropolitan Opera’s
2020–­21 seasons. The virtual opera Death by Life, sponsored by the Boston-­
based activist opera company White Snake Projects, received its premiere in
May 2021; the work explicitly addresses the mass incarceration of Black peo-
ple by taking the viewer through an immersive, video-­game-­like portal styled
after a prison. Continuing this work, George Lewis, working with Yuval Sha-
ron, will unveil their hybrid opera project Comet/Poppea in 2024 at the Gef-
fen Contemporary at MOCA and The Industry in Los Angeles. The piece
merges Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) and W. E. B. Dubois’s
science fiction short story “The Comet” into a probing meta-­commentary on
dystopia, mythology, and power, from the seventeenth century’s dreams of
ancient Rome to a speculative imagining of post-­apocalyptic race relations
just over a century old.
Along with the Detroit Opera, the San Francisco Opera is particularly
noteworthy for having commissioned new operas that expand the genre’s
topical range and scope, which include, but are not limited to, Bright Sheng’s
Dream of the Red Chamber (2016), based on an eponymous Qing dynasty
novel; Gabriela Lena Franks’s El último sueño de Frida y Diego (2023), about
the life of the artist Frida Kahlo; and Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’s
Omar (2022), based on an autobiography of an enslaved Muslim man, which
won the Pulitzer Prize for Music Composition in 2023.

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 Introduction 15

Finally, we would be remiss not to mention women composers who write

operas as a means of addressing issues of sexuality, gender, and societal vio-
lence. The first two decades of the twenty-­first century were a watershed
moment in which any sociopolitical movement or mass-­mediated event, no
matter how controversial or current, could become the topic of a new opera.
Paralleling the #MeToo movement, many operas on sexual taboos, assault,
or social injustice against women emerged, such as Missy Mazzoli and Royce
Vavrek’s Breaking the Waves (2016), Du Yun and Vavrek’s Angel’s Bone (2016),
and Ellen Reid and Roxy Perkins’s p r i s m (2018). Du Yun and Reid were
each awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Music Composition for these operas, as with
Giddens and Abels’s Omar, a sign not just of critical acclaim but of perceived
social and cultural relevance. European counterparts addressing violence
against women include, but are not limited to, Cecilie Ore and Bibbi Moslet’s
Come to the Edge (2013),35 centering on the trial of Pussy Riot in Moscow;
Adam and Eve: A Divine Comedy (2015), a critique of religion’s place in soci-
ety; and Moneim Adwan’s Kalîla wa Dimna (2016), a modern political alle-
gory of corruption and injustice incorporating Arabic and French texts. Kaija
Saariaho did not shy away from composing operas on the topic of violence
against women and children; following Adriana Mater, about the trauma of
a woman raped during wartime, Innocence (2021) traces the repercussions
of an incident of gun violence after which survivors are haunted by mem-
ory. As the actions unfold simultaneously within two temporal realms (at a
present-­day wedding and the time of the school shooting), Markéta, one of
the innocent victims, makes ghostly visitations to her mother, who is unable
to let go of her child.
Amid these seismic changes in opera’s range of subject matter, one won-
ders whether operatic representations of identity and selfhood have shifted
away from the conventions established in nineteenth-­century verismo and
grand operas in new works. The association of voice type (fach in German)
with character representation provides one kind of yardstick. According to
Catherine Clément, characters in nineteenth-­century operas map onto voice
types as follows: persecuted victim (soprano); heroes of rebellion (tenor);
organized opposition (baritone); resistance, witchcraft, and treason (mezzo-­
soprano); and men of spirit and power (bass).36 Operas that feature sopranos
as victims of tragedy and fate include many of the most-­performed works
in the canon. Tenor rebels risk their lives for the women they love, while
baritones play older men negotiating conflict (or getting in the way of young
lovers). Mezzo-­sopranos typically portray characters who put themselves in
a position of violent contestation, and basses often play great priests and sha-

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 16 contemporary opera in flux

mans. The identities formed by such character types have been woven into
existing tropes of operatic representation.37
While familiar tropes of operatic representation have persisted in post-
war operas to some degree, there has been a notable shift in voice type asso-
ciated with the role of persecuted victims. Recent operas have reoriented old
operatic discourses of masculinity to showcase men (especially in tenor roles)
who, regardless of precise sexuality, are caught in impossible situations for
which there is no escape.38 Take Stewart Wallace’s Harvey Milk (1996), in
which the first openly gay elected politician in San Francisco is sung by a
tenor, in a narrative that chronicles his coming-­out story from boyhood to the
day of his assassination. The happy-­go-­lucky tenor Jack, in Wuorinen’s Broke-
back Mountain (2014), meets an untimely death because he dares to embrace
his homosexual identity in a largely homophobic environment in rural Texas,
while his partner, Ennis (baritone), chooses to remain closeted. Everett (chap-
ter 10) argues that Jack, like the heldentenor Siegfried in Wagner’s Ring cycle
(and by extension Twilight: Gods), dies prematurely for his fearless and reck-
less conduct. In Gregory Spears’s Paul’s Case (2013), the young man (a tenor,
once again) who is bullied for his queer-­coded behavior in Pittsburgh, ends
the opera by throwing himself in front of a train in his beloved New York.
Thomas Hyde’s That Man Stephen Ward (2006–­7) revolves around the Pro-
fumo affair, a sex scandal in England circa 1963; rather than pitting gay against
straight men, the shifting dynamics of hegemonic masculinity led Ward to
take his own life as a scapegoat for a scandal involving higher-­ranking men
in British society. Edward Venn (chapter 9) sees this opera as a psychological
portrait of a man who ultimately fails in his self-­legitimation while attempting
to rewrite his own history.
Surveying the broad trajectories that have emerged in opera composition
and production as of the early 2020s, one may note a rift between operas that
decenter human beings as primary actors or eschew traditional constructions
of character and, on the other hand, those that renew opera’s exploration of
individual psychology and group belonging by expanding the genre’s range
of represented identities along lines of gender, sexuality, and race. At times,
the tension between the two poles manifests within a single work, as with
van der Aa’s Upload and Machover’s Death and the Powers. At other times,
the concept of subjecthood fractures through a postmodern juxtaposition
of images and representations, as in Twilight: Gods, or through the absence
of an actual subject in Bauer’s discussion of ¡Unicamente La Verdad! On the
opposite side of the spectrum are operas that focus intently on what it means

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 Introduction 17

to be human and speak directly to the oppression of subject(s) by represen-

tatives of normative society. Operas in this latter vein, as the last three essays
by Venn, Everett, and Bertola attest, continue the well-­established theme of
a tragic hero or heroine in opera with a postmodern and postdramatic twist.

The Volume

Concerns of dramaturgy, posthuman conditions, vocality, and subjectivity

unite our contributors’ essays in a continuum, from the emphatic posthu-
manism of Novak’s and Stevens’s exemplars to the innovative representations
and modes of subjective experience in Everett’s and Bertola’s. Like our open-
ing discussion on Twilight: Gods, these essays offer case studies of operas
that disrupt conventional notions around the staging of operas from yester-
year. Dialogues between authors ensue. Essays by Stevens (chapter 1) and
Novak (chapter 2) home in on operatic mise-­en-­scène and vocality beyond
the human: Novak surveys sculptures, installations, virtual-­reality environ-
ments, and digital “divas” that bring opera into a tech-­saturated Anthropo-
cene, while Stevens examines the influence of science-­fiction literature and
ecocritical theory on operas depicting non-­and more-­than-­human objects.
Ebright (chapter 3) and Bauer (chapter 4) converge on documentary opera,
the former foregrounding human concerns of faith, truth, and witness amid
an analysis of Reich and Korot’s The Cave while the latter plays with mediated
representations of the legendary, perhaps fictional Camelia la Tejana.
Dramaturgical innovations (including and beyond the eschewal of char-
acter) link Rothe’s essay (chapter 5), which introduces concepts of the ava-
tar and collective voice in Lewis’s Afterword, to Calico’s (chapter 6), which
uncovers the effect of Czernowin’s radical approach to vocality and spatialized
sounds in Infinite Now. Rao’s essay (chapter 7) probes aspects of inter-­Asian
sensibilities in Tan Dun’s Tea: Mirror of Soul while attending to extended
vocality and the materiality of sound, a focus not unlike Renihan’s (chapter
8) in a reflection on a wedding ritual among women in Svadba. Focusing on
narratives of oppression, trauma, and fractured subjectivity, Forner (chapter
9) shows how Anthony Davis deploys a blues-­inflected “battle of the sexes”
scene to undermine heteropatriarchal norms, Venn (chapter 10) explores a
crisis of masculinity stemming from political scandal in Hyde’s That Man
Stephen Ward, while Everett (chapter 11) examines acousmatic expressions of
oppression and homophobia in the lives of Wyoming cowboys in Wuorinen’s

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 18 contemporary opera in flux

Brokeback Mountain and Bertola (chapter 12) offers examples of fractured

operatic subjectivities in Sciarrino’s Lohengrin and Superflumina.
These essays are by no means exhaustive in scope and coverage, but they
provide concrete illustrations of the central issues that occupy us in this
volume—­posthuman conditions, vocality, dramaturgical innovations, and
subjecthood—­as we respond to shifting discourses in today’s opera scholar-
ship. The contributors thus engage each other in robust exchange along such
connecting threads such as vocality, mediated representation, and operatic
tropes both new and old, as well as new forms of subjectivity and other post-
dramatic strategies discussed above. In flux since 1600, opera has adapted to
new media and stage technologies, as well as evolving social concerns and
discourses. Its representations have ranged from societal oppression and
resistance to posthuman collectivity and virtuality. A tentative haze rises over
the old, exclusive citadels of power. We offer these essays in the hope that
they will illuminate what the future brings.
Notes
1. Yuval Sharon, “An Operatic Innovator Takes on Detroit,” interview by David Allen,
New York Times, September 9, 2020, [Link]
/[Link]
2. Yuval Sharon, “Discussion II: Developing New Themes in Opera,” interview by Gun-
dula Kreuzer, Yale Opera Studies Today Conference [Virtual], Yale University, May 8, 2021.
3. Sharon, “Discussion II: Developing New Themes in Opera.” David Levin proposes a tex-
tual separation between the source materials of opera (the opera text) and elements related
to specific production (the performance text) such that the stage director reinforces familiar
modes of representation in the source material or, more often than not, unsettles the opera
text via “strategies of conflict, criticism, or resistance.” David Levin, Unsettling Opera: Staging
Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 12.
4. Megan Steigerwald, “Ride of the Spectators: Out of the Opera House and Into the
Car,” Lyric Lately, April 12, 2021, [Link]
ators-out-of-the-opera-house-and-into-the-car/. Steigerwald further contextualizes Twi-
light: Gods as a radical production within traditional operatic institution in Steigerwald,
Opera for Everyone: The Industry’s Experiments with American Opera in the Digital Age
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024), 207–8.
5. See Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (New York: Far-
rar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) for an assessment of Wagner’s posthumous influence on art-
ists. Ross comments that Gesamtkunstwerk, although widely cited as Wagner’s concept, is
“maddeningly vague,” becoming a restrospective projection of concerns of the twentieth
century—­when sound and film technologies allowed for novel media syntheses—­onto the
nineteenth (355).
6. On operatic obsolescence, see Heather Wiebe (guest editor), Opera Quarterly 25
(2009). For a contrasting view on the relationship between the operatic tradition through
the early twentieth century and more recent operas, see Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker,
A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years, 2e (London: Penguin, 2015).

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 Introduction 19

7. See Tereza Havelková, Opera as Hypermedium: Meaning-­Making, Immediacy, and

the Politics of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). On rising public per-
ceptions of opera as inherently elitist since the dawn of cinema as mass entertainment,
see Alexandra Wilson, Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2019).
8. Gundula Kreuzer, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-­
Century Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 8–­12.
9. See the respective program books, available at [Link]
hedule/twilight-gods/ for the Detroit production and [Link]
/upcoming/2020-21/twilight-gods-film/program-book/ for the Chicago version.
10. Kreuzer, Curtain, Gong, Steam, 215–­20.
11. Jelena Novak, Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-­Body (London: Ashgate, 2015), 3–­18.
12. See Novak, Postopera, 58–­76.
13. Hans-­Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-­Munby (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 18. In Robert Greenaway and Louis Andriessen’s Writing to Vermeer
(1999), the letters written by women on stage are projected onto the screen in real time so
as to blur the distinction between text and moving image.
14. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 65.
15. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 58.
16. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 65.
17. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 25–­27.
18. Ryan Ebright, “Doctor Atomic or: How John Adams Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love Sound Design,” Cambridge Opera Journal 31, no. 1 (March 2019): 85–­117.
19. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 58–­59. While Wilson’s “theatre of images” pro-
duces “a peculiar aura of fatefulness as the figures seem to be at the mercy of a mysterious
magic,” Lehmann argues that it cannot be identified with a specific ideology of fate.
20. Other contemporary East Asian composers writing operas on historical subjects,
such as Toshio Hosokawa, Guo Wenjing, Zhou Long, Bright Sheng, among others, incor-
porate ritualistic elements, but not to the extent Tan has done.
21. Michelle Duncan, “The Operatic Scandal of the Singing Body: Voice, Presence, Per-
formativity,” Cambridge Opera Journal 16, no. 3 (November 2004): 286.
22. Duncan, “The Operatic Scandal of the Singing Body,” 305.
23. Yayoi U. Everett, “The Tropes of Desire and Jouissance in Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de
loin,” in Music and Narrative in Music Since 1900, ed. Michael Klein and Nicholas Reyland
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 331.
24. Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expres-
sion, trans. Paul A. Kottman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 152.
25. Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin, eds., The Voice as Something More: Essays
Toward Materiality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 13.
26. See Nina Williams and George Burdon, “Writing Subjectivity Without Subjecthood:
The Machinic Unconscious of Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms,” Social and Cultural Geogra-
phy, April 20, 2022, [Link] and Melanie Sehgal,
“A Thousand Subjectivities. Rethinking Subjectivity with Félix Guattari and Alfred North
Whitehead,” Intervention Paper Terra Critica II (Utrecht University, November 23, 2013),
[Link]
27. More specificially, Guattari introduces the concept of ecosophy at three registers,
comprising metal or psychological ecology, social ecology, and environmental ecology, as

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 20 contemporary opera in flux

intersecting forces that shape subject formations in the globalized age. See Félix Guattari,
Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (New Brunswick: Athlone Press, 2000).
28. Tamar Katz, “Modernism, Subjectivity, and Narrative Form: Abstraction in The
Waves,” Narrative 3, no. 3 (1995): 237. The collision between realism and fantasy can also
be found in a surrealistic postwar novels such as Abe Kōbō’s Woman in the Dunes (1964)
and The Face of Another (1964).
29. In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, a “barred” subject results from the act of sup-
pressing or denying one’s own desire in order to cope with societal expectations.
30. See Anthony Tommasini, “Review: ‘Fire’ Brings a Black Composer to the Met,
Finally,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 2021. The choreographer, Camille A. Brown, created a
dream ballet in which Charles is simultaneously terrified and entraced by a vision of allur-
ing, embracing men circling his bed.
31. Mary I. Ingram, Joseph K. So, and Roy Moodley, eds., Opera in a Multicultural World:
Coloniality, Culture, Performance (New York: Routledge, 2016), 1. New operas that foreground
coloniality and racial prejudices include Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang, An American
Soldier (2014; 2018; 2024) and Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, Omar (2022).
32. See Sophia A. Hall, “Soprano Anna Netrebko Faces Renewed Blackface Accusations
over Verona ‘Aida’ Production,” Classic Fm, July 11, 2022, [Link]
ts/anna-netrebko/soprano-blackface-accusations-verona/
33. Naomi André, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (Urbana: University of Illi-
nois Press, 2018), 177.
34. For an in-­depth account of the collaborative process, see Joy H. Calico, “White
Snake Projects, Death by Life (May 2021), Q&A with Composer David Sanford,” BORN
Forum, May 20, 2021, [Link]
ke-projects-death-by-life-may-2021-and-qa-with-composer-david-sanford/
35. Forner argues that Ore and Moslet establish a dialogue with biblical texts to uncover
the collective failures of religion in contemporary society to protect women’s rights, evok-
ing discomfort as a precondition for spectatorship. Jane Forner, “Distant Pasts Reimagined:
Encountering the Political Present in 21st-­Century Opera” (PhD diss., Columbia Univer-
sity, 2020), 93.
36. Catherine Clément, “Through Voices, History,” in Siren Songs: Representations of
Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000), 22–­24.
37. According to Ralph Locke, a paradigmatic plot for exotic operas from Carmen to
Madame Butterfly comprises “a young, tolerant, brave, possibly naive or selfish, white-­
European tenor-­hero” who intrudes into a colonized territory represented by female danc-
ers and an affectionate lyric soprano, pitting himself against a chorus of male savages led
a brutal chieftain or priest (bass or baritone). See Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and
Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 181.
38. An exception can be found in Laura Kaminsky’s chamber opera As One (2014),
which features a transgender subject who is born male (baritone) and transitions to a
female (soprano) as she moves toward self-­realization and empowerment.

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 1

Fear of an Envoiced Planet

Speculative Arias of the Operatic Hyperobject

Nicholas David Stevens

“bursts of static came through the headphones against a background of deep,

low-­pitched murmuring, which seemed to me the very voice of the planet
itself.”1

The voice of a planet, electronically mediated, fills a void left by expected

human speech. How would this scenario, outlined by Stanisław Lem in the
quotation above—­his aural-­only first depiction of the titular alien world in the
novel Solaris (1961)—­play out at the opera? This is no hypothetical question.
Between 2011 and 2015, three new operatic adaptations of the novel made
their debuts across Europe. A fourth, neglected since the 1990s, returned to
stages in 2017. Even canonic fare warped amid Solaris’s mysterious gravity: a
2017 staging of Puccini’s La bohème, informed by Lem’s plot devices, incensed
Regieoper opponents in Paris.2 In this chapter, I argue that the sort of plan-
etary voice that Lem conjures in the epigraph above has begun to reverber-
ate in opera beyond adaptations of his novel. Between 2016 and 2018, Ash
and Adam Fure debuted early versions of The Force of Things, an “opera for
objects” that, in evoking voice-­bodies and vocality at environmental scales,
relates back to Solaris in a readily traceable lineage of ideas. The question of
how opera might envoice things too vast for humans to comprehend thus
became a practical one for twenty-­first-­century opera creators. I treat the
problem of giving planets voice as a way into a broader set of questions: as
opera creators decenter or unsettle depictions of humanity in new works and
radical productions, what novel configurations of voice, body, and perfor-
mance space become possible?3 Can the sublimely vast sing?4

21

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 22 contemporary opera in flux

Here, Lem’s novel Solaris—­titled for its setting, an exoplanet—­sheds light

on a diverse set of operas. I first consider the adaptation that makes the most
of Lem’s descriptions of alien voices: composer Dai Fujikura and librettist
Saburo Teshigawara’s Solaris (2013, revised 2014). I focus on a 2021 staging by
Neue Oper Wien, in part because of its wide (if brief ) availability via stream-
ing video, and in part due to the real-­world resonances afforded by its cre-
ative team’s scenic and dramaturgical interventions. Among all the operatic
adaptations of the novel, Fujikura and Teshigawara’s offers uniquely persua-
sive solutions to the challenge of making a planet sing. Lem’s text implies
that protagonist Kris Kelvin unlearns distinctions separating him from others
and the environment; in Teshigawara’s text, Kelvin states as much outright.
Fujikura’s body doubles and live-­electronic vocal prostheses render audible a
breakdown of human individuality and autonomy.
Fujikura’s live-­electronic hybrid voices seem to emanate from singing
human(oid) bodies entangled with their environments, less nonhuman than
more-­than-­human. In the passage quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, Kel-
vin perceives it at once as a voice and a sonic “background,” a contradiction
that resolves as the planet erases distinctions between foreground and back-
ground, character and setting. In so doing, it recalls the philosophical notion
of the hyperobject. Scholar Timothy Morton’s neologism describes “a bundle
of entities massively distributed in time and space that forms an entity in
its own right, one that is impossible for humans to see or touch directly.”5
Among Morton’s inspirations for this concept: Solaris. Influenced in turn by
Morton’s manifestos and other recent environmentalist philosophical writ-
ings, The Force of Things meditates on themes of ecological injury and its con-
sequences, distinct from but akin to those latent in Solaris. Composer and
sound artist Ash Fure brings the hyperobject—­the concept through which I
frame Solaris and Earth alike—­into opera.6
At stake in this chapter is the range of motivations and strategies for the
creation of more-­than-­human voices in opera and the way such specula-
tive voices guide decision making about music, text, and dramaturgy. Lem’s
Solaris remains central to this inquiry even after I move from Fujikura and
Teshigawara’s adaptation to the seemingly unrelated The Force of Things. In
their respective adaptations of Lem’s novel, Michael Obst and Detlev Glanert
locate the sound or “voice” of Solaris beyond human characters’ bodies, in
the background.7 These composers decline to envoice the planet as the entan-
gled, more-­than-­human presence it is; rather, it remains a mirror of human-
ity, problem to solve, or mere setting. Fujikura, by contrast, renders audible

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 Fear of an Envoiced Planet 23

the sort of foreground/background collapse that makes Solaris a locus classi-

cus of the hyperobject.
I focus on hyperobject voices rather than Solaris adaptations per se—­a
subject no less worthy of study—­in part because notions of planetary voice
and agency have become pertinent in another, wider context: that of the cli-
mate crisis. The music scholar Andrew J. Chung describes a reduction in
atmospheric carbon dioxide around 1610, likely caused by mass death as
Europeans invaded the Americas, as one of the first major events in anthro-
pogenic climate change—­and as a vocalization. Chung writes, “the lethality
of . . . colonial invasions caused the planet itself to gasp. I regard this char-
acterization of atmospheric chemistry in terms of planetary voice as only
slightly metaphorical.”8 In this understanding of history as a composite of
“human” and “natural” events so inextricable as to obviate the distinction,
anthropogenic climate change and opera history share almost the same time-
line. Here, I bring Chung’s notion of planetary voice into the realm of con-
temporary opera composition.
The novel Solaris achieved its peculiar resonance in opera, and The Force
of Things dared critics to challenge its claim to the genre, as climate activists
wondered whether people will ever heed nonhuman and more-­than-­human
voices of warning. At the same time and for related reasons, scholars pro-
posed renovations of such humanist and human-­centered (anthropocentric)
conceits as natural vs. cultural history; vitality as a merely biological quality;
and, in J. Martin Daughtry’s case, the voice as a human-­, animal-­, or even
sonic-­only phenomenon.9 By 2021, some opera houses had embraced eco-­
friendly practices and eco-­conscious art.10 But the Fure siblings’ piece, and
even Fujikura and Teshigawara’s (not intentionally environmentalist) opera,
pose more fundamental challenges to definitions of opera and vocality.
Ash Fure describes The Force of Things, which eschews a fictional plot
or characters, as an exercise in centering nonhuman and more-­than-­human
objects, including entities that exceed human comprehensibility in space,
time, and vibration: hyperobjects. The piece invites attendees to feel Earth’s
distress as their own, not unlike the empathy that Fujikura and Teshigawara’s
protagonist develops for Solaris. The latter creative team modifies Lem’s text,
making the mutual imbrication of humans and their environment audible
in singers’ electronically extended voices and words. The Fure siblings, by
contrast, configure musicians and objects in a space such that the installation
becomes an enveloping, prosthetic vocalic body, with human, nonhuman,
acoustic, and electronic vocal organs.11 In examining both operas’ reinven-

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 24 contemporary opera in flux

tions of voice/body relationships that have long defined opera, I build on

the work of Jelena Novak.12 The implications of posthumanism and post-­
anthropocentrism—­respectively, intellectual projects devoted to moving past
the humanist intellectual tradition and humanity’s self-­centering in Western
philosophy—­could be profound for scholars of the voice in music and the-
ater.13 I maintain, however, that opera has already opened itself to the pos-
sibility of more-­than-­human, mass-­assemblage, and hyperobject vocalities.
The composer Matthew Aucoin asserts: “opera is impossible and always
has been.”14 To a rare degree, he writes, its creators have aspired to “unrealiz-
able” artistic syntheses and levels of affective intensity. The more-­than-­human
voice, a key element of any opera fit for Morton’s “time of hyperobjects,” is
another in a long line of such productive impossibilities.15 Posthumanist and
post-­anthropocentric ideas arrived in opera by varied routes: sometimes via
science fiction that has inspired contemporary thinkers (see Solaris) and
sometimes via those philosophical movements themselves (The Force of
Things). Regardless of origin, such thinking sends operatic dramaturgy and
vocality into states of flux.

Lem and the Uncanniness of the

Self-­Humanizing Hyperobject

The title of Lem’s Solaris refers interchangeably to an exoplanet and its liv-
ing liquid surface: “one massive ocean body . . . perhaps sentient on a scale
beyond human comprehension . . . at once an environment and a subject,” as
Melody Jue puts it.16 By the time the novel’s events commence, Solaris has
been creating copies of human-­made objects (“mimoids”) from its own tissue
for years. That it has a sensorium and a form of intelligence seem beyond
question. The planet, however, declines to communicate and defies compre-
hension. Readers learn that just prior to psychologist Kris Kelvin’s arrival on
Solaris, the scientist Gibarian had bombarded the “ocean” with high-­intensity
X-­rays. Soon after, living manifestations of figures from the scientists’ minds,
each a source of deep shame, materialized in the station. These “visitors”
never allow hosts to leave their sight. The eruption of human inner torment
into embodied social reality pulls readers’ attention from the planet’s alterity
toward the affairs of the heart, a more familiar operatic concern and a major
reason why many composers and librettists have adapted the novel as a love

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 Fear of an Envoiced Planet 25

story set against a hostile setting, rather than as an exploration of that set-
ting’s strangeness, agency, and vocality.
Solaris-­as-­story has proved as fluid in form as its namesake. Cinephiles
know a version of its plot from Andrei Tartovsky’s film adaptation (Солярис,
1972). Obst’s opera adaptation made its debut at the 1996 Munich Biennale
and has proved a rarity since, although theaters in Linz and Saarbrücken
mounted director Hermann Schneider’s revival in 2017 and 2018. In 2002,
Tartovsky’s film resurfaced on DVD just as Steven Soderbergh introduced a
Hollywood remake. The first direct translation of Lem’s Polish into English
emerged in the novel’s fiftieth anniversary year of 2011.17 A wave of operatic
adaptations followed: that same year, Torino’s Teatro Valdocco gave the pre-
miere of composer/librettist Enrico Corregia’s original opera, which awaits
revival at the time of writing. Glanert and librettist Reinhold Palm’s adap-
tation first appeared at the 2012 Bregenzer Festspiele, then at Oper Köln in
2014. Fujikura and Teshigawara’s piece was completed in 2013, revised in
the following year, and given its world premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-­
Elysées in 2015. It has since had productions in Lausanne, Augsburg, Tokyo,
and Vienna. This opera thus became the third adaptation to appear in a four-­
year span, around the same time the world rediscovered Obst’s piece and
Guth staged his Solaris-­inspired bohème.18
In all adaptations and media, Solaris melts individual subjectivity into
ambient communal desperation. Gibarian kills himself hours before Kelvin
arrives, but returns in the latter’s dreams. Snaut (Snow in the ubiquitous
English translation by Steve Cox and Joanna Kilmartin) seldom appears
sober. Sartorius remains locked in a lab, hiding his visitor, a child, from sight.
Kelvin’s own visitor assumes the form of his late wife Harey (Rheya in the
Kilmartin-­Cox translation; henceforth the japanized Hari of Teshigarawa’s
libretto). It speaks as though a revived version of the real person but lacks her
inner life, being not a replica but rather a simulacrum, mediated by Solaris’s
mimicry and Kelvin’s memory.19 The real Hari killed herself after Kelvin aban-
doned her. (I refer to the “visitor” character by her human template’s name,
as do Lem and all librettists.) The scientists preceding Kelvin gazed into an
ontological abyss and the abyss literally gazed also into them, rising not just
from setting to character but also to author of characters. It creates interme-
diaries who are at once of itself and of humanity, erasing distinctions of self/
other, subject/object, inner/outer, and environment/occupant.
In describing an alien Other that exists in multiple places and forms at

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 26 contemporary opera in flux

once, Lem limns the indescribable while also offering a more conventional
image of unearthly life: humanoids, just far enough from actual humanity to
occupy the uncanny valley.20 Radical alterity unsettles characters and readers
in one way; the apparition of familiar faces in a station light years from Earth
buffets them in another. By taking many shapes, defying comprehension,
and collapsing Jue’s dichotomy of “environment and subject,” Solaris antic-
ipates a philosophical concept over forty years the novel’s junior: Morton’s
hyperobject.21
Morton advances an “object-­oriented” ontology that gives nonhuman
and more-­than-­human assemblages parity with, if not priority over, humans
and anthropocentric ways of knowing.22 That Morton’s thought aligns with
Solaris is no coincidence; the novel clearly fired their thinking. Less than two
years before publishing their first writings on hyperobjects, Morton argued,
in clearly related terms, that Lem’s book anticipated theories about our own
planet’s vitality.23 Comparing Lem’s descriptions of Solaris to the language
of James Lovelock and Lynne Margulis’s “Gaia hypothesis,” which reimag-
ines the earth as a massive organism with quasi-­biotic regulative processes,
Morton notes, “Gaian language portrays the Earth as telling us that we are
harming it, through indirect, emergent messages. . . . Solaris communicates
in a far more direct way, as a singular being speaking to singular beings.”24
Here Morton suggests that the key difference between Lovelock and Mar-
gulis’s Gaia and Lem’s Solaris is the voice as medium of language, facilitator
of direct address, and marker of isolable identity. In Morton’s interpretation,
the creatures appear in response to Gibarian’s violent scans, seizing research-
ers’ attention with anthropomorphic, or humanized, forms and forcing the
aggressors to empathize. From Lem’s living planet that hybridizes itself with
humanity—­among other science-­fiction conceits—­arose a line of thinking
that soon led to the hyperobject. In one passage of their subsequent book The
Ecological Thought, Morton claims that “ecological crisis has disrupted our
normative sense of foreground and background”; cites Solaris as prophetic
of this paradigm shift; and introduces their first published definition of the
hyperobject.25
As Chingshun J. Sheu argues, Solaris is the perfect Mortonian hyperob-
ject avant la lettre.26 Morton defines the hyperobject through five proper-
ties, beyond human-­dwarfing scale: viscosity, a “sticky” attachment to beings,
such as humans, involved in it; nonlocality, a refusal to exist solely (or ever) in
complete form in the same space as us; temporal undulation, or existence on
many timescales at once, including unfathomably long (yet finite) durations;

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 Fear of an Envoiced Planet 27

phasing, in which an object makes more sense to humans as a process than

as a thing; and interobjectivity, the mutual relationality linking things across
categories of subject and object. Solaris is at once a planet, a living ocean,
the mimoids, and the visitors; telepathically hooked into human minds; and
ungraspable in age, extent, or agency. No mere background, it makes itself
impossible to ignore. It meets Morton’s criteria, in part because it appears
to have helped inspire said criteria. Its spatiotemporal vastness and ontolog-
ical alterity render it unthinkable and unrelatable unless embodied as figures
from human imagination and memory—tragic ones who, in opera, must sing.

Fujikura and the Live-­Electronic Realization

of the Hyperobject Voice

As Anthony Enns observes, no one ever hears a unitary voice of Solaris

unmediated.27 Lem, however, returns to alien voices throughout the novel,
his mention of planetary murmurs a foreshadowing of the visitors’ speech.
Fujikura, in turn, lavishes technical resources on filtering, extending, and
multiplying the voices of humans and visitors alike. Like Obst, he developed
the electronic elements of his score with composer and sound artist Gilbert
Nouno at IRCAM, including fixed sound files and software patches for live
processing.28 As in the novel, and in line with the behaviors of the hyperob-
ject, the assemblage called “Solaris” sounds mostly as an effect on humans in
this opera, each member of the cast shadowed by uncanny body and elec-
tronic doubles. Over time, even “real” humans take on live-­electronic plane-
tary vocality.
In the novel, planetary sounds first emerge in the form of a basso profundo
audio artifact in radio transmissions. Fujikura includes a sound file consisting
of low, quiet sounds, intended to prime listeners for the opera subliminally as
they take their seats.29 This optional element recalls Lem’s “deep, low-­pitched
murmuring . . . the very voice of the planet itself,” regardless of whether Fuji-
kura intended the reference. Other fixed samples augment the sound of the
pit orchestra’s player-­per-­part string section, but most of the electronics con-
sist of live vocal processing patches to amplify and prosthetically extend the
sounds of singers, on-­and offstage.
At one point in the novel, a disturbing sound, heard through an inter-
com, emerges from Hari. Its words remain intelligible, but Lem writes that it
“[bears] not the slightest resemblance to the human voice.”30 Kelvin remains

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 28 contemporary opera in flux

shaken by this voice long after hearing it, but aside from its high pitch, Lem—­
given to extended flights of lyrical description elsewhere in the novel, as Seo-­
Young Chu observes—­declines to describe what makes it so distinctly inhu-
man.31 Its very nature as a voice that is nonhuman may trigger Kelvin’s fear,
as vocality has long been seen as unique to, even constitutive of, humanity
or animality.32 It may also fall into a sort of vocal uncanny valley, at once
like a human voice and not. Drawing on spectralist aesthetics in the cor-
responding scene of the opera, Fujikura draws high overtones out of Hari’s
voice. A software patch (“Hari scream”) adds inhumanly high pitches atop the
soprano’s (Act II mm. 466 and 478; Act III m. 337) and a filter sweep over the
combined sound.33 This, then, is Fujikura’s solution to Lem’s intercom voice.34
Even under “normal” conditions, however, Fujikura renders Hari’s human/
nonhuman duality audible by doubling her sung lines out of sync through a
patch called “Hari electronics.”
Another of Fujikura’s vocal filters represents the planet melding minds
with Kelvin. The composer divides the Kelvin character across two baritones,
one onstage for social interaction and another offstage for inner monologue.
He adds a vocoder effect to the latter in a dream implying communion with
the ocean (Act III, m. 455). The onstage Kelvin thrashes in his sleep as “his”
voice describes dream imagery from offstage. Whispering of “tiny molluscs”
and other aquatic phenomena in electronically generated harmony with
himself, Kelvin gains something of Solaris’s vocalic multiplicity and nonlo-
cality. He fleshes out a vision of oceanic immersion reminiscent of Morton’s
metaphors for living in a hyperobject: “squishy and mollusk-­like . . . as if we
were inside a giant octopus.”35 Like Morton, Fujikura and Teshigawara imag-
ine a simultaneous loss and heightening of selfhood in perceiving oneself in
an ecological hyperobject, an affect blending the familiar and alien. Alexa
Woloshyn argues that electroacoustic vocalities can queer, or transgress,
binaries between human and nature, voice and environment, or soundscape
and listener; they thus sound queer in many senses.36 In this scene, electronic
multiplication of the voice sounds the erotic intimacy of man and alien ocean.
Like Hari, a sort of queer progeny of these entities, Kelvin too assumes a
more-­than-­human vocality.
Solaris, Jue argues, acts as a mirror: it materializes humans’ repressed
interiority.37 Snaut, one of Lem’s researchers, introduces this metaphor in
a monologue on humans’ inability to view alterity as anything more than a
reflection of themselves: “[space explorers] are only seeking Man. We have
no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.”38 Fujikura and Teshigawara pare

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 Fear of an Envoiced Planet 29

away Lem’s minor scientists and visitors and pair each remaining character
with a double, a vocal reflection, at once self and Other. Hari has her disem-
bodied echoes and screams; Kelvin has inner and outer selves. The couple
in turn becomes an inseparable unit. Snaut (an unheroic tenor) mirrors col-
league Gibarian (an archetypal voice-­of-­warning spectral bass), who has his
own live-­electronic patch. Both haunt the station—the former figuratively, as
a shell of himself, and the latter semi-­literally, as the planet projects images
of him into the dreams of the living. In the 2015 world premiere production
of the opera, Teshigawara’s doubling of most of the vocal cast with dancers
heightened the uncanny mood and fixation on mirroring.
A staging of Solaris by Neue Oper Wien in 2021 offered powerful visual
analogues for the terrestrial hang-­ups that follow humans to Solaris. Per-
formed live for critics only amid the Covid-­19 pandemic, the performance
occupied a small semicircular stage in Vienna’s Atelierhaus der Akademie
der bildenden Künste, in part to enable multicamera recording. I, and others
worldwide, watched the resulting film online via streaming video, available
on the company’s website for several months thereafter. Their programming
proved apt: Solaris Station’s death-­haunted skeleton crew, confined to a
pillar-­ringed platform with minimal set, resembled quarantining households
across the world outside.
The production team behind this Solaris—­production designer Helen
Malkowsky, stage director Kathrin Kemp, costume designer Anna-­Sophie
Lienbacher, video artist Sophie Lux, “sound director” Christina Bauer, and
lighting designer Norbert Chmel—­mounted scenic and dramaturgical inter-
ventions that put themes of entanglement and mirroring at the fore. A large
circular mirror on the floor visually duplicated each singer who stood or
lay on it. The “offstage” inner Kelvin, gold-­encrusted and clutching a micro-
phone, swanned onstage in defiance of the score and libretto, providing a
visual double where Fujikura had scored for acousmatic voice. Ordinary
yarn played an affecting role: Hari materialized holding a half-­knitted pink
sweater, a tragic nod to her and Kelvin’s lost domesticity as well as an emblem
of mental unraveling. In Act III, she unwound it, along with its ball of what
reviewer Christoph Irrgeher, attending to the object’s connotations of femi-
ninity, calls “Damenwolle”: women’s yarn.39 Hari, and later Snaut, stretched
threads around the innermost ring of columns later in the performance,
shrinking the already-­small staging area.
As this process of hemming-­in proceeded, a circular cutout loomed behind
the actors, unattended to despite projections flitting across it (fig. 1.1). This,

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 30 contemporary opera in flux

Fig. 1.1. Hari (Simona Eisinger) and Kelvin (Timothy Connor) in Neue Oper Wien’s
2021 Solaris. © Photograph used with permission from Andrej Grilc.

then, was Solaris. The circular mirror at center stage, which appears to have
fallen out of the void representing the planet, comes to resemble the pool of
Narcissus. The planet has spoken, but the scientists hear mostly their own
echoes. Teshigawara’s final lines for Kelvin, however, suggest in this and every
production that Kelvin comes to feels a new affect; he perceives the planet, no
mere mirror, as a part of himself and vice versa. An orchestral crescendo to
nowhere rises all around as the onstage Kelvin soars to F4 on a text that jetti-
sons Lem’s reflective anticlimax in favor of ecstatic resolve: “Having this feeling
transcends human knowledge . . . I will stay here, as a new lifeform.”40 The fore-
grounded figure not only wishes to merge with something once consigned to
the background, but also to moot the distinction between these categories. In
this opera’s final minutes, it transcends the tendency of adaptations of Solaris
to devolve into a tragic love drama with extraterrestrial tinta.
For contrast, consider the most widely accessible 2010s opera perfor-
mance to feature aspects of Solaris’s plot: Guth’s 2017 staging of Puccini’s
La bohème for the Opéra national de Paris, as it appears in an audiovisual
recording.41 Rodolfo, Marcello, Schaunard, and Colline become astronauts
in a space station above an exoplanet. Mimì, Musetta, and others appear as

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 Fear of an Envoiced Planet 31

Fig. 1.2. Atalla Ayan (Rodolfo) and Nicole Car (Mimì) in Opéra national de Paris’s
2017 La bohème. © Photograph used with permission from Bernd Uhlig and the
Opéra national de Paris.

their hallucinations of the terrestrial past. Guth named Solaris as an inspira-

tion for the production.42 Grafting bohème’s cast into the scenario of Solaris,
Guth unsettles Puccini, Illica, and Giacosa’s operatic text in David Levin’s
sense of the verb.43 An opera known for soaring sentiment takes on disturb-
ing implications amid unfamiliar visual cues and events. In setting up the
incongruities of language, sound, and acting typical of Regieoper, Guth inde-
pendently arrives at strategies similar to those of the Vienna Solaris. Mimì
enters in Act I with her customary candle, here symbolic of a lost home;
body doubles appear with her and Rodolfo, heightening the staging’s vocal
and visual uncanniness; and the planet always looms, whether through a
window, abstracted as Parpignol’s balloon, or dominating the stage in Act
III. Guth adds sounds of superhuman scale: breathy vocalizations sweep the
auditorium between scenes. Any suggestion of planetary agency, however,
ends there.
Guth’s emphasis on human interpersonal drama is unsurprising for any
production of La bohème, but is also typical of direct Solaris adaptations.
One reviewer complained specifically that Obst’s work consigns the planet

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 32 contemporary opera in flux

to the sonic and scenic margins in favor of monologues plumbing the human
psyche.44 Obst’s statement on the work notes that the planet, while given a
“sound world” all its own, remains a setting.45 Although Glanert and Palm
devote a role in their cast list and the literal, collective voice of a choir to
the planet, reviews confirm that in this opera, Solaris’s voice mimics or mir-
rors Kelvin, singing from the wings.46 Fujikura and Teshigawara’s piece, with
its electroacoustic vocalities that synthesize human and hyperobject, is thus
an outlier. From here, however, I turn from operas that stumble upon the
hyperobject via Lem’s novel to theories of posthumanist vocality per se, and a
speculative realization thereof: The Force of Things (2016/2017).

Shivering Lungs, Wailing Winds:

The Force of Things Reinvents the Voice-­Body

Amid an airborne pandemic and the warming of Earth’s atmosphere, J. Mar-

tin Daughtry advances a posthumanist redefinition of the voice that stretches
the concept beyond humanly audible in-­and exhalations from biological life.
He includes material and vibrational events that flout detectability by typi-
cal human sensoria, at difficult-­to-­process scales: “[W]e need a posthuman,
post-­sonorous conception of voice, one that acknowledges the provincial-
ity and contingency of its sounded dimension and highlights its many envi-
ronmental entailments. With this in mind, I will here be treating voice not
as a purposeful sound issuing from a human throat that expresses human
thoughts and identities, but rather as a widespread atmospheric phenome-
non that is not limited to humans, or even to biological life.”47
Daughtry, like Morton and other scholars who seek to decenter humanity
and transcend humanism, gives urgent political reasons for ditching tradi-
tional definitions: “a necessary price to pay . . . as the changing composition
and dynamics of air are connected to many of the local and global challenges
we face.” His explosion of the concept of voice represents a long-­anticipated
move for voice studies. As early as 2013, Milla Tiainen pointed out that post-
humanist philosophical currents, including Morton and cohorts’ object-­
oriented ontology, promised ways to examine how voices enact relational-
ity beyond the bodies of individual human subjects.48 As Virginie Magnat
observes, however, little interaction between voice studies and the “new”
posthumanist ways of thinking—­ many of which, she and others argue,
resemble animistic philosophies of Indigenous communities, rebranded as
innovations by Western academics—­actually followed.49

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 Fear of an Envoiced Planet 33

Many a scholar has since assigned voice to ecological hyperobjects in the

rhetorical sense of giving voice to the voiceless, that is, speaking for something
without language. Deborah Wardle, for instance, proposes groundwater as
a hyperobject, introducing an analogy that recalls Glanert’s vocal writing
for the planet Solaris: groundwater calls out “like a choir where harmonies
meld and separate according to the range of voices[.]”50 This is the hyper-
object voice as pure metaphor. The political theorist and “new materialist”
philosopher Jane Bennett declares, in similar fashion, “I will try to give voice
to a thing-­power.”51 The title of the chapter in her monograph Vibrant Mat-
ter that advances this goal: “The Force of Things.” In their eponymous piece,
inspired by the eco-­oriented philosophical writings of Bennett, Morton, and
colleagues such as Donna Haraway and Christoph Cox, the Fure siblings lit-
eralize and push beyond this metaphor of “giving voice.”
Morton and their philosophical kin have posited inaction on climate
change as, in part, a problem of human attention. Object-­oriented and new
materialist thinkers, acknowledging debts to posthumanism, argue that the
scale of destruction that humans have wrought defies our powers of spatial
and temporal comprehension. Hyperobjects fail to register in their entirety
in the domain of the senses, also straining cognitive capacities. One of the
most remarked-­upon pieces of music theater to address climate change, The
Force of Things follows Morton in construing global warming and pollution
plumes, of, for instance, Styrofoam as hyperobjects that need translation into
audible, palpable, and visible forms on short timescales for humans to feel
their presences. Yet Ash Fure’s sounds for the piece remind attendees that all
human sensoria have limits. Critic Alex Ross, attending a 2017 performance
at Montclair State University, emphasized the role of infrasound in this
effect: “Enveloping dread, ambient unease, a kind of sensuous foreboding . . .
Fure addresses feelings that are all too familiar in early-­twenty-­first-­century
life. . . . For most of the work’s duration, twenty-­four subwoofers, placed with
their cones pointed upward, emit electronic tones that vibrate at a frequency
of 10.67 hertz, or around ten oscillations per second. . . . The body is listening
even when the ears tune out.”52
The “opera for objects” places custom instruments, conventional winds
played with extended technique, speaker components, and other objects in
the hands of musicians—­not in character—­who move in ritualistic solemnity,
eschewing language. Opera, for all its diversity, has almost always hewed to
conventions such as plot, character, interpersonal drama, and setting. The
Fure siblings cut it loose.53 Their piece exemplifies Novak’s concept of postop-
era, adopting selected formal elements, descriptive language, and strategies

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 34 contemporary opera in flux

for affective attunement from opera while dispensing with other constitutive
traits. Novak writes that postopera complicates the question of what “the
voice” in a piece even is, let alone from where, what, and whom it may ema-
nate.54 The question I pursue here: How does The Force of Things reinvent
opera’s historical voice-­body relationships for the time of hyperobjects?55 In
offering a partial dramatis non-­personae of objects that define the piece, I fol-
low Ash and Adam Fure’s posthumanist concept while departing from their
chosen descriptive language to date.
Prosthesis has fascinated posthumanists since the movement’s insur-
gency in the 1990s.56 I argue that this installation becomes a sort of prosthetic
voice-­body through its audible and palpable vibrations. In 2018, at a perfor-
mance of The Force of Things I attended, the Fure siblings presented visual and
sonic elements that suggested real-­world referents yet became alien in their
scale and ambiguity.57 Ash Fure called for performers to evoke humanoid and
nonhuman forms of vocality along spectra from infrasonic to ultrasonic and
quasi-­vocal to mechanistic, often out of sync with expected roles of singers
and instrumentalists. Essential to the project is immersion as though in a
hyperobject: audience members perceive their somatic and sensory limita-
tions, feeling subsumed and pervaded, somewhat like astronauts on Solaris.
Condemning the perceived misogyny behind a review of the 2016 world
premiere performance, Fure assures readers that, far from the human anat-
omy to which the critic in question referred, The Force of Things arose from
“thoughts of the anthropocene, of ‘hyperobjects,’ of timescales impossibly out
of sync, of alien materials.”58
Although Ash Fure has called The Force of Things a “drama,” musicians
seldom interact with one another, and no plot becomes apparent.59 Language
remains limited to preperformance addresses in which Ash Fure exhorts
attendees to feel catastrophes such as climate change, which unfold on a
hyperobject’s scales of time and space, with the sort of fear that would arise
were a tiger to stalk through the room.60 Silences in the opera offer not relief,
but the paralysis of standing with a knife to one’s throat.61 On a webpage
for the piece posted in 2023, Fure updates its subtitle from An Opera for
Objects to A Climate Opera and lists one of its guiding questions as: “where
is the sonic adrenaline we need?”62 I read this quotation as a suggestion that
the opera creates not just an architectural assemblage, as the Fure siblings
describe it, but also a prosthetic voice-­body with its own endocrine system,
in this case a pathway for transmuting ambient dread into acute fear.
Ash Fure characterizes the piece as “an immersive intermedia work that

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 Fear of an Envoiced Planet 35

wrestles with collective violence, material agency, and the haunting thrust
of the anthropocene . . . [and] explores a post-­human terrain.”63 Anthropo-
cene denotes an epoch in which human influence on all life and landscapes
defines the state of the planet, becoming a permanent layer of death and
detritus in the geologic record.64 In speaking of “post-­human terrain,” Fure
names but one influence on the piece; post-­anthropocentrism is another.
Hans-­Thies Lehmann, theorist of postdramatic theater, almost predicted
The Force of Things in sketching a possible “post-­anthropocentric theatre”:
“Under this heading one could assemble the theatre of objects entirely with-
out human actors . . . and theatre that integrates the human form mostly
as an element in landscape-­like spatial structures. They are aesthetic fig-
urations that point utopically towards an alternative to the anthropocen-
tric ideal of the subjection of nature.”65 Many principles of posthumanism
and post-­anthropocentrism—­for one, the conviction that one must look
and listen past ordinary human experience to render vast phenomena
comprehensible—­reverberate through Fure’s comments on The Force of
Things, a posthuman prosthetic apparatus in postoperatic form. A program
note further explains:

The Force of Things . . . wrestles with the animate vitality of matter and the
mounting hum of ecological anxiety around us. The project is driven by a
desire to tune our focus toward a rate of change (impossibly slow) and a
scope of alteration (unthinkably vast) at odds with the scale of human life. . . .
[The piece] has a palpable sense of urgency and yet it’s eerily still[.] These
moves attempt to train our perception beyond its given boundaries—­below
the sounds we’re built to hear and through the sensory illusion of stasis that
renders us still in the face of collapse.66

Chung observes that Etudes from the Anthropocene, a predecessor to

The Force of Things, makes “training” of the listener explicit in the title. It
aspires to the condition of listening pedagogy: ear training for planetary swan
songs.67 While each class of object in the opera refers to a limitless range of
personal associations for each attendee, I construe each as a specifically vocal
apparatus, calling Fure’s “sonic adrenaline” into circulation.68
Mouths; throats. Several minutes into an opera that begins with
no humans in sight other than fellow attendees, a pair of singers with
megaphones—­vocal prostheses that obscure and extend mouths—­appear
and emit clicks, gasps, and slower inhalation/exhalation sounds, all spatially

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 36 contemporary opera in flux

and timbrally estranged from the bodies that initiate them. These amplified
whispers echo the vocal writing of Ash Fure’s sometime composition teacher
Chaya Czernowin: “singers snake side-­by-­side amidst the audience, shouting
a warning that sounds like a whisper in a language no one can understand.”69
Holding these amplification devices, reminiscent at once of disaster sites and
protests, the singers led audience members at the 2018 production into a
second space. Other musicians, sheathed in the plastic coats of scientists or
hazmat cleanup technicians, activate speaker drivers, steel cables, and tra-
ditional instruments such as a bassoon and saxophone. Sources of sound
and infrasound “sing” laments for dying ecosystems, as humans (including
Ash Fure, behind the scenes but visible at an electronics station in the 2018
version) remain literally peripheral.70 The vocalists move on to recognizably
human sung tones, with instrumentalists matching them in intensity and, at
times, timbre.71 In a then still-evolving document and instructions that Fure
shared with me, a note advises, “try to make the bassoon sound as much like
a wailing female voice as possible.”72
Vocal cords. From Tripwire, a 2010 installation co-­created with Jean-­
Michel Albert, Ash Fure derived the wires (duly labeled “tripwires” in the
above-­mentioned performance document) that, attached to speaker driv-
ers at one end and the ceiling at the other, occupy the center of the seating
area.73 They vibrate quickly enough to produce visible waveforms, but slowly
enough to not produce pitches; instead, hidden speakers suggest the low
tones that might emerge from such massive strings. Performers manipulate
them, sometimes slackening them by lifting the speaker cones. The piece ends
after performers leave the room and one by one, the wires cease to vibrate: a
death scene. From electrical conduits and stabilizing tethers to strings on a
mammoth musical instrument, the cables recall dozens of industrial, infra-
structural, and artistic objects from everyday life, as well as a seismograph’s
wavering lines. Their motions, however, inescapably (and intentionally) sug-
gest vitality. I offer the vocal cord—­an outdated term for the thus-­named part
of the larynx, but an image to which I circle back below—­as one productive
analogue.
Lungs. Installation-­performances titled Shiver Lung and Etudes from the
Anthropocene appeared in performances led by Ash Fure in 2016, each a par-
tial preview of the full “opera for objects” to come.74 A subsequent installment
in the Shiver Lung series clarified one of the title’s meanings: slowed to vibrate
below human limits of pitch and volume perception, amputated speaker
cones resemble inhuman lungs, laboring to breathe under hands that resusci-

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 Fear of an Envoiced Planet 37

tate and/or suffocate.75 Their dilations and collapses provide the opera with a
flutter that ranges from the softness of teeth chattering to the shattering clank
of a jackhammer, depending on the objects, from cardboard or foam panels
to bar chimes and chains, interacting with them in a given instant.
Vocal Folds. For the 2018 performances of The Force of Things, the sib-
lings divided a ballet practice hall into an anteroom and a larger space, each
swathed in (decidedly nontheatrical) curtains made of drafting paper and
synthetic rubber. The clattering that greets attendees arises from the tap of
floor-­to-­ceiling cables, driven by subwoofers, against these towering figures.
As the lighting changed, these sculptural pieces looked in turn like sheets of
ice, titanic jellyfish, or—­in reddish light—­hides.76 In a revealing coincidence,
they also resemble the cover art of scholar Nina Sun Eidsheim’s monograph
Sensing Sound, published months before the 2016 premiere of a version of The
Force of Things at the 48th Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music.77 The
photograph, from artist Vilde Rolfsen’s Plastic Bag Landscape series, calls gla-
cial environments or organic tissue to mind but, as the title suggests, depicts
an ordinary shopping bag, at once quotidian and an emblem of plastic pollu-
tion.78 In the context of Eidsheim’s work, the image also recalls the interior of
the human throat. If The Force of Things’ wires, with their visible waveforms,
recall the popular yet anatomically infelicitous idea of vocal “cords,” like those
of a stringed instrument, then the curtains, like Rolfsen’s photograph, evoke
the terminology of vocal folds.
Unintended kinships between Eidsheim and the Fure siblings’ work run
deeper, extending to the notion of the voice as but one of many vibratory
forces for affective transference and political solidarity across people and
things. Ash Fure continues to add components to the piece, such as the talk-­
box-­like “mouthtubes” that appeared in performances at Dartmouth Uni-
versity in 2022. These devices direct instrumental sound into human vocal
tracts for live manipulation by mouth, almost inverting the vocoder effect of
Fujikura’s Solaris/Kelvin dream voice. The Force of Things’ reinvention of the
voice-­body in opera expands as a side effect of its own continual evolution.
Skeptics of posthumanism, object-­oriented ontology, new materialism,
and fellow-­traveler philosophies remain wary of Bennett, Morton, and oth-
ers’ lack of attention to human difference.79 In music studies, Chung has cri-
tiqued Bennett, Eidsheim, and Fure’s work in this vein, cautioning against
theories and artistic rationales that elide fraught histories of the “human.”80
Other scholars have questioned the novelty of “new” materialist posthu-
manisms and the implied universal human experience underpinning object-­

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 38 contemporary opera in flux

orientation as a stance.81 Extreme weather and rising waters have devastated

swaths of the so-­called global South to a degree far out of proportion to these
regions’ carbon emissions, for instance—­disparities that make no sense with-
out analysis of human societies’ power structures.82 Fujikura and Teshiga-
wara’s Solaris, like The Force of Things, avoids explicit mention of racism or
colonialism, despite Lem addressing these issues in his text (to variously tren-
chant and unfortunate results).83 Chung argues that the kinds of listening that
Ash Fure calls for need not conflict with Indigenous thinkers’ advocacy of
more-­than-­human communication, that we need not accept the “flat” ontol-
ogy of Morton and like-­minded writers to listen beyond bounded, discrete
human selfhood.84 Indeed, one must always ask Eidsheim’s “acousmatic ques-
tion” when perceiving a speculative nonhuman or more-­than-­human voice:
regardless of the implied what, who is it who is speaking (or singing)?85

Precarious Earth, Precarious Opera: Raising Voices

With opera companies concentrated in the places on Earth most inured to

fossil fuel consumption, questions about the opera world’s sustainability
have arisen. Some houses have achieved or moved toward carbon neutral-
ity, prioritizing local artists and events over globetrotting stars and tours.86
Sustainability scholars, though, have identified other sources of waste and
overconsumption in opera, such as the construction and disposal of new
sets for lavish productions.87 I see a greener future for opera in the Viennese
Solaris or The Force of Things than in the Parisian bohème. In the former, the
production team recognizes the potential for critique latent in Fujikura and
Teshigawara’s opera, realizing it via humble yet affecting means. The Force of
Things gathers hacked, reusable found objects that double as visual reminders
of pollution and global warming, for instance, aircraft cables over Styrofoam
bridges. Consider, for contrast, the conspicuously expensive spacecraft in
Guth’s bohème.88
I do not intend to praise Neue Oper Wien for its ability to, as the cliché
goes, do more with less. On the contrary: I invite readers to challenge recent
efforts to defund it and other companies. In 2021, a jury allocating local gov-
ernment funding for the performing arts in Vienna faulted the city’s entire
opera scene for “stagnation” and rejected almost all applications for music
theater, including Neue Oper Wien’s. (Months later, the company would win
the German Theater Publishers’ annual prize for 2021, precisely for its inno-

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 Fear of an Envoiced Planet 39

vative performances given limited resources.) The company’s fate remained

uncertain at the time of writing.89 Opera has, as Megan Steigerwald Ille
writes, shown an ability to thrive outside the opera house—­see for example,
The Industry, the startup-­style company that Ash Fure joined as a co-­artistic
director in 2021. However, even companies such as NOW that provide wide
access to socially resonant productions are not safe in a time of arts auster-
ity.90 New vocalities and dramaturgies for opera can only emerge if artists
have the resources to reach for the impossible.
Notes
1. Stanisław Lem, Solaris, trans. Steve Cox and Joanna Kilmartin (New York: Walker
and Company, 1970), 3. This translation is based not on the original Polish (Warsaw:
Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, 1961) but rather on the first French
translation: Lem, Solaris, trans. Jean-­Michel Jasiensko (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1966). A
direct English translation from the original is available in audiobook form: Lem, Solaris,
trans. Bill Johnston (Newark: Audible, 2011).
2. See for example: Shirley Apthorp, “A Storm of Boos for La Bohème at the Paris
Opera,” Financial Times, December 4, 2017, [Link]
-11e7-9504-59efdb70e12f
3. The non-­or posthuman voice has already become a topic of scholarly discussion.
See for example: Jessica Tsun Lem Hui, “Reconfiguring Voice in The End: Virtuosity, Tech-
nological Affordance and the Reversibility of Hatsune Miku in the Intermundane,” Cam-
bridge Opera Journal 34, no. 3 (November 2022): 364–­79.
4. Here I paraphrase Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Can
the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 21–­80.
5. Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London: Verso,
2017), ebook introduction n46.
6. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
7. Available documentation of Enrico Corregia’s Solaris opera is limited. Here I refrain
from commenting on it.
8. Andrew J. Chung, “Songs of the New World and the Breath of the Planet at the Orbis
Spike, 1610: Toward a Decolonial Musicology of the Anthropocene,” Journal of the Ameri-
can Musicological Society 76, no. 1 (2023): 65.
9. On the increasing untenability of “nature” and “the world” as categories, see Morton,
Hyperobjects, 4–­7. On the collapse of the idea of a human/cultural “foreground” and envi-
ronmental “background,” see Ian Baucom, History 4° Celsius: Search for a Method in the
Age of the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 95–­97. On the mooting
of human vs. natural history as a binary, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History:
Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–­222. On the speculative extension
of vitality to “inanimate” objects, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of
Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), vii–­19.

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 40 contemporary opera in flux

10. On “green” practices in opera production, see Rebecca Schmid, “How Opera Is
Going Green,” New York Times, May 10, 2021, [Link]
/music/[Link]. On environmentalism on the operatic stage, see Kirsten
Paige, “Opera’s Inconvenient Truths in the Anthropocene Age: CO2 and Anthropocene,”
Opera Quarterly 36, nos. 1–­2 (Winter–­Spring 2020): 99–­112.
11. Jelena Novak, Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-­Body (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2015), 3–­40.
12. See Novak, Postopera, and Novak, chapter 2 in this volume.
13. For an articulation of a posthumanist opera studies, see Christopher Morris, “Cast-
ing Metal: Opera Studies after Humanism,” Opera Quarterly 35, nos. 1–­2 (2019): 77–­95.
14. Matthew Aucoin, The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera (New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 2021), ix. In 2023, Aucoin announced a 2024 premiere date for a new operatic
work titled Music for New Bodies, an ecological-­themed piece in which “we hear the voice
of the ocean floor itself, speaking with superhuman pressure and force.”
15. Morton’s “time of hyperobjects” and the “after the end of the world” of their book’s
subtitle are one and the same. See Morton, Hyperobjects, 6–­7.
16. Melody Jue, review of Emerging from Its Elements: Solaris Across Media by Mark
Bould, Extrapolation 58, no. 1 (2017): 113–­15.
17. Lem, Solaris [Johnston translation].
18. Fujikura translated the libretto with the assistance of Harry Ross.
19. For a Baudrillardian perspective on Solaris, see Miriam Jordan and Julian Jason Hal-
adyn, “Simulation, Simulacrum, and Solaris,” Film-­Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2010): 253–­73.
20. The term “uncanny valley,” born of robotics, now refers to any object that invites
affinity by anthropomorphism only to elicit revulsion as its not-­quite-­humanness becomes
apparent. See Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” trans. Karl F. MacDorman and Norri
Kageki, IEEE Spectrum, June 12, 2012, [Link] (orig-
inally published in Japanese in Energy 77, no. 4 (1970): 33–­35).
21. Morton fleshes out the hyperobject concept in the eponymous monograph, but its
published debut arrived in Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2010), 19.
22. Object-­oriented ontology originated with philosopher Graham Harman. Only later
did Morton join Harman and the scholar Ian Bogost in the movement.
23. Timothy Morton, “Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals,” SubStance 37, no. 3, issue
117 (2008): 73–­96.
24. Morton, “Ecologocentrism,” 81.
25. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 110–­35.
26. Chingshun J. Sheu, “Conceptualizing the Hyperobject in Stanisław Lem’s Solaris,”
paper presented at International Symposium on Literature and the Environment in East
Asia, Taipei, National Taiwan Normal University, October 20, 2018.
27. Anthony Enns, “Mediality and Mourning in Stanisław Lem’s Solaris and His Mas-
ter’s Voice,” Science Fiction Studies 29, no. 1 (March 2002): 34–­52, at 39.
28. Dai Fujikura and Saburo Teshigawara, Solaris: Opera in 4 Acts (Milan: Ricordi,
2014), 6–­35 [PDF].
29. Fujikura and Teshigawara, Solaris, 35 [PDF]. A note on this page indicates that at
least some sampled audio came from the soundtrack of Tartovsky’s film.

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30. Lem, Solaris, 64.

31. Seo-­Young Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-­Fictional Theory of
Representation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 38–­40.
32. For discussion of definitions of voice as uniquely human, see Rachel Mundy, Animal
Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Uni-
versity Press, 2018), 109–­67.
33. Fujikura and Teshigawara, Solaris, 6 [PDF].
34. Lem also dwells on Hari’s ability to create vibrations—­infrasound, felt more than
heard—­at amplitudes sufficient to rattle a spaceship hatch. Fujikura notes this vibration in
a stage direction but provides no sound to match, acoustic or electronic.
35. Morton, Hyperobjects, 64.
36. Alexa Woloshyn, “Electroacoustic Voices: Sounds Queer, and Why It Matters,”
Tempo 71, no. 280 (2017): 73–­79.
37. Melody Jue, “Churning up the Depths: Ecologies of Metaphor in Solaris and ‘Oce-
anic,’” in Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, eds. Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley
Robinson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014), 226–­42, at 229–­30.
38. Lem, Solaris, 72. Neue Oper Wien reproduced this scene from the novel in the pro-
gram book accompanying its production of Fujikura and Teshigawara’s Solaris, available at
[Link]
39. Christoph Irrgeher, “Solaris: Die Frau, die aus dem Ozean kam—­und sang,” Wiener
Zeitung, April 7, 2021, [Link]
[Link]
40. Fujikura and Teshigawara, Solaris, 27–­28 [PDF].
41. As of the time of writing, the production remained available on the streaming site
[Link]: [Link]
42. For Guth’s remark, see Agence France-­ Presse, “Une Bohème intergalactique à
l’Opéra de Paris,” RBTF, November 30, 2017, [Link]
rgalactique-a-l-opera-de-paris-9776108. For a review that calls the Solaris reference “obvi-
ous,” see Laurent Amourette, “La bohème at the Opera of Paris: Hello Houston, We Have a
Problem!,” Classicagenda, December 2017, [Link]
ra-of-paris-houston/
43. David Levin, Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), ix–­36.
44. Detlef Brandenburg, “Houston, wir haben ein Problem: Solaris,” Die Deutsche
Bühne, March 29, 2018, [Link]
en-ein-problem-0/
45. Michael Obst, Solaris: Kammeroper program note, available at [Link]
[Link]/work/4961
46. Guy Rickards, “Copenhagen and Bregenz: Penderecki’s The Devils of Loudun and
Glanert’s Solaris,” Tempo 67, no. 265 (2013): 70–­86.
47. J. Martin Daughtry, “Call and Response (or the Lack Thereof ): Atmospheric Voices
and Distributed Selves,” Sensate: A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice 8,
[Link]
-and-distributed-selves/

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 42 contemporary opera in flux

48. Milla Tiainen, “Revisiting the Voice in Media and as Medium: New Materialist Prop-
ositions,” European Journal of Media Studies 2, no. 2 (2013), 387.
49. Virginie Magnat, The Performative Power of Vocality (New York: Routledge, 2020),
124–­86.
50. Deborah Wardle, “Groundwater as Hyperobject,” Mosaic 52, no. 2 (June 2019): 7.
51. Emphasis mine. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 2. New materialism, like object-­oriented
ontology, represents a questioning of fundamental precepts of Western philosophy, often
to environmentalist ends.
52. Alex Ross, “Infrasound Opera,” New Yorker, October 23, 2017, [Link]
[Link]/magazine/2017/10/30/infrasound-opera
53. Human performers remain present almost throughout, differentiating The Force of
Things from such automated (post)operatic installations as those of Heiner Goebbels.
54. Novak, Postopera, 3–­18.
55. Novak stakes her claim of a break from operatic tradition on reinventions of the
relationship between performers’ bodies and the voice. See Novak, Postopera, 3–­6.
56. See, for example, N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies
in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
57. The performance in question took place at Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center in Brooklyn
between August 6–­8, 2018, as part of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival.
58. Ash Fure, “Reflections on Risk: Pigeonholes, Precarity, and the Zero-­Sum Game of
Time,” in Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 24, ed. Michael Rebhahn and Thomas
Schäfer (Mainz: Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, 2017): 50–­54, at 51–­52. Elaine Fitz Gibbon
has asked whether the radio feuilleton in question represented misogyny, as Fure argued,
or rather a misunderstood attempt at reading against the grain. Elaine Fitz Gibbon, “Stag-
ing the Anthropocene, Refusing Difference: Problems of Translation in the Premiere of Ash
Fure’s The Force of Things (2016),” paper presented at Society for American Music Annual
Meeting, Virtual/Tuscon, March 11, 2022.
59. In a 2016 talk, Fure extolled pre-­, non-­, and extra-­linguistic approaches to meaning
making in music. See Ash Fure, untitled position statement delivered at Debate: Darmstadt
Forum I—­New Conceptualism: A Dead End or a Way Out?, Darmstadt, 48. Internationale
Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, August 4, 2016, available at [Link]
DjHp2p0?t=2706 [45:06].
60. Ash Fure, remarks cited in Andrew Chung, “Vibration, Difference, and Solidarity in
the Anthropocene: Ethical Difficulties of New Materialist Sound Studies and Some Alter-
natives,” Resonance 2, no. 2 (2021): 218–­41, at 221–­22.
61. Ash Fure et al., “Music in the Expanded Field—­Darmstadt Summer Course 2016,”
uploaded December 31, 2016, [Link] [04:00].
62. Ash Fure, “The Force of Things: A Climate Opera,” Ash Fure Artist Page, [Link]
.[Link]/fot-hop
63. Fure, “Reflections on Risk,” 51.
64. Jussi Parikka, “Anthropocene,” in Posthuman Glossary, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Maria
Hlavajova (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 51–­53.
65. Hans-­Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jurs-­Munby (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 81.

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66. Ash Fure, “The Force of Things,” Ash Fure Artist Page, [Link]
/force
67. Chung, “Vibration, Difference, and Solidarity,” 222–­23.
68. Video of Fure and others activating components of The Force of Things appear in
online documentation posted after the 2022 Dartmouth University performance. Each
custom instrument appears under Fure’s own name for it. The videos Tripwires, Hides,
Monocords, Infra-­subs, and Mouthtubes, along with a trailer for and full recording of the
event, remained available at [Link] as of the time of writing.
69. Fure, “The Force of Things” [Artist Page]. On Czernowin’s breathy vocalization, see
Calico, chapter 6 in this volume.
70. Adam Fure codesigns the sculptural elements and spaces for The Force of Things, but
he does not perform. In the 2022 Dartmouth University performances, Ash Fure joined
other performers at the heart of the installation.
71. One reviewer wrote, “the singers were liberated from their whispery megaphone
duties . . . the operatic voice was ready to sing[.]” Seth Colter Walls, “The Force of Things, an
Indirectly Audible Opera,” New York Times, October 10, 2017, [Link]
/2017/10/10/arts/music/[Link]
72. Ash Fure, “internal organization document” for The Force of Things, 2018, shared in
email to author, August 29, 2019.
73. Ash Fure, “Tripwire,” Ash Fure Artist Page, [Link]
The reference to cables in The Force of Things as “tripwires” occurs in Fure, “internal orga-
nization document.”
74. Ash Fure, “Shiver Lung,” Ash Fure Artist Page, [Link]
-lung
75. Ash Fure, “Shiver Lung 2,” Ash Fure Artist Page, [Link]
-lung-2
76. For a review speaking to their ambiguity of referent, see Rebecca Lentjes, “Ashley
and Adam Fure’s The Force of Things at Mostly Mozart Festival,” I Care if You Listen, August
23, 2018, [Link]
tly-mozart-festival/
77. Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
78. Vilde Rolfsen, “Plastic Bag Landscapes 2014–­,” Vilde Rolfsen Artist Page, [Link]
[Link]/plastic-bag-landscapes
79. See, for a compelling Black queer feminist critique, Tiffany Lethabo King, “Humans
Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight,” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 1
(Spring 2017): 162–­85.
80. See Chung, “Vibration, Difference, and Solidarity,” 224–­37, and Chung, “Posthu-
man but not Post-­Colonial: The Subject of New-­Materialism-­Inspired Sonic and Vibra-
tional Thought Remains Hegemonic,” paper presented at Society for Music Theory Interest
Group Virtual Meeting, November 8, 2020, [Link]
PmO3w. For an object-­oriented philosopher’s response to Chung, see Graham Harman,
“Moral Superiority as First Philosophy: In Response to Andrew J. Chung,” Resonance: The
Journal of Sound and Culture 3, no. 2 (2022): 194–­213.

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 44 contemporary opera in flux

81. See, for example, Alison Ravenscroft, “Strange Weather: Indigenous Materialisms,
New Materialism, and Colonialism,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5,
no. 3 (September 2018): 353–­70.
82. See Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
83. Teshigawara’s libretto omits Gibarian’s visitor: a Black woman, described in racist
and objectifying language. The first production of Glanert and Palm’s opera, by contrast,
found this character’s role expanded.
84. Chung, “Vibration, Difference, and Solidarity,” 235–­37.
85. Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African
American Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 42 and 102.
86. Schmid, “How Opera Is Going Green.”
87. Mercè Roca, Jaume Albertí, Alba Bala et al, “Sustainability in the Opera Sector:
Main Drivers and Limitations to Improve the Environmental Performance of Scenogra-
phy,” Sustainability 13/22 (November 2021), [Link]
88. For more on designer Etienne Pluss’s set, see: [Link]
/etienne-pluss-la-boheme/
89. Christoph Irrgeher, “Die Neue Oper Wien kämpft ums Überleben,” Wiener Zeitung,
November 28, 2022, [Link]
/[Link]
90. Megan Steigerwald Ille, Opera for Everyone: Experimenting with American Opera in
the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024).

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 2

Posthuman Voice Beyond Opera

Songful Practice of Holograms, Robots,
Machines, and Vocaloids
Jelena Novak

While interviewing Philip Glass in Lisbon in 2007, I was curious to hear his
opinion on how new technologies have reinvented the protocols of operas
and how we experience them. He was intrigued by the radical change in the
viewer’s consumption of opera brought on by new technologies: “I think
when you have a room in your house which projects a three-­dimensional
image in the room, then you’ll have something. But, when you are looking at
the screen, it’s not good enough. It’s going to change. It will be beyond that
in fifteen, twenty years. I don’t know if I will be around to see it, but for sure
it will be.”1
Twelve years later, I recalled this conversation with Glass—­his contem-
plation of an operatic hyperreality—­after seeing Michel van der Aa’s virtual
reality installation Eight (2018–­19).2 There I was in the “deserted” Muziekge-
bouw aan’t IJ in Amsterdam, walking through a “mixed reality” opera wearing
a VR headset and surrounded by projected humanoid simulacra and their
voices. Eight took place in a constructed space/installation located in a room
so small that only one audience member could visit at a time. There was
an uncanny intimacy and chamber-­like atmosphere, not least because as a
listening spectator, I was alone. Suddenly, all the attention was focused on
my reactions—­one particular audience member—­thrust to the center of the
opera/VR/gaming experience.
Technology has not only paved the way for the operatic experience to be
transmitted, performed, and/or mediated in ways hitherto unimaginable, but
in the process has redefined the ontologies of operatic experience and the

45

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 46 contemporary opera in flux

voice. In 1998, an industrial robot choreographed by Åsa Unander-­Scharin

“sang” music by Claudio Monteverdi in “The Lamentations of Orpheus.” In
2013, a “vocaloid” opera, The End, was composed for the hologram personal-
ity of Hatsune Miku, performed in some of the most progressive opera houses
of the day.3 This was followed by Martin Riches’s artwork Singing Machine
(2010–­2013), which demonstrated that a machine could sing operatic aria
by Tom Johnson called “The Audition” (2019). The operatic roles assigned to
holograms, vocaloids, robots, animals, monsters, and singing machines made
me think again about Glass’s predictions. New technologies have reinvented
the genre of opera, taking it beyond the materiality of the human body. So
what does it mean and what does it take to sing beyond human?
The human voice has historically been central to our psychological and
social understanding of individuality and selfhood. Hence the voice is inti-
mately entwined with what counts as being “human.” The category of “human”
is inherently non-­neutral as it indicates access to certain privileges and enti-
tlements, such as being endowed with a voice for speaking and singing.4 In
the 2019 exhibition I co-­curated with Kris Dittel entitled “Post-­Opera,” we
asked, “what kind of voices are recognized as such, within our societal power
dynamics, and what are the possibilities for ‘other’ voices to be heard?”5
Speaking of the “modernist crisis of the voice,” Marcelle Pierson claims that
Stockhausen’s vocal treatment in Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–­56) offers “a
different representation of musical humanity,” that is to say, “[humanity] is
evoked in a different way by making the voice into a ritual, a system.”6 Follow-
ing Pierson, I will define what happens with the voice in the present moment
of what I understand to be an anthropocentric knot in the age of posthuman-
ity. I am interested in how different artists work with the posthuman voice in
the contexts of (post)opera.
In shedding light on such issues, this chapter focuses on how we might
pose the question of what it means to be a human in the context of con-
temporary opera, and how we can attend to the processes of “becoming” a
cyborg, a machine, an animal, and/or a monster through the shifting medium
of the singing voice. What is the line that separates a human from a “beyond
human” mode of singing? How can we contend with this ever-­shifting, ever-­
fluid border that exists between human and “beyond human”?
The reinvented relationship between the singing body and the voice lies at
the core of the most intriguing attempts to question opera as a stable genre. To
this end, I will refer to four case studies of (operatic) singing beyond the human:

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 Posthuman Voice Beyond Opera 47

Kate Miller-­Heidke, Livia Kolk, and Nederland Kamerkoor’s singing in Eight by

van der Aa; Singing Machine by Riches (singing Johnson’s “The Audition”); “The
Lamentations of Orpheus” (a “solo choreography for an orange industrial robot
to Monteverdi’s aria from L’Orfeo” (1607))7; and the hologram vocaloid Hatsune
Miku’s singing in Keiichiro Shibuya’s opera The End (2013).
Allow me to make a short but picturesque digression about voice
beyond human by reference to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915). Kafka
illuminates precisely what interests me: how we detect, understand, and
hear the human-­animal barrier, and how and when we know if this barrier
is crossed.8 Gregor Samsa wakes up one day in his room only to discover
that his body has transformed into the body of a huge insect. While his
family members try to figure out why he stays in his locked room, he strug-
gles with his new existence, at first trying to pretend that everything is the
same as it has been. But at the point when he starts talking to his family
through the locked door, they become aware that something is “wrong.”
Although Gregor believes that his voice and speech are the same as they
were when he had human shape, his vocal pitch and articulation become
disfigured to those around him. He can still understand human speech, but
humans are unable to understand his speech.
Gregor’s voice enters the flux of becoming, becoming an animal, and
becoming monstrous.9 When his family hears him, the shock of finally seeing
Gregor in a form of an insect confirms the metamorphosis, but it was hearing
his monstrous “voice”—­the process of becoming animal—­that triggers the
distress.10 Gregor Samsa does not sing like the characters from the cases I
analyze here. But the effect of vocal metamorphosis from human to “beyond
human” follows a similar trajectory.
Nicholas D. Stevens (chapter 1) explains how the posthuman voice pro-
duces unease, uncanniness, fear, and/or the urge to simultaneously empa-
thize with and distance oneself from the monstrous voice, whose source
may or may not be traced to a human body. Stevens also writes about
nonhuman personhood and vocality, the idea that as humanity has been
extended to a “beyond human” sphere, we are confronted with the possi-
bility of extending the concept of vocality along with it. I am interested in
how we distinguish the process of becoming posthuman: whether “the bar-
rier” exists between human and animals, like in case of Samsa, or involves
a technologically mediated person, as in the cases that employ holograms,
vocaloids, robots, and singing machines.

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 48 contemporary opera in flux

The Translucent Voices of Eight

Kate Miller-­Heidke, a singer known both for classical/operatic performances

and for her career on the pop scene, lent her “real” voice to her virtual holo-
gram double in van der Aa’s Eight.11 On June 10, 2019, when I was in Muz-
iekgebouw aan’t Ij, the building seemed empty of any other human pres-
ence. Afterward, I realized that this solitariness served as an introduction
to, and was an integral part of the experience of, Eight (it was necessary to
reserve a fifteen-­minute slot for this performance since only one person can
experience it at a time). The live performers completely vanish in this piece,
although they had previously lent their voices to virtual reality characters.
Miller-­Heidke’s character in Eight was actually multiplied through her var-
ious “versions.” She was not present at the performance, but she had been
previously filmed, and that recording was used in modified form, with VR
projections as a 3D avatar that included her voice.12
An assistant invited me to the entrance of the installation and started
preparing me for the “performance.” She put a VR headset on my head and
added headphones, instructing me not to touch the equipment even if I felt
bad or panicked, but instead to raise my hands above my head, a sign to the
assistant to come and disengage me from the experience, if necessary. I found
myself on a curving path, and a projected 3D image of a virtual older lady
(played by Vakil Eelman) appeared and gave a gesture of invitation, indicating
that I should follow her; I did. There was so much virtual scenery to see and
experience, mostly stunning nature landscapes, and I had to cope with simul-
taneous feelings of excitement and astonishment.
After the hologram of the older lady had been replaced by that of her
younger self, the latter continued to sing and to act as my guide. The trans-
parent, luminescent virtual character resembled Miller-­Heidke. She brought
me to the edge of a cliff. I didn’t have the courage to approach the edge and
my knees felt weak. I couldn’t see my legs when I looked down through the
VR headset, but I continued walking. Miller-­Heidke’s singing voice was in a
kind of pop idiom referring to the vocality of Björk, Dolores O’Riordan (of
the Cranberries), or Meredith Monk. Music formed the background to the
experience, creating the overall ambience, and singing was present almost all
the time. Notably, before entering the installation I was presented with the
words of poetry that was going to be sung, including:

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I hear time falling

my breathing happens—­it’s not mine
There’s something flowing
that I can’t grasp.13

The meaning of the sung words was echoed in the atmosphere of the VR
spaces and in the vocal expression of sung materials throughout the work.
I remember that at one point I moved a curtain to enter a cave. There I
saw shadows, faceless humanoid figures that were bending the sides of the
corridor through which I walked. I heard the projected choral music of the
Nederlands Kamerkoor and perceived the voices of the choristers as if they
were produced by shadows, “ghosts” that inhabited the space of “the cave.”
If these ghostly shadows had been moving around in silence, I suppose that
they would not have generated the same tension or created the same uneasy
atmosphere. The reverberating choral singing in an idiom reminiscent of
Gregorian chant, alongside the ghostly apparitions and the shadowy and dark
ambience of the cave, created a truly uncanny effect.
The impossibility of identifying the precise source of an acousmatic sound
raises an important question. Nina Sun Eidsheim argues that this acousmatic
question is “the foundational question asked in the act of listening to a human
voice.”14 She sums it up in this question: Who is this? Who is speaking? To this,
I would add: Who is singing? I would further emphasize that the most founda-
tional question one may ask is whether the singing can be traced to a human
source. This opens up a whole spectrum of issues related to the ontology of
the voice and its potential to surpass the human sphere.
The climax of Eight arrived for me when I saw a projection of a small
girl under a table (Livia Kolk, a child soprano), an even younger version of
my guide. She invited me to join her. She sang a cappella while staring at me
with her translucent blue eyes. Her voice sounded “real,” like a human child,
yet the accompanying holographic appearance produced a powerful ventril-
oquistic effect. Being around her didn’t feel comfortable; indeed, it was scary.
She looked almost as if she were real, kind of alive, but at the same time I was
aware that she was only a simulacrum, and that awareness was decidedly
unsettling. I wasn’t confident enough to stay there under the table with her,
for the situation evoked memories of some unpleasant horror-­movie scenes.
Instead, I remained half in and half out of that under-­the-­table space.

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 50 contemporary opera in flux

I suppose I was experiencing an “uncanny valley” syndrome, which van

der Aa defines as the degree of an object’s resemblance to a human being as
well as our emotional response to such an object. He suggests that a sim-
ulacrum entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feel-
ings in the viewers.15 And the effect of the mismatch between the artificial
visual appearance of the girl and her “natural”-­sounding voice was indeed
anything but soothing. The voice that was heard did not resemble a human
voice; rather it was a projected human voice, that of Kolk. Moreover, this
naturalized voice was assigned to a visual simulacrum, a kind of apparition
resembling a human child.
A mismatch between the voice and the body, such as this gap between the
“realistic”-­sounding voice of a child and the obvious simulacrum to which van
der Aa had matched it, is something inherent to postopera.16 Depending on
the context, sometimes the body appears “natural” and the voice “artificial,”
and sometimes vice versa. It is this gap between what we hear and what we
see at the same time that produces such rich meaning. This gap is also one
of the characteristics of “theatre of absence,” as defined by Heiner Goebbels,
who notes that some of its characteristics are anchored in the gap between
what we hear and what we see at the same time.17 He mentions “a separation
of the actors’ voices from their bodies and of the musicians’ sounds from their
instruments” and “a de-­synchronization of listening and seeing, a separation
or division between visual and acoustic stage.”18 That desynchronization is,
according to Goebbels, typical for postdramatic theater, where “the spectator
is involved in a drama of experience rather than looking at drama in which
psychologically motivated relationships are represented by figures on stage.”19
In the case of the “uncanny valley” effect in Eight, this “drama of experience”
happens through the gap or desynchronization between what we see and
what we hear. Desynchronization is not time-­based, but rather is rooted in
connection and disconnection with conventions of being human, where the
voice “confirms” its own human origins and the projected body denies them.
In Eight, I experienced the paradox firsthand when I could not identify the
simulacrum girl as human even if her humanlike voice persuaded me to do so.
The end of Eight revealed the end of a path that seemed to lead to
nowhere. Miller-­Heidke’s virtuosic vocal abilities, the pop-­electronic instru-
mental music, and the uncanny atmosphere all combined to define the envi-
ronment of the whole opera. I felt as though I was in NO PLACE, at NO
TIME, and with NO PLOT. The experience was similar to a walk-­through,

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 Posthuman Voice Beyond Opera 51

almost like a dream.20 At one point I even thought that I might actually be
the main character of this imaginary opera. With the VR characters per-
forming prerecorded actions with a limited amount of live responsivity to
the attendee, it means that the person attending is the only “performer” in
a traditional sense. It is hard to be sure that Eight happened at all, as no one
else witnessed it with me. Still, it didn’t exactly feel as if I were alone. There
were voices around, but none of them really confirmed a human presence.
The “real world” experience was used here as material for a virtual reality,
with the voices and images of existing persons—­Miller-­Heidke, Kolk, and
the choir—­serving as the basis for a virtual, beyond human, identity. What I
heard instead of the “human voice” was a series of liminal states of becoming:
becoming-­cyborg, becoming-­android, becoming-­virtual, where relationships
of human with “nonhuman people” become reinvented.21

Voice and the Uncanny: Machines Singing

Typically, only humans are considered to have a voice, while animals are
endowed with the capacity to sing; take, for example, whales and birds. A typ-
ical definition of voice relates to human body and human linguistic expres-
sion, even if animals are sometimes briefly mentioned. For example, the
Oxford English Dictionary defines the voice as: “Sound, or the whole body
of sounds, made or produced by the vocal organs of man or animals in their
natural action; esp. sound formed in or emitted from the human larynx in
speaking, singing, or other utterance; vocal sound as the vehicle of human
utterance or expression. Also occasionally, the faculty or power of producing
this; or concretely, the organs by which it is produced.”22
In the increasingly ventriloquistic world we live in, however, hearing
voices and singing by machines, mechanisms, animals, and other “nonhu-
man people” has become commonplace. Curator Kris Dittel and I researched
“singing beyond human” in the operatic field in preparation for the exhibi-
tion “Post-­Opera” (2019).23 The exhibition included artworks and installations
by artists, composers, and performers from the fields of contemporary art
as well as opera, presented alongside archival documents and objects con-
cerning early attempts to recreate the human voice by artificial means. We
focused on the question of who can have a voice and who can sing. Eventu-
ally, we found ourselves in an exhibition space that echoed with the sounds

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 52 contemporary opera in flux

Fig. 2.1. Martin Riches, the Singing Machine (2010–­13), with the score of “The
Audition” (2019) by Tom Johnson. From Post-­Opera, TENT Rotterdam (2019).

of singing monsters, animals, machines, sirens, and additional “Others” in a

sphere beyond the voice. Consequently, the exhibition dismantled the opera
world as one of the last unquestioned bastions of humanism.
One artwork that attracted considerable attention at “Post-­Opera” was
Riches’s Singing Machine. At regular intervals the Singing Machine sings a
cappella “The Audition,” an aria that Tom Johnson wrote for this artificial
voice. Before this, Riches’s fascination with mechanical speech synthesis had
produced other vocalic mechanisms, such as his Talking Machine (1989–­91)
and MotorMouth (1996–­99).24 The idea for Singing Machine came from the
composer Masahiro Miwa. Its first outing was a performance of “Finita iam
sunt proelia” by Palestrina in four-­part harmony, with three of the voices pre-
recorded. After this first version of the machine, which he made in Japan,
Riches returned to Europe and made a second version. Unlike the first one,
it did not attempt to pronounce consonants. The version of the machine that
performed in Rotterdam has a range of one octave and the ability to sing only
vowel sounds (a, e, i, o, u). The sound of the machine’s voice is both impres-
sive and uncanny. It produces its song with a flow of air, a vibrating larynx,
and an imitation of a tongue and lips that manages to extend beyond the
human body while imitating its vocalizations.

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 Posthuman Voice Beyond Opera 53

Riches emphasizes the likeness to and imitation of the human voice in

Singing Machine and MotorMouth as the main concept underlying his voice
machines: “These vocal devices are imitative: attempted copies of the human
voice. Basically, a ‘mission impossible,’ but worth trying and, since they
receive occasional kind words from professional phoneticists, I think they
can be counted as brave attempts.”25 For Riches, the “worth trying” judgment
lies in the emotional response of the listening spectator:

Affection is a natural sympathetic response to the pathos of an imitative

machine. I could make the imitative machines more realistic. I could give my
“MotorMouth” a rubber face mask and glasses like the Waseda Talker no. 7
(refined). Tests with that Japanese speaking machine showed that the rubber
mask makes it easier for people to understand it. But it also approaches what
is known in animatronics as “uncanny valley.” I prefer the mechanism—­and
the affectionate response.26

In this case, the “affectionate” response is obtained via Tom Johnson’s vocal
writing for the machine, which critiques the pomposity of the divas as well as
the “unnaturalness” of vibrato in opera singing.
Johnson is best known for minimalist compositions, including operas, in
which he critically and ironically engages with operatic institutions and conven-
tions. This is evident in his lyrics for “The Audition” (see fig. 2.2). The machine
sings an aria, drawing attention to its own abilities and shortcomings, while
questioning the status of the opera singer, the practice of musical auditions,
operatic stardom, and the self-­importance of the conventional opera world.
“The Audition” is itself a miniature yet profoundly affecting operatic scene.
This curious machine, and the miniature operatic scene written for it (as
featured at TENT), does not confront us with virtual reality characters, holo-
grams, or vocaloids. With Riches’s Singing Machine, the illusion of creating
an anthropomorphic entity is not present. Instead, there is a do-­it-­yourself
(DIY) mechanism placed on a pedestal, boldly putting on display a mechan-
ical imitation of voice production in the human body. It uses the motor of
a vacuum cleaner (functioning as lungs) to pump air through a glass tube
(working as a larynx). The machine looks like an analog device, resonating
(ironically enough) with the protocols of a contemporary world that becomes
increasingly ventriloquistic through digital means. Still, it is connected to
an old-­fashioned computer that Riches has programmed to manipulate the
mechanism of the machine. The variable height of its air tube and “lip open-
ing” enables it to perform the song.

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 Fig. 2.2. Tom Johnson, “The Audition.” Score by Editions 75
(Courtesy of author).

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 Posthuman Voice Beyond Opera 55

Riches’s machine does not have the sort of superhuman virtuosity that
would make it sound cyborg-­like, as is the case with the opera One by van
der Aa.27 There Barbara Hannigan becomes a vocal cyborg onstage. Her voice
is upgraded, enhanced by interventions of her recorded “vocal double.” The
Singing Machine instead sings Johnson’s melody that is very simple, tonal,
and leans on the rhythm of the words in the text. The voice’s quality is not
electric, it is instrumental, it sounds as caricature of contrabassoon sound.
Its attempt to imitate the gestures of bel canto singing—­that is, producing
vocal ornamentation or overemphasizing glissando and vibrato—­gives way
to an absurd atmosphere, typical of Johnson’s operas. In “The Audition,” the
Singing Machine imitates vocal singing that carries heightened emotion, as
in a Romantic operatic aria.
Exploring “the relationship of mimesis and desire that circulates between
the human and the machine,” Miriama Young writes about the technological
replication of the voice by touching on Descartes (as the first philosopher to
write of the human body as a machine), automata, speaking machines, and
speech synthesis.28 The mechanical voice is inherently a copy devoid of its
original, never tied to a human, physical origin. Moreover, there is a partic-
ular purity to its physical form, for the sounding voice object is not subject
to the manifestations of human aberration, error, randomness, or decay. The
mortal, carnal, fleshly body is bypassed entirely in the machine’s rendering of
a disembodied, omnipresent, divine, or perfect ideal. Moreover, the abstract
and ideal form can be preserved in perpetuity.29 This disembodiment that
Young writes about is present both in the appearance and in the performance
of the Singing Machine. It is obvious, hearing the sound of the mechani-
cal baritone, that the voice is not coming from the human throat. Moreover,
since the machine only produces vowel sounds, it is not possible to under-
stand the words of Johnson’s aria by listening alone. Once we listen with score,
however, an unexpected “molding” of the vocal performance takes place, and
the words become understandable. In that process, the empathic response
grows, and the machine, at least in my perception, moves closer to the human
realm even though it performs beyond human.
Commenting on the performance of “The Audition” by Riches’s unusual
mechanical baritone, Johnson at one point said, “It will not get the role!”30 But
this machine’s raison d’être was never to replace a human singer in the con-
ventional operatic world. It was meant to sing operatically beyond the voice,
beyond the human, and beyond opera. What makes it so intriguing for the
audience is that its very existence is based on the striking contrast between

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 56 contemporary opera in flux

the state of singing and a blatantly mechanical object that denies—­at least
visually—­any pretense of anthropomorphism (an imitation of human action).
“The Lamentations of Orpheus” is a prime example of the uncanny
machine voice, first performed by a robot in 1998.31 The piece lasts for two
and a half minutes and was described as a “solo choreography for an orange
industrial robot to sing Monteverdi’s aria from L’Orfeo, in which Orpheus
laments Euridice’s death, vowing to descend to the underworld to bring her
back to earth.”32 The piece exists in two modalities: as an installation where
the robot performs the choreography “live,” and as a video recording of the
performance.33 The robot performs the choreography while the aria is heard,
with the tenor voice of Carl Unander-­Scharin accompanied by an ensemble,
all from a recording.34
In an honorary mention of choreographer Åsa Unander-­Scharin, an
anonymous writer posits that the work “implies an interesting relational
equality between human and robot, so although as an image it reminds [me]
of the famous pixar luxor lamp, it acquires its lifelikeness in a more subtle
way.”35 There is no mention of the singing voice, nor of the very act of singing,
although acquiring lifelikeness is deeply connected to the vocal performance
and not just to the movement and visuals.
The most interesting questions concerning “The Lamentations of
Orpheus” arise from this 170 cm tall, 500 kg robot’s relationship with the
singing voice. Although it might not appear to be the case, I claim that it is
the robot that actually sings, as its movements are determined by the con-
text of singing. Technically speaking, the tenor voice that is heard is that of
Carl Unander-­Scharin, as his singing was recorded and projected at the scene
of the installation. Symbolically, however, the moment that voice enters the
installation, it is “captured” by the ABB Robot IRB 1400’s movements, as the
vocal inflections are embodied by the mechanism of the machine. The robot’s
choreography, elegant and energetic, is synchronized with the music and the
singing, so that the robot assumes the role of singing. So the response to the
first question would be that the one who sings is the robot, and that it sings
with Unander-­Scharin’s voice. Although this voice originates from a human
throat, it becomes the voice of the machine. This voice goes beyond human,
perpetuated in a continuous act of becoming, fluctuating between the voice
produced by vocal organs and the voice that emanates as though from the
interior of the machine.
The ABB Robot IRB 1400 thus becomes vocally “alive.” It claims the right
to have a voice, a right that is usually the exclusive preserve of the human

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 Posthuman Voice Beyond Opera 57

Fig. 2.3. ABB Robot IRB 1400 in “The Lamentations of Orpheus”

domain. But the balance typical for melodic and vocal style used to express
affect in early music corresponds with the machine’s supposed emotional
restraint. In this aria, the small intervals and slow pace of singing are sug-
gestive of sorrow. And those slow melodic gestures and some jumps are fol-
lowed and synchronized with movements of the robot. What escapes syn-
chronization with choreography are rich vocal ornaments that build tension
and excitement and give fullness to emotional expression. The singing tenor
voice, combined with the mechanical choreographed movements, consti-
tutes a moment at which those who are usually not allowed to have a voice
finally sing. It is a moment of escape from stereotypes. Critical questions are
raised about who owns the voice, both for singing and, metaphorically speak-
ing, for being human, and why.

Holographic Singing: Hatsune Miku in The End

Singing beyond human, in the case of Hatsune Miku in the opera The End,
takes on a different character from the “translucent” singing in Eight, the
uncanny and parodic aria of Singing Machine, or the machine’s sorrowful
singing with a recorded human voice in the case of “The Lamentations of
Orpheus.” Here the central character Hatsune Miku’s flat, high, and “plas-

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 58 contemporary opera in flux

Fig. 2.4. Hatsune Miku singing in The End (video still).

tic” voice is implausibly paired with her animated, blue-­haired persona. It

is intriguing, then, to explore how the vocaloid Hatsune Miku crosses the
borders of the human realm through singing.
Hatsune Miku is the name of “the most popular humanoid avatar of the
vocal synthesizer VOCALOID,” an item of commercial software that was
developed by Yamaha Corporation in a research project led by Hideki Ken-
mochi in 2000.36 Vocaloid has been marketed as a “virtual singer in your
computer,” a kind of vocal “font” or “engine” that can sing melodies and
phrases and be used for the collaborative creation of new songs to replace the
live vocal performer.37 The “Hatsune Miku” vocaloid software was developed
by Crypton Future Media and is based on the voice of the Japanese voice
actress Saki Fujita. The name of the character comes from merging the Jap-
anese words for first (初 hatsu), sound (音 ne), and future (ミク miku), thus
meaning “the first sound of the future.”
The word “vocaloid” amalgamates “voice” and “android.”38 While an
android stands for a robot/machine that is designed to resemble humans,
I perceive vocaloid as a voice that is intended to resemble the human voice,
though it inevitably fails to do so. A vocaloid was at first just the name for
the voice synthesis software, but the company at one point created a visual
image for it—­a character behind the voice—­and this turned out to be a huge
commercial success. This is how Hatsune Miku, a virtual sixteen-­year-­old girl

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 Posthuman Voice Beyond Opera 59

with blue pigtails, came to “life.” In effect, Miku grew out of the quest of the
voice for a persona to represent it. She became a celebrity and was marketed
as a virtual icon. Miku had her first “live” concert in 2009 and since then
she has held many sold-­out 3D concerts around the world (including one
with Lady Gaga), “boasting over two and a half million Facebook friends and
singing an incredible repertoire of more than 100,000 user-­released songs.”39
Miku performs at concerts onstage as an animated projection (rear-­cast on a
specially coated glass screen). Her fame is especially marked in Japan, where
she has been described as a “collaboratively constructed cyber celebrity,”40
and where one online review of her performance was notably titled, “One of
Japan’s biggest Pop stars isn’t human.”41
Miku has gained international renown as a virtual pop star, singer, and
dancer, a virtual icon, and “a pre-­recorded hologram gimmick.”42 But I dis-
covered Miku through the world of opera, after she had sung the principal
role in the opera The End, for which Keiichiro Shibuya wrote the music.43
This is how the opera was introduced to the audience of the Holland festi-
val: “Miku begins her journey by asking herself: ‘will I die?’ (. . .) Travelling
through a virtual world, accompanied by Shibuya’s score of minimal techno
and EDM, modern and contemporary classical music and sound art, Miku
goes in search of the paradox of her own existence.”44
Wearing clothes designed by the haute couture fashion house Louis Vuit-
ton, Hatsune Miku entered the operatic world, brought some nonhuman
voices to that world, and further opened it up to new audiences. Two char-
acters join Miku in this piece: a kind of animal, which resembles a Pokémon
character, and the Visitor, who appears as Miku’s double. But no humans per-
form in this “first Vocaloid opera (. . .) constructed from multi-­screen 3D
images and electronic sound.”45 Miku experiences a realistic human drama
as she is obliged to confront questions about death, a concept that does not
belong to her world. The drama of what it means to be human unfolds, then,
in a beyond-­human setting.
The aria “Because I Am Imperfect/Theme of Super Animal” points
to the posthumanist tendency to question the relationship between the
human and the Other: human-­animal, human-­machine, human-­hologram,
human-­monster. Miku sings about those relationships, and, in turn, her
own voice presents itself as a product of the questioning of those relation-
ships in the act of singing. At the beginning of the song/aria we see Miku
and the Animal talking if they should “join forces.” Here are the opening
lines of the song:46

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 60 contemporary opera in flux

Do you wish to be one again?

Then it will be clear to everyone,
It will be clear for everyone,
You are close to being a human being,
But imperfect
How close you are to human and how incomplete
Shall we join forces again?

In an explosively animated metamorphosis, Miku and the animal are

transformed into a flying lion/dragon that has the face and hair of Miku in
the lion head and the body and wings of an animal. And the composite entity
sings and speaks at the same time. The speaking voice sounds as feminine, and
the singing voice is noisy as if it contains spectra of white noise in it, sandy
and somewhat childlike, cartoonish, as it is based on high pitches. Those two
vocals perform the singing/speaking dialogue together: Miku expresses her
concerns of never being able to be as perfect as human.

(. . .)
I am not that far from being a human
Because I am imperfect
I am just as imperfect
I am mortal, like humans
My existence has meaning because I am imperfect
I am the me I am because I am imperfect.47

And then the singing and speaking voice enter into the repetitive loop
with the words “If I don’t have any words to speak,” they become entangled,
sandy white-­noise voice fused together with sonic attributes of a feminine
voice. The music turns into a repetitive electronic dance and we see Miku/
dragon/lion flying above the illuminated geometry shown on several screens
on stage. It flies and floats within a nongravitational field. Feminine voice is
in a speech loop, combined with an animal white-­noise voice that sings in
Japanese. Miku and the Animal are shown in embrace within the jaw of the
lion/dragon and they slowly dissolve into separate entities again, which is
how the song ends.
Like her visual appearance, Miku’s voice is invented, it is a voice “with a
shadow,” so to speak. The element that resembles white noise gives this voice
its identity. White noise includes in itself all the audible frequencies in equal

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 Posthuman Voice Beyond Opera 61

measure. This noisiness of Miku’s voice is highly symbolic: it is the voice that
can sing the multiplicity. And this multiplicity sings together with the speak-
ing human voice as if the human feminine speech becomes one of the shad-
ows, one of the nuances. This is noisy meta-­voice, voice about voice that is
posthuman, but still keeping itself human in equal parts. It does not produce
feelings of fear, discomfort, or unpleasantness. It rather calls for a sense of
solidarity and togetherness in the mind of the beholder.

Conclusion

I am now remembering the conversation I had with composer Ivo Malec

more than decade ago. “I think that the time for singing about things has
already passed. It is obsolete. Why should one sing about something?”48 The
more I think about Malec’s claim, the more provocative and relevant it seems.
For Malec, as for most modernist composers, writing melodies was a thing
of the past. And Pierson’s observations about Nono’s and Stockhausen’s vocal
poetics of modernism brought me back to Malec in its illumination of the
connection between melody and voice: “In the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury (. . .) composers in the West who identified with the tenets of modernism
largely stopped writing melodies (. . .) to shift somewhat abruptly toward
texture and timbre (. . .) melody and voice are so intertwined as to form a
single entity.”49 If paradigmatic examples of the posthuman voice in musical
modernism can be traced back to works by Nono and Stockhausen, what
would be the equivalent of the posthuman voice when considering songful
practice of technological creatures such as holograms, robots, vocaloids, or
machines?
Despite their posthuman nature, the voices explored in this chapter are
nevertheless not unmelodic; that is, a melodic-­posthuman binary is not
entirely viable. The singing in Eight, for example, is certainly melodic, some-
times resembling an early music singing style and sometimes an indie pop
style. What matters in this piece is the melodic utterance of the voices, both
solo and choral, so much so that even if words of poetry were to be heard,
those words would, I suggest, seem irrelevant. Singing evokes the uncertainty
in the experience of going beyond oneself: going too high in VR mountains,
or going too low in VR caves, or simply going beyond oneself by extending
one’s comfort zone and sensorial abilities. The melodic quality of nonhuman
or not-­entirely-­human voices paired with the unique textural and timbral

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 62 contemporary opera in flux

qualities of holograms is what made them posthuman. Similarly, when indus-

trial robots and singing machines sing, it is the melodic quality of their sing-
ing that inevitably (post-­)humanizes them. In case of “The Lamentations of
Orpheus,” the voice singing Monteverdi’s aria functions as a choreographic
score for the industrial robot. Finally, the voice of Hatsune Miku is electronic,
but is also presented through a melodic matrix. Its texture is rich and layered,
combining white noise and transgendered singing.
Arguably, the “melodic turn” in contemporary opera can be understood
to have emerged in parallel with the posthuman turn. Attraction to mel-
ody is present not only in these four works I have discussed here, but much
more widely. Philip Glass, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, intro-
duces long melodic lines in his operas even since composing Satyagraha.
What makes this turn peculiar is that this overt melodicism often emerges
in instances where the singing voice moves or gestures beyond the human.
In these instances, even simple and common-­sounding melodies glow and
resonate in a very different light.
In an attempt to establish a posthuman, postsonorous conception of voice
as “one that acknowledges the provinciality and contingency of its sounded
dimension and highlights its many environmental entailments,” J. Mar-
tin Daughtry describes vocality as a convergence of five processes: gaseous
exchange, atmospheric disturbance, sharing of airborne elements between
environments (cross-­pollution), durational effects as a result of this sharing
and dissolution of boundaries that separate the environments.50 “My breath-
ing happens—­it’s not mine” is one of the verses from Van der Aa’s Eight. The
entities that reproduce singing voices in the aforementioned cases do not
involve breathing: they are not alive, therefore the voices are mediated. Voices
in the cases included here are attributed to holograms and industrial robots.
Hatsune Miku’s voice is invented. The singing machine presents perhaps the
closest example to breathing, its voice mechanically produced in the image of
a human vocal and respiratory apparatus.
Of the five aforementioned processes, the “dissolution of boundaries”
is the most present and relevant in the cases of posthuman voice discussed
here. Voices being multifarious, otherworldly, and silvery (Kate Miller Heidke
in Eight), immersive and translucent (choir in Eight), windy, circussy, and
buffo-­instrumental (Singing Machine), steely and mechanical (robot in “The
Lamentations of Orpheus”) noisy, sandy, dusty, and pokemonish (Hatsune
Miku), all those choristers of multitude dissolve the boundaries between
voice and metal, voice and light, voice and air, voice and movement, voice and

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 Posthuman Voice Beyond Opera 63

noise, and voice and minerals. Singing translucent VR characters in Eight, the
instrumental singing voice of the Singing Machine, the electric noisy voice of
Hatsune Miku, the choreographed sorrowful voice of ABB Robot IRB 1400,
they all join this operatic quest for a new vocal relationality. They go beyond
the comfort zone of the human realm in opera. Those “nonhuman people”
are activists and poets at the same time. Together they fight metaphorically
for their voices, for different voices that can also sing and should be given the
opportunity to be heard.
Notes
This work was made with the support of CESEM (Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e
Estética Musical), NOVA FCSH, UIDB/00693/20203 and LA/P/0132/2020 with the finan-
cial support of FCT, I.P. through National funds. In this chapter I develop ideas previously
discussed in my conference paper “Opera beyond the City: Vocaloids, Mixed Realities and
Singing Machines,” presented at the conference Opera and the City, which I co-­organized
with Jõao Pedro Cachopo in 2019 at CESEM, Lisbon Teatro São Carlos and Cinemateca
Portuguesa.
1. From the 2007 interview with Philip Glass in Lisbon. This interview was published
in Serbian: “Operska kuća je odavno mrtva,” Teatron 142 (2008): 83–­88, and in Swedish:
“Philip Glass tvillingpar—­opera och film,” Nutida Musik 1 (2008).
2. “Hyperreality is the result or the effect of the process of simulation, i.e., simulacrum
that does not originate from reality experienced by senses, but which looks as if it is more
real or more natural than that reality. Reality is defeated by imaginary which is more real
than the real” (my translation from Croatian). See Miško Šuvaković, Pojmovnik suvremene
umjetnosti [Glossary of Contemporary Art] (Zagreb; Horetzky; Ghent: Vlees/Beton, 2005),
263. In his Glossary Šuvaković extracts a definition of hyperreality from writings of French
theorist Jean Baudrillard.
3. It was performed at the Dutch National Opera & Ballet in Amsterdam in 2015 and
the Théatre du Châtelet in Paris in 2013, among other venues.
4. This is an argument made at length by Rosi Braidotti in the 2019 monograph Post-
human Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).
5. See “Post-­ Opera,” [Link]
-opera/
6. Marcelle Pierson, “Voice, Music, Modernism: The Case of Luigi Nono and Karlheinz
Stockhausen,” in The Voice as Something More: Essays Towards Materiality, ed. Martha
Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 78, 87.
7. This explanation is derived from Operamecatronica, a project run by composer Carl
Unander-­Scharin and choreographer Åsa Unander-­Scharin. A long collaboration between
the two resulted in the world’s first choreographed industrial robot “The Lamentations of
Orpheus” in 1998. Since then, many interactive robotic art works have seen the light of day,
for example, the three-­meter-­long puppet “Olimpia” or the robotic swan “Robocygne” that
moves the audience to tears through its melancholy dance to Carl’s electro-­acoustic version
of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. [Link]

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 64 contemporary opera in flux

8. Naama Harel investigates the human-­animal barrier in the work of Kafka in inspir-
ing ways. As often happens in posthumanist theory, however, there is a dearth of scholar-
ship around vocality, as if the voice is rendered invisible, a silent attribute excluded from
posthuman identity. Naama Harel, Kafka’s Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-­Animal Barrier
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020).
9. For more about the concept of monstrous voice related to vocals featured in Steve
Reich and Beryl Korot’s opera Three Tales, see my book Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-­
Body (London: Ashgate, 2015) or “Monsterization of Singing: Politics of Vocal Existence,”
New Sound International Journal of Music 36, no.2 (2010): 101–­19.
10. I first talked about the case of vocal transformation of Gregor Samsa in a conference
paper “Voicing beyond the Human: Constructing Canine Vocality” exposed at “Human
Voice, Animal Voice,” conference at Tel Aviv University, organized by Michal Grover Fried-
lander in December of 2018.
11. See more about the performance of Eight at the Holland Festival in Jelena Novak,
“Eight, aus Licht, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being Immersed in Opera,” Opera
Quarterly 35, no. 4 (Autumn 2019): 358–­71.
12. The music of Eight got some kind of afterlife within van der Aa’s first indie-­pop
album “Time Falling” (2020), a collaboration with Miller Heidke. Some music from Eight
found a place there, for example the song “I Think of Fire.” The aesthetics of the “I Think of
Fire” music video, featuring Miller-­Heidke, plays with the concept of an augmented real-
ity and the aesthetics of arcade games. See [Link]
lNCA (accessed October 12, 2020).
13. From Michel van der Aa’s libretto of Eight, Holland Festival program booklet,
Amsterdam, 2019.
14. Nina Sun Eidscheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African
American Music (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 1.
15. Jelena Novak, “Music Beyond Human, Conversation with Michel van der Aa,” New
Sound International Journal of Music 55, no. 1 (2020): 14, [Link]
.php/NS/article/view/37/65
16. See more about this gap in my book Postopera.
17. Heiner Goebbels, “Aesthetics of Absence” in Lectures (How) Opera Works, ed. Pierre
Audi (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 159.
18. Goebbels, “Aesthetics of Absence.”
19. Goebbels, “Aesthetics of Absence,” 156.
20. The Borgesian motive of infinity and dreaming in Eight could also be associated with
the music video “What a Dream” (from the album the Time Falling), based on materials
from van der Aa’s earlier opera The Book of Sand, which also features Miller-­Heidke as
a principal character. [Link] (accessed August
10, 2021).
21. Here I refer to the presentation “Vocal Becomings” by Kris Dittel delivered at the
symposium “Installing the Voice” at TENT, Rotterdam, in May 2019. For the notion of
“nonhuman people,” see Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People
(London: Verso, 2017).
22. “Voice,” Oxford English Dictionary, [Link]
(accessed February 17, 2023).

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 Posthuman Voice Beyond Opera 65

23. The featured artists included Jan Adriaans, Adam Basanta, Paul Elliman, Ho Tzu
Nyen, Janneke van der Putten, Martin Riches, and the composers Tom Johnson and Jasna
Veličković. “Post-­Opera” took place at the Rotterdam exhibition spaces TENT and V2, with
the support of the Operadagen Rotterdam Festival. For more information about the “Post-­
Opera” exhibition and the “Installing the Voice” symposium, [Link]
/en/tentoonstelling/next-up-post-opera/, as well as the exhibition booklet: [Link]
[Link]/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/PO_BookletB5_DEF.pdf. In “Exhibiting the
Voice,” Dittel and I discuss some of the installations and performances that were part of
“Post-­Opera” in more detail. See Kris Dittel and Jelena Novak, “Exhibiting the Voice,” Parse
Journal 13, no. 2 (Summer 2021), [Link]
24. For more details about the Talking Machine and MotorMouth see [Link]
[Link]/[Link], [Link] and [Link]
787687
25. Andrea Jahn, ed., Two Measures of Time: Martin Riches (Stadgalerie Saarbrücken:
Kerber Verlag, 2016), 46.
26. Jahn, Two Measures of Time, 50.
27. For more about One see Novak, Postopera, 41–­56.
28. Miriama Young, Singing the Body Electric: The Human Voice and Sound Technology
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2020), 79.
29. Young, Singing the Body Electric, 77.
30. From the author’s phone conversation with Tom Johnson, February 2019.
31. The video of the piece and further details about it are available at the webpage of
Opera Mecatronica: [Link]
32. Opera Mecatronica: [Link]
heus/
33. The words that the robot sings are in Italian. Here I quote the English translation of
that part of the libretto:

You are dead, my life, and I still breathe?

You are gone from me
Never to return, and I should remain?
No, for if verses can do anything,
I will go in safety to the deepest abysses,
And having softened the heart of the King of shades,
I will bring you back with me to see the stars again:
Oh, if wicked destiny refuses me this,
I will stay with you, in the company of death.
Farewell earth, farewell Heaven and Sun, farewell.

Translation quoted from Claudio Monteverdi, L’Orfeo, Favola in Musica. Italian libretto by
Alessandro Striggio and English translation by Gilbert Blin. See [Link]
.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/[Link]
34. I am grateful to my student Noeli Kikuchi at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, who
introduced me to this installation.

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 66 contemporary opera in flux

35. See [Link]

36. Ana Matilde Diogo de Sousa, “A Colaboração Massiva de Hatsune Miku: software
Vocaloid como catalisador de criações colectivas, grassroots e multidisciplinares na sub-
cultura otaku.” Revista Croma, Estudos Artísticos, vol. 2/3 (2014), 121–­37. [Link]
[Link]/bitstream/10451/12237/2/ULFBA_PER_CROMA_N3_ANA%20MATILDE%20​
DE%[Link]
37. See [Link]
38. de Sousa, “A Colaboração Massiva de Hatsune Miku.”
39. See “Global Star Hatsune Miku’s First Pop-­Opera The End,” [Link]
[Link]/en/program/2015/the-end/
40. See “Lady Gaga Is Going on Tour with a Hologram,” [Link]
ch/innovation/lady-gaga-going-tour-hologram-n83406
41. “One of Japan’s Biggest Pop Stars Isn’t Human,” see [Link]
ws/videos/2017-10-29/one-of-japan-s-biggest-pop-stars-isn-t-human-video
42. Mark Oppener, “Seeking Hatsune Miku,” June 10, 2011. [Link]
.com/on/seeking-hatsune-miku/
43. I am grateful to Geert Braam (Nationale Opera and Ballet, Amsterdam) who intro-
duced me to this piece.
44. This was a quote from the online program, on the page of Holland Festival. Info is
not available there anymore. But it is partly available at: [Link]
-04/ (accessed February 13. 2023).
45. See “Global Star Hatsune Miku’s First Pop-­Opera The End,” [Link]
[Link]/en/program/2015/the-end/
46. “Hatsune Miku—­ The End—­ Because I Am Imperfect/Theme of Superanimal,”
[Link] (accessed on December 13, 2022).
47. “Hatsune Miku—­The End.”
48. See Jelena Novak, “Singing in the Age of Capitalist Realism. The Pervert’s Guide
to (Post)Opera,” in The Sound of Žižek, ed. Mauro Fosco Bertola (New York: Peter Lang,
2023), 114.
49. Pierson, “Voice, Music, Modernism,” 77.
50. J. Martin Daughtry, “Call and Response (or the Lack Thereof ): Atmospheric Voices
and Distributed Selves,” Sensate: A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice
(April 2021): 8. See [Link]
ospheric-voices-and-distributed-selves/

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 3

Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave, Theater

of Testimony, and the Documentary Turn in
American Opera
Ryan Ebright

American composers and audiences love a true story, if a quick perusal of

new US operas of the past four decades is any indication. Chicago Tribune
critic John von Rhein boldly proclaimed in 1987 that John Adams’s Nixon in
China instituted the new genre of “docu-­opera,” notwithstanding Anthony
Davis’s groundbreaking and equally historical X: The Life and Times of Mal-
colm X a year earlier. The ensuing years have seen operas about political fig-
ures such as John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Martin Luther
King Jr., and Harvey Milk; artists including Frank Lloyd Wright, Frida Kahlo,
and Marilyn Monroe; and even athletes and musicians such as Charlie Parker,
the boxer Emile Griffith, and the ballplayer Josh Gibson.1 Such operas, as
Linda Hutcheon and Lawrence Kramer have observed, constitute a powerful
form of national myth making.2 At the same time, they feed a broader cul-
tural appetite for authenticity that cultural theorist Daniel Schulze argues is
characteristic of a structure of feeling tentatively termed “metamodernism,”
a successor to postmodernism that “reconstructs concepts of telos, engage-
ment and closure.”3 This desire for realness or authenticity in the face of “the
perceived superficiality and fakeness of contemporary culture” has impelled
a resurgence of theater, film, and even music that represents or re-­enacts the
past, either distant or recent, in service of commemoration, memorialization,
and the formation of a collective historical consciousness.4
In a particular subset of these “docu-­operas,” the documentary impulse
extends beyond the dramatization of historical episodes and figures and into
the very materials with which opera is created. Since the 1980s, composers
such as Adams and Steve Reich have relied increasingly on documentary

67

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 68 contemporary opera in flux

sources in fashioning both staged and nonstaged works, including the for-
mer’s On the Transmigration of Souls (2001), Doctor Atomic (2005), and Girls
of the Golden West (2017) and the latter’s Different Trains (1988), City Life
(1995), and WTC 9/11 (2010). This use of documentary material has profound
implications for a musical work, posing thorny questions about authenticity,
subjectivity, and aesthetics. With Reich’s work on his operas The Cave (1993)
and Three Tales (2002), the question of documentary use is particularly com-
plex. Whereas Adams’s documentary impulse in the past two decades often
has led him to forego newly penned librettos in favor of textual pastiches that
interpolate historical records with poetic sources, the materiality of Reich’s
approach is more encompassing: text and music—­ melodies, harmonies,
rhythms—­derive directly from first-­person testimonial “documents” (in this
case, recorded speech from interviews), and the screen-­dominated mise-­en-­
scène grows out of the visual component of these same interviews.
Despite Reich’s insistence that he is adamantly “not a man of the the-
ater,” the particular documentary nature of his operas and even pieces like
his Grammy Award-­winning string quartet Different Trains might fruit-
fully be understood with reference to the tradition of documentary theater,
which was experiencing both a resurgence and transformation in the United
States during the 1980s and early 1990s when Reich was creating Different
Trains and The Cave.5 During this era, a “theater of testimony” or “verbatim
theater”—­derived from oral histories and interviews—­began to define Amer-
ican documentary (spoken) theater.6 Notwithstanding its status as an opera,
The Cave encapsulates this shift in the history of documentary theater, both
in the understanding of what constitutes a document—­in this case, the inher-
ently subjective statements of interviewees—­and in how those documents
are employed in a theatrical context. Within subsequent operas and oratorios
in the United States and abroad, the documentary impulse has opened new
avenues for narrative and dramaturgy, as in Gabriela Ortiz’s ¡Unicamente La
Verdad! (Only the Truth!) (2008) and Donnacha Dennehy’s staged “docu-­
cantata” The Hunger (2012–­16; rev. 2019).7 With The Cave, the reliance on
first-­person testimony led Reich and video artist Beryl Korot, his co-­creator,
toward the creation of a multiply mediated theatrical environment that
reconfigures the operatic role of singers.8
Framing The Cave as documentary theater raises a number of hermeneu-
tic possibilities and questions. Even more so than contemporaneous spoken
documentary theater, The Cave foregrounds the use of audiovisual media and
technology, therefore arguably obviating the need to acknowledge the medi-

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 The Cave and the Documentary Turn in American Opera 69

ated nature of the theatrical material, as is typical in much spoken documen-

tary theater. As Reich succinctly noted, “the basic theater was the video.”9 This
technological mediation within the genre of opera, however, poses a signifi-
cant problem, one that Reich appeared to struggle with during the gestation
of his first theater piece: What is the function of the singers, who for many
constitute the sine non qua of opera? Their vocal and corporeal presence
in The Cave challenges traditional understandings of operatic subjectivity,
as they eschew conventional operatic singing and dramatic characterization.
I suggest that amid the technological tapestry created by interwoven video
and audio samples of interviewees in The Cave, the singers ultimately act as
a multivalent conduit between authors and audiences; the recorded and the
live; text, speech, and song. This mediative function itself takes place within
a broader matrix of mediations that comprises written text, recorded speech,
instrumental music, singing, video, and staging, along with relationships
between authors, performers, audiences, and documentary materials.
The role of the singers is hardly the opera’s only unconventional element.
Premiered in 1993 at the Vienna Festival, The Cave is intentionally unorth-
odox, so much so that Reich and Korot coined their own genre designa-
tion: a “documentary music video theater work.”10 Organized in three acts
of decreasing length, The Cave examines the story of the biblical patriarch
Abraham and his family using texts drawn from the book of Genesis and the
Koran, as well as accounts found in the Jewish Midrash and Islamic Had-
ith commentaries. Reich and Korot interweave these Abrahamic narratives,
which are projected onto screens in different languages and sometimes sung
(in English) as well, with collaged sections of audiovisual fragments drawn
from interviews they conducted with Israeli Jews (act 1), Palestinian Muslims
(act 2), and Americans (act 3), who offer subjective commentary on Abra-
ham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac (table 3.1 indicates the structure of
act 1; the other acts are similarly interwoven).11 The dramaturgy of The Cave,
then, is fundamentally dialogic, arising from the juxtaposition of contrasting
contemporary reflections on these foundational figures with historical reli-
gious accounts, all of which participate in a process of mutual refraction and
mediation. Going a step beyond Different Trains, which used a similar audio
sampling technique, the interview excerpts constitute the musical and the
visual basis for the entire work, which plays out via five large video screens,
thirteen instrumentalists, and four singers.12 Created on the cusp of the digi-
tal revolution in new media, The Cave was a technological and musical mar-
vel in its synchronization of video, speech, and music.

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 Table 3.1. The Structure of The Cave, Act 1, Showing the Interweaving of Narrative
and Interview Sections
Text source Performing forces
Genesis XVI: 1–­12 instruments (percussion & typing)
Israeli Responses to “Who is Abraham?” I spoken by interviewee
Israeli Responses to “Who is Abraham?” II spoken by interviewees, doubled by
instruments
Genesis XI:27 and Midrash Rabbah singers and instruments
Israeli Responses to “Who is Abraham?” IIIa spoken by interviewees, doubled by
instruments
Genesis XII:1 singers and instruments
Israeli Responses to “Who is Abraham?” IIIb spoken by interviewees, doubled by
instruments
Genesis XII:5, XIII:14–­18, XV:1–­5, and XVI:1 singers and instruments
Israeli Responses to “Who is Sarah?” spoken by interviewees, doubled by
instruments
Genesis XVI:2–­4 handwritten on video screens
Israeli Responses to “Who is Hagar?” I spoken by interviewees, doubled by
instruments
Genesis XVI:5–­6 handwritten on video screens
Israeli Responses to “Who is Hagar?” II spoken by interviewees, doubled by
instruments
Genesis XVI:7–­12 typing instrument
Israeli Responses to “Who is Ishmael?” spoken by interviewees, doubled by
instruments
Genesis XVIII:1–­2, 9–­14, XXI:1–­3 singers and instruments
Israeli Responses to “Who is Isaac?” I spoken by interviewees, doubled by
instruments
Genesis XXI: 8–­20 singers and instruments
Israeli Responses to “Who is Isaac?” II spoken by interviewees, doubled by
instruments
Genesis XXIII text alone on screens, plus interviewee
voiceover
Discussion of Machpelah I spoken by interviewees, doubled by
instruments
Discussion of Machpelah II spoken by interviewees
Genesis XXV:7–­10 chanted by interviewee, with instrumental
drone
None A minor drone (video footage of Cave interior)

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 The Cave and the Documentary Turn in American Opera 71

In what follows, I briefly survey the documentary impulse as it manifested

in Reich’s and Korot’s works prior to The Cave before turning to an overview
of documentary theater. Although the practice has flourished in the new mil-
lennium, my concern here is to outline the history, materials, and mediat-
ing strategies of documentary theater up through the early 1990s in order to
establish an aesthetic link between this tradition and The Cave. In the final
section, however, I focus on where this opera and the broader documentary
tradition diverge: in the representational capacity of the performers. Unlike
verbatim theater, in which actors embody a Brechtian dialectic between
“actor/researcher and character/‘real person,’” as well as document/body, in
The Cave the singers do not act, per se, maintaining an aesthetic distance
from the documentary material that results in a challenge to both opera’s and
documentary theater’s longstanding conventions of drama and mimesis.13
This in turn prompts a consideration of how notions of realism, authenticity,
and subjectivity play out along musical and dramaturgical vectors in the ever-­
growing body of contemporary American operas inspired by “true stories.”

Reich, Korot, and the Documentary Impulse

Reich’s well-­known fascination with documentary material stretches back to

the early 1960s, when he worked with recorded voices on tape to produce
Plastic Haircut (1963), It’s Gonna Rain (1965), and Come Out (1966). Through
his tape work, Reich would have been familiar with the processes of selecting,
transcribing, arranging, and presenting fragments from recorded interviews
that he later used in The Cave.14 Reich’s continued commitment to a realist or
documentary aesthetic in the 1980s is evident in his sketchbooks and notes
for both Different Trains and The Cave. Early tentative titles for Different
Trains included True Story, Aural History, Oral History, and Recent History,
and the earliest sketches for Different Trains include Reich’s imperative that
“it is a must to choose the documentary materials first. Their pitches and
rhythms will then determine the string music.”15
The composer placed a similar emphasis on documentary materials
for The Cave, reminding himself that the success of Different Trains, in his
opinion, was the result of the documentary, personal nature of the piece. He
wrote, “Get people telling about their own lives. This is what you had in Dif-
ferent Trains and it worked because it’s authentic! Similarly here.”16 The devel-
opment of Different Trains and The Cave took place on parallel tracks; the

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 72 contemporary opera in flux

string quartet, commented Reich, served as “a kind of study for an entire[ly]

new kind of music theater—­say, a documentary music video theater—­which
would use real documentary footage manipulated in sound and in video
image at the same time as you have live musicians onstage.”17 Throughout
the creation of The Cave, Reich referred to Different Trains as “theater of the
mind,” whereas The Cave brought the visual element out of the mind and onto
the screen through the work of Beryl Korot.18
Korot’s documentary aesthetic is equally apparent in her works preceding
The Cave. Her first multichannel video art installation, Dachau 1974, displays
on four horizontally aligned monitors video footage that she had filmed at
the Dachau concentration camp memorial site during the summer of 1974.19
With a temporal structure that rhythmically interweaves footage of Dachau
between the four monitors, Dachau 1974 resonates strongly with Reich’s own
early work with tape phasing, as paired channels present identical footage
that is slightly out of sync. Korot’s use of multiple channels would eventually
inform her work in The Cave, which threads together interview footage and
abstracted visuals in a similar manner.
The influence of Dachau 1974 on The Cave is not solely technical, however.
The earlier work marks an engagement with history—­that of the Holocaust—­
through a documentary focus on the present. Korot concentrates only on the
concentration camp as it existed during her visit. “In making this piece,” she
explained, “I chose not to use anything about what happened there except the
architecture which spoke for itself.”20 Korot’s focus on the then-­present-­day
architecture of Dachau, rather than its artifacts or historical footage, thus
prefigures her and Reich’s own preoccupation with place and the present in
The Cave (the title of which alludes to the Cave of Machpelah, where the bib-
lical Abraham and Sarah, as well as Adam and Eve, are purportedly buried).21
Moreover, Dachau 1974 and its successor, Text and Commentary, foreshadow
the contrasting narratives at play in The Cave, as they both present, in varying
degrees, multiple perspectives of the same or similar visual information. “It’s
documentary,” Reich noted about Text and Commentary, “i.e., what you see
is the piece. You walk in, you see the finished linen cloth that [Beryl] wove,
you see five screens of video taken with a camera hanging from the ceiling
portraying that same action, and then you see on the wall the weaving dia-
grams. . . . These are all different views of the documentary reality. We share
that interest, that fascination with dealing with documentary material, which
is very often loaded.”22
Whereas Korot’s documentary reality in The Cave is the visual frame of

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 The Cave and the Documentary Turn in American Opera 73

each interview recording, Reich’s centers on the interviews’ sonic element;

namely, the speech. For Reich, the appeal of recorded speech lies both in
its perceived authenticity—­stemming from the (re-­)presentation of others’
lived experiences rather than his own authorial vantage (i.e., “people telling
about their own lives”)—­and its multiple meanings. Moreover, the speaking
voices themselves denote authenticity through their seemingly unmediated
musicality, free of the expressive weight of a composer’s melody or a singer’s
voice. In a 1971 interview, Reich noted that “voices, used as sound, never-
theless have a residual meaning which was also very ambiguous—­it could
be sporting, or sexual, or political—­and immediately seemed to me to be
the solution to vocal music.”23 In his early tape pieces, which were subject to
manipulation via various processes, these voices sounded within the realm
of the unconscious and the psychological, acting as aural “Rorschach tests.”24
Sumanth Gopinath, for example, demonstrates how Daniel Hamm’s recorded
voice in Come Out (and Reich’s process-­based treatment of it) creates multi-
ple potential meanings, conjuring up the specter of midcentury Black urban
uprisings in the United States as well as “the oversexualization of African
American males in the white racial imaginary.”25 In Different Trains and The
Cave, however, the voice fragments undergo no such rigorously consistent
processes, but rather Reich’s own intuitive processes of selection, ordering,
harmonization, and counterpoint.
Act 1, scene 13 (“Sarah Casts Hagar and Ishmael Out”), for instance,
incorporates seventeen distinct speech samples from eight Israeli Jewish
interviewees. Reich doubles the scene’s opening speech melody (spoken by
Nadine Shenkar, a professor of Jewish art at the Bezalel Academy of Art in
Israel) with vibraphone, violin, and cello, while the piano, keyboard sampler,
and other vibraphone sustain a harmonic backdrop that hovers ambiguously
around E minor (see figure 3.1; sounding speech sample indicated in paren-
theses), a harmonic abstraction that complements Korot’s colorful abstrac-
tions of visual details from the camera shot.26 The string quartet immediately
spins out the final three words (“him to go”) into a miniature, imitative web,
with the second violin and viola harmonized in thirds. Without words, the
instrumental melodies nevertheless retain Shenkar’s textual meaning even as
they emphasize the purely sonic characteristics of her speech: the distinctive
ascending minor seventh inflection of “Sarah” and its descending semitone
lean into the first syllable of “wanted,” which conveys the assertiveness of both
the speaker and her subject.
In comparison with Reich’s 1960s tape works, the speech samples in

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 Fig. 3.1. The Cave, act 1, scene 13—­Sarah Casts Hagar and Ishmael Out, mm. 1–­11
(reduced score).

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 The Cave and the Documentary Turn in American Opera 75

The Cave clearly retain their semantic meaning as constructed through lan-
guage as well as any ambiguous residual meanings that derive from the sonic
properties of the samples alone. Moreover, they accrue additional relational
meaning from their juxtaposition with one another. The synchronization of
speech and image, as well as the instrumental fabric’s responsiveness to the
colors and rhythms of speech, ultimately position the interview fragments—­
the “documents”—­as both authentic and authoritative, effectively engender-
ing the mise-­en-­scène and sonic palette with seemingly minimal authorial
mediation from Reich and Korot.

Documentary Theater: History, Materials,

and Mediating Processes

The use of documents as the material basis for theater has a rich history that
spans much of the twentieth century and gave rise to a new genre: the doc-
umentary play. Unlike historical dramas, which typically rely on secondary
source-­derived facts to help create and tell a story, documentary plays utilize
and foreground primary source material; in essence, the sources are the story,
arguably even the protagonist. German playwright and director Erwin Pisca-
tor’s Trotz Allendem! (In Spite of Everything!) marked the birth of the genre
in 1925; one year later the word “documentary” entered the modern lexicon.27
Using Piscator’s plays as a basis, theater historian Attilio Favorini defines doc-
umentary theater as “plays characterized by a central or exclusive reliance on
actual rather than imaginary events, on dialogue, song and/or visual materials
(photographs, films, pictorial documents) ‘found’ in the historical record or
gathered by the playwright/researcher, and by a disposition to set individual
behavior in an articulated political and/or social context.”28 The porousness of
Favorini’s definition highlights the difficulty in mapping the boundaries of the
genre, and over the course of the twentieth century, different terms—­Theater
of Fact, verbatim theater, tribunal plays, theater of testimony, and Theater of
the Real—­have been employed in an attempt to capture the various historical
nuances and instantiations of the genre.29 Documentary plays, then, like doc-
umentary opera, might be situated along a broad spectrum of authenticity or
realism defined in part by materiality and mediation.
The line from Piscator to Reich is surprisingly short, weaving through
various twentieth-­century avant-­garde movements within which documen-
tary theater first developed.30 Piscator, for instance, worked closely with col-

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 76 contemporary opera in flux

laborators associated with Expressionism, Dada, the Bauhaus, and the Neue
Sachlichkeit.31 Just as the avant-­garde informed documentary playwrights,
these artists, in turn, influenced future practitioners of the avant-­garde. Judith
Malina and Julian Beck, cofounders of the Living Theater, studied under Pis-
cator at the New School for Social Research, where he worked in the 1940s.
The Living Theater, in turn, inspired American avant-­garde theater troupes
including Bread and Puppet Theater, El Teatro Campesino, Free Southern
Theater, and, perhaps most importantly for The Cave, the San Francisco
Mime Troupe, with whom Reich worked in the early 1960s.32
Within the United States, the tradition of documentary theater has been
largely episodic. In the mid-­1930s, certain of the Federal Theater Project’s
Living Newspapers—­including Triple-­A Plowed Under and Ethiopia (both
1936)—­became the earliest and most visible examples. At mid-­century, plays
such as Martin Duberman’s In White America (1963) and Eric Bentley’s Are
You Now or Have You Ever Been (1972) marked a second period of activity that
confronted postwar social anxieties.33 The revival of documentary theater in
the century’s closing decades, however, saw a new approach toward the genre,
in which oral history, rather than transcripts, diaries, and other written doc-
uments, became the predominant primary sources. Adopting the practice of
using newly made tape-­recorded materials (derived from interviews, often
conducted by the performers themselves) as the documentary basis for their
work, playwrights such as Emily Mann and Anna Deveare Smith contributed
to a corpus of documentary plays that includes the former’s Still Life (1980)
and Annulla (An Autobiography) (1985) and the latter’s Fires in the Mirror:
Crown Heights (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994).
Despite differences in materials and mediating strategies, documentary
plays often retain the oppositional ethos of the avant-­garde, one frequently
directed at mass media and mainstream journalism. “Documentary theatre,”
writes Timothy Youker, “aims to alter audience perceptions about how both
documents and the theatre are produced, received, and evaluated . . . [it] pres-
ents criticisms of and/or alternatives to the ways in which dominant culture
constructs, circulates, and hierarchizes the materials of memory.”34 Korot’s
comments on the aesthetic of experimentation behind The Cave reveal its
conceptual kinship to the practices of documentary theater: “The Cave was
our way of creating a Theatre of Ideas based on the documentary material we
had gathered, and in a sense, delivering the news in a whole other context,
and through a different type of delivery system . . . in this case to a theatrical
audience by musicians and singers interacting with prerecorded documen-
tary material.”35

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 The Cave and the Documentary Turn in American Opera 77

Korot’s concept of “delivering the news in a whole other context” strongly

links The Cave to the documentary tradition, as well as to her own work
in 1970 as coeditor of a magazine called Radical Software. When the opera
was created in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Israel-­Palestine conflict
was very much in the global news owing to the First Intifada. In contrast to
mainstream media, The Cave offered an oblique perspective on the conflict
that Reich and Korot felt was lacking at the time, one that emphasized what
they perceived as the religious, even familial, roots of the ongoing conflict.36
This cultural critique unfolds alongside the opera’s critiques of operatic
conventions, both visual and sonic. Korot draws on a television aesthetic in
the cinematography of The Cave, deliberately maintaining in the interviews a
strictly frontal perspective that mimics the camera angles used in television
news programs.37 At the same time, Reich’s amplified large chamber ensem-
ble and his preference for a quartet of “early music” voices contributed to
the composer’s “answer to what music theater can be” in the (post)modern
era: a contemporary art form that draws on contemporary technologies and
aesthetics.38 Reich required performers capable of singing with little or no
vibrato and with a precision of rhythm and pitch suited to his postminimal-
ist contrapuntal language, in other words a style of vocal production that
would be unsuitable for large performance spaces without the affordances
of amplification. Unlike his erstwhile colleague Philip Glass, whose operas
Satyagraha and Akhnaten in the early 1980s embraced opera’s traditional
vocal and orchestral aesthetics even as they upended narrative norms, Reich
prescribed a “different kind of artifice” for contemporary opera.39
From the recording process of its pre-­compositional phases to the time-­
consuming sampling and editing of audiovisual excerpts during its com-
positional phase to the meticulous synchronization of sound and image in
performance, The Cave represented a technological vanguard in the early
1990s. This reliance on technology is typical of the documentary theater tra-
dition, which engages diverse materials, media, and modes of communica-
tion. “While documentary theatre remains in the realm of handcraft—­people
assemble to create it, meet to write it, gather to see it—­it is a form of theatre,”
writes Carol Martin, “in which technology is a primary factor in the trans-
mission of knowledge.”40
The chronology, materials, and mediating techniques of The Cave thus
situate the piece within the tradition of oral history-­based documentary
theater or, in Emily Mann’s preferred designation, “theater of testimony.”
Carey Perloff, the stage director for the first production run of The Cave, has
pointed to the affinities between verbatim theater and The Cave, suggesting

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 78 contemporary opera in flux

that “the techniques utilized in The Cave pioneered techniques that are now
quite common in the spoken theater world, so in that sense it was revolution-
ary.”41 Unlike much documentary theater, however, The Cave is not about a
specific event per se, but rather a particular story—­that of Abraham and his
family—­and its enduring influence on divergent narratives of identity. And,
rather than placing the words of the interviewees in the mouths of actors who
assume the interviewees’ personas, Reich and Korot foreground the docu-
mentary footage itself as the primary dramatic element and the interviewees
as the dramatis personae.
The turn toward testimonial theater in the 1980s might be seen on the
one hand as a testament to human presence and subjectivity as the ultimate
authentic, and, on the other, as an implicit recognition of objectivity’s elu-
siveness. Pointing to the growing dominance of the “rhetoric of witness” in
theater, Derek Paget suggests that as faith in facts “have drained away from
‘post-­documentary’ cultures in mediatized societies” and documents “have
become vulnerable to postmodern doubt” and spin, “the witness’s claim to
authenticity can still warrant a credible perspective.”42
This rhetoric of witness similarly animates Reich’s documentary approach,
and the fact that neither Reich nor Korot have indicated any knowledge of or
engagement with documentary theater speaks to their work as emblematic
of this broader cultural shift. “The only way to deal with events like [9/11],”
Reich said in 2011, “is to go to the documentary sources that participated in
that event . . . the tone of voice, the speech melody, contains within it the true
intensity of the event, not a dramatization thereof, not a fantasy thereof, but a
retelling of a witness.”43 In The Cave, this “retelling” occurs via audiovisual doc-
uments, but also through the on-­stage voices and bodies of the opera’s singers.

Singers as Witnesses: Mediating Presence in The Cave

Reich’s penchant for testimonial documentation speaks to his unabashedly

realist aesthetic. It also reflects his distaste for the mimetic strategies of more
conventional theater, and an implication that video recording hews closer
to pure reproduction than to mediated representation. To that end, Reich
proclaimed, “I don’t really feel comfortable with the idea of singers acting
biblical roles. . . . We really have no idea how these 4,000-­year-­old characters
looked, and it’s always rather awkward when someone portrays them. The
reality is that Abraham and the others only live in the words and thoughts of

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 The Cave and the Documentary Turn in American Opera 79

the living.”44 By eschewing acting in The Cave, Reich and Korot largely side-
step one of documentary theater’s longstanding theoretical problems: namely
the way in which, as Alan Filewod puts it, “‘reality’ collapses into the pres-
ence of the actor who stands before us as subject and object, document and
documenter, whose authority derives simultaneously from the representation
and the erasure of actuality.”45 But in a theater (or opera) of the real in which
reality is constructed through audiovisual technology, where does that leave
performers?
During the early compositional stages of The Cave, Reich struggled to
answer this, unsure of the roles that singers might play in The Cave, even
as he likely knew that they were needed to fulfill the generic expectations
of opera. His notes and sketches show that he initially experimented with
having the singers repeat the words of the interviewees in the “talking heads”
sections of act 1. Instead, he shifted this role to the instruments, writing that
in doing so “the section becomes more abstract and the ‘commentary’ on the
meaning shifts to the instruments”46 (see, again, table 3.1). Months later, he
elaborated on this decision to keep the singers in the background: “by limiting
the amount of time ANY singer sings and is seen as opposed to when they
are silent and unseen (dark) you change something conventional (the duet,
trio or quartet of opera/musical) into something less conventional while
commenting on the convention itself.”47 (Notably absent from his list of con-
ventions is the aria.) Thus, in the first act the two sopranos, tenor, and bass
sing only a handful of sacred texts. In the second act, they do not sing these
narrative texts owing to prohibitions against singing the Koran, and instead
musically echo the Palestinian interviewees. The final act combines these two
approaches, as the singers both echo the American interviewees and recount
still more Abrahamic narratives, all of which are interpolated with increasing
frequency and fluidity.
The distinction between these two functions—­echo and narrative—­is
represented musically and even spatially. Throughout act 1, the episodes of
narrative text from Genesis unfold as a series of vocal duets in strict rhythmic
unison, a compositional decision that minimizes the individual sound of each
singer in favor of a collective vocality. In act 1, scene 12, for instance (fig. 3.2),
a soprano and tenor sing from opposite sides of the stage, framing the large
screens as they recount the biblical story of Abraham and Sarah’s decision
to cast Hagar and her son Ishmael into the wilderness. This duet’s rapid suc-
cession of constantly changing meters and harmonies recalls Reich’s earlier
idiosyncratic approach to text setting in Tehillim and The Desert Music, and

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 80 contemporary opera in flux

Fig. 3.2. The Cave, act 1, scene 12—­Genesis XXI, mm. 24–­35 (reduced score).

the ensemble nature of the music suggests that, as in the earlier pieces (per
Marcelle Pierson), “there is no specific subjectivity or presence that could
be understood to lie behind the vocal utterances.”48 And yet, for tenor James
Bassi, who performed in the initial production run, although the piece is
“staged sitting or standing still,” it nevertheless requires being “focused and
purposeful,” in other words, imbued with subjectivity, albeit absent one con-
nected with a traditional dramatic role.49 Soprano Cheryl Bensman-­Rowe,
a longtime Reich collaborator, described this as “almost like reporting on a

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 The Cave and the Documentary Turn in American Opera 81

story instead of being a story”; in fact, the singers were costumed and staged
in contemporary attire as if they were newscasters—­voices of depersonalized
authority in the late twentieth-­century televisual domain.50
The singers’ echoes of the interviewees in acts 2 and 3 offer a marked
musical contrast to the seeming objectivity of the sacred text-­settings. Unlike
the latter’s strict scansion, the musical echoes are comparatively free, with
variations in rhythm, melody, harmony, and texture that offer, in Bensman-­
Rowe’s formulation, “singing commentary to reflect what the talking heads
are saying” (see fig. 3.3). “We were supposed to be like our own talking head,”
she recalled.51 Timbrally and registrally, the often solo voices of the singers
typically match the genders of the interviewees, a compositional and dra-
maturgical move that begins to collapse the interpersonal distance between
the singers and the talking heads. On stage, the singers occupy four separate
spaces around the screens, emphasizing their individuality. Throughout the
final act, however, the vocalists appear spatially and musically as a quartet
(above the center screen), presenting both the narrative texts and echoing
commentary in short, paired canons. This new formation counterpoints the
spatial layout of the screens in act 3; rather than the symmetrical arch design
of the preceding acts, one of the five screens is moved upward to break the
symmetry.
The vocal presentations of text and commentary have the effect of placing
the singers outside the “action” of The Cave, positioning them obliquely in
relation to the central characters on screen. Like newscasters, they inhabit
what audiovisual theorist Jesús González-­Requena describes as a “space
[that] is radically different from the space of events,” one that constructs “the
present of the communicative act itself.”52 This presentness is both temporal
and spatial. As Kevin Barnhurst writes in his expansive study of how the news
has transformed in the digital era, “for newscasters, proximity occurs along
a direct line from audience to event, and the way they present news attempts
to shorten that distance,” collapsing “distant events into real-­seeming ‘here’”
and “project[ing] events into a televisual present.”53 To facilitate the construc-
tion of this theatrical present, the singers in The Cave perform a paradoxical
role. “In a piece like The Cave,” Bassi reflected, “you don’t use the full bloom
of your voice because you’re part of a larger musical texture. Even the singers
are sort of cogs, in a way—­you’re featured but not, you’re foreground and
background at the same time. . . . You’re part of a large, complex organism
more than anything else.”54
The roles of singer-­ as-­
newscaster bring what director Carey Perloff

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 Fig. 3.3. The Cave, act 2, scene 4—­Sacrifice: Ismael and Ishak, mm. 32–­41 (reduced score).

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 The Cave and the Documentary Turn in American Opera 83

describes as a necessary human presence to what is otherwise an intensely

mediated experience:

The singers didn’t play characters per se but they embodied the conflicts
and ideas articulated by all of the witnesses on the screens. So in a sense,
they were the “live witnesses,” the human embodiment of the eternal issues
and sorrows roiling around the Middle East. It’s one thing to see those ideas
expounded on video, it’s another to hear them live, to realize that even if
something being said is controversial or upsetting, it is coming out of the
mouth of a real human being standing in front of us.55

What Perloff theorizes, then, is a different form of witness, one whose

authenticity stems from bodily presence rather than technologically medi-
ated documents. Assistant director Nick Mangano (later the director for the
revised production) conceives of the singers’ presence similarly and suggests
a further level of complexity:

They were witnessing, in a sense, along with the audience. . . . You could look
at it as almost a Greek chorus . . . a part of the community, in a way . . . I think
what’s potent or theatrically viable is the witness of any kind of storytelling . . .
having the presence of singers standing there on stage, again witnessing, but
also conveying story, basically—­narrative and story to the audience—­it’s a
bridge, it just bridges the gap and renders it theatrical.56

Mangano’s metaphor of a bridge is suggestive. In this interpretation,

the singers—­and the instrumentalists, for that matter—­bridge the chasm
between the mediated, documentary video and the audience, in effect ren-
dering the mediated immediate, collapsing the distance but not the distinc-
tion between the two poles. Moreover, in Mangano’s conception, the sing-
ers are simultaneously audience members and storytellers, both witness to
the sampled testimonies and bearing witness to the narratives—­that is, the
sacred texts—­that gave rise to these testimonies. They could be said to model
what Jenn Stephenson calls performative witnessing, an active, ethical form
of audience-­witnessing that recognizes and accepts the culpability inherent
in the act of witnessing.57
Amy Lynn Wlodarski’s study of Different Trains offers still another con-
ceptual model, in which the singers might function as a kind of secondary
witness, a term used in Holocaust studies for “intellectual interpretations of

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 84 contemporary opera in flux

survivor testimonies that are advanced without the author revealing his or
her own subjective standpoint or scholarly agenda.”58 As secondary witnesses,
the singers could even be interpreted as representative stand-­ins for Reich
and Korot, thus bridging the gap between the authors and their audiences.
The singers’ presence, their corporeality and vocality, throws into relief the
collaged, mediated nature of The Cave, which purports to objectively present
viewpoints that are inherently subjective.
Throughout The Cave, Reich and Korot maintain separation between
subject and object, document and documenter in the theater (although their
authorial roles are obfuscated), whereas in operas like Frederic Rzewski’s The
Triumph of Death (which sets Peter Weiss’s 1965 Holocaust-­themed docu-
mentary play, The Investigation) and Adams’s Doctor Atomic, the layers and
levels of mediation from document to performance are more ambiguous.59
In such instances of documentary music theater, to what extent does music
threaten to erase the actuality of documentary materials in the service of
song?60 How are notions of authorship and authority complicated by distinc-
tions between composition and performance? As scholars and critics begin to
grapple with American opera’s documentary turn over the past few decades,
the tradition of documentary theater offers a fruitful point of comparison for
formulating these and other questions of realism, materiality, mediation, and
authenticity.
Notes
1. John von Rhein, “It’s Perfectly Clear: ‘Nixon’ Is Great Docu-­Opera,” Chicago Tribune,
October 25, 1987.
2. Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, “The Inward Turn: American Opera
Revisits America’s Past,” Canadian Review of American Studies 44, no. 2 (2014): 178–­93;
Lawrence Kramer, “The Great American Opera: Klinghoffer, Streetcar, and the Exception,”
Opera Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2007): 66–­80.
3. Daniel Schulze, Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance (London:
Bloomsbury, 2017), 2.
4. Schulze, Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance, 8. On contem-
porary American opera’s engagement with history, see Colleen Renihan, The Operatic
Archive: American Opera as History (London: Routledge, 2020).
5. Steve Reich, phone interview with the author, July 25, 2016.
6. Derek Paget, “The ‘Broken Tradition’ of Documentary Theatre and Its Continued
Powers of Endurance,” in Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, ed. Alison For-
syth and Chris Megson (Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 224–­38; Attilio
Favorini, “Introduction: After the Fact: Theater and the Documentary Impulse,” in Voicings:
Ten Plays from the Documentary Theater (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1995), xi–­xxxix.
7. See Amy Bauer, chapter 4 in this volume.

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 The Cave and the Documentary Turn in American Opera 85

8. In a related study, Jelena Novak demonstrates how Reich and Korot’s subsequent
collaboration, Three Tales, effectively reinvents the relationship between voice and body
in opera. Jelena Novak, Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-­Body (London: Ashgate, 2013),
57–­76.
9. Steve Reich, phone interview with the author, July 25, 2016.
10. On the (self-­)production process of The Cave and questions of genre, see Ryan
Ebright, “‘My answer to what music theater can be’: Iconoclasm and Entrepreneurship in
Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave,” American Music 37, no. 1 (2017): 29–­50.
11. Table 3.1 reflects the first act structure as it appears in the published libretto and as it
was performed during the initial performance run. Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, The Cave,
production book (UK: Hendon Music, 1993). Several subsequent cuts are reflected in the
online edition of the score as well as the 1995 Nonesuch recording; this newer structure is
used in this article’s music example captions. Steve Reich, The Cave, full score (New York:
Boosey & Hawkes, undated), [Link] Steve
Reich, The Cave, CD (New York: Nonesuch, 1995).
12. On the narrative and harmonic structures of The Cave, see Maarten Beirens, “Dif-
ferent Tracks: Narrative Sequence, Harmonic (Dis)continuity, and Structural Organization
in Steve Reich’s Different Trains and The Cave,” in Rethinking Reich, ed. Sumanth Gopinath
and Pwyll ap Siôn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 75–­92. On Korot’s contri-
bution, see Mathieu Duplay, “Le lyrisme du détail dans The Cave de Steve Reich et Beryl
Korot,” Revue française d’études américaines 160, no. 3 (2019): 105–­15.
13. Derek Paget, “‘Verbatim Theatre’: Oral History and Documentary Techniques,” New
Theater Quarterly 3, no. 12 (November 1987): 332. On mimesis in opera, see, for example,
Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-­Century Opera (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2004).
14. See, for instance, John Pymm, “Steve Reich’s Dramatic Sound Collage for the Harlem
Six: Toward a Prehistory of Come Out,” in Rethinking Reich, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and
Pwyll ap Siôn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 139–­57.
15. Sketchbook #39, Steve Reich Collection, Paul Sacher Stiftung. Underlining in origi-
nal. Despite the composer’s claims of merely ceding to the demands of the speech samples
in the compositional process, he occasionally took an active directorial role in the pre-­
compositional phases—­i.e., the interviews—­to achieve desired inflections or phrasings.
See Celia Casey, “From World War II to the ‘War on Terror’: An Examination of Steve
Reich’s ‘Docu-­Music’ Approach in WTC 9/11,” in Rethinking Reich, ed. Sumanth Gopinath
and Pwyll ap Siôn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 159–­76.
16. “Cave-­Thoughts to Improve,” computer document. Steve Reich Collection, PSS.
17. Tom Surowicz, “Music: The Reich Stuff,” Twin Cities Magazine, February 1988, n.p.
18. Robert Cowan, “Joining the Real World? Steve Reich in Conversation with Robert
Cowan,” CD Review (n.d.): 85.
19. On Dachau 1974 and the larger context of early video art, see chapter 2 of Katie E.
Geha, “Like Life: Process, Data, and Change 1967–­1976” (PhD thesis: University of Texas
at Austin, 2012). See also Beryl Korot, “Dachau 1974,” in Video Art—­An Anthology, ed. Ira
Schneider and Beryl Korot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 76–­77; Mark
Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 140–­67.

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 86 contemporary opera in flux

20. Ingrid Wiegand, “Multi-­Monitors,” The SoHo Weekly News, March 20, 1975.
21. Initial ideas for The Cave focused greater attention on the archeology and architec-
ture of the structures built over the Cave of the Patriarchs throughout history, including
the mosque that currently sits above it. On the thirteen-­year development of The Cave,
see Ryan Ebright, “Echoes of the Avant-­garde in American Minimalist Opera” (PhD diss.,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014), 102–­26.
22. Reich, phone interview with the author, July 25, 2016.
23. Michael Nyman, “Steve Reich: An Interview,” Musical Times (March 1971): 230.
Marcelle Pierson argues that Reich’s treatments of the voice throughout his career repre-
sent various attempts at reinvigorating “the ‘vocal imaginary’ of Western classical music,”
a “long-­standing linkage between ‘unified’ melody, singing voice, and Rousseauian sub-
jectivity.” Marcelle Pierson, “Voice, Technē, and Jouissance in Music for 18 Musicians,”
Twentieth-­Century Music 13 (2016): 28.
24. Rob Baker, “The Art of Fine Tuning: Conversations with Steve Reich, Lincoln
Kirstein, and Peter Brook,” Parabola 13, no. 2 (1988): 52.
25. Sumanth Gopinath, “The Problem of the Political in Steve Reich’s Come Out,” in
Sound Commitments: Avant-­Garde Music and the Sixties, ed. Robert Adlington (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 137.
26. A photograph of this moment in The Cave can be found at [Link]
.org/Detail/objects/64065
27. Documentary filmmaker John Grierson used the term to describe Robert Flaherty’s
film Moana; Brecht used it to describe Piscator’s plays. “Flaherty’s Poetic Moana,” The New
York Sun, February 8, 1926; Brecht, Gesammelte Schriften zum Theater, cited in John Wil-
lett, The Theater of Erwin Piscator: Half a Century of Politics in the Theater (New York:
Methuen, 1978), 186.
28. Favorini, “Introduction,” xx. On documentary theater, see Get Real: Documentary
Theatre Past and Present, ed. Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson (Hampshire, England: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2009); Roger Bechtel, Past Performance: American Theatre and the His-
torical Imagination (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007); Gary Fisher Dawson,
Documentary Theatre in the United States: An Historical Survey and Analysis of Its Con-
tent, Form, and Stagecraft (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).
29. See, for example, Carol Martin, “Introduction: Dramaturgy of the Real,” in Drama-
turgy of the Real on the World Stage, ed. Carol Martin (New York: Routledge, 2010), 1; Dan
Isaac, “Theatre of Fact,” TDR: The Drama Review 15, no. 3 (Summer 1971), 109–­35; Paget,
“Verbatim Theatre,” 317–­36.
30. Timothy Youker, “‘The Destiny of Words’: Documentary Theatre, the Avant-­garde,
and the Politics of Form” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012), 1.
31. Youker, “The Destiny of Words,” 18.
32. On Piscator, see Gerhard F. Probst, Erwin Piscator and the American Theatre (New
York: Peter Lang, 1991); Judith Malina, The Piscator Notebook (London: Routledge, 2012).
On Reich’s political music from this time, see Sumanth Gopinath, “Contraband Children:
The Politics of Race and Liberation in the Music of Steve Reich, 1965–­1966” (PhD diss.,
Yale University, 2005).
33. These plays address, respectively, the history of race relations in the United States
and Joseph McCarthy’s House on Un-­American Activities committee hearings.

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 The Cave and the Documentary Turn in American Opera 87

34. Youker, “The Destiny of Words,” 18–­19.

35. Beryl Korot, phone interview with the author, August 19, 2013.
36. On the politics of The Cave and its aesthetic of reconciliation, see Ryan Ebright,
“‘We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece’: The Reconciliatory Aesthetic of Steve Reich
and Beryl Korot’s The Cave,” in Rethinking Reich, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 93–­109.
37. The creative team referred to these documentary interview sections as the “talking
heads” sections.
38. Steve Reich to Betty Freeman, August 14, 1980, Betty Freeman Papers, Special Col-
lections and Archives, UC San Diego. For Reich, to compose for traditionally operatic
(bel canto) voices would be culturally inauthentic. See Reich, “Kurt Weill, The Orches-
tra, and Vocal Style—­An Interview with K. Robert Schwarz (1992),” in Writings on Music
1965–­2000, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 166–­68; Ebright, “My
answer to what music theater can be.”
39. K. Robert Schwarz, “The Cave Walks, but Doesn’t Quack, Like an Opera,” New York
Times, October 10, 1993.
40. Carol Martin, “Bodies of Evidence,” TDR: The Drama Review 50, no. 3 (2006): 9.
41. Carey Perloff, email correspondence with the author, July 16, 2013.
42. Paget, “The ‘Broken Tradition’ of Documentary Theatre,” 235–­36.
43. Alex Petridis, “Music Weekly Podcast: Steve Reich. Interview with Alexis Petridis,”
The Guardian, August 12, 2011, [Link]
11/aug/12/music-weekly-steve-reich-audio
44. Steve Reich, “Jonathan Cott Interviews Beryl Korot and Steve Reich,” in Writings
on Music 1965–­2000, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 175. In his
notes from September 1989, however, Reich briefly flirted with the idea of having the sing-
ers take on different roles. “The Cave—­Notes,” computer document. Steve Reich Collec-
tion, PSS.
45. Alan Filewod, “The Documentary Body: Theatre Workshop to Banner Theatre,” in
Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, ed. Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson
(Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 62.
46. “Note on development section,” Computer document. Steve Reich Collection, PSS.
47. Reich, “The Cave—­Notes.”
48. Pierson, “Voice, Technē, and Jouissance in Music for 18 Musicians,” 38.
49. James Bassi, Zoom interview with the author, August 12, 2022.
50. Cheryl Bensman-­Rowe, Zoom interview with the author, August 18, 2022.
51. Cheryl Bensman-­Rowe, Zoom interview with the author, August 18, 2022.
52. Jesús González-­Requena, “The Television Newscast: A Postmodern Discourse,” in
Critical Practices in Post-­Franco Spain, ed. Silvia L. López, Jenaro Talens, and Darío Villan-
ueva (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 31, 32.
53. Kevin G. Barnhurst, Mister Pulitzer and the Spider: Modern News from Realism to
the Digital (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 127–­28, 160.
54. James Bassi, Zoom interview with the author, August 12, 2022.
55. Carey Perloff, email correspondence with the author, July 16, 2013.
56. Nick Mangano, phone interview with the author, September 23, 2013.

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 88 contemporary opera in flux

57. Jenn Stephenson, Performing Autobiography: Contemporary Canadian Drama

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 45–­67.
58. Amy Lynn Wlodarski, “The Testimonial Aesthetics of Different Trains,” Journal of
the American Musicological Society 63, no. 1 (2010): 103.
59. On The Triumph of Death, see Beate Kutschke, “On Rzewski’s The Triumph of
Death: Coping with the Holocaust in the 1980s,” Contemporary Music Review 29, no. 6
(2010): 643–­60.
60. Robert Fink argues that Reich’s logocentric compositional approach in The Cave
in fact transmutes both writing and song into speech through repetition and audiovisual
mediation. Fink, “Repetition, Speech, and Authority in Steve Reich’s ‘Jewish’ Music,” in
Rethinking Reich, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2019), 113–­38.

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 4

¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Only the Truth!)

Camelia la Tejana’s Many Truths

Amy Bauer

Who was Camelia la Tejana? Murderer? Outlaw drug smuggler? Evangelist

preacher? Or simply a fictional heroine brought to life by Ángel González,
composer of “Contrabando y Traición” [Smuggling and Betrayal], the
renowned 1970 narcocorrido by norteño band Los Tigres del Norte?1 The
fictional Camelia is betrayed by her drug trafficker lover Emilio Varela, whom
she has helped smuggle marijuana into Los Angeles. As the transaction is
finished, he leaves her with the revelation that he is going to San Francisco
with “la dueña de mi vida” [“my true love”]. Rather than collapse or fade from
view, Camelia kills Emilio and is never heard from again. Or is she? A tabloid
photo surfaced in 1986 depicting a woman weeping over her lover’s headless
corpse. In following years the Camelia myth grew, fed by lurid tales in the
tabloid Alarma! and a proliferation of candidates for the “real” Camelia.2 Her
story inspired ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Only the Truth! 2007–­2010), a “doc-
umentary” opera in six scenes written by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz
(1964–­) on a libretto by her brother, the Los Angeles–­based multimedia artist
Rubén Ortiz Torres (1964–­).3 Only the Truth is a nonlinear attempt to chart
these various Camelias since 1970, with a libretto compiled solely from exist-
ing documents in Spanish and English. Ortiz’s one-­act exposition leaves no
tale of carnage, dead end, or possible redemption unremarked, and includes
an academic lecture on the corrido and a cameo by El Tigre, the original
singer of “Contrabando y Traición.”
I will argue that the opera functions as a contemporary analogue of
the Mexican American corrido: at once epic ballad, purveyor of news, and
repository of a nation’s myths. Ortiz’s heterogeneous score weaves allusions
to traditional Mexican music alongside modernist harmonic soundscapes,

89

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 90 contemporary opera in flux

electronic drones, Weimar-­like cabaret numbers, and musique concrète. A

kaleidoscopic effect is produced as these musical settings are matched to the
Rashomon-­like views of Camelia’s fate,4 much as the evolution of the corrido
into the narcocorrido mirrored the fragmentation of contemporary myth via
vastly different media: tabloid newspapers, word-­of-­mouth, popular song,
television, and film. The juxtaposition of both old and new media forms—­all
of which remain vital in the twenty-­first century—­establish a disinterested
conceptual matrix, which puts into doubt the truth or meaning of any one
subject position. In this sense it fulfills several tenets of the postdramatic the-
ater outlined by Hans-­Thies Lehmann (discussed in the introduction to this
volume). Given that ¡Unicamente! celebrates the overlap and conjunction of
media forms, it could be seen as a meta-­commentary on the very existence of
postdramatic theater, which Lehmann views as a direct outgrowth of media’s
omnipresence in everyday life since the 1970s.5 As Alan Filewod notes (dis-
cussed further in Ryan Ebright, chapter 3 in this volume), the notion of reality
in documentary opera often dissolves into the presence of the actor before
us.6 ¡Unicamente! self-­reflexively revels in this disruption of reality, its docu-
mentary facade questioned by dialogues, hearsay, and imagined scenes that
promote ambiguity, pluralism, and discontinuity.
As the narcocorrido has influenced popular print and broadcast media
and spawned a cottage industry of academic scholarship, so Ortiz and Ortiz
Torres incorporate blogs, newspapers, television interviews, and academic
lectures into the opera, with no vantage point given priority over another.
Ortiz and Ortiz Torres deliberately chose their music-­cultural points of ref-
erence.7 Musical points of reference include Kurt Weill and the fifty-­year (and
counting) career of the award-­winning norteño band Los Tigres del Norte,
banda and norteño genres of Mexican American border music, and—­to my
ears—­a nod to a longer history of Mexican musical appropriation in Amer-
ican art music, from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, with its roots in
Aaron Copland’s danzons, inspired by the music of Carlo Chávez. The drama
of Berthold Brecht influenced the libretto, which cites the tabloid newspaper
Alarma!, a predecessor to the paranoid and conspiracy-­laden social media
landscape of today, the academic study of Mexican and border culture, the
Mexican multimedia conglomerate Tv Azteca, and a blogosphere that unites
all of the above. Both Ángel González, the composer of “Contrabando y Tra-
ición,” and Jorge Hernández, the lead singer of Los Tigres del Norte, are char-
acters in the opera, along with Elijah Wald (the foremost academic expert on
narcocorrido), and various men and women that TV Azteca and ¡Alarma!

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 ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Only the Truth!) 91

have put forth as “proof ” that the fictional Camelia actually exists. If ¡Unica-
mente! rejects a single narrative voice or position, its direct appeal to a willing
audience in the know represents, I maintain, a return to earlier twentieth-­
century traditions of Zeitoper, with greater relevance to contemporary cul-
ture than many heralded documentary operas. Furthermore, as I will dis-
cuss below, the opera opens new vistas on tragedy, marrying its historical
references to Christoph Menke’s notion of a “tragedy of play” and Lehmann’s
notions of how tragic irony functions in postdramatic theater.8 This function
is bound to the figure of Camelia, as a woman who not only doesn’t, but from
a Lacanian standpoint can’t, exist, so that she can ground the cultural signifi-
ers that circulate around her.

“Contrabando y Traición,” Musica Norteña,

and the History of the Corrido

In “Contrabando y Traición,” the fictional protagonist from San Antonio, and

her boyfriend Emilio Varela, cross the Mexican American border at Tijuana,
with a car whose tires are filled with marijuana. As a Texan, Camelia secures
safe passage, and they pull into a famous alleyway in Hollywood to make
the drop. After a successful transaction, Emilio announces that he is leaving
Camelia for his true love, the “owner of his heart,” in San Francisco. Seven
shots later he is dead; the corrido ends with the famous line “Of the money
and Camelia / Nothing else was ever known.” But of the fictional Camelia,
much remained to be known. “Contrabando” is credited with launching the
infamous narcocorrido genre, and its themes entered popular culture in the
form of B movies, pop art, and—­of course—­a narconovela, approximately
three hundred times as long as the original song.9
Elijah Wald characterizes Los Tigres del Norte as “like Willie Nelson and
the Rolling Stones combined,” superstars of a working-­class music whose
most notorious genre, the narcocorrido, is a starkly “medieval” anachronism.10
Formed of the brothers Jorge, Raúl, and Hernán Hernández and their cousin
Oscar Lara, they came originally from the west Mexican state of Sinaloa, but
settled in Northern California.11 If “Contrabando y Traición” was not the first
corrido about smuggling and drug trafficking, it was the first to launch the
distinctive genre known as narcocorrido. Wald speculates that the success
of Ángel Gonzalez’s song was due in part to the fact that he had never writ-
ten a corrido. As a form typically based on real events, a corrido gained its

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 92 contemporary opera in flux

sense of authenticity by memorializing places, dates, and subjects by name.

Wald’s assertion that “Contrabando” “had the colorful, larger-­than-­life feel of
a Hollywood movie” is itself memorialized in the opera’s duet between Wald
and González (discussed below). As Cathy Ragland reminds us, the corrido
arrived at a fraught moment for U.S.-­Mexican border relations, as the U.S.
government launched a war against undocumented Mexican workers and
drug trafficking.12 The spectacular career of Los Tigres continued to serve as
an ironic reflection of their dual role as revered standard bearers for norteño
and a wider audience that exoticizes their representation in Spain and else-
where.13 The self-­referential Corridos prohibidos (Banned Corridos, Fonovisa,
1989) included a tribute to the assassinated journalist Héctor Félix Miranda
that can be read as a “veiled ode to the corrido genre itself,” as well as a track
simply titled “El Corrido” extolling the “voice of the oppressed” and of the
patriotic Mexican people.14 Their Grammy-­winning double album Jefe de Jefe
(Boss of Bosses, Fonovisa, 1997) casts a negative light on both immigrant
labor and the drug trade, while betraying an intimate knowledge of the latter’s
quotidian details.15
“Contrabando” itself bears a familiar canción-­corrido form: six-­line stan-
zas with a refrain, and it suggests the traditional border ballad of yore with
its simple introduction, through-­composed lyrics, and singer as impersonal
narrator, as shown in a transcription of the first verse in figure 4.1. Small
details in early stanzas foreshadow events to come, and the song combines
both the solo and border dueto traditions (two male vocalists singing in close
harmony with a slightly pinched, nasal quality), with the second voice enter-
ing high in his range on the final two lines of each stanza. A three-­stress
rhythmic pattern in the text flows over a duple meter, not the triple meter
typical of corridos, typical of Texas-­Mexican conjuntos (ensembles featuring
accordion, bajo sexto, bass, and drums, Mexican song forms, and European
dance rhythms).16
I argue that the opera’s success derives from its multileveled awareness of
how truth functions in both the Mexican American corrido tradition and the
twenty-­first-­century global media landscape represented by “Contrabando
y Traición” and the spectacular success of the narcocorrido. The Mexican
American frontier serves as a microcosm of the line that separates the pure
truth—­la pura verdad—­from fiction in contemporary narratives of border-
land antiheroes. On one level ¡Unicamente! mirrors the role of the corrido as
romance, journalism, and reservoir of a cultural imaginary. Corridos’ epic
narrative style embraced clever wordplay that expressed a complex critique

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 Fig. 4.1. Transcription of “Contrabando y Traición,” mm. 1–­28

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 94 contemporary opera in flux

of authority and political reality. Hence the traditional corrido influenced

generations of Chicano/a poets and scholars, who found in its contradictions
and hybrid blend of Spanish balladry with Mexican realism the inspiration for
their own struggles with a modernist poetic language.17 The effacement of the
corridista—­the author—­reinforced the social, collective nature of the corrido.
Yet it was an inherently reflexive form, which placed the central narrative in a
meta-­narrative frame that drew attention to its performative nature.18
Mark Edberg highlights the “propositional” character of a typical corrido
narrative, which hinges on moments of violent confrontation in which death
is always present, often in the form of a duel between equally matched foes.19
Within the context of the narcocorrido in particular, the persona of the nar-
cotrafficker in some sense is not complete until either the narcotrafficker is
dead or betrayed (which constitutes a symbolic death). The narcocorrido
is, quintessentially, a genre of the subaltern, the dispossessed, and the poor
within a highly stratified society. But it has a far more ambiguous relation to
money and power than that suggested by this description, one signaled by
its self-­deprecating humor and the pre-­eminent figure of the border crosser
between countries, strata, and gender identifications.20 If we view “Contra-
bando y Traición” as the primal scene—­one that shifts the corrido into a con-
temporary register—­we see both this ambiguity and the “anamorphotic pres-
ence” of death marked by the contrast between the song’s rhythmic intensity
and its vocal, a lament whose laconic vocal performance negates any melo-
dramatic expression, yet which generates an acute sense of foreboding that
suffuses the narrative.21

The Many Camelias of la pura verdad

Los Tigres’ Camelia soon escaped the land of fiction, as she was mysteri-
ously found again and again, and as a proliferation of candidates for the “real”
Camelia took material form within a media nexus created by tabloid jour-
nalism, reality television, and the blogosphere. A photo surfaces in 1986 in
the pages of the lurid tabloid ¡Alarma!, depicting a woman weeping over the
headless corpse of her lover Eleazar Pacheco Moreno.22 In 1999 a journalist
from the “real” newspaper La Jornada—­after various inquiries, intermediar-
ies, and a series of changing phone numbers—­obtained an interview with the
fifty-­year old-­Camelia María after being smuggled within a sealed car and
driven to an unknown location. Her responses meet the interviewers’ par-

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 ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Only the Truth!) 95

ries with well-­practiced evasions and misdirection, yet she claims to be the
“original” Camelia, one-­time partner of Hermilo, names changed to protect
the guilty, now involved in import-­exports of a perfectly legal variety.23 In
October 2004 on TV Azteca in Mexico City, a journalist interviews Agustina
Ramírez as the “real” Camelia la Tejana. She claims that a radio interview
in 1977 about her life as a drug kingpin was turned into the corrido. Such
testimony brings to mind such infamous figures as the cocaine Godmother
Griselda Blanco, also the subject of a movie and two TV series.24 Agustina
maintains a full-­time evangelical career, as a reformed Camelia come to Jesus
Christ, paying no heed to those who claim to know of her origins much fur-
ther south of the border.25
The opera’s themes—­like the corridos that inspired it—­reflect aesthetic
and political topics that have occupied Latin American cultural studies for a
generation. Camelia joins the ranks of famous female killers in Latin Amer-
ican fiction such as Emma Zunz and Antonia Josefa Ramírez, Latin Ameri-
can heroines who have an ambiguous, liminal status, but play central roles
in their stories and usually escape the law’s patriarchal reach.26 In this larger
context the drug war becomes but the most recent manifestation of a malev-
olent violence that operates in Latin America, characterized by many critics
as a fundamentally antimodern, Baroque society.27
The theme of border crossings takes on multiple meanings, from the lit-
eral border between Ciudad Juárez end El Paso to the fusion of “art” and pop-
ular music to the rhetorical performance of “truth” and fiction in each scene.
Ciudad Juárez has long served as an avatar of violence, especially against
women (represented most famously by Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666). But the
sense of paralysis in the face of senseless violence—­that of Ciudad Juárez and
the border area in particular—­suggests the writings of Jorge Ibargüengoitia,
especially his famous Las muertas, the desultory and fragmented retelling
of the tale of the Poquianchis sisters, a pair of notorious madams and serial
killers. Like ¡Unicamente La Verdad!, Las muertas is a hybrid text: half fiction
and half documentary, a testimonial in which the narrative voice “is deprived
of all ethical and rhetorical authority.”28 Although Ortiz Torres shapes his
libretto entirely from found sources, the various Camelias and their “wit-
nesses” are allowed to speak for themselves, as the opera’s narrative shifts to
meet their gaze.
The opera devotes a scene to each one of these fascinating Camelias, who
receive a signature Mexican song genre type and their own public chorus,
framed by a male authority figure who comments on each story. These scenes

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 96 contemporary opera in flux

frame a central passage devoted to Camelia’s three “fathers”: Ángel González,

the corrido’s composer, Jorge Hernandez, the lead singer of Los Tigres del
Norte, and Elijah Wald, a celebrated writer associated with the narcocor-
rido genre. The opera begins with a male character given no voice: Eleazar
Pacheco Moreno, who—­deported, assaulted, and abused—­lays his head on
the track at the Ciudad Juárez railway station (the only actual death depicted
in the opera).
The arch and ironic cast of Ortiz Torres’ libretto—­assembled entirely
from existing interviews and texts29—­is perfectly complemented by music
that registers on several semiotic levels at once, as did the narcocorrido in
its retention of traditional forms and instrumentation for lyric commentary
with the immediacy of today’s news. As the narcocorrido has influenced pop-
ular print and broadcast media and spawned a cottage industry of academic
scholarship, so Ortiz Torres incorporate blogs, newspapers, television inter-
views, and academic lectures into his libretto, with no vantage point given
priority over another, outside of a kind of Brechtian sense of ironic distance.30
¡Alarma! serves as an obvious predecessor to the paranoid and conspiracy-­
laden social media landscape of today, while TV Azteca represents a slick
multimedia conglomerate. Yet their reportage sits alongside that of academic
study of Mexican and border culture, and that of a blogosphere that travels
freely among the above.

Crossing the Sonic Border

The opera begins with a collage of sound, music, and images: video of the
Mexican National Train Station at the bordering of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico,
and El Paso, Texas, accompanied by the sound of a train arriving.31 Thirty
seconds in, a menacing low rumble mixes with the high harmonics of a crys-
tal wine goblet, arco harmonics on vibraphone, chorus whispers, and micro-
tonal movement from G ♯2–­B ♭2 in contrabass. At 1:22 voices enter, saying
“Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua,” before lapsing into sibilance that blends with
distorted and reverberant voices on tape. After 3:18 the instruments fall quiet,
save for the bells that toll A4–­C5–­G4–­D5 as a voice discusses “Camelia,” until
a C4 in clarinet and trumpet ushers in natural harmonics in low strings, and
soft arpeggios in winds and percussion, which—­spurred on by a tam-­tam—­
increase dynamics until the tape stops abruptly at 4:20.
At this point in the opera we don’t know who or when our protagonist

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 ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Only the Truth!) 97

will arrive (if at all), why we are at the train station, what role “Ciudad Juárez,
Chihuahua” might play in the narrative, or what kind of music to expect as the
curtain rises. Yet the sonic collage that begins ¡Unicamente! primes the audi-
ence to anticipate the opera’s complicated relationship to truth. If such col-
lage practices resist totalization—­and thus any coherent political message—­
they yet suggest a profound historical truth regarding the decay of the polis.32
Collage in general, in all its mixed representations, creates an empty space,
an aporia, where conflicting meanings cannot be resolved. Thus the opera
begins without a central authority or viewpoint, and it lacks a coherent visual
or oral image that might suggest one genre as its musical ground or one sight-
line to represent a singular point of view. The only guarantee we can expect is
one of anxiety regarding how to interpret what we experience.
The consequent Obertura explodes as an ostentatiously hybrid gesture.
An introduction in a recognizable American post-­minimalist vein on a static
diatonic chord that emphasizes fourths (0257, B-­D-­E-­A) gives way at letter
A to a norteño cumbia, a B7 on the offbeats in guitar and accordion over a
floating bass line in tuba.33 As the orchestra gradually rejoins, the dance is
interrupted by flights of modernist fancy (mm. 23–­29, and the violin solo at
mm. 49–­54, which sounds like an homage to György Ligeti’s violin concerto),
neoclassical excursions (mm. 26–­29, 55–­62), and Broadway schmaltz (a mod-
ulation up a third to E ♭ , accompanied by meter changes and stop time, mm.
36–­48).34 The musical representation of each Camelia begins with a cumbia
given to the faceless woman who, in the ¡Alarma! photo, was seen crying over
the dead Eleazar Pacheco Moreno. The introduction of this first tale begins at
rehearsal C on an altered B dominant, as the chorus recounts the horrifying
fate of Moreno, complete with onomatopoeic train and track sounds (m. 61
ff ). In 2005 El Señor de El Paso recalls that a woman of around fifty-­five years
old, called Camelia, also known as “La Tejano,” who was a prostitute and drug
addict, was seen in the vicinity.35 The vague import of this story is comple-
mented by its musical accompaniment. A trumpet solo in an additive rhyth-
mic pattern confuses the 4/4 meter; its successive 2, 3, and 4-­sixteenth-­note
units are added and subtracted, in the same way that the opening D-­D ♯ -­E-­F
cluster adds and subtracts tones to confuse any firm identification of tonal
center.
Unlike the anonymous woman in the ¡Alarma! picture, Agustina Ramírez
and Camelia María claim to be incarnations of the legendary Camelia, and
each gets her own mythologizing corrido. Agustina Camelia’s tense corrido
begins scene 2 over oscillating half-­diminished seventh chords a step apart.

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 98 contemporary opera in flux

The chorus enters first, repeating the fabled history in all its lurid detail. We
remain in 4/4 over a more decisive dominant (B11), when Agustina herself
enters with a fiery cumbia rhythm at rehearsal A, augmented by a lyrical bass
clarinet solo and strings that sweep up and down four octaves. The accompa-
niment changes as her aria grows more dramatic, before returning to alter-
nations of the cumbia and the oscillating chord section, as though to under-
score the reality and the “imagination on the part of the author.” Agustina’s
own “message” arrives at the close of Corrido II in a sacred aria extolling her
new mission serving Jesus Christ.
The central scene in the opera sees Camelia’s three “fathers” hold forth
on the lasting influence and paradoxes of “Contrabando y Traición,” its fame
both eclipsing and at right angles to the narcocorrido tradition as a whole.
The opera’s hybrid musical heritage comes to the fore here as well, when the
narcocorrido’s composer Angel González and Jorge Hernandez, the lead
singer of Los Tigres del Norte, join the writer Elijah Wald. Much of the text
comes from a 1999 interview of Wald with Hernandez that references Gon-
zalez. The Writer and Composer sing a bilingual duet, which revolves around
the shocking success of simply replacing the standard antihero of a corrido
with a woman, buoyed by singers entering as an ironic Greek chorus at cru-
cial junctures. When the Writer sings that “Contrabando” gave the formerly
“realistic” genre the “larger than life feel of a Hollywood movie,” the chorus
sings “They came to Los Angeles and swung over to Hollywood” (A los Ange-
les llegaron y a Hollywood se pasaron). When the Composer moots his femi-
nist credentials—­women in his songs win “all the time” (todo el tiempo)—­the
chorus assents, repeating “todo el tiempo” in canon. And when the Composer
deflects questions about the narco culture represented in his songs as simply
a problem of borders all over the world (todas las fronteras del mundo), the
chorus agrees.
The duet is followed by a solo aria for Jorge Hernandez as “El Tigre,” fash-
ioned from one paragraph excerpted from that interview and edited; those
passages used in the aria are marked in bold, with repetitions and added
words in brackets:

Jorge Hernandez: Bueno, lo que pasa yo creo, cuando yo escuché los temas
de ellos han hecho de esas canciones, creo que hay dos factores y el regrabar
una canción sin ponerle la intención el feeling que se le pone a los temas,
hay canciones que se hacen [cantan] por dinero y [otros que se cantan]
canciones que se hacen por sentimiento. Conozco a los dos interpretes bien,

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 ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Only the Truth!) 99

pero conozco mas a Pepe Cabrera, lo hacen por dinero y el arte, en lo que a
mi respecta, yo no hago esto por dinero, yo lo hago porque yo siento la
historia, le [los] personaje, [y] porque desde niño quise ser actor, me
apodero de los papeles que el interprete o que el personaje quiere decir y creo
que ahí es una gran diferencia, cuando grabas un tema, debes tener [er]
imaginación, de [y hacer] tu propia película [debes saber], que quieres
decirle a la gente y probablemente vaya algo envuelto tu sentimiento
para que penetre el público y no lo cantes por que tienes que ganar un peso,
porque tienes que decir, bueno, voy a vender 20 discos, sino simplemente
escuchen tu sentimiento, escuchen tu estilo, que es lo que importa, el estilo de
interpretar un tema, tenemos dos situaciones que nos llevan. Hay canciones
que hacen al artista y hay canciones que [hacen al] el artista [y hay can-
ciones que las] hace [el artista al artista el artista] la canción.36

Hernandez states that some songs are made for money while others are
made for sentiment. He chooses to do it because he feels the story and the
character, as he has always wanted to be an actor. He imagines a movie when
he records, summoning the proper feeling so that it might penetrate to the
public. El Tigre’s aria is sung in norteño ranchera style, complete with falsetto
on the crucial terms “have imagination,” “people,” and “artista.” But whereas
the transcript states that “There are songs that make the artist and there are
songs in which the artist makes the song,” the aria trails off on “the artist”
echoed by the chorus, as shown in figure 4.2.
Who indeed is artist and who is sung in the cycle of violence and ret-
ribution launched by one, somewhat nostalgic corrido? And “why,” asks
the Wald character directly after El Tigre, “did people like the killing of a
man by a woman?” Before the final Camelia gets her say, we have a fourth
scene devoted to “blogger, cyberpunks, nortecos, and social media.” Here the
grounded stories of old media spin off into wild fantasies, represented by
video and electronic representations of technology, always melding with the
orchestra. Camelia Maria’s aria begins scene 5 with not so much her own
corrido as her own separate suite. A “misterioso” recalls Agustina’s vamp;
beginning in 4/4 over oscillating perfect fourths a step away, it evokes a hol-
low sound. The scene is orchestrated in the fashion of a 1960s mystery movie
soundtrack, complete with a prominent wind choir and flute obbligato over
descending lines in glockenspiel as a journalist begins a relatively straight-
forward introduction to this new Camelia.37 As the 4/4 meter gives way to
unmetered, chromatic roulades in piano and winds at rehearsal A, synco-

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 Fig. 4.2. The coda of El Tigre’s aria, scene 3, reh. F
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 ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Only the Truth!) 101

pated accents intervene, and the journalist begins to question Camelia Maria,
who remains elusive. At rehearsal B the chorus enters with a canon on “nar-
cotráfico,” as if to spur on Camelia Maria. Her story is interrupted by a furious
cumbia rhythm at rehearsal C. But these rhythms fall away as her lengthy aria
takes on a mid-­twentieth-­century expressionistic cast as her answers grow
more evasive. A truculent tuba solo eggs on the journalist, until a whiff of the
original “Contrabando y Traición” enters with the return of the misterioso
music and Maria’s admonition that “people like to hear stories with strong
women.” Camelia María’s corrido brings the old and new media representa-
tions full circle, the melodramatic heft of her tale sealed by the last lines of the
interview: “Do you know weapons, ma’am. . . . Do you know how to shoot?”
“There are things that hands never forget.”
The sober suicide of Eleazar Pacheco is followed by a second electro-
acoustic interlude which samples the popular quebradita song “La culebra”:
the music playing on public loudspeakers when presidential candidate Luis
Donaldo Colosio was killed at a political rally in Tijuana in 1994.38 The opera’s
closing scene picks up the beheading, narrating it in gory detail, before shift-
ing to Eleazar’s moving funeral. Yet our heroine gets the last word in a spectral
epilogue, where the “real” Camelia appears to sing her original narcocorrido
a cappella to the accompaniment of ghostly cow bells and a muted electronic
soundscape. She sings in the key of E ♭ , the key referenced in the Obertura, but
a minor third higher than the C major of the original “Contrabando.”

The Woman Who Does Not Exist

Despite its swirl of influences and conflicting tales, ¡Unicamente La Verdad!

remains focused on one woman, refracted into many, often conflicted por-
traits that refuse to coalesce into one individual. It may prove instructive to
compare Camelia la Tejana to the two Sciarrino operas discussed by Mauro
Fosca Bertola in the final chapter of this collection. Each revolves around
a female character: a reimagining of Wagner’s Lohengrin centered on Elsa,
and Superflumina, centered on the experience of an unhoused woman. The
audience learns that Elsa has suffered a psychotic break, which locates her
at one pole of an uncanny, estranged “night of the world,” unable to achieve
full subjectivity. Superflumina’s protagonist operates at the boundary of the
human, existing both within and outside the law as she shuttles between
silent witness to her abjection and an operatic style coterminous with the

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 102 contemporary opera in flux

state. That both characters are women is significant, yet their gender is sub-
servient to the psychological narrative of Lohengrin and the sociopolitical/
ethical portrait offered in Superflumina. By contrast, Camelia la Tejana over-
flows the limits of her narrative, as a subject both overdetermined and hollow
at its core. Her many guises invert the tragic heroine of European opera, a
“decorative jewel” who sings her perpetual undoing.39 If Bizet’s Carmen chal-
lenged the docile heroines of the past, so Camelia rejects Carmen’s destiny:
she becomes Don José without succumbing to his fate, elevated to the status
of legend, never dead, but always, just possibly, still alive to tell her tale. Her
avatars—­unlike those discussed in Alexander K. Rothe’s chapter on George
Lewis’s Afterword—­are virtual in the predigital sense of the world, as intima-
tions of an ideal Camelia.
As the absent center of ¡Unicamente La Verdad!, Camelia la Tejana is
herself an avatar for the ultimate Other “in the most radical sense, in the
sexual relationship.”40 Camelia can only be glimpsed through anamorphosis
via either the symbolic register of names and descriptions or her represen-
tation in the imaginary as one of many media images. Her status in these
accounts—­depersonalized, mythologized, and emptied of all substance—­
resembles that of the inaccessible and idealized Lady, as discussed in Lacan’s
examination of courtly love in Seminar VII.41 Camelia takes the place of the
Thing in a “form of sublimation,” as Lacan notes, one specific to art and the
demands of her age.42 In his view all systems of culture require a grounding
signifier, one capable of imparting a consistent meaning to the multifarious
elements of which it is composed. Yet only a signifier with “negative” power
can break with existing relations and “call something new into life” purely on
the basis of its autonomous operation.43 Woman—­as the signifier that bears
the clearest trace of the break with the real—­serves this function, as the “exti-
mate” center around which cultural signifiers rally. As the sublimated object,
woman repeats the primary cut that marked the symbolic’s break with the
real.44 The late medieval culture of courtly love—­suffused by melancholy and
haunted by death—­was grounded by the form of the remote and imperious
Lady. Similarly, the inaccessible, dangerous Camelia la Tejana, sets the limits
of desire in ¡Unicamente La Verdad! Absent the mask of traditional femi-
ninity, she is able to inscribe division and difference into the world.45 Where
traditional opera featured a dramatic protagonist whose personal subjectivity
was assured, ¡Unicamente! offers a Woman who does not exist: Camelia la
Tejana as an absent center, around which manifold narratives and images
circulate, tinged with death and melancholy.

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 ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Only the Truth!) 103

The fraught figure of Camelia suggests an answer to Lehmann’s follow-­up

to his work on postdramatic theater, as he asks what tragedy means within
“the framework of an artistic institution that transforms everything into
entertainment (against which even its radical forms have no protection).”46
As Lehmann notes, at each moment in the history of postdramatic theater
“transgression, the theme of dangerous excess, has proven central,” even as
it compounds the issues of representation as such.47 He points out how—­in
dissolving inherited categories of the dramatic subject—­postdramatic theater
has reintroduced ancient aspects of ritual and the notion of the subject as
“being spoken” as the blank center of a mediatized discourse.48 This new sub-
jectivity preserves tragedy in postdramatic theater as the only form of repre-
sentation that fractures the unity of individual experience.49 This new subjec-
tivity mirrors the media world we inhabit, whose basic pattern is “sensation”
and the wholesale dramatization of reality. Such dramatization of both public
and individual suffering plays the role in the imaginary once held by tragedy.
What happens then, asks Lehmann, to the depth below the surface, the inner
reflection that might provide catharsis?50
One answer is provided by those stagings that eschew naturalism and
mimesis for artifice.51 Expanding on this, Lehmann draws on the ideas
of Christoph Menke regarding the “tragedy of play.”52 The “subject being
spoken”—­the embodiment of tragic irony—­provides the center of all tragedy
in a postdramatic vein. Such a view posits tragedy in essence as a decon-
struction of the illusion represented by a dramatic subject. Lehmann goes
a step further, however, requiring a true “tragedy of play” to implicate the
spectator. “For there to be a ‘presence of tragedy,’ aesthetic play itself and
as a whole must be thematized and problematized by such a break, and the
spectator must be taken, time and again, to the borderline between ‘play’ and
[that which is in earnest].”53 If Camelia la Tejana—­the “subject being spoken”
as absent center—­grounds the opera’s conflicting discourses, she invites the
audience to parse the role of truth, fiction and testimonio in ¡Unicamente!

Truth and Testimonio

If ¡Unicamente! is an ideal vehicle to express the narrative and performative

contradictions of the contemporary corrido writ large, it is in no small part
because it reminds us of what opera was in its ideal form: an art of difference
that suspends not only the obvious border between normal and abnormal,

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 104 contemporary opera in flux

but the deeper differences that ground such notions, those between “polic-
ing and transgressing, edification and debasement, the symbolic and the
imaginary, eros and the death drive.”54 The cultural import of these themes
is borne out by the opera’s reception history. Despite laudatory reviews and
the recording’s nomination for a Latin Grammy, some seemed to miss ¡Uni-
camente!’s dark wit and trenchant satire. Hence a cable television channel
assumed that Only the Truth was a straightforward documentary, while the
BBC bemoaned the cultural stain produced by the first “drug opera.”55 Unlike
the so-­called CNN opera tied to the immediacy of contemporary events,
¡Unicamente! maintains a necessary distance that ties it more closely to the
Zeitoper of Krenek and Weill, a celebration of modern life that relied on par-
ody, social satire, and burlesque that drew freely from contemporary popular
idioms.56
The most recent edition of Eric Salzman’s venerable survey of music the-
ater asks whether the Weill/Brecht model still provides a useful template in
the twenty-­first century.57 I offer ¡Unicamente La Verdad! as evidence that
it does. Its many truths are rooted in the timeless function of the corrido;
as a cab driver told the composer when she questioned Camelia’s existence,
“all corridos tell the truth.”58 It retains the aspect of testimonio or testimo-
nial writing that counters official history, as it recounts la pura verdad as
an experience of the real different from those produced by nonfiction or
documentary fiction.59 As such, ¡Unicamente La Verdad! essays not only the
borderland of the twenty-­first-­century Mexican American imaginary, but the
border between opera and the highly mediated world in which opera now
lives.
Notes
I would like to thank Stephan Hammel, Alejandro Madrid, Gabriela Ortiz, and Leonora
Saavedra for their help with this paper.
1. Angel Gonzalez, “Contrabando y traición,” Peer International Corporation (1973).
2. Just like its namesake, the opera has several titles: ¡Unicamente La Verdad! La
Authéntica Historia de Camelia de Texana; ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Only the Truth!), the
true story of Camelia la Tejana; ¡Unicamente La Verdad! La Verdadera Historia de Came-
lia, la texana; Only the Truth! a border-­crossing video opera.
3. An earlier version of the opera was performed at the University of Indiana School
of Music, August 8–­9, 2008. The author saw the production at the Long Beach Opera
on March 13, 2013; see Peter Lefevre’s review “Camelia La Tejana: Only the Truth. Long
Beach Opera,” [Link]
NG_BEACH,_CA__Camelia_La_Tejana.html
4. I refer here to the classic film by Akira Kurosawa—­based on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s

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 ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Only the Truth!) 105

short story “In a Grove”—­in which supposed witnesses to a crime give contradictory, sub-
jective accounts of the event.
5. Hans-­Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-­Munby (London:
Routledge, 2006), 22–­23.
6. Alan Filewod, “The Documentary Body: Theatre Workshop to Banner Theatre,” in
Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, edited by Alison Forsyth and Chris Meg-
son (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 62.
7. Tom Moore and Gabriela Ortiz, “Gabriela Ortiz—­An Interview,” Opera Today, Feb.
10, 2010, [Link]
8. Christoph Menke, Die Gegenwart der Tragdie. Versuch über Urteil und Spiel (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), cited on pp. 439–­40 of Hans-­Thies Lehmann, Tragedy and
Dramatic Theatre, trans. Erik Butler (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016).
9. Films include Contrabando y traición: Camelia la texana, dir. Arturo Martínez
(Hermanos Benítez and Producciones Potosí S.A., 1976), featuring the members of Los
Tigres del Norte, and at least five sequels; the narconovela was created by Diego Ramón
Bravo, Camelia la Texana (Telemundo, 2014), and novelized by Diego Ramón Bravo and
Hilario Pea as Camelia la texana (Vintage, 2013). The renowned Spanish novelist Arturo
Pérez-­Reverte was inspired by “Contrabando” to write the five-­hundred-­page novel La
reina del sur [The Queen of the South] (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002), which in turn became
a TV series with seasons in 2011 and 2019 (coproduced through Spanish, Columbian, and
Mexican studios) and an album by Los Tigres del Norte (Fonovisa, 2002). See also Ryan
Rashotte, Narco Cinema: Sex, Drugs, and Banda Music in Mexico’s B-­Filmography (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and O. Hugo Benavides, Drugs, Thugs, and Divas: Tele-
novelas and Narco-­Dramas in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008).
10. Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas, ebook (New
York: HarperCollins, 2001), chap. 1.
11. Cathy Ragland offers a brief history of the group in Música Norteña: Mexican
Migrants Creating a Nation between Nations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2009), 142–­44.
12. Ragland, Música Norteña, 145.
13. Ragland, Música Norteña, 166; Helena Simonett, “Los gallos valientes: Examining
Violence in Mexican Popular Music.” TRANS-­Revista Transcultural de Música 10 (2006),
[Link]
-mexican-popular-music
14. José Pablo Villalobos and Juan Carlo Ramírez-­Pimienta, “Corridos and la pura ver-
dad: Myths and Realities of the Mexican Ballad.” South Central Review 21, no. 3 (2004):
133–­35.
15. See Mark Cameron Edberg’s discussion in El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and
the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the U.S.-­Mexican Border (Austin: University of
Texas Press 2004), 78.
16. See Jonathan Sauceda, “Smuggling, Betrayal, and the Handle of a Gun: Death,
Laughter, and the Narcocorrido,” Popular Music and Society 37, no. 4 (2014): 427–­29; Rag-
land offers an analysis and transcription of “Contrabando,” in Música Norteña, 146–­53.
17. Stephen Neufeld and Michael Matthews discuss the role of the Mexican corrido in

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 106 contemporary opera in flux

general (“Introduction,” in Mexico in Verse: A History of Music, Rhyme, and Power, ed. Ste-
phen Neufeld and Michael Matthews [Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015], 8); José
E. Limón relates this history to the modernist Mexican poetic tradition (Mexican Ballads,
Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-­American Social Poetry (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1992). See also Aurelio González, “El corrido: Expresíon pop-
ular y tradicional de la balada hispánica,” Olivar 12, no. 15 (2011): 11–­36, and Magdalena
Altamirano, “De la copla al corrido: influencias líricas en el corrido Mexicano Tradicional,”
in La copla en México, ed. Aurelio González (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 2007),
261–­72.
18. Lîmon, Mexican Ballads, 15.
19. Edberg, El Narcotraficante, 42, 82. See also Mercedes Zavala Gómez del Campo,
“Del duelo a la muerte a traición en el corrido: una cuestión de matices,” Revista de El Cole-
gio de San Luis 1, no. 2 (2011): 163–­82.
20. Edberg, El Narcotraficante, 103–­6, 113; Ragland, Música Norteña, 44, 155; Sauceda,
“Smuggling, Betrayal, and the Handle of a Gun,” 425. See also María Herrera-­Sobek, The
Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
21. Hermann Herlinghaus, “Narcocorridos: An Ethical Reading of Musical Diegesis,”
TRANS-­Revista Transcultural de Música 10 (2006), [Link]
culo/150/narcocorridos-an-ethical-reading-of-musical-diegesis
22. Juan Pablo Vázquez, “El tren le arrancó la cabeza [The train tore his head off ],”
Alarma! 1191, February 26, 1986, 29.
23. César Güemes, “Camelia La Texana: ‘yo no maté a Emilio Varela,’” La Jornada, Dec.
28, 1999, cited in Arturo E. García Niño, “¿Atípicas narrativas o expresiones inherentes al
espíritu de los tiempos? (Postales para un reacercamiento autocrítico a la narconarrativa),”
in Narcocultura de norte a sur. Una mirada cultural al fenómeno del narco, ed. Ainhoa
Vásquez Mejías (Mexico City: Literatura y Alternativas en Servicios Editoriales S.C., 2017),
38.
24. Discussed in Ainhoa Vásquez Mejías, “Los narcos también lloran: narcoseries y
melodrama,” in Narcocultura de norte a sur. Una mirada cultural al fenómeno del narco,
ed. Ainhoa Vásquez Mejías (Mexico City: Literatura y Alternativas en Servicios Editoria-
les S.C., 2017), 201–­19. See also Monika Kaup Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative
Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2012). Sofia Vergara stars in an English language adaptation of Blanco’s story in the
2024 Netflix drama Griselda.
25. Eugenio Delgado Parra, “La ópera Únicamente la verdad. La auténtica historia de
Camelia ‘La tejana,’ de Gabriela Ortiz: Interpretación crítica a partir del análisis integral de
la obra,” Research Proposal, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Subdirección General de
Educación e Invenstigación Artícas, 2013 (unfunded), 5.
26. Josefina Ludmer, “Women Who Kill (Part 1),” Journal of Latin American Cultural
Studies, 10, no. 2 (2001): 157–­69, and “Women Who Kill (Part 2),” Journal of Latin Ameri-
can Cultural Studies, 10, no. 3 (2001): 279–­90.
27. See Persephone Braham, Crimes against the State, Crimes against Persons: Detective
Fiction in Cuba and Mexico (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
28. Braham, Crimes against the State, 73.

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 ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Only the Truth!) 107

29. Rubén Ortiz Torres, cited by Reed Johnson, “Rumor, Legend and a Tabloid Report
Sparked ‘Camelia la Tejana,’” Los Angeles Times, March 16, 2013, [Link]
/entertainment/arts/la-xpm-2013-mar-16-la-et-cm-camelia-la-tejana-narco-opera-20130​
[Link]
30. José Noé Mercado bemoaned both the fact that the libretto reads more like a police
report than a literary piece and that it shows no love toward its “clichéd” characters. “La
ópera de las Camelias,” Blog José Noé Mercado, March 22, 2010, [Link]
[Link]/2010/03/[Link]; see also “Únicamente la Verdad en el
teatro Julio Castillo,” Pro Ópera 3 (2010): 18–­21.
31. Ortiz Torres and the composer shot footage of some of the actual locations men-
tioned in the journalistic reports. Video projections of actual locations where the events in
the story took place mix with video of the singers captured in real time to create shifting
borderland encounters of audience, performers, media, spectators, and historical charac-
ters that unfold both individual and collective dimensions.
32. Thomas Brockelman discusses the hermeutics of collage in The Frame and the Mir-
ror: On Collage and the Postmodern (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001).
33. This B7, with its associated rhythmic expression, returns twice, for “Camelia’s cum-
bia,” scene 1, reh. G, and Eleazar’s funeral, scene 6.
34. Marianne Kielen-­Gillbert compares the opening of the Obertura to passages in Stra-
vinsky and speculates on their relationship in “Musical Bordering, Connecting Histories,
Becoming Performative,” Music Theory Spectrum 33, no. 2 (2011): 200–­207.
35. This testimony is offered in the present tense, collected by Rubén Ortiz Torres from
Mario Borunda, in an interview from June 18, 2005, cited in Delgado Parra, “La ópera Úni-
camente la verdad,” 5.
36. Elijah Wald and Jorge Hernández, “Jorge Hernández Interview” (n.d.), [Link]
[Link]/[Link]
37. Examples include Lalo Schifrin’s scores for Joy House (1964) and The Venetian Affair
(1966), John Barry’s music for The Ipcress File (1965) and The Quiller Memorandum (1965),
and Bernard Hermann’s contributions to the original Twilight Zone (1959–­63).
38. Alejandro L. Madrid, “Mythology, Nostalgia, and the Post-­Mortem Imagination in
Gabriela Ortiz’s ¡Únicamente la verdad!,” paper given at the 2015 annual meeting of the
American Musicological Society.
39. Catherine Clement, Opera, Or, The Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 5. In Alejandro Madrid’s assessments, the
composer’s tactics effectively queer operatic conventions; Madrid, “Mythology, Nostalgia,
and the Post-­Mortem Imagination.”
40. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge. Book XX
Encore 1972–­73, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton,
1999), 81.
41. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–­1960: Seminar VII., trans. Dennis
Porter, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 139–­54.
42. Lacan, Seminar VII, 150.
43. Marc de Kesel, Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII, trans. Sigi
Jöttkandt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 179.

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 108 contemporary opera in flux

44. de Kesel, Eros and Ethics, 180.

45. See Alenka Zupančič’a discussion of feminine masquerade in What is Sex? (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 25–­36.
46. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 401.
47. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 411.
48. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 417.
49. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 418; Lehmann admits that Brecht held
this view, but Adorno and Horkheimer held the position that tragedy requires a unified
individual; Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 419–­20.
50. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 422–­23.
51. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 424–­25.
52. Christoph Menke, Die Gegenwart der Tragödie. Versuch über Urteil und Spiel
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), cited in Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre,
439–­40.
53. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 441.
54. Lawrence Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2004), 40–­41.
55. Juan Arturo Brennan, “. . . y nada más que la verdad,” La Jornada, March 20, 2010,
[Link] Julian Miglierini, “Drugs
Opera Opens in Mexico City,” BBC News, March 12, 2010, [Link]
/americas/[Link]. See also James Baker, “Is Gabriela Ortiz’s ‘Camelia La Tejana’ an
Opera or Documentary?,” Texas Public Radio, March 22, 2013, [Link]
/gabriela-ortizs-camelia-la-tejana-opera-or-documentary
56. Suzanne Cook, Opera for a New Republic: The Zeitopern of Krenek, Weill, and Hin-
demith (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1988), 4.
57. Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi, The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing
the Body (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 263.
58. Moore and Ortiz, “Gabriela Ortiz—­An Interview.”
59. Ragland, Música Norteña, 180; Villalobos and Ramírez-­Pimienta, “Corridos and la
pura verdad,” 144.

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 5

Technics and Dramaturgy of the Avatar

in George Lewis’s Afterword
Alexander K. Rothe

An avatar is a visual or sonic representation that stands in for a human being

in a virtual environment.1 Taking into account the rich history of cybernet-
ics, the composer and musicologist George Lewis conceives of the oper-
atic medium as a mixed reality beyond the problematic binaries of human/
machine and real/virtual.2 Indeed, Lewis’s description of his chamber opera
Afterword (2015) as a virtual meeting of members of the Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) invites listener-­viewers to con-
sider how human expression and technology are inextricably intertwined in
today’s age of ubiquitous media. As N. Katherine Hayles puts it, “instead of
constructing virtual reality as a sphere separate from the real world, today’s
media have tended to move out of the box and overlay virtual information
and functionalities onto physical locations and actual objects. [Today’s
media] have created environments in which physical and virtual realities
merge in fluid and seamless ways.”3 Yet while Lewis takes mixed reality as his
point of departure, he nevertheless also draws on the concept of technics as
discussed in the writings of French philosophers Bernard Stiegler and Gilbert
Simondon. Technics is the making of tools, or the “exteriorization” of human
memory, gesture, and aesthetics.4 According to Stiegler and Simondon, tech-
nology is a central part of what it means to be human, and the human and
technics are co-­constitutive and inseparable.
Since the opera Afterword was conceived as a celebration of the fiftieth
anniversary of the founding of the AACM, a collective of African American
musicians founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1965, it seems especially
fitting that Lewis should turn to the memory technics of Stiegler. In the age
of mass media (television and radio broadcasting and audiovisual recording

109

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 110 contemporary opera in flux

technologies), Stiegler argues, human beings are incapable of creating their

own living memories (anamnesis) and instead rely on external media tech-
nologies (hypomnesis), which commodify cultural memory and erase mem-
ories that do not conform to the logic of what Deleuze calls “control societ-
ies.”5 There is a great deal of truth in Stiegler’s account of memory technics,
particularly his discussion of the politics of memory and forgetfulness as it
applies to education and school. One cannot read the news in the United
States in the 2020s without noticing how education is at the front line of an
ideological battle in which coercive memory technologies (textbooks, state
legislation, media campaigns, political rallies, court rulings, etc.) attempt to
erase the history of slavery, reproductive rights, and voices of the LGBTQ+
community. Stiegler’s prognosis, however, is not entirely pessimistic. The
relationship between living memory and external memory technologies is
dynamic and changes over time, and today’s digital networked media have
the potential to bring people together and to tell the stories of historically
underrepresented communities.6 Lewis’s opera Afterword, which he refers to
as a Bildungsoper, literally “an opera of education,” demonstrates this aspect
of digital networked media by educating a younger generation of musicians
and the audience about the history not only of the AACM, but also of the
Great Migration, the civil rights movement, and the segregation of the South
Side of Chicago and the recording industry.7
This chapter argues that at the heart of Lewis’s opera is a dramaturgy of
the avatar, which presents singers and dancers as avatars of AACM members,
both living and deceased.8 The avatar is a tool in Stiegler and Simondon’s
sense, and it takes the mixed reality of cybernetics as its basis. The opera’s
singers and dancers control their avatars as virtual representations, drawing
on a digital repository of memories, testimonies, and audiovisual recordings
of AACM archival materials. In other words, Afterword enacts a technics
of memory, and the opera itself becomes a tool for remembering the past.
Afterword revivifies the act of remembering at the level of the performers and
the audience. The embodied avatar performance breathes new life into the
AACM archival memory, reactivating past memories for AACM members in
the audience and creating new memories for non-­AACM members.
Afterword’s singers and dancers shift fluidly between historical charac-
ters, eschewing the individual character and psychological development of
traditional dramatic theater in favor of a consideration of the community as
a whole. My analysis will focus on the dramaturgy of the avatar in scene 4
(“First Meeting”) and will also consider the juxtaposition of contrasting musi-

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 Techniques and Dramaturgy of the Avatar in Afterword 111

cal styles and sonic gestures as key attributes of these avatars. In doing so, I
draw attention to how Afterword sheds new light on topics such as postdra-
matic theater, remediation, immediacy, and hypermediacy.
Afterword was premiered on October 16, 2015, at the Museum of Con-
temporary Art in Chicago, with staging and choreography by Sean Griffin and
Catherine Sullivan. Lewis wrote the libretto, based on the final chapter of his
book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental
Music, in which he depicts a virtual meeting of AACM members both living
and deceased.9 Lewis’s chapter interweaves numerous interviews, testimo-
nies, and transcriptions from recordings of past AACM meetings. The opera,
like the book chapter, is a performance of AACM archival materials, a digital
repository of materials that trace the AACM musicians across the globe.
Lewis’s opera Afterword creates this virtual meeting by means of three
singers, three dancers, and instrumental music. Lewis writes: “The opera
eschews a conception in which fixed, authorial characters pose as what
Michel Foucault calls “historical figures at the crossroads of a certain number
of events” in favor of having music, text, and movement deploy a tricksterish
displacement of character onto metaphysical collectivities. Sung and spoken
voices, instrumental music, and movement become heteroglossic avatars, in
a process described by Toni Morrison and others as the expression of a com-
munity voice.”10
In place of individual (“fixed”) characters, Afterword deploys a polyph-
ony of voices and instruments as “heteroglossic avatars” in a process of com-
munity formation depicted in Toni Morrison’s novels such as The Bluest Eye
(1970). A brief description of Lewis’s opera in terms of Hans-­Thies Lehmann’s
theory of postdramatic theater will afford insight.11
Lewis’s “heteroglossic avatars” correspond with Lehmann’s discussion
of polyglossia in the works of the German composer and director Heiner
Goebbels. In Roman Dogs (1991), Goebbels juxtaposes spirituals with texts
by Heiner Müller in German, William Faulkner in English, and partly-­sung
French Alexandrine verses from Corneille’s Horace (1640–­41). In Lehmann’s
description of Goebbels’s work, the polyglossia are “multi-­lingual texts” that
break up the monologic national language.12 There is, however, at least one key
difference between Lewis’s heteroglossic avatars and Lehmann’s polyglossia.
While Lehmann’s postmodern celebration of diversity favors breaking down
the theatrical process of communication, Lewis’s avatars communicate on a
different level, beyond monologic language, at the level of memory, where
the opera serves to activate existing memories as well as to create new ones.

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 112 contemporary opera in flux

Similar insight may be gained by considering Afterword in terms of Leh-

mann’s concept of the postdramatic “theater of ceremonies.”13 In the theater
of Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor, “there is a search here for a ‘state of non-­
being’ and non-­continuous plot structure, but instead repeatedly expression-
istically condensed scenes, combined with a quasi-­ritualistic form of conjur-
ing up the past [. . .]. It is a theater after the catastrophe (like Beckett’s and
Heiner Müller’s texts); it comes from death and stages a ‘landscape beyond
death’ (Müller).”14 Like Lehmann’s “theater of ceremony,” Lewis’s opera is a
virtual meeting beyond the physical constraints of death, as members, both
living and deceased, gather to celebrate the AACM’s anniversary and discuss
its hopes for the future. And as in Kantor’s and Müller’s work, Afterword has
a scene set in a cemetery (scene 3). Moreover, Afterword eschews the unity
of place and time in traditional dramatic theater, as well as the linear plot
in which one event clearly follows another in a continuous chain of events.
Rather, Afterword is episodic in its ordering of scenes, each of which is like a
tableau vivant based on the AACM’s fifty-­year history (not to mention the
opera’s reference to historical periods preceding 1965 and also in the future.)
But unlike the Kantor and Müller works, which express a postdramatic mel-
ancholia over life’s loss of meaning, Afterword depicts a world in which words
and actions have meaning and a positive outcome.
Here I think we come to the core of what makes Lewis’s opera such an
insightful example of postdramatic theater: while Lewis rejects character and
psychological development of traditional dramatic theater, he upholds the
agency of the individual AACM musicians. Most importantly, Lewis’s opera
introduces a new historical subject (subjectivity), those groups that dominant
culture had previously treated as not-­human or not-­quite-­human (African
Americans, Asian Americans, Indigenous peoples, women, the LGBTQ+
community). Especially from the 1960s onward, these groups articulated
their histories with such force and persuasion that Fredric Jameson speaks of
the emergence of a new type of subjectivity.15 A key model for Lewis here is
Anthony Davis’s opera about Malcom X (X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,
1985), which is a milestone in the history of opera, a signal “that maybe opera
can go beyond valorizing people who are already being valorized by society.”16
In the section that follows, I argue that we may gain a greater appreciation of
Lewis’s opera by considering its compositional models. Specifically, I look at
three operas that influenced Afterword in their incorporation of features of
the avatar.

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 Techniques and Dramaturgy of the Avatar in Afterword 113

Genealogy of the Avatar (Operatic Models for Afterword)

Beth Coleman describes the genealogy of the avatar as a transformation of its

reference to Hindu mythology (for instance, the god Vishnu appearing in the
human avatars of Rama and Krishna) to the usage designating a digital image
controlled by a human in a virtual setting.17 Between these two stages, there
is a third meaning of avatar, which emerged in the English language at the
end of the eighteenth century: avatar as an allegorical figure that personifies
or embodies a principle.18 This section elaborates on how the genealogy of the
avatar is reflected in three of the compositional models for Lewis’s Afterword.
Anthony Davis’s Amistad, premiered at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in
1997, features a libretto by Thulani Davis based on historical events surround-
ing the 1839 slave revolt aboard the Spanish ship Amistad. The opera depicts
the heroic story of the revolt and its leader Cinqué, who along with the other
Mende captives eventually gained their freedom. The plot describes how the
Yoruba trickster god Esu-­Elegba descends to earth as an avatar taking mul-
tiple human forms: first he appears as himself, stirring up the slave revolt
(Esu-­Elegba can only be seen by Mende captives); then he appears as former
U.S. president John Quincy Adams’s servant, before finally appearing as a
court translator. At the opera’s conclusion, Esu-­Elegba decides to remain in
the United States, where he will fight as an abolitionist.19
Composed in 1985, Anthony Braxton’s Composition No. 126 (Trillium-­
Dialogues M) is based on the composer’s own Tri-­Axium Writings, a three-­
volume work of sociomusical commentary published in 1985.20 Like the other
operas that make up Braxton’s twelve-­opera Trillium series, Composition
No. 126 is a fictional sketch between avatar-­like characters who sing pas-
sages from the Tri-­Axium Writings. According to Graham Lock, the Tril-
lium operas may be conceived as virtual reality performances, and some of
Braxton’s scores actually include virtual maps.21 These virtual settings, how-
ever, are imagined in the mind’s eye, not experienced in the physical space via
staging and costumes. In this respect, Braxton’s operas are more like the early
days of role-­playing games before the advent of computer simulation. What
makes the characters of Composition No. 126 so avatar-­like is how Braxton
instructs the performers to minimize the psychological development of their
individual characters and instead focus on the philosophic values they are
made to embody. Here we see a foreshadowing of Lewis’s dramaturgy of the
avatar, where the characters are visual representations controlled by the per-

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 114 contemporary opera in flux

formers in real time. Braxton, however, focuses more on how the characters
are allegorical figures of his philosophical system. This contrasts with the per-
formers of Lewis’s Afterword, who shift between different historical figures or
past AACM members in a more mimetic way without being confined to the
character depiction of traditional opera.
Brian Ferneyhough’s Shadowtime, premiered at the Munich Biennale in
2004, features a libretto by Charles Bernstein as well as texts by Ferneyhough,
both of which draw on the life and writings of Walter Benjamin. The fourth
scene (“Opus Contra Naturam”) describes the descent of Benjamin’s ava-
tar into the underworld, where he encounters various historical figures and
shades, both living and deceased.22 By avatar, we mean that Benjamin’s char-
acter moves beyond Benjamin’s own historical reality and enters the hyperre-
ality of Hades. Ferneyhough writes: “The piece [. . .] is to be accompanied by
a silent film projection encompassing the chaotic intersection of scenes from
fin-­de-­siècle Berlin cabaret, medieval labyrinths, and images from the hyper-­
dissimulatory environment of present-­day Las Vegas.”23 In Ferneyhough’s
opera, Hades is a virtual meeting of sorts, a hypertext at the crossroads of a
number of different media (opera, film, and photography). Without a doubt,
this idea of a virtual meeting between figures both living and deceased influ-
enced Lewis’s Afterword. But unlike Benjamin’s avatar, which has a clear con-
nection to the historical figure of Benjamin and was meant to be recognized
as such by the audience, the avatars in Lewis’s opera remain unnamed in
the libretto, and the relationship between the avatars and historical figures is
much more fluid.

Dramaturgy of the Avatar in the Musical Score

and Libretto of Afterword’s Scene 4

What makes the dramaturgy of the avatar in Lewis’s Afterword unique is that
it proceeds from the premise that this opera is a media technology (hypomne-
sis) that revivifies the embodied act of remembering (anamnesis). My analysis
of the music and libretto of scene 4 (“First Meeting”) demonstrates how the
dramaturgy of the avatar can accomplish the task of revivifying living mem-
ory. In addition to discussing compositional details, I also consider the avatar
performance in terms of remediation, immediacy, and hypermediacy. Lewis
describes scene 4 in his program notes as follows: “The sung texts are drawn
largely from the audio recording of the founding AACM meeting in May

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 Techniques and Dramaturgy of the Avatar in Afterword 115

1965. As the musicians speak frankly among themselves, hopes, fears, aspi-
rations, and a gradual self-­realization dovetail with a general understanding,
sung by the tenor, that music composed by the members themselves could
play a major role in reconnecting them to their ancestors, as well as fostering
social, political, and cultural change.”24 At the AACM’s founding meeting on
May 8, 1965, musicians gathered to discuss how they could survive in an envi-
ronment in which Black musicians were increasingly being pushed out of the
South Side of Chicago.25 At the conclusion of the scene, they vote in favor of
promoting their own compositions, a key moment in the opera’s larger narra-
tive of self-­sacrifice, community building, and self-­determination.
By depicting this historical meeting in Afterword, Lewis follows what Jay
David Bolter and Richard Grusin refer to as the “logic of immediacy,” which
dictates “that the medium should disappear and leave us in the presence of
the thing represented.”26 Indeed, we as listener-­viewers of Afterword feel as
if we are eavesdropping on the meeting, like a fly on the wall. This effect of
“actually being there” is multiplied by the nature of opera as a medium, where
we are in the same physical space as the performers. Afterword makes the
AACM’s history “present” in all senses of the word by allowing the audience
to see this history unfold in real time. This is however only one aspect of
Afterword, and the effects of presence, proximity, and immediacy are placed
in opposition to the equally powerful effect of the hypermediacy of the ava-
tars. By focusing on the performer’s body as a site of meaning, the avatars’
hypermediacy draws attention to opera’s theatricality, that is, the operatic
medium as a site of representation.27
The libretto of scene 4 does not specify the names of the musicians who
participated in the AACM’s founding meeting, which contributes to the
namelessness of the avatars appearing on the stage.28 The three vocal parts
are labeled in the libretto as “soprano,” “contralto,” and “tenor.” But the audi-
ence at the Chicago world premiere on October 16, 2015, many of whom
were members or family and friends of the AACM, would have known which
musicians were being quoted in the libretto.
Comparing the libretto for scene 4 with a transcript of the audio record-
ing of the AACM’s founding meeting, I have traced the source of each line.29
Lewis quotes the meeting directly, although the meeting was much longer
in duration (approximately 110 minutes) than its depiction in the opera. The
following musicians are quoted in the libretto here: Muhal Richard Abrams,
Philip Cohran, Steve McCall, John Groden, Melvin Jackson, Fred Berry,
Jerol Donavon, Roscoe Mitchell, Ken Chaney, John Coleman, Jodie Chris-

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 116 contemporary opera in flux

tian, Betty Dupree, and Gene Easton. As chairman of the meeting, Abrams is
quoted most frequently, and his words appear in the parts of all three singers.
But since Abrams is the first to speak and the contralto begins the scene, the
contralto is associated with Abrams’s character. The soprano voice is initially
linked with Philip Cohran and Steve McCall, but this connection changes
throughout the scene. The turning point in the scene occurs when the tenor
voice performs Gene Easton’s monologue, urging his fellow musicians to
reconnect with their ancestors by promoting original, creative music.
The fact that the characters in the libretto remain unnamed, along with
how the performers shift between depicting different historical figures, gives
rise to the effect of hypermediacy. The dramaturgy of the avatar emphasizes
the process of representation by drawing attention to the operatic medium.
The performers are in control of their avatars, much like human users are
in control of their digital representations in a human-­computer interaction.
In this way, the dramaturgy of the avatar rejects the character depiction of
conventional drama, the “fixed” individual characters that Lewis describes in
his program notes.
These two contrasting aspects of Afterword’s scene 4, the immediacy of
seeing the AACM’s founding meeting unfold in real time and the hypermedi-
acy of the avatar performance, is a perfect example of Bolter and Grusin’s dou-
ble logic of remediation.30 A remediation is the representation of a medium
within a different medium. Lewis’s opera Afterword remediates the final chap-
ter of his book A Power Stronger Than Itself, much as that chapter is itself a
remediation of AACM archival materials. Moreover, Lewis’s opera remediates
the operatic tradition of composing an opera on the subject of the magical
powers of music to effect change on the human ethos (the Orpheus myth).
There is another aspect in which Afterword is a remediation: Lewis refers
to his opera as a “Bildungsoper—­a coming-­of-­age opera of ideas, position-
ality, and testament.”31 In other words, Lewis’s opera is a remediation of the
Bildungsroman, a coming-­of-­age novel, along with the narrative formula
associated with it. According to Jennifer Heinert, the bildungsroman has tra-
ditionally been associated with dominant cultural values, coded as “white.”32
In the bildungsroman, Heinert states, a young hero (“a white, male propertied
citizen”) is confronted with a series of obstacles that, once overcome, lead
him to embrace the values of the dominant culture.33 Instead, Lewis’s reme-
diation presents a critical revision of the traditional bildungsroman, a revi-
sion that deconstructs the genre’s values, assumptions, conventional narra-
tive techniques, and the people that it normally depicts (upper-­middle-­class
white male citizens). In Afterword, the development of the community (the

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 Techniques and Dramaturgy of the Avatar in Afterword 117

AACM, the South Side of Chicago) is even more important than that of the
individual. Like the bildungsromans of Toni Morrison, especially The Bluest
Eye (1970), Lewis rejects the linear and teleological trajectory of the tradi-
tional bildungsroman in favor of the juxtaposition of multiple narratives and
historical moments. In doing so, Afterword presents listeners with a positive
model of development that does not reduce African Americans and women
to the role of the Other.
The double logic of remediation is also evident in the music used to depict
the avatars in Afterword’s scene 4. The scene’s musical form provides a sense
of immediacy akin to the experience of driving a race car: we are constantly
in motion, and there’s a sense of excitement of not knowing what’s around the
corner. The scene’s musical form divides into three parts: an opening fanfare
or call-­to-­attention (mm. 1–­74); a discussion about original, creative music
(mm. 75–­163); and a final section in which the fanfare-­like music returns and
the musicians decide to take a vote (mm. 164–­223).
An arch map reveals the geometric proportions in the musical form of
scene 4.34 As can be seen in figure 5.1, Lewis uses the golden ratio at multiple
levels in the musical form: the smaller divisions of the first part, as well as the
larger second and third parts.35 The golden ratio is also present in the individ-
ual tempo markings given for each rehearsal letter (refer to fig. 5.2).36

Fig. 5.1. Arch Map of Afterword, scene 4 (adapted from Tywoniuk 2019, 49).

Fig. 5.2. Tempo Proportions in Afterword, scene 4 (adapted from Tywoniuk 2019, 60).

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 118 contemporary opera in flux

Yet it seems remarkable to me that Lewis would incorporate these geo-

metric proportions into his musical form, since notated durations are not
identical with clock time, and the listener is unlikely to hear the proportions
as such. While the musicians performing the score may be aware of the geo-
metrical design, the listeners nonetheless do not hear it. Be that as it may,
the discovery of the golden ratio in scene 4 is important because the musical
form is the framework in which the avatars appear. If we take Lewis’s idea
of Afterword as a virtual meeting as our basis, the musical form is the plat-
form in which the avatar performance takes place. While the musical form
provides the listeners with an aesthetic feeling akin to driving a race car, the
feeling is slightly different for the performers. Gilbert Simondon describes a
similar example as a “phanero-­technics” in which the form and its materials
are made evident to the viewer, as demonstrated in Le Corbusier’s architec-
ture and the Garabit viaduct on the Truyère.37 Simondon discusses the sim-
ple pleasure of seeing these proportions as a perceptual blending of technics
and aesthetics (“techno-­aesthetics”). My own point here is to emphasize how
the musical form can be perceived differently by the performers versus the
audience. In both cases, the form’s effect of immediacy contributes to the
presence and immediacy of the avatar performance.
Another key aspect of scene 4 is how the instrumental music takes on
virtual attributes in tandem with the avatar performance. Robert Hatten
has written about how music may exhibit a virtual agency of its own, inde-
pendent from the composer and performers, and this is certainly the case
in Afterword.38 The music’s first virtual attribute is the transformation of an
initial chord.39 As show in figure 5.3, m. 1 features a dense vertical sonority
built on C2 in the piano: above the C2-­cluster in the piano are an augmented
second between the horn and cello and an open-­spaced chord played by the
violin, flute, and clarinet.40 Lewis’s rapid transformation of this initial chord
results in a state of sonic flux, and the singers’ avatar performance seems to
hover over an impenetrable force field.
The music’s second virtual attribute is the juxtaposition of contrasting
musical styles, especially those types of music referred to in the libretto (“jazz
standard,” “creative music,” and “ancestral music”). As shown in figure 5.4,
the opening section of scene 4 incorporates an altered version of the fan-
fare musical topic, which is frequently used by opera composers to signal the
onset of an important event.41 Here the fanfare music literally calls the singers
and their avatars to attention for the AACM’s founding meeting.
The next musical style is the jazz standard, which appears at rehearsal C.

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 Fig. 5.3. Initial chord and transformations in Afterword, scene 4

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 Fig. 5.4. Musical styles, motives, and gestures in Afterword, scene 4

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 Techniques and Dramaturgy of the Avatar in Afterword 121

When the soprano sings “We thought of all the things we are / What every-
body would like to do,” the melodic line includes a motivic reference to the
jazz standard “All the Things You Are,” composed by Jerome Kern and with
lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein.42 In addition to being a playful reference to the
text (“We thought of all the things we are”), the jazz style also refers to the
self-­sacrifice of the AACM musicians, who gave up performing jazz stan-
dards in favor of composing their own original compositions. The third musi-
cal style is “creative music” and appears at rehearsal E (“What point are we
on now? / Original music?”), which features short melodic bursts, or sonic
gestures. The gestures at m. 47 resemble the “little instrumentals” frequently
used by AACM members, including small percussion instruments, bells,
and found objects. The music at rehearsal F and G is in an atonal melody-­
accompaniment style. The fifth musical style is R&B music and appears at
rehearsal L (“The other music is already being presented / Record compa-
nies / Disk jockeys / Everyone is promoting it.”) The instrumental music con-
tains a low tom-­tom, suggesting that the industry was beating the drum for
this music, and perhaps literally beating it into people’s heads. At rehearsal
T, Lewis introduces the musical style of ancestral music, which coincides
with Gene Easton’s monologue (“Getting closer to the music our ancestors
played”). The tenor voice is accompanied by various sound gestures (col legno
battuto in the strings, flute with tongue ram, clarinet with slap tongue, and
horn playing air sounds with percussive tonguing), which invites the listener
to make a strong connection between the ancestral music and creative music.
Lewis’s juxtaposition of contrasting musical styles results in a strong feel-
ing of hypermediacy. Bolter and Grusin’s discussion of montage and photo-
collage may be equally applied to the music here. Bolter and Grusin write, “A
viewer confronting a collage, for example, oscillates between looking at the
patches of paper and paint on the surface of the work and looking through
to the depicted objects as if they occupied a real space beyond the surface.”43
This oscillation between looking at the medium and looking through the
medium at the images that are depicted in it is similarly evident in Lewis’s
treatment of musical style. Lewis’s “exploring of the interface” (Bolter and
Grusin) involves a sophisticated attention to the acoustic properties of the
musical surface while simultaneously inviting the listener to experience the
semantic and associative meanings of the different musical styles.
The oscillation between the musical surface and the representation of
the individual musical styles cultivates what Bolter and Grusin describe as
a “mobility of observation.”44 Like early nineteenth-­ century technologies

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 122 contemporary opera in flux

such as the diorama, phenakistoscope, and the stereoscope, which drew the
observers’ attention to their desire for immediacy, Lewis’s use of musical style
encourages listeners to change their perspective and to alter the way they see
the performers and avatars on stage. This is none other than what Tereza
Havelková alludes to as the “critical possibilities contained within hyperme-
diacy, including operatic spectacle,” which is to reconfigure how the audience
views and listens.45 The mobility of observation also proves to be true for
the avatar performance, which invites viewers to oscillate between seeing the
performer and the depicted character (avatar). In both cases, Lewis’s opera
serves as a memory technology that blasts the listener-­viewer free from con-
trol societies in favor of creating new living memories.

Dramaturgy of the Avatar in the Production of

Afterword’s Scene 4

Any discussion of the dramaturgy of the avatar would be incomplete without

considering the scene’s staging and performance. According to the cultural
historian Uri McMillan, the embodied avatar is a way of performing object-
hood that destabilizes conventional, stereotyped depictions of Blackness.46
It is a performance mode that highlights the body as a site of meaning and
that extends the agency of the performers. McMillan’s notion of the embod-
ied avatar may be fruitfully applied to the staging and choreography by Sean
Griffin and Catherine Sullivan.
Director, composer, and artist Sean Griffin is the director of Opera
Povera, a performance and design consortium that he created in 2010.47 Grif-
fin has directed six unique stagings of Lewis’s Afterword, and my analysis of
scene 4 will focus on the world premiere performance at Chicago’s Museum
of Contemporary Art on October 16, 2015.48 What makes Afterword’s world
premiere performance different from Griffin’s other five stagings of this opera
is that it incorporates three dancers in addition to the singers, who also func-
tion as dancers. The complex choreography of the world premiere, created by
Griffin and visual artist Catherine Sullivan, is especially relevant for consid-
ering the dramaturgy of the avatar and its attention to the human body as a
site of meaning.
Griffin states that his collaboration with Lewis on Afterword was unusual
in that Lewis presented Griffin with a completed, fully notated musical
score.49 Griffin explains that his gestural and choreographic language for

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 Techniques and Dramaturgy of the Avatar in Afterword 123

Fig. 5.5. Production photo of Afterword, scene 4, world premiere performance on

October 16, 2015, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. (Courtesy of
Opera Povera.)

Afterword emerged in the process of rehearsals with the singers and dancers.
Sullivan also worked independently with the dancers, which also shaped the
final choreography. After a morning of rehearsals, Griffin would meet Lewis
for lunch, at which time Lewis would “share books, photographs, and tex-
tile designs from Egypt and Africa related to the mythology of the AACM.”50
Griffin then incorporated these pictures into his costumes and stage design,
creating a type of living memory. These conversations were supplemented by
Griffin’s own personal experiences with AACM members, many of whom he
had known for decades. Lewis pays tribute to Griffin by quoting him in the
libretto for act 2, scene 1 (“Ariae”) of Afterword: “We can take anything / Make
anything out of it.”51
Griffin describes the complex layering of meaning in scene 4’s choreogra-
phy, beginning with the rapid tilts of the seated dancers (31:31): “[The begin-
ning of scene 4] shows the swaying of gravity that pulls people around. It’s
like a large orb that circles around the room—­like an energy from a different
planet.”52 Griffin refers to this planet as “an abstract Africa” that returns in a
later scene. Additionally, the dancers’ gestures are derived from album cov-

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 124 contemporary opera in flux

ers of the AACM. When the libretto states, “We are gathered here to form
an association” (34:32), the singers and dancers form a tableau based on an
AACM album cover.53 At the world premiere, many AACM members were
in attendance and several commented to Griffin that they recalled and recog-
nized particular scenes and images.
Several other moments in the choreography should be mentioned. At
32:13, the singers and dancers are seated around a table as in a meeting.
Contralto Gwendolyn Brown stands at the head of the table as the avatar of
Muhal Richard Abrams, the chairman of the first AACM meeting. All three
singers’ movements become more naturalistic here, to emphasize the text
they are singing. When a given singer’s avatar speaks, he or she walks freely
about the space, as if literally taking the floor. When soprano Joelle Lamarre’s
avatar declares, “Now is the time / This is an awakening” (41:03), she removes
her blond wig—­a symbol of liberation from white societal expectations and
notions of beauty. At 41:44, the dancers kneel as if in prayer. When tenor
Julian Terrell Otis performs the avatar of Gene Easton at 42:32 (“Original
means / Sound-­conscious musicians”), both the singers and dancers begin to
move freely about the space.
Griffin also highlights how the singers and dancers add spoken interjec-
tions, which are not notated in the score or the libretto. These interjections
contribute to the sense of a community voice that Lewis mentions in the
program notes.
The multiple temporalities in the choreography are an important aspect
of the avatars’ hypermediacy. For example, the linear, dramatic time of the
singers contrasts with the cyclical time of the dancers, who repeat the same or
similar gestures. The costumes also contribute to the multiple temporalities.
In scene 4, the costumes are more or less in keeping with the time period
described in the libretto (the mid-­1960s); some of the other scenes, however,
include historical costumes (for example, a soldier’s uniform in scene 1). As
Griffin puts it, the avatars move forward and backward through time, stretch-
ing from ancient Africa to the future circa 2055.54 Afterword’s staging of multi-
ple temporalities is in keeping with Lehmann’s concept of the “archaeological
kaleidoscope” in postdramatic theater in general and Wilson’s works in partic-
ular: “Without restraint his theater tableaux mix times, cultures, and spaces.”55
A third feature of the avatar is its ability to move between the media
involved in opera. For instance, at 42:25 (“Getting closer to the music our
ancestors played”), the avatar is not limited to the singer, as when the dancers
become soloists. The percussive sound gestures of the instrumental music

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 Techniques and Dramaturgy of the Avatar in Afterword 125

radiate outwards to enliven the dancers, who take on a meaning of their own.
At such moments of hypermediacy, the thick web of visual and sonic signi-
fiers creates an experience akin to what Daphne Brooks calls “spectacular
opacity”—­dense and opaque performances that “confound and disrupt con-
ventional constructions of the racialized and gendered body.”56 This profound
experience of hypermediacy is exactly what McMillan has in mind when he
states that the embodied avatar subverts negative stereotypes and extends the
performer’s agency.
A choreomusical analysis of scene 4 reveals several further insights. The
music and dance may be synchronized at one level while contesting each
other at another level. The quick and irregular pacing of the dancers’ side tilts
(31:31) highlights the fast tempo of the music. When the tempo slows down at
32:13, the movement of the dancers and singers similarly decreases in speed.
The dancers’ gestures and postures, however, have no direct relationship here
to the sung and spoken text (“original music / only / this will have to be voted
on”), instead they anticipate the tableau based on the AACM album cover
at 34:32 (“We are gathered here to form an association”). At 40:00, there is
a strong audiovisual downbeat, creating what Stephanie Jordan describes
as “visual capture,” or movement that draws extraordinary attention to the
musical events.57 The dancers’ sudden slack posture and downward move-
ment coincides with the onset of the AACM-­like small percussion sound ges-
ture in the vibraphone and violin (m. 150). The movement highlights a shift in
the music that would otherwise be much less apparent.
Finally, the production’s lighting design creates a play of shadows on the
background screen, a visual reference to Plato’s allegory of the cave. This
effect of hypermediacy seems to be a direct reference to the projection of the
hyperreal simulation of Hades in Ferneyhough’s Shadowtime. The iconogra-
phy of Griffin’s staging is slightly different here. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates
describes the philosopher’s duty to help guide fellow citizens from the cave
of shadows into the daylight of the truth.58 The message here is of service,
community building, and self-­sacrifice, which is in keeping with the narrative
of scene 4. The lighting and stage design of Afterword encourage the viewers
to contemplate the deeper significance of the events unfolding on the stage.
As Griffin states, “there’s a whole [visual] language related to the imaginary
part that lives through the whole piece through references.”59 In sum, the
scene demonstrates the politics of hypermediacy to change the audience’s
perception and cultural assumptions away from the stereotypes and racial
prejudices of today’s dominant media culture.

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 126 contemporary opera in flux

Conclusion

In this chapter, I argue that the dramaturgy of the avatar is at the heart of
Lewis’s opera Afterword, which presents singers and dancers as avatars of
AACM musicians, both living and deceased. The avatar is a tool or visual rep-
resentation controlled by a human in a virtual setting, one that extends the
agency of the performer. Given today’s understanding of virtuality beyond
the real/virtual binary, Lewis’s Afterword enacts a virtual meeting through
its lively engagement with a digital repository of AACM archival materials.
Lewis’s opera illuminates aspects of postdramatic theater and opera alike
by considering new historical subjects. Making an observation that can be
equally applied to postdramatic theater, Naomi André states that a great deal
remains to be done in terms of addressing the perceived whiteness of opera
by confronting the history of opera as a segregated space, and by decentering
and decolonizing “Eurological” narratives of opera.60 Similarly, Lewis’s After-
word draws attention to the political potential of hypermediacy to enable a
perceptual change and reactivate living memory in the face of what Deleuze
refers to as today’s control societies. In this respect, Lewis’s opera is a power-
ful example of memory technics in the age of digital networked media.
While technics attends to the making of tools and the constitutive role of
technology for humanity, it nevertheless relies on technology’s function as
a supplement, prosthesis, and extension of agency. A fruitful line of inquiry
would be to apply the concept of “coevolution”—­the influence that humans
and technology have on one another in their evolution—­to Lewis’s compo-
sitions that incorporate electronics, in particular his Recombinant Trilogy.61
Be that as it may, cultural historian Alexander Weheliye highlights
how nonwhites have traditionally been excluded from the category of the
Human.62 This observation is particularly relevant to the study of technics,
which focuses on the inseparable relationship between technology and the
human being (the “Human”). While Lewis’s Afterword contributes a great
deal to the much-­needed task of incorporating the concept of race into the
consideration of technology and the Human, future research on Lewis’s music
will need to move beyond the Human to evaluate alternate modes of being
along with Weheliye’s idea of “racializing assemblages”—­that is, how “the
idea of racializing assemblages construes race not as a biological or cultural
classification but as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity
into full humans, not-­quite-­humans, and non-­humans.”63
Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates how the dramaturgy of the avatar in

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 Techniques and Dramaturgy of the Avatar in Afterword 127

Afterword moves beyond the kinds of cyber discourse that depict Blackness
as the “anti-­avatar of digital life.”64 Such discourse turns a blind eye to a long
history of African American technoculture. By drawing attention to the his-
torically situated sociopolitical and material aspects of memory technics and
discourses of race, the avatar is one such way of highlighting the technologi-
cal agency of African American artists beyond racism and the stereotypes of
dominant media culture and control societies.
Notes
1. My definition of avatar here is based on Beth Coleman, Hello Avatar: Rise of the
Networked Generation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). I nevertheless have a broader
view of avatar than Coleman, who defines avatar as a digital representation controlled by a
human being within a human-­computer interaction. My understanding of avatar is more
in keeping with that presented by Uri McMillan, who focuses primarily on how artists
perform and manipulate embodied images in performance art. Uri McMillan, Embodied
Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 2015).
2. For a brief introduction to cybernetics, see N. Katherine Hayles, “Cybernetics,” in
Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010), 145–­56. On George Lewis’s understanding of cyber-
netics, see especially George E. Lewis, “The Virtual Discourses of Pamela Z,” Journal of
the Society for American Music 1, no. 1 (2007): 59. See also George E. Lewis, “Improvising
Tomorrow’s Bodies: The Politics of Transduction,” Emisférica 4, no. 2 (2007), [Link]
.[Link]/journal/4.2/eng/en42_pg_lewis.html. I’m also indebted to the work of Lucie
Vágnerová. See Lucie Vágnerová, “Sirens/Cyborgs: Sound Technologies and the Musical
Body” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2016).
3. Hayles, “Cybernetics,” 148.
4. Bernard Stiegler, “Memory,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitch-
ell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 67. On tech-
nics and music, see Michael Gallope, “Technicity, Consciousness, and Musical Objects,”
in Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives, ed.
David Clarke and Eric Clarke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 47–­64. On opera
and technicity, see Jonathan Sterne, “Afterword: Opera, Media, Technicity,” in Technology
and the Diva: Sopranos, Opera, and Media from Romanticism to the Digital Age, ed. Karen
Henson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 159–­200.
5. Stiegler, “Memory,” 78–­81. According to Gilles Deleuze, corporations and comput-
ers control today’s societies. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Octo-
ber 59 (Winter 1992): 3–­7.
6. Stiegler, “Memory,” 83.
7. George Lewis refers to Afterword as a “Bildungsoper” in George Lewis, “Program
Notes for Afterword,” 71st Ojai Music Festival, Libbey Bowl, June 9, 2017. Lewis writes
here, “Afterword is not a history of the AACM, but a ‘Bildungsoper’—­a coming-­of-­age
opera of ideas, positionality, and testament.”

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 128 contemporary opera in flux

8. Music dramaturgy refers to how the music shapes and structures the drama and
performance of an opera as a whole. See Christopher B. Balme, The Cambridge Introduc-
tion to Theatre Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 149.
9. Lewis refers to the final chapter of his book as a “virtual AACM meeting, sampled
from the many self-­critical musings that I heard in my interviews with my colleagues and
friends in the collective.” George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and
American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 498.
10. George Lewis, “Program Notes for Afterword,” 71st Ojai Music Festival, Libbey
Bowl, June 9, 2017.
11. Hans-­Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-­Munby (London:
Routledge, 2006). Lehmann’s book originally appeared in German in 1999. My discussion
of postdramatic theater is mainly limited to Lehmann’s chapter “Panorama of Postdramatic
Theatre” (pp. 68–­133).
12. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 147.
13. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 71.
14. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 71.
15. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text 9/10 (Spring-­Summer 1984): 181.
16. Alexander K. Rothe, “Boundaries: An Interview with George Lewis,” Van Magazine,
June 22, 2017, [Link]
17. Coleman, Hello Avatar, 44.
18. Coleman gives an example: “To say ‘she is the face of innocence’ captures the sense
of someone personifying or embodying a principle. Through its evolving uses, avatar has
consistently given a face to the abstract or untouchable.” Hello Avatar, 44. Further discus-
sion of allegory is beyond the scope of this chapter. On the use of allegorical theater in
contemporary opera, specifically Robert Ashley, see David Gutkin, “‘Meanwhile, Let’s Go
Back in Time’: Allegory, Actuality, and History in Robert Ashley’s Television Opera Tril-
ogy,” Opera Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2014): 5–­48.
19. See George E. Lewis, “The Dancer of All Dancers: Anthony Davis and Amistad,” liner
notes for Anthony Davis: Amistad, An Opera in Two Acts, New World Records, Anthology
of Recorded Music, 2008.
20. Anthony Braxton, Tri-­Axium Writings (Oakland: Synthesis Music, 1985).
21. Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work
of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999),
186–­89.
22. Brian Ferneyhough, “Program Notes for Opus Contra Naturam,” Flanders Festival,
October 2000. Opus Contra Naturam, though premiered in 2000, was conceived as part
of Ferneyhough’s opera Shadowtime. [Link]
/pdf/opus_contra_naturam.pdf.
23. Ferneyhough, “Program Notes.”
24. Lewis, “Program Notes for Afterword.”
25. The AACM’s founding meeting is described in greater detail in Lewis, A Power
Stronger Than Itself, 97–­105. See also Paul Steinbeck, Message To Our Folks: The Art
Ensemble of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 9–­34.
26. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 6.

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 Techniques and Dramaturgy of the Avatar in Afterword 129

27. On opera’s hypermediacy, see Tereza Havelková, Opera as Hypermedium: Meaning-­

Making, Immediacy, and the Politics of Perception (New York: Oxford University Press,
2021), 1f.
28. George Lewis, “Libretto for Afterword,” 71st Ojai Music Festival, Libbey Bowl, June
9, 2017.
29. George Lewis provided me with the unpublished transcript. “First AACM Meeting—­
Saturday, May 8, 1965” (unpublished manuscript, last modified October 26, 2017), Micro-
soft Word file.
30. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 5.
31. Lewis, “Program Notes for Afterword.”
32. Jennifer Lee Jordan Heinert, Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni
Morrison (New York: Routledge, 2009), 15.
33. Heinert, Narrative Conventions, 14.
34. My incorporation of arch maps is indebted to Derek Tywoniuk, “Context, Time,
Texture, and Gesture in George E. Lewis’s The Will to Adorn” (PhD diss., University of
California, Los Angeles, 2019), 46–­83.
35. Since the meter remains the same throughout the entire scene (4/4), the ratios refer
to the measure counts in the musical score. The golden ratio is evident in the smaller divi-
sions of the first part: mm. 1–­47 (46 measures) plus mm. 47–­75 (28 measures) equals mm.
1–­75 (74 measures). The second and third parts also approximate the golden ratio: mm.
75–­164 (89 measures) and mm. 164–­223 (59 measures) equals mm. 75–­223 (148 mea-
sures). The ratio is three measures short of the golden ratio, but this may be corrected by
beginning the third section three bars later at m. 167, which is exactly where the fanfare
material from the beginning of the scene returns.
36. Scene 4’s opening tempo is 116 bpm, which is 44 bpm faster than 72 bpm. The indi-
vidual tempo markings also consist of a number of superimposed arithmetic sequences: 60,
66, 72; 76, 84, 92; 60, 72, 84; 60, 76, 92. 7.
37. Gilbert Simondon, “On Techno-­Aesthetics,” trans. Arne De Boever, Parrhesia 14
(2012).
38. Robert S. Hatten, A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2018), 8.
39. David Metzer describes a similar procedure in Kaija Saariaho’s works Du cristal
and . . . à la fumée, though in Lewis’s case the transformation occurs much more quickly,
resulting in a greater state of sonic flux. David Metzer, Musical Modernism at the Turn of
the Twenty-­First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 187.
40. An altered version of the m. 1 sonority appears at m. 15, though the piano cluster
chord is transposed down to G1 (note also the quarter-­tone compression of the previous
horn-­cello dyad and the removal of the accidentals in the open-­spaced chord above it).
When Lewis’s initial chord returns in m. 26, it is mainly compressed into the mid-­range
(D3-­E4). The transformation of these vertical sonorities continues throughout the scene
until mm. 167–­168, when the C2 chord on the piano returns.
41. On the fanfare musical topic, see Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic
Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 33–­38.
42. The musical quotation of the standard “All the Things You Are” may also be inter-
preted within the framework of Henry Louis Gates’s notion of the Signifying Monkey,

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 130 contemporary opera in flux

where signifyin(g) refers to repetition with a signal difference. The practice of musical sig-
nifyin(g) is elaborated upon in Samuel A. Floyd, The Power of Black Music: Interpreting
Its History from Africa to the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). For a
reading of Afterword, scene 4 in terms of musical signifyin(g), refer to my AMS Musicol-
ogy Now post: Alexander K. Rothe, “The Sound of Empathy in George Lewis’s Afterword,”
Musicology Now, last updated May 11, 2018. [Link]
pathy-in-george-lewiss-afterword/
43. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 41.
44. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 37.
45. Havelková, Opera as Hypermedium, 33.
46. McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 11.
47. [Link]
48. A video of Afterword’s world premiere at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art
is available on the Web. My time listings correspond with this video: [Link]
8533728. For a contrasting staging of Afterword, see Griffin’s staging at the Ostrava Days
Festival in August 2015, which incorporated elaborate assemblage-­based set designs—­
giving the set design a much greater independence than in the other Afterword stagings.
The Ostrava staging is documented in a YouTube video of the death scene (act 2, scene 3):
[Link]
49. Sean Griffin, interview by author, Los Angeles, July 22, 2020.
50. Griffin, interview.
51. Lewis, “Libretto for Afterword.”
52. Griffin, interview.
53. The time stamp refers to the video recording cited in note 48.
54. Griffin, interview.
55. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 79.
56. Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Free-
dom, 1850–­1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 8.
57. Stephanie Jordan, “Choreomusical Conversations: Facing a Double Challenge,”
Dance Research Journal 43, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 50.
58. Plato, Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),
240–­49.
59. Griffin, interview.
60. Naomi André, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (Urbana: University of Illi-
nois Press, 2018), 6. I adopt the term Eurological from George Lewis to refer to musical
discourse that focuses primarily, in many cases exclusively, on Western Europe, the United
States, and Canada.
61. For a recent book on coevolution, see Edward Ashford Lee, The Coevolution: The
Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).
62. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and
Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 9.
63. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 4.
64. Alondra Nelson, “Introduction: Future Texts,” Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002): 1.

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 6

Dramaturgies of Trauma
Chaya Czernowin’s Infinite Now

Joy H. Calico

Imagine that the hall, the whole space of the hall, is the inside of a head/
heart/body. The audience is immersed in the working of the head/heart/
body of a person who finds themselves in a difficult or hopeless situation, a
person who is struggling to find their footing. The hall becomes an acoustic
space where the outside is reacted upon, digested, dreamt, in an attempt to
figure it out, and to survive.
— ­C haya Czernowin1

This opening epigraph is composer Chaya Czernowin’s description of her

opera Infinite Now (2017), and while she does not use the word “trauma,” she
certainly could have. This chapter focuses on two dramaturgies used to create
a traumatic immersive audience experience: the composite libretto and the
use of sound design to determine one’s experience of theatrical space. Dra-
maturgy refers to the ways in which an opera’s constituent elements—­musical
and poetic form, instrumentation, vocal Fach, stage direction, mise en scène,
and, in this case, libretto and sound design—­determine audience experience
and contribute to “telling the story” (the latter being loosely defined, since
experimental opera may lack conventional narrative). These devices may
serve numerous purposes, but in Infinite Now, their attributes of fragmenta-
tion, disorientation, and forced intimacy communicate the cultural trauma of
two horrific, large-­scale events from twentieth-­century history: World War
I in Europe and the Cultural Revolution in China. Cultural trauma is defined
as “a specific form of collective trauma, affecting collective identity, where
groups of individuals feel similarly affected by a fracturing of the existential
security that a firm sense of identity affords.”2

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 132 contemporary opera in flux

Infinite Now was an international co-­commission from the National

Theater Mannheim (Germany) and the Institute for Research and Coordi-
nation in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM; France). It won the Opera Premiere of
the Year award from Opernwelt Jahrbuch, seventeen years after Czernowin’s
first opera, Pnima . . . ins Innere (2000), received the same honor. It is scored
for full orchestra, a concertino instrumental quartet (electric guitar, acoustic
guitar, two cellos), electronics, six singers divided into two trios, and seven
actors. All parts are amplified. The work consists of six acts without inter-
mission, and the total running time is 150–­175 minutes. Key collaborators
were computer music designer Carlo Laurenzi and engineer Sylvain Cadars,
both of IRCAM; musical director Titus Engel; stage director Luk Perceval;
stage and video designer Phillip Bussmann; and musicians with a history of
performing Czernowin’s music, especially the extraordinary contralto Noa
Frenkel.

The Dramaturgy of a Composite Libretto

Czernowin created the libretto for Infinite Now from two apparently unre-
lated extant sources. One is Perceval’s 2014 play FRONT, a Polyphony . . . ,
which is a visceral account of World War I’s Western Front “from all sides
of the trenches in Belgium.”3 In the tradition of documentary theater, Per-
ceval uses historical and literary sources in French, German, Flemish, and
English, including Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western
Front (1929) in the original German. The second primary text is the short
story “Homecoming” by Chinese avant-­garde author Deng Xiaohua (b. 1953),
who publishes under the name Can Xue. Live performers render excerpts
from the story in English translation, and a recording of Weiwei Xu read-
ing it in Chinese is part of the electronic soundscape.4 In this surreal story a
woman (called X) returns to a house she has been to many times before, yet
finds it completely different: the old man who lives there now tells her that
the house is dying, that they must remain in darkness, and that she cannot
leave. The days run together, and she can no longer remember exactly how
she got there. Czernowin selected only sentences directly related to the house
and avoided those that might establish a precise sense of location (monkey,
flamingo, banana groves).
The verb Czernowin uses to describe the arrangement of the two texts is
“intercut,” which is a common film technique. Elsewhere she describes the

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 Dramaturgies of Trauma 133

process as one of “creating a dialogue between the two materials” in which

“the two texts begin to talk and relate to each other” and “bring it all to the
Now,” the current moment of feeling as if we live perpetually in a state of
pending disaster.5 Each act begins with the sound of a metal gate closing fol-
lowed by instrumental and electronic sounds before any voices enter. At first
the texts alternate. In acts I, II, III, and V excerpts from “Homecoming” are
heard first, followed by excerpts from FRONT; in acts IV and VI the sequence
is reversed. The crisis comes in Act IV, when they are not just juxtaposed but
interleaved, so that lines alternate and even overlap. The texts converge more
and more in the second half of the opera.
The performers do not portray characters or engage one another in a
conventional narrative manner. Infinite Now thus qualifies as an example of
Hans-­Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic theater, by which he means that “at least
the imagination of a comprehensible narrative and/or mental totality” is no
longer the driving force.6 Jelena Novak explains that “though postdramatic
theater does not break with verbal text, it does break with its dramatic prin-
ciples,” in that literary text and plot are no longer primary and that “all phe-
nomena are given equal attention.”7 In this case, the plot is not enacted based
on the libretto; it is the interaction between the two texts that constitutes the
plot. The opera’s five discernible languages alternate coming to the fore, with
English the most prominent (an impression reinforced by English-­language
surtitles and mostly English projections, even in a production for a German
theater). At other times their cacophony produces a Babelesque welter of
thwarted verbal communication. Czernowin distinguishes the source texts
throughout by assigning a dedicated vocal timbre to each source. Excerpts
from FRONT are always performed by Trio #1 (a mezzo-­soprano, counter-
tenor, and baritone) and seven actors. Excerpts from “Homecoming” are
always performed by Trio #2 (a soprano, contralto, and bass). Each trio func-
tions as a single “meta-­voice,” Trio #2 as a “blurred, unison meta-­voice” and
Trio #1 as “three voices combin[ing] together to create a meta-­voice, singing
in slow unison which changes its colors with the change of the dynamic indi-
vidually for the single voices within the unified unison.”8
Both texts are present-­tense, first-­person narratives, and they are linked
by a common theme: the trauma of being trapped in a horrible situation (sol-
diers in trench warfare, the woman in the house). This narrative strategy gen-
erates a temporal distortion common to trauma, which can feel like being
trapped in a perpetual present (hence the title), reliving an experience again
and again. Their authors also represent the cultural trauma of their respec-

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 134 contemporary opera in flux

tive regional generational cohorts. The authors in FRONT were writing from
firsthand experience in World War I, but they also serve as synecdoche for
the trauma of an entire European generation. Similarly, Can Xue’s family was
persecuted by the Chinese state beginning in 1957 and throughout the Cul-
tural Revolution; she wrote “Homecoming” in the wake of the 1989 Tianan-
men Square massacre. Analyses of her better-­known short story “The Hut
on the Mountain” are also relevant to “Homecoming.” Lingchei Letty Chen
writes that “the psychic disturbances and suggestive fears and paranoia in
this short story are emblematic of ‘the untraceable, traumatized historical
experience of psychic assaults from which Can Xue—­like all others who
underwent the ‘proletarian dictatorship’—­has suffered.’”9 Conventional opera
can also generate a trauma-­induced sense of entrapment through repetition,
even if the narrative is more straightforward by comparison. Emanuele Senici
finds evidence in Rossini’s operas of a Freudian “posttraumatic compulsion to
repeat,” as they “staged over and over again the historical trauma of the post-
revolutionary and Napoleonic years and the compulsion to repeat in which
Italians found themselves trapped.”10
Perhaps libretti composed of extant, disparate texts can form a corpus for
analysis. One might begin by text mining each libretto to assess the interac-
tion of the separate texts, such as identifying common vocabulary, imagery,
syntax, and concepts; parsing the rate at which texts alternate at the levels
of word, line, paragraph, scene, and act; and locating instances of simulta-
neous presentation of multiple texts. The results would produce groupings
for comparison based on similarities in these categories. A music scholar can
then extrapolate dramaturgical strategies, narrative abstraction, and linear-
ity of the libretti alone before extending the comparison to musical settings
and even stagings. These composite libretti need not conform to Lehmann’s
notion of postdramatic theater, although the method may lend itself particu-
larly well to that orientation.
Postdramatic or no, an effective comparison to Infinite Now would
require some sort of sustained interaction between multiple, large texts, such
as Czernowin’s own Zaïde/Adama (2006; revised to add chorus 2017). The
Salzburg Festival commissioned her to write a companion piece for Mozart’s
fragmentary opera Zaïde, and she created a counterpoint in which each piece
has its own ensemble, and the two orchestras and two casts alternate scenes
on the same set. The juxtaposition of the exoticist Singspiel set to Mozart’s
music, against the story of forbidden Israeli-­Palestinian love set to Czernow-
in’s, is striking. The pieces are almost completely independent, yet they com-

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ment on one another in their alternation thanks to a shared theme and space,
as Martin Iddon notes: “love across cultural, social or political divides, for-
bidden by masculine authority.”11 George Lewis’s forthcoming Comet/Poppea
may emerge as another fitting point of comparison, as it promises a meeting
between his setting of the W. E. B. DuBois short story “The Comet” and Clau-
dio Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea.
Other types of multi-­sourced libretti might constitute additional cor-
pora for analysis and provide an opportunity to examine what dramaturgical
function they can serve other than trauma. There are those that function as
compilations of short excerpts on a common theme rather than extended,
interconnected texts: the libretto for Philip Glass’s Akhnaten brings together
numerous sources in multiple languages linked by their common original
subject matter (the Pharaoh), which is also the subject of the opera, while
the libretto for Doctor Atomic is a “‘cut-­and-­paste’ assemblage of poetry and
historical documents compiled and arranged” by composer John Adams and
collaborator Peter Sellars.12 Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (1990–­
96) by Helmut Lachenmann incorporates quotations from Leonardo da Vinci
and Gudrun Ensslin into a text abstracted from Hans Christian Andersen’s
short story, although those quotations function as interpolations (albeit
highly provocative ones). Finally, there is Kaija Saariaho’s 2015 opera Only the
Sound Remains, which is essentially a pair of short operas on two different
Japanese Noh dramas translated by Ernest Fennolosa and completed by Ezra
Pound, in which the multiply mediated and multiply authored texts remain
separated in two discrete acts.

The Dramaturgy of Spatialized Sound Design

Luigi Nono (of more below) used the term “spatial dramaturgy” to describe the
role of spatialized distribution, location, dislocation, and mobility of sound—­
both acoustic and digital, live and prerecorded—­in telling the opera’s story. In
operas that use electroacoustic sound, its design is the primary means of spa-
tial dramaturgy, although that need not be its only function. Composer Elfyn
Jones identifies “five modalities of existing sound practice with the potential
to be integrated into opera composition”: sound as environment, music, dra-
maturgy, sign, and inner voice.13 He does not explicitly connect each of these
to spatiality, but his review of theatrical precursors and tributaries frequently
returns to this domain. Ryan Ebright, on the other hand, argues for sounds

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 136 contemporary opera in flux

design’s fundamental purpose in opera as “using sound to activate and make

use of the space inhabited by listeners,” noting that despite its essential role
in much repertoire since the 1980s, opera studies has not yet taken up sound
design as a standard category of analysis.14 There are exceptions, of course;
for example, Yayoi Uno Everett analyzes the spatialization of sound effects
both electronic and acoustic in Golijov’s Ainadamar as indices of a lost time
and place without using the terms spatial dramaturgy or sound design.15 And
I should note that Czernowin does not use the term “sound design” either,
preferring to describe the use of amplification and sound manipulation in
Infinite Now as simply “composition”;16 I use it here to connect her music
to a broader discourse on creative practices in which composers and sound
designers function as co-­creators, much as Ebright does in his work on the
Doctor Atomic collaboration.
I envision at least three operatic subspecies in which research into dra-
maturgy through spatialized sound design could be productive: site-­specific
operas, operas created for cyberspace, and those created for performance in a
theater, such as Infinite Now. I will touch briefly on the first two before focus-
ing on the third. Site-­specific operas are, by definition, experienced outside
of an opera house, and an audience member’s mobility through a particular
site determines their spatial experience, both in terms of scenography and
in terms of sound (what I hear and when, from what distance, and what is
most prominent). Director Yuval Sharon has specialized in such productions,
first with his LA-­based opera company The Industry and now at Detroit
Opera Theatre, where he is Gary L. Wasserman Artistic Director. How does
sound design facilitate the spatial dramaturgy of Hopscotch, in which audi-
ence members in groups of three or four took one of three routes through
Los Angeles in a series of limousines that also contained live performers?
(There is no sound designer credited in the production team, although it does
include numerous AV technicians.) Or Sweet Land, which was created for
outdoor performance at the State Historical Park in downtown Los Angeles?
Audiences were assigned to one of two simultaneous tracks in close proxim-
ity to one another, which meant that sound designer Jody Elff had to account
for sound bleed between the temporary structures, among countless other
concerns (all sound was amplified, both acoustic and electronic). Finally, as
discussed in the introduction to this volume, Sharon’s production of Twilight:
Gods in October 2020 was an ingenious product of its pandemic moment. I
had to remain in my car with the windows rolled up, and as I arrived at each
new scene, I tuned into a different FM frequency to augment the sound I

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could hear coming from outside the car. Mark Grey’s sound design, simulta-
neously both mediated and unmediated, managed to generate a multidimen-
sional space for me as a listener confined to my car.17
The as-­yet unrealized spatial dramaturgy Anthony Braxton has con-
ceived for his massive multi-­opera complex Trillium is of the “choose your
own adventure” type, in which an audience member is also her own sound
designer. Katherine Young describes it as follows:

Ideally, each of the three primary layers of the ensemble (the singers, the
orchestra, and the instrumental soloists) would be on separate audio-­visual
channels, so that audience members could create their own mix and edits,
navigating the materials as they would a session in a recording studio, select-
ing the tracks and perspectives they want to engage with at any given time.
Rather than sitting still in a concert hall, audience members could move vir-
tually or physically, listening and watching from as many different vantage
points as desired.18

Second, Covid-­19 conditions triggered experiments in live cyberspace

opera that warrant inquiry in terms of spatial dramaturgy. These are clearly
examples of media opera, in Bianca Michaels’s terms, meaning a digital native
that is musically and visually conceived as such, with all the terms and con-
ditions of communication therein.19 Boston-­based White Snake Projects
undertook an ambitious three-­part online pandemic series in 2020–­21 that
put them at the forefront of technological innovation. Alice in the Pandemic,
Death by Life, and A Survivor’s Odyssey are visually innovative in that they use
immersive 3D environments created by Curvin Huber and built with Unreal
Engine, the game engine used in Fortnite. The biggest challenge for opera,
however, was resolving latency issues to enable live, simultaneous, remote col-
laborative performance between singers scattered around the United States
(in Death by Life, for example, singers were in California, Nebraska, Illinois,
and New York). Sound engineer Jon Robertson designed a plugin called Tutti
Remote that goes a long way toward solving that problem.20 Sound design
functions differently in the cyberspace environment, partly because one can
never know what kind of audio technology the audience member has on her
phone or computer, particularly if the user is not a serious gamer. Colleagues
in ludo-­musicology might be good interlocutors in this area. Other aspects
could be addressed using research and methodologies established by Chris-
topher Morris, Joseph Attard, and others, whose work on opera cine-­casts is

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 138 contemporary opera in flux

usefully gathered in a special issue of Opera Quarterly devoted to Opera at

the Multiplex.21

Spatial Dramaturgy in the Theater: Dislocation and Mobility

In this section I sketch some background for spatial dramaturgy in the opera
theater and then focus on two sound design elements that determine an audi-
ence’s experience of that space for Infinite Now: (1) sound dislocation and
mobility and (2) amplified breathy vocalization.
Spatial dramaturgy did not begin with the digital age, of course. Michel
Leiris argued that all operatic music “carves and sculpts the space of the the-
ater,” causing “an intensely palpable space (un espace intensément sensible)
to blossom forth”; Jonathan Cross extrapolates that “music in an opera does
not only function to serve character and dramatic situation but also to define
space.”22 For Cross, Leiris’s metaphysical property is enhanced by compos-
ers’ use of spectral analysis, but spatial music—­meaning that which specifies
and incorporates the placement or movement of sound in order to affect the
listening experience—­has a considerable pre-­spectralist history in the opera
house. It is perhaps most familiar in the form of offstage sound that estab-
lishes distance and direction. Consider Hector Berlioz’s use of three bands
placed offstage at increasingly closer proximity to signal the approaching
Trojan horse in the act I finale of Les Troyens. The first group is situated far
behind the upstage wall with a distinctive instrumentation featuring the high
saxhorn sur-­aigu with trumpets, cornets, trombones, and ophicleide; the sec-
ond is closer to the audience but still behind the stage, consisting of four-­part
saxhorns plus cymbals; and the third is in the wings, closest to the audience,
with three-­part oboes and six or eight harps. The opening scene of Il tabarro,
from Giacomo Puccini’s Il trittico, calls for a car horn to sound in the distance
followed by a tugboat whistle even further away. Arman Schwartz cites this as
an example of the type of realistic ambient noise that was common in Pucci-
ni’s operas of the 1890s.23 Offstage acoustic sound lends verisimilitude to the
action onstage by extending the opera’s conceptual space beyond the stage.
Electroacoustic technology enables a wide variety of spatial effects that
cannot be achieved by relying solely on the audience’s or performers’ physi-
cal proximity to the stage or to one another, as composers of acousmatic and
other electronic music have long known. Such effects have been technolog-
ically mediated in opera since at least Moses und Aron (1932), when Arnold
Schoenberg called for the six voices that constitute the burning bush to be

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 Dramaturgies of Trauma 139

separated from each other offstage, “using telephones which will lead through
loudspeakers into the hall where the voices will then coalesce.”24 Such sonic
manipulation is the storytelling role that Luigi Nono referred to as spatial
dramaturgy. Nono developed his notions of theatricality and soundspace in
the electronic pieces he wrote in the 1960s and then adapted those concepts
for stage works.25 Regarding his Prometeo: Tragedia dell’ascolto (Prometheus:
Tragedy of Listening) from the 1980s, he wrote: “Soloists in motion—­sounds
reading the space / creating a new spatial dramaturgy / from the slightest
amount of space subjected to variation / to the whole space totally filled with
live sound and sound elaborated by means of live electronics [. . .] mobile
sounds that read, discover, empty, fill the space.”26
Nono’s journal fragments on Prometeo reveal a preoccupation with
soundspace and the technologies necessary to create and manipulate it for
dramaturgical purposes. His research notes from his work with colleagues in
Freiburg are revealing:

The diffusion in the hall with variously placed loudspeakers in relation to

the six voices (each with a direct microphone) takes into account the space,
still “uniform-­rectangular,” with different itinerant paths that “compose” the
diversity of the signal-­sounds. Active perception is complicated, of course,
but it is “provoked” by the plurality of the sources and the multidimensional-
ity of the acoustic diffusion.
And the space articulates the diffusion and the directionality of the sound
in different ways, becoming a creative component with respect to a single
source.27

Nono treats the mobility, diffusion, and directionality of sound design as a

“creative component,” adapted to a specific venue, to affect a particular spatial
experience in that hall.
Czernowin and IRCAM computer music designer Carlo Laurenzi had
similar priorities for Infinite Now. The meticulous design of amplification
and directionality; extensive use of electronics, filters, and microphones; the
adaptation required for each new venue; and attention to audience percep-
tion all suggest a comparable understanding of the role of sound design for
spatial dramaturgy. In Doctor Atomic, the sound design functions primarily
as verisimilitude; in Infinite Now, it enables an audience member to inhabit
an otherwise impossible space: inside another person (“Imagine that the hall,
the whole space of the hall, is the inside of a head/heart/body. The audience

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 140 contemporary opera in flux

Fig. 6.1. Production photo of Infinite Now, 2017. (© Annemie Augustijns / Opera
Ballet Vlaanderen.)

is immersed in the inner workings of a person who is in a difficult or hopeless

situation”28). I experienced this spatial manipulation most conspicuously in
two ways: the misdirection of amplified voices from the performers onstage,
and the mobility of prerecorded sound.29 In the first instance there were
moments when the singers’ voices were thrown, creating an effect that Jelena
Novak, building on Steven Connor’s theory of ventriloquism and the vocalic
body, might describe as the power of the disembodied voice to disrupt the
perception of space. For example, in act I (m. 235), Trio #1 stood directly in
front of me onstage yet I heard their synthesized meta-­voice emanating from
the sides of the hall. Similarly, near the end of act IV (m. 1142), each voice in
Trio #1 was projected from a different location even though they were stand-
ing together onstage, as a kind of deconstruction of the meta-­voice through
spatial distortion. The distribution of amplified voices is clearly marked in
the score. At the same time Perceval’s overall stage direction, in which stage
performers move at a glacially slow pace, and Bussmann’s stage design, in
which lighting and set changes occur so slowly as to be almost impercepti-
ble, create a sense of temporal distortion (see fig. 6.1). Close coordination of

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 Dramaturgies of Trauma 141

sound design and staging create an immersive environment in which time

and space are disrupted, as if one were immersed in a being who is struggling
with trauma.30
The location and mobility of prerecorded tracks was just as immersive
but less disorienting because, unlike the singers’ physical presence onstage,
there is no visual cue to create directional expectation for the source. The
beginning of act III (m. 546) provides a good example of the precise sound
design: “the wind and train slowly move around the loudspeaker array in a
counterclockwise fashion at an approximate rate of one full revolution per
60″—­200,″” while the “demonstration” sounds move from front to back and
the “lively” track emanates from all four sides of the hall. Another excerpt
from act III (m. 689–­94) shows the circular symbols used to indicate the spa-
tialization of three tracks in the electronics (bird wings, sine tones, waves of
distant cicadas). The spatialization symbols are used in all parts.
The graphic notation for the “bird wings” track in figure 6.2 is a remnant
of Czernowin’s creative process. She began with visualizations of the sounds
she wanted, and then she and Laurenzi used those as the basis for creating
the electronics, much of it musique concrète, at IRCAM.31 The notation is
quite illuminating for score study and useful for reconstructing creative pro-
cess, but probably unnecessary for performance. The audio files are prere-
corded, and the sound engineer relies on explicit IRCAM documentation to
realize their part of the soundscape. These instructions consist of seventeen
pages of lists (required computer music equipment and files), instructions
and diagrams (audio and loudspeaker setup), and screenshots of correct set-
tings.32 Clearly the sound engineer must be every bit as virtuosic as the other
performers in the hall. The document concludes with a prose summary of the
opera’s overall aesthetic, followed by a paragraph for each act describing its
sonic shape. David T. Little and Royce Vavrek’s opera Dog Days (2010), which
is a very different work aesthetically but also fully amplified, includes a similar
summary by sound designer Garth MacAleavy.33 In addition to the technical
specifications outlined in the documentation, these sound design narratives
are important primary sources that could enhance the work of opera studies.
In performance I frequently had the impression that recorded sounds
were moving around me, but in fact that was rarely the case. Laurenzi
explained that that effect was achieved by using multiple static spatial layers,
and clarified that all decisions pertaining to the development of electronics
and their spatiality were guided by “ease of perception” and “musical and dra-
maturgical needs”:

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Fig. 6.2. Act III, mm. 689–­694, from Czernowin’s Infinite Now. (Copyright © 2016 Schott Music
GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz, Germany. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European
American Music Distributors Company, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music GmbH &
Co. KG, Mainz, Germany.)
 Dramaturgies of Trauma 143

Spatialization of sounds, either static placement or dynamic movement, are

to be handled according to these principles. Since Infinite Now has most of
the time very dense orchestral passages, many of the electronic sounds were
designed to occupy specific and static positions in space. That’s why we pre-
pared three kinds of static spatial layers: bi-­dimensional close and far plans,
and a tri-­dimensional medium distant plan, enveloping the entire hall. The
spatial organization of electronic sounds was done, like in a complementary
form of orchestration to the traditional one. . . .
Each sound had to have its different spot and dramaturgically correct
sound quality, from the points of view of spatial location and sound pres-
ence. Locations ranged from little tiny spots in the tri-­dimensional space (the
“Morse” sounds), to medium and wider areas (the “Chinese spoken” parts,
or the “machines” sounds), up to the full 360 degrees of the electroacous-
tic space (the train at the beginning, or the “portal” sounds at the beginning
of each act). Very few sounds were moving, actually, mainly only the “bird
wings” sounds were conceived to be something moving constantly around
the audience. In all the other spots, the perception of dynamic space was
achieved by creating fast alternating appearances of similar sounds from dif-
ferent spots in the space.34

Spatial Dramaturgy in the Theater:

Amplified Breathing and Whispering

Just as the directionality and mobility of sound situated me in an impossible

location (in another person’s head/heart/body), amplified breath and whis-
pering distorted my proximity to the performers onstage and created an
impossible sense of intimacy. Isabella van Elferen notes that “scholarly debate
on timbre tends to focus either on the material aspects of timbral production
or on the perception of timbral sonorities,” and in this section I undertake a
bit of both.35 Czernowin writes for three vocal modes: breathing, singing, and
talking. I will focus on the mode that is least indigenous to opera, which is
breath “as a fully developed instrument” of its own, and as the key component
of breathy vocalizations.36 The singer’s breath is not just the imperceptible
foundation of good bel canto technique. The color of the breath, as shaped
by her body’s unique physiology, is as important as the timbres of her sung
and spoken tones; “the sound of the breath is an equal partner to that of
the voice.”37 Breath is integral to Infinite Now’s sound world, and recordings

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 144 contemporary opera in flux

of wind and breathing also feature prominently in the electronics. (In fact,
Breath was at one time the working title of Infinite Now.)
In the 1960s and 1970s, intrepid musicians with formal vocal training
such as Bethany Beardslee, Cathy Berberian, Joan La Barbara, Meredith
Monk, and Yoko Ono experimented with extended technique that included
breathy vocalizations: unvoiced phonemes, whispering, half-­singing, audible
inhaling and exhaling, ingressive phonation, etc.38 These sounds can be highly
effective in many contexts (the recording studio, singing a cappella, or with
small ensembles in live performance), but live opera with large instrumental
forces poses a challenge. Amplification is required to render breathy vocaliza-
tions audible. Czernowin argues that this is an asset, claiming that “amplified
breath is an untapped and rich musical resource.”39 When such utterances
carry text with semantic meaning, they require additional mediation in the
form of projected titles to communicate.
Large opera houses typically use discreet sound enhancement systems
to bolster singing voices in a natural-­sounding way, but the amplification in
Infinite Now is conspicuous by design. Close miking of breathy vocalizations
so that they are as present as the operatic singing voice has several ramifica-
tions. First, amplification extends the range of vocal timbre available to opera
creators, be it for sonic exploration or emotional expression, just as it chal-
lenges operagoers to expand their conception of the operatic voice. Second,
it foregrounds the singing body by making audible the physical labor that
is concealed by bel canto technique (inhalation). Third, there is a particular
tension inherent in the sound of amplified breathing and whispering when
it emanates from live performers onstage rather than from the electronics.
Brandon LaBelle writes that whispering “hovers at the end of the audible
spectrum as a subtracted orality that subsequently aims for those who are
nearby (or for oneself only). It is to speak so not everyone will hear, envel-
oping conversation in secrecy, intimacy, and confidentiality.”40 Furthermore,
he states, “while physiologically whispering may be defined as ‘unvoiced,’
from a cultural perspective it might be understood more as a ‘meta-­voice’ . . .”
Perhaps this explains why, even in a completely mediated environment, the
amplified whisper commanded my listening consciousness whenever it was
present. Audible breathing implies proximity, and whispering is understood
to be private. Amplification forces intimacy.
Czernowin’s choice of vocal mode was determined by what she wanted
to highlight in the text at any given moment.41 Roughly half the vocalizing
for the two singing trios in Infinite Now consists of breathy vocalizations.

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 Dramaturgies of Trauma 145

Some such passages convey text with semantic content (e.g., mm. 88–­98 in
act I) and some do not (e.g., mm. 863–­867 in act IV), just as there is the rare
segment that is nearly entirely sung with words (mm. 885–­928 in act IV) and
others that are mostly sung vowels and voiced consonants without (e.g., mm.
1723–­63 in act VI).42 Most of the time, voiced and breathy vocalizations are
woven together in continuous lines, what Czernowin calls “a unified vocal
experience.” This unified experience is necessarily different for the listener
than for the singer, who continuously negotiates the technical demands of
shifting vocal modes in performance.
The vocal climaxes of Infinite Now illustrate the vocal variety and under-
score the primacy of amplified breath. (I would argue that the overall sonic
and dramatic pinnacle is the extended storm scene in act V, which is almost
entirely instrumental and electronic; perhaps another useful category for
analysis might be those operas whose climaxes are not vocal.) As previously
noted, the singers perform almost exclusively in one of two trios, each of
which functions collectively as a unison meta-­voice. A conspicuous excep-
tion occurs in act IV, approximately 75 minutes into the work (m. 885), when
the contralto from Trio 2 performs the only aria in the piece. Her text is a seg-
ment of seven contiguous sentences taken from “Homecoming,” the longest
section Czernowin adopted as a unit from that source, when the protagonist
fully realizes she is trapped. Over the course of forty-­three measures the vocal
range extends from D3 to G5, and the vocal timbres run the gamut of voiced
and breathy vocalizations. Aside from the fact that the contralto dwells for
extended periods at both ends of her range, the most conspicuous aspect for
the listener is the frequent interpolation of gasps between words, all notated.
The second vocal climax at the end of the opera is the opposite of the
first: it is quiet, scored for both trios rather than a soloist, and has no seman-
tic content. It is also defined by breath, but not in the same way. An actor
recites the passage from All Quiet on the Western Front in which the protag-
onist realizes that life became more precious than ever during the horrific
final days of the war: “oh, Leben, Leben, Leben!” (Just before m. 1783; 2:26 in
the video). This is followed by an extraordinary moment in which the two
trios, functioning as a homophonic sextet for the only time (mm. 1787–­1843),
emerge from the electronic soundscape. The sextet’s fully sung unison E’s at
m. 1788, m. 1808, and m. 1828 may deliver the biggest sonic shock of the eve-
ning. Czernowin describes this as her “favorite tune” in the opera, observing
that perceptible repetition, predictable rhythms, and lack of distortion feel
very pleasurable after such protracted tension, and they mark the moment

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Fig. 6.3. Act IV, mm. 885–­89, from Czernowin’s Infinite Now. (Copyright © 2016 Schott Music

E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2024, [Link]

GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz, Germany. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European
American Music Distributors Company, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music GmbH
& Co. KG, Mainz, Germany.)
 Dramaturgies of Trauma 147

at which the possibility of life begins to emerge in each source text.43 The
singers have phonemes only, as if the life force is so new it is still in a prelin-
guistic phase, rendered across the gamut of voiced and breathy vocalizations.
Breath is also prominent in the electronics, life’s essence audibly present at
its re-­emergence.
Lachenmann’s vocal writing in Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern
may provide a point of comparison. He had written for voice only once
before, experimenting with extended vocal techniques as sheer instrumen-
tal sonority in the chamber work temA (1968) for mezzo-­soprano, flute, and
cello. The title is a play on the German word for breath (Atem), and it makes
extensive use of breathy vocalizations to focus on the “non-­semantic abilities
of vocal intonations to communicate on the threshold of perception.”44 Even
then, Lachenmann noted that others had already been working on the phe-
nomenon of “breathing as an acoustically transmitted energy process” (Ligeti,
Holliger, Globokar, Kagel, Schnebel, and Stockhausen). In the opera Das
Mädchen, thirty years later, the amplified soprano soloists and other vocal-
ists whisper consonants and plosive sounds.45 Lachenmann later expressed
qualms about writing for the voice. “[W]ith one singing voice the personality
of the person who sings is so beautiful and intense with personality—­what
should I do as a composer? The sounds are already full of intensity before I
even write one note—­this was a problem for me.”46
Czernowin made a similar observation, noting how “problematic it is to
write for the voice, because we are so connected to the voice, and because
of this it gets always a patina of pathos that we have absolutely no control
of, and I hate that pathos.”47 Even so, Infinite Now is a long opera featuring a
wide range of vocality, and my compulsion to attend to the amplified whisper
suggests that said “pathos” remains intact even without the sung tone. This
aspect of the sound design reconfigured my experience of theatrical space
by placing me in impossibly intimate proximity to those onstage because, to
paraphrase LaBelle, amplified breathy vocalization is a meta-­voice. And, as
such, it is not neutral. The amplified gasps notated in the first vocal climax
described above force a particular intimacy because this type of ingressive
phonation elicits such a visceral involuntary response in a listener raised
in western art music traditions.48 It is strongly correlated with trauma and
appears to have a gendered component to it. (The correlation with trauma
does not hold true in Inuit throat singing, for example, which is also primar-
ily associated with women; even so, listening with my white settler ears does
not elicit the same involuntary response, perhaps because gasping is prev-

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 148 contemporary opera in flux

alent in that practice rather than an isolated, contrasting event.) Consider

the gasp in Damien Ricketsen and Adena Jacobs’s experimental opera The
Howling Girls (2018); its use in a more conventional recent opera like Kamala
Sankaram’s Thumbprint (2014), in which amplified sharp inhalations sonify
a sexual assault without words, music, or explicit staging; or the most scru-
tinized moment in all of Hamilton, which is the way the show ends—­with
Eliza gasping.49

Conclusion

Czernowin and her team took full advantage of the extraordinary resources
that accompany a major international commission: guaranteed performances
at prestigious institutions in three countries, access to state-­of-­the-­art tech-
nology for creation and performance, and collaborations with elite artists.
Most experimental operas emerge from a much leaner environment, but
the dramaturgies of composite libretti and spatialized sound design can be
scaled, and they may serve storytelling purposes other than trauma. Many
works are designed to exist outside the theater both as a space and as an insti-
tution, in which case the technical specifications of sound design will vary
considerably, but its function—­to create, manipulate, and activate the spatial
dimension of the audience’s experience—­is always relevant for creators and
scholars alike.
Notes
I am grateful to Chaya Czernowin, Noa Frenkel, and Carlo Laurenzi for their generosity,
and to many colleagues for assistance: Richard Beaudoin, Ryan Dohoney, Emily Dolan,
Ryan Ebright, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Freya Jarman, Elfyn Jones, Megan Steigerwald Ille, Ari-
ana Philips-­Hutton, Colleen Renihan, Anne Shreffler, Eva Van Daele, Guojun Wang, and
Heidy Zimmermann.
1. [Link] (accessed June 7, 2023).
2. Nicolas Demertzis and Ron Eyerman, “Covid-­19 as Cultural Trauma,” American
Journal of Cultural Sociology 8 (2020): 428–­50. [Link]
1290-020-00112-z
3. [Link]
4. Translation by Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang in Conjunctions 28 (1997): 101–­8.
5. [Link]
6. Hans-­Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-­Munby (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 21.
7. Jelena Novak, Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-­Body (London: Ashgate, 2015), 25.

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 Dramaturgies of Trauma 149

8. [Link] When a soloist does emerge, it is the

middle voice of the trio.
9. Lingchei Letty Chen, “Writing Historical Traumas in the Everyday,” in A Companion
to Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 457.
10. Emanuele Senici, Music in the Present Tense: Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 225.
11. Martin Iddon, “Giving Adam Voice: Troubling Gender and Identity in W.A. Mozart’s
Zaïde and Chaya Czernowin’s Adama,” in Masculinity in Opera: Gender, History, and a
New Musicology, ed. Philip Purvis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 168.
12. Ryan Ebright, “Doctor Atomic or: How John Adams Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love Sound Design,” Cambridge Opera Journal 31, no. 1 (2019): 87.
13. Elfyn Jones, “Sound Design for the Opera Composer: Concepts and Methods” (PhD
thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2022), 4. Open Access at [Link]
.uk/id/eprint/31575/. He demonstrates the five modalities in three operas he composed as
part of his doctoral project. See also Elfyn Jones, “The Trilobite, or The Fall of Mr. Williams:
Opera with Integrated Sound,” Sonic Scope, October 27, 2021, [Link]
f840a4.3187fd8b
14. Ebright, “Doctor Atomic,” 85–­86. His clarion call for opera studies to interrogate the
role of sound design is critical to the vitality and even the legitimacy of the field. It should
be noted that electroacoustic sound is not only for spatial dramaturgy. For example, Kaija
Saariaho uses filters in L’amour de loin as subtle enhancements to the orchestra, but their
primary function is not dimensional.
15. Yayoi Uno Everett, Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera:
Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, Tan Dun (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2015), 41–­80.
16. Czernowin, interview with WhatsApp, August 14, 2020.
17. Megan Steigerwald Ille is the leading scholar of Sharon’s oeuvre. See Ille, “Live in the
Limo: Remediating Voice and Performing Spectatorship in 21st-­Century Opera,” Opera
Quarterly 36, nos. 1–­2 (2021): 1–­26, and especially her forthcoming book, Opera for Every-
one: Experimenting with American Opera in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2024). See also Gundula Kreuzer, “Butterflies on Sweet Land? Reflections
on Opera at the Edges of History,” Representations 154 (2021): 69–­86.
18. Katherine Young, “Nothing Is as It Appears: Anthony Braxton’s Trillium J” (DMA
dissertation, Northwestern University Bienen School of Music, 2017), 88.
19. Bianca Michaels, “Is This Still Opera? Media Operas as Productive Provocations,” in
The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music Theatre as Experience and Performance, ed. Dominic
Symonds and Pamela Karantonis (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 25–­38.
20. [Link] See also Joy H. Calico, “White Snake Projects, Death by
Life, and Q&A with Composer David Sanford,” May 20, 2021. [Link]
[Link]/forum/2021/05/20/white-snake-projects-death-by-life-may-2021-and-qa-with​
-composer-david-sanford/
21. Opera Quarterly 34, no. 4 (2018).
22. Jonathan Cross, “Musical Spectra, l’espace sensible and Contemporary Opera,”
Twentieth-­Century Music 15, no. 1 (2018): 107.

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 150 contemporary opera in flux

23. Arman Schwartz, “Puccini, in the Distance,” Cambridge Opera Journal 23, no. 3
(2011): 167–­89. Schwartz’s analysis focuses on “musical effects of echoing and distance,”
what he calls “a poetics of distance” in his later operas that is less literal than the ambient
offstage noise cited above. Schwartz, “Puccini, in the Distance,” 169 and 170, respectively.
24. Carola Nielinger-­Vakil cites the Schoenberg example in a discussion of spatiality in
Luigi Nono: A Composer in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 91.
25. Andrea Santini, “Multiplicity-­Fragmentation-­Simultaneity: Sound-­Space as a Con-
veyer of Meaning, and Theatrical Roots in Luigi Nono’s Early Spatial Practice,” Journal of
the Royal Musical Association 137, no. 1 (2012): 71–­106.
26. Luigi Nono letter to Renzo Piano, cited in English translation in Nielinger-­Vakil,
Luigi Nono, 193. Emphasis in the citation. Prometeo was composed 1981–­84 and revised in
1985.
27. Luigi Nono, Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono’s Selected Writings and Interviews,
ed. Angela De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2018), 242, 243.
28. [Link] There is a slightly
different version of this statement on Czernowin’s website [Link]
inite-now
29. I attended the final dress rehearsal (a complete run-­through) at the Mannheim
National Theatre on May 25, 2017.
30. Czernowin, interview with WhatsApp, August 14, 2020. These events occur at
approximately 0:18 and 1:35 respectively in the video recording of the 2017 production. It
streamed on OperaVision in 2020 but is not commercially available as of this writing. I am
very grateful to Czernowin for sharing it with me.
31. Laurenzi, email correspondence, December 27, 2020. I am very grateful for his
assistance.
32. The documentation is licensed under Creative Commons license BY-­NC-­ND 4.0.
IRCAM Archive service “Sidney” at [Link]. Peter MacMurray observed that the
technological requirements constitute “an interesting kind of excess that’s different from
standard operatic excess” (email to the author, June 21, 2021). Ryan Ebright astutely noted
that notating the electronics might also be an attempt to thwart technological obsolescence.
33. See the “tech info” tab at [Link] Hiring a sound
engineer is a prerequisite for renting the parts of Dog Days for performance.
34. Laurenzi, email correspondence, December 27, 2020.
35. Isabella van Elferen, “Agency, Aporia, Approaches: How Does Musicology Solve a
Problem Like Timbre?” Contemporary Music Review 36, no. 6 (2017) [Link]
[Link]/doi/full/10.1080/07494467.2017.1452685
36. Chaya Czernowin, “The Primal, the Abstracted and the Foreign: Composing for the
Voice,” Contemporary Music Review 34, nos. 5–­6 (2015): 449–­63; 461. She explores singers’
breath in several “Etudes in fragility for voice and breath,” Adiantum Capillus-­Veneris I, II,
and III (2015–­2016). See also Joy H. Calico, “Breathing and Gasping,” [Link]
[Link]/2022/04/28/breathing-and-gasping/
37. Czernowin, “The Primal,” 449.
38. The extraordinary contributions these women made to contemporary music are

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 Dramaturgies of Trauma 151

increasingly recognized. See Pamela Karantonis, Francesca Placanica, Anne Sivuoja-­

Kauppala, and Pieter Verstraete, eds., Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality
(London: Routledge, 2014), and Tempo 76, no. 301 (2022), a special issue of the journal
honoring Joan La Barbara’s 75th birthday.
39. Czernowin, “The Primal,” 461. David Lang’s the whisper opera (2013) poses a direct
challenge to the fetishization of the operatic voice. He does not permit the work to be
amplified or recorded.
40. Brandon LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral
Imaginary (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 148.
41. Czernowin, video conversation with WhatsApp, August 14, 2020.
42. Her opera Pnima has only phonemes and other vocalizations because “words would
have been too defined and the music would have had to struggle with the finality of the
words.” Czernowin, “The Primal,” 453.
43. Approximately 1:45 in the IRCAM master class she gave on June 24, 2017. [Link]
[Link]/watch?v=xHMF6UIirlQ. Further details emerged in a WhatsApp video
conversation with Czernowin, August 14, 2020.
44. Piotr Grella-­Możejko, “Helmut Lachenmann—­Style, Sound, Text,” Contemporary
Music Review 24, no. 1 (2010): 70.
45. Joy H. Calico, “Opera as Resistance: The Little Match Girl and the Terrorist in
Helmut Lachenmann’s Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern,” in Art and Resistance in Ger-
many, ed. Elizabeth Otto and Deborah Barnstone (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 221.
46. Cited in Jessica Aszodi, “Got Lost: Embodied Vocal Performance at the Junction of
Autoethnography and Practice-­Based Research,” in Creative Selves / Creatives Cultures:
Critical Autoethnography, Performance, and Pedagogy, ed. Stacy Holman Jones and Marc
Pruyn (Cham Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), 199.
47. [Link]
rnowin-et-le-violoncelliste-pierre-strauch/ at approximately 2:36. On vocal pathos and the
body, see also Sarit Ashley-Zondiner, “Striving for the Underneath: Body and Pathos in
Chaya Czernowin’s Composition for Voice in Infinite Now and Heart Chamber,” Tempo 77,
no. 305 (July 2023): 44–59.
48. For a thorough analysis of the full range of ingressive phonation (of which gasping is
a subset) from the perspective of vocal pedagogy and performance, see Amanda DeBoer,
“Ingressive Phonation in Contemporary Vocal Music” (DMA diss., Bowling Green State
University, 2012).
49. Perhaps further research building on Novak’s theorizing of the body-­voice gap
in conjunction with Amy Bauer’s work on the failure of language would yield additional
insights. Bauer, “Contemporary Opera and the Failure of Language,” in The Routledge
Research Companion to Modernism in Music, ed. Björn Heile and Charles Wilson (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2019), 427–­53. Ariana Philips-­Hutton and Richard Beaudoin are working
on separate projects about the gasp as well; see Beaudoin, “Dashon Burton’s Song Sermon:
Corporeal Liveness and the Solemnizing Breath,” Journal of the Society for American Music
16, no. 1 (2022): 1–­23.

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 7

Inter-­Asia Sensibility
Vocality and Materiality in
Tan Dun’s Tea: A Mirror of Soul
Nancy Yunhwa Rao

I met Tan Dun in New York City and I asked him, “Why me?” He said, “I’ve
had two directors direct the piece. Both were Europeans. They tried to make
Asia have a mysterious image.”
—­Amon Miyamoto, director of Tea: A Mirror of Soul
(Santa Fe Opera, 2007)

This predilection for a non-­mysterious representation of Asia on the opera

stage might seem merely a composer’s staging preference. Yet behind the
seemingly innocuous exchange is a profound critique, as well as Tan’s yearn-
ing to be seen. Although scholars have scrutinized the racial stereotypes of
Asia in canonic European operas and reviewers have criticized orientalist
tropes such as yellowface production,1 their efforts have not steered toward a
greater understanding or exploration of Asia from an Asian composer’s per-
spective.2 “Invisibility,” as I noted elsewhere, “is the constant state of not being
seen, even when the object of study.”3
Quoted by Miyamoto in an interview, Tan Dun’s remark reveals an intense
desire for an “inter-­Asia” cultural sphere and sensibility to be seen and felt on
the opera stage.4 With the notion of “inter-­Asia,” I propose an approach that
recenters the analysis outside the Anglo-­American axis and constructs an
inter-­Asia subjectivity. In this chapter, I argue that an inter-­Asia sensibility
constructs the conceptual space of the opera and shapes the sonic, textual,
and visual imagination of the opera.

152

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 Inter-­Asia Sensibility 153

The inter-­Asia sensibility is made poignant in the 2007 Santa Fe production

of Tan Dun’s Tea: A Mirror of Soul. Its director, Amon Miyamoto, a dancer
and producer of musicals based in Tokyo, was supported by an all-­Japanese
production team, and the production is distinguished by the theatricality of
musicals and Japanese sensibility. It is the first design in the seven productions
of Tea that distinguishes Japanese from Chinese customs in its dramaturgi-
cal conception. Prince Seikyo’s sumptuous costumes take their cue from haori
hakama, traditional formal attire for Japanese males; Chinese characters’ cos-
tumes draw from Chinese robes with large and wide sleeves. The painting of
enormous peonies is used as the backdrop, a flower that symbolizes wealth,
nobility, bravery, and honor in both Chinese and Japanese culture. Together
with the lush, red-­colored stage, this production depicts the decadent golden
era of the Tang dynasty and its transient beauty. Rich symbolism characterizes
the production as a whole, such as the staging of shadow puppetry depicting
the famous Chinese legend of Journey to the West and the use of a large circular
ornamental design for the Chinese character of “shuang xi” (“double happi-
ness”) as an auspicious symbol of marriage. The profound inter-­Asia sensitivity
is made vivid in the presentation of the shared-­but-­different cultures. Miyamo-
to’s production befits an opera that intently explores inter-­Asia sensibility, an
important impetus behind Tan Dun’s conception of Tea.
This chapter situates the analytical approach of Tan Dun’s Tea in a man-
ner responsive to the local and regional in the heterogeneous Asia. By explor-
ing elements inspired by different modes of inter-­Asia connection, this chap-
ter examines the multifaceted ways that inspiration from such a connection
came to form the basis of the opera, determining the kind of story to be told
and the sonic expressions that can be distilled or sculptured. I argue that
Tea: A Mirror of Soul engages in a radical “inter-­Asia imagining.” Through
this process, Tan Dun expresses his vision of music theater and explores new
sonorities and sonic designs. Premiered in 2002, Tea is arguably Tan’s most
important opera. Heidi Waleson pinpointed the essential quality of the opera
as follows: “effectively integrat[es] a Western orchestra and singers with the
water, paper and ceramic percussion sounds that are the composer’s trade-
mark. These sounds, played by three onstage percussionists, not only created
their own magical realm in the opera but fit elegantly with the careful orches-
tration, so that the harp, flute, or string colors coming from the pit provided
both context and contrast.”5
With “inter-­Asia imaginings,” the opera’s conceptual space draws on his-
torical, social, and geographical connections in northeast Asia. The musical

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 154 contemporary opera in flux

language, vocality, and imagery that Tan forged also reflects inter-­Asia sen-
sibility in the visual, kinesthetic, and sonic dimensions of this opera. In this
chapter, I will explore these issues in two parts. In part I, by considering the
space and the story of the opera and three layers of significance, I examine
how the inter-­Asia sensibility forms the basis of the opera. In part II, I con-
sider the ways in which an amalgamation of Tan Dun’s sonic creations from
the previous decade, which include the elements (water, paper, and earth)
and vocality, and a distinctive notion of musical gestures shape the opera with
sonic imageries closely linked to the inter-­Asia space of the libretto. The con-
clusion reflects on the role of inter-­Asia sensibility in contemporary music
analysis.
Tan Dun emerged in the contemporary music scene in the last decade of
the twentieth century. After moving to New York in the late 1980s, he quickly
became active and contributed to the synergy of Lower Manhattan’s art
scene, composing for dance groups and experimental theaters. His distinctive
sonic imagination was complemented by a theatrical sensibility sharpened in
the era of Model Opera (the primary art form during China’s Cultural Revo-
lution), when he gained experiences as a young adult working with regional
dance and theater troupes in Hunan province. He has the incredible spark
of the creative energy of what I call, “sonic imaginary after Cultural Revolu-
tion,” which many among his cohort shared.6 His talent stood out. In the span
of two weeks in December 1991, the New York Times published two music
reviews on Tan Dun, both by its chief critic Edward Rothstein. A shrewd
title, “A Shaman Without Religion,” led Rothstein’s second, glowing review.7 It
encapsulated Tan Dun’s distinctive characteristics that would come to mes-
merize audiences for decades to come.
Opera as a genre prospered in America during the last decades of the
twentieth century. It was the beginning of a growing trend; the number of
American opera premieres jumped from 100 (1980–­89) to near 250 (1990–­
99).8 The 1980s saw many important American opera premieres, including
Akhnaten (1984) by Philip Glass; Nixon in China (1987) by John Adams; X,
or The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986) by Anthony Davis; Europeras I &
II (1987) by John Cage, and The Cave (1993) by Steve Reich. Glass pointed to
the important shift in contemporary opera as follows: “There’s been a real
revolution in the world of music theater. My perception is that the world of
progressive theater has found its way into the world of the opera house. . . .
You’re getting people who don’t come from the world of repertory opera,
but they come from the world of progressive experimental theater, and they

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 Inter-­Asia Sensibility 155

are bringing what they know about theater to the world of opera.”9 Glass’s
general assessment could not be more fitting for Tan Dun. In the variegated
and vibrant scenes of contemporary opera, Tan was given significant oppor-
tunities to bring together a multitude of sounds, genres, materials, visual arts,
philosophies, and aesthetic ideals. They were essential to his previous opera,
Marco Polo (1995), as well as works such as Water Concerto for Percussion
(1998) and Water Passion After St. Matthew (2000), which were commis-
sioned by prominent music institutions in Europe and North America.

Space, Story, and Significances

Space

Tea: A Mirror of Soul was unique in its locality. Inter-­Asia sensibility was at
the heart of this commission from the start. Tea was commissioned by Sun-
tory Hall in Tokyo in 1997 and dedicated to its founder, Keizo Saji, when it
was completed in 2002. This was the second commission that Tan received
from Suntory Hall; his Orchestral Theatre II: Re (1993) was commissioned by
its international program on composition, directed by Tōru Takemitsu.10 The
commission of Tea was particularly significant for Tan Dun. Symbolically, it
connected Tan, a Chinese composer on the rise in the international scene, to
a prominent East Asian composer, Takemitsu, who passed away in 1996. As
a performing venue, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall is not only a prestigious cultural
institution, but also provides a unique performing space. In describing the
space of Suntory Hall, Toshio Hosokawa invokes the notion of “a superb can-
vas”: “I call my music a calligraphy of sound on space and time. [. . .] What I
mean by calligraphy of sound is that when I write lines of ‘sound,’ I consider
many things such as the thickness and softness of the lines. This hall allows
us to pick up on these delicate changes in sound.”11
Hosokawa’s invocation of calligraphy points to the prominent cultural
inspiration of the unique space. For Tan, therefore, this opera commission
was inculcated with Asian sensibility and cultural associations, uniquely
binding him to an important cultural center in East Asia.
As a “hall opera,” Tea was also conceptualized differently from regular
operas. The limited physical space of the stage espoused an intimacy, suited
to Tan Dun’s ritual of sound, space, silence, and his experimental theater.
He mentioned its similarity to “Greek plays, Chinese festive ceremonies and

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 156 contemporary opera in flux

operas, or the Noh and Kyogen traditions of Japan.”12 For the opera’s premiere,
Het Muziektheater was a co-­commissioner. Tan worked with Pierre Audi as
stage director, Jean Kalman as stage designer, and Angelo Figus as costume
designer. Even though the costumes were of epic scale in the mythical realm,
including attire of exaggerated shapes and neon color schemes for the main
characters, the set design quietly acknowledged the distinctly Asian space.
Kalman’s stage design used large sloping and angled walkways that occu-
pied the hall’s long rectangular stage. In critic Ken Smith’s words, “Kalman’s
simple walkways of overlapping wooden planks actually form the linguistic
character ‘ru’ (‘enter’), a poignant multilingual frame for scenes involving
either love or death.”13 This Chinese character 入 can be profoundly sugges-
tive. This reading was echoed by other critics and by Tan himself. At the same
time, the placement of the planks recalls the stage of the Noh theater. The
strikingly positioned angled walkway is reminiscent of the iconic bridgeway
of traditional Noh theater, hashigakari, which runs at an oblique angle off
the main stage. It traditionally represents the space that divides the realm
of the dead and the living. The back of the stage in Noh theater, known as
the ato-­za, is reserved for instrumentalists who are essential to the presenta-
tion of Noh, a tradition that also informed Tan’s placement of three percus-
sion players on stage.14 Regardless, the premiere’s stage design tapped into
the Asian sensibility of the Suntory Hall. In its spatial design the interac-
tions among singers, chorus, and instrumentalists in close proximity were
perceived as a whole, and the conception of the orchestra as an actor in the
drama could be realized.15

Story

Tea’s libretto was authored primarily by Xu Ying, a Chinese opera practi-

tioner and playwright at China National Opera and Dance Theatre. Xu met
Tan Dun and began their collaboration while residing in New York from
1996 to 1998 on a cultural exchange fellowship. The initial conception of Tea
was undefined and open, such that the liberty was nearly stifling to the play-
wright. After pondering on the gist of “tea” for nearly a year, Xu recalled later,
he had an epiphany: the essence of the opera is in the title, that is, the ulti-
mate relationship between humans and nature. The pictogram of the Chinese
character for “tea” 茶 from top to bottom is made up of “plant-­human-­wood,”
草-­人-­木, suggesting a harmonious relationship between man and nature, a
way of life.

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 Inter-­Asia Sensibility 157

With this interpretive logic, the notion of tea serves as an impetus for
contemplation of elements of nature and the essence of life. The subject mat-
ter is ideal for an opera commission from a revered institution in Asia, whose
tea has a profound history. The creators made a classic treatise, The Book of
Tea (760–­762 CE) by Tang dynasty’s Lu Yu, the focal point and used the his-
torical passage made by Imperial envoys between Japan and China of Tang
dynasty as the backdrop. The opera draws attention to the complexity of tea
and explores existential questions through the efficacy of tea. They developed
an inter-­Asia story revolving around the romance between the Chinese prin-
cess Lan and the Japanese prince/monk Seikyo, and the meddling of Lan’s
jealous brother. The plot is filled with operatic archetypes such as dueling
desires, conflicts, and lament, but is mainly set up to explore and reveal the
ethos of tea, its materiality, and the purity and spirituality of its essence.
The opera opens in the scene of a ninth-­century monastery in Kyoto,
where an ascetic tea ceremony is taking place. Seikyo, the Japanese prince-­
cum-­high monk, sips from an empty bowl of tea. When asked by others why
he savors this tea of emptiness, the high monk relates a decade-­old tragedy
that continues to torment him. As a young prince, he traveled to China to
pursue love and tea. The opera then shifts to the location of Chang An, the
Chinese capital of the Tang dynasty, where the palace is busy enjoying family
puppet theater with siblings playing characters from Monkey: Journey to the
West. Seikyo enters to propose marriage to Chinese Princess Lan, honoring
a prior promise. The emperor tests Seikyo on composing poems and cou-
plets, using tea as the theme. Seikyo’s brilliant answers win him the emperor’s
approval of the marriage proposal, to which Lan consents. With the nup-
tial agreement, the preparation of a tea ceremony is announced, but Lan’s
brother, the prince, vehemently disapproves, loathing the rupture it would
bring to the family union. Meanwhile, the female ritualist enters to announce
the wish of a Persian merchant to trade a thousand horses for The Book of
Tea held by the prince. Seikyo, however, declares the Book fraudulent, noting
that the real Book was written by the tea sage Lu Yu. The indignant prince
dares Seikyo to find Lu Yu to validate his claim; the one proven wrong must
surrender his life. Seikyo accepts the bet. Lan is horrified, afraid that she will
lose either Seikyo or her brother, and begs them to revoke the bet, but to no
avail. In act II, Seikyo and Lan begin a journey searching for Lu Yu. Their love
grows in a buoyant mood as they contemplate the sensuality of tea, its scent,
feel, glow, etc. Their lovemaking is mixed with the bliss of fragrant teas. In act
III, they reach the tea sage’s daughter, who reveals Lu Yu’s death. The daughter

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 158 contemporary opera in flux

consents to give them the Book on the condition that they promise to spread
its wisdom throughout the world. Seikyo rejoices while Lan becomes terrified
of losing her brother. But the prince bursts in to snatch the Book and a fight
erupts, during which Lan is mortally wounded. The despondent prince sur-
renders his life to Seikyo. Instead of slaying the prince, Seikyo seeks austere
peace in the monastery. In the final scene the chanting of monks returns. In
a Japanese tea garden, the high monk Seikyo raises the empty teapot, passes
the empty tea bowl, and savors the emptiness within.16

Three Layers of Inter-­Asia Significance

Tea is embedded in layers of significance associated with China and Japan’s

shared history and culture. First is the famous historical period of cultural
interaction between the two countries, the Tang dynasty, a high point in
Chinese civilization, and a golden age of cosmopolitan culture. Tang China
is known as a critical time for cultural transmission to Japan. During the
dynasty, the two countries established agreements, and the Japanese court
appointed official envoys to China. Fourteen missions completed the arduous
journey to and from the Chinese capital, Chang An. The missions brought
back elements of the Tang civilization that profoundly affected Japan’s gov-
ernment, culture, and religion. The missions were large, sometimes number-
ing up to six hundred individuals, and among their members were princes,
students, and monks. Japanese embassies to China transported raw materials
and a variety of silk textiles and exchanged them for Chinese goods, such as
books, musical instruments, religious writings, and Buddhist images.17 Simi-
larly, the calligraphy of Chinese masters was also transmitted from China to
Japan and became its finest art tradition.18 The opera draws its inspiration
from this shared history. The Tang dynasty setting of the opera’s plot gestures
toward this prominent era of China-­Japan cultural exchange.
Tea constitutes another critical layer of significance. In both Chinese and
Japanese societies tea is not only a daily necessity, but also a work of art, asso-
ciated with exquisiteness and manifesting itself in the spiritual and aesthetic
realm. Lu Yu’s The Book of Tea is the first seminal work that explores both the
mythological and pragmatic aspects of tea.19 Its ten chapters systematically
introduce the history, production origins, efficacy, cultivation, harvesting,
processing, brewing/infusing methods, and drinking of tea.20
Lu Yu’s The Book of Tea initiated the discourse on tea culture and had a
strong influence on Japanese tea masters such as Murata Jukō (1473–­1502)

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 Inter-­Asia Sensibility 159

and Rikyū (1522–­1591), who developed and codified the way of tea, chadō
茶道, which continued to evolve and develop through several schools. It is
regarded as one of the classical Japanese arts of refinement. In 1906, Okak-
ura Kakuzō, a Japanese scholar in Boston, wrote, “Tea with us became more
than an idealization of the form of drinking, it is a religion of the art of life,
. . . an excuse for the worship of purity and refinement.”21 In China, the culture
of tea began in medieval China with Buddhist monastics, later spreading to
the literati and wider population. By Tang dynasty, the practice of tea con-
noisseurship became a marker of wealth, status, leisure, and good taste. The
process of making tea evolved from simmering fresh leaves to simmering
processed loose tea, then fermented tea, and to dried tea in the form of cakes.
Poets and literati idealized spiritual and nonmaterial way of life through the
practice of tea. As historian James Benn notes, “the physiological properties
of tea—­heightened sensitivity, concentration of mind, prolonged states of
wakefulness—­were interpreted in religious terms as well as medical ones.”22
Tan’s choice of this cultural symbol for the Suntory commission signaled his
commitment to an inter-­Asia pursuit.
Tan gives compelling expression to the elements and spirit of tea. Much of
what Lu Yu details in the chapters, matters of tea that include its attributes and
instruments, constitute important sources of inspiration to the composer. Tan
references organic elements such as water, paper, ceramic, wind, and stone—­
integral to the ritual and ceremony of tea in Japan and China—­and explores
their sonic, visual, and symbolic significance. Water, wind, fire, and earthware
are subject matters central to Lu Yu’s book, as shown in table 7.1.
The third layer of significance is the spirituality of Zen Buddhism philos-
ophy and Taoism shared between China and Japan. The spirit of “tea” extends
beyond the physiological aspects of tea drinking to its ritual attributes, its
potential for eradicating suffering from the past, purifying the self, and ele-
vating the mind. Thus the philosophy of tea—­cultivating one’s mind, body,
and soul altogether—­is closely connected with Zen Buddhism philosophy.
Kakuzō makes this point particularly clear, bringing attention to Zenism,
Buddhism, and Taoism in his book. The search for The Book of Tea, therefore,
symbolizes the search for the truth. In addition, the story of Journey to the
West in the mise-­en-­scène centers around a westward quest in search of the
truth and wisdom of the Buddhist Sutra, a spiritual quest that parallels the
search for its spiritual truth in The Book of Tea.
Finally, “emptiness” is repeatedly referenced in the opera, a most import-
ant concept in Zen philosophy and Taoism alike. This may be a particularly

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 160 contemporary opera in flux

Table 7.1. Summary of The Book of Tea, by Lu Yu

The Book of Tea 茶經 chajing

One: The Origin of Tea (一之源) introduces geographical regions, harvest seasons,
and growing methods in relation to tea quality
Two: Tools of Tea Production (二之具) introduces fifteen tools for picking, steaming,
pressing, drying, and storing tea
Three: Process of Producing Tea introduces methods of picking, processing, classi-
(三之造) fying, and differentiating for the steamed green tea
Four: Tea Wares (四之器) describes twenty-­eight items used in the brewing
and drinking of tea, their names, shapes, struc-
tures, sizes, producing methods, and purposes of
the tea wares for brewing and drinking tea, and
their impact on tea
Five: Tea Brewing/ Infusing Methods describes ideal water for tea brewing and proper
(五之煮) flame and heat condition for tea boiling, as well
as different phases of water boiling and methods
affect the color, aroma, and taste of the tea
Six: Ways of Tea Drinking (六之飲) introduces the entire process from tea leaves pick-
ing to tea drinking and the points for attention
Seven: Anecdotes of Tea (七之事) introduces the tea-­related affairs concerning
historical figures as well as tea-­related historical
data before the Tang dynasty (618–­907), including
legends, allusions, poems and verses, essays and
prescriptions
Eight: Tea-­Producing Regions (八之出) ranks eight tea-­producing regions
Nine: Simplified Method of Tea Making lists procedures of omitting steps under different
(九之略) circumstances
Ten: Illustrations of Tea (十之圖) shows transfer the contents of nine chapters on
four or six pieces of white silk and put them on
the wall in order to make the contents of the book
clear at a glance

crucial layer of significance shared by China and Japan. Chiang Ching, a long-
time collaborator who produced Tea for the 2007 Stockholm performance,
recalls, “What he [Tan Dun] wants to express is not merely a story, but also
the Zen philosophy of ‘true and false, existence and nonexistence, life and
death.’”23
These three layers form the inter-­Asia nexus, a cultural sphere constituted
by the close proximity of the physiognomy, linguistic form, and geographi-
cal location, as well as aspects of similarity and difference in their shared

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 Inter-­Asia Sensibility 161

spiritual, religious, and aesthetic traditions. It situates the opera’s points of

reference in Asia, allowing for divergent and multiple expressions and sensi-
bilities, possibilities of solidarity, and an emotional basis for new imaginings
of Asia to emerge.24

Materiality (Water, Paper, Stone), Vocality, and Act II

“Tan Dun’s newest opera, Tea, succeeded in distilling the best of the compos-
er’s musical innovations (including his film scores and concert works) of the
past decade into a compact three-­act, 100-­minute work,” proclaimed Joanna
C. Lee in the London-­based magazine Opera after the world premiere.25 The
pronouncement could not be more astute. Three aspects of Tan’s musical
innovations to date are most centrally related to Tea: organic music, spatial
dramaturgy, and human-­body-­as-­instrument.
While the most exquisite elements in The Book of Tea—­water, fire (flame),
wind (fostering growth), and pottery (teaware)—­are used as symbolism in the

Table 7.2. Overall Design of Tea: A Mirror of Soul

Act I
division scene 1 scene 2 Act II Act III

symbolism water fire paper ceramic, stone

location monastery palace (Chang An, voyage (southern Lu Yu’s home /
(Kyoto, Japan) China) China) monastery (China
/ Japan)
main events tea ceremony, mise-­en-­scène ode of tea, truth revealed,
reflection, lament puppet theater, sensual love duet conflict, death,
marriage proposal, lament
conflict, challenge,
ode of tea
main Seikyo Lan, emperor, Lan, Seikyo Lan, Seikyo,
characters Seikyo, prince prince, emperor
role of shadow lady of spiritual shadow daughter of tea
contralto sage Lu Yu
role of monks guests shadow / cloud stone forest /
chorus monks
page number 1–­21 22–­111 112–­150 151–­233
gesture “longing” “filial piety” “longing” “longing” “filial
“roguish” “longing” piety” “roguish”
“doom” “doom”

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 162 contemporary opera in flux

opera, they already appear in Tan’s nonprogrammatic works. Indeed, organic

music constitutes one of Tan’s most important innovations: stones and papers
in Ghost Opera; water in Water Concerto and Water Passion; ceramic in
Soundshape; and stones in Death and Fire: Dialogue with Paul Klee. But their
presence in the opera takes the notion of organic music to yet another plane.
On the operatic stage, the organic music are themselves “actors” that animate
the materiality of tea. For example, water: one that crosses fire to be boiled for
tea. Its connotation of clearing, healing, and purity is made apparent from the
start. The opera opens with a performer bowing on waterphone, three per-
cussionists on stage creating rhythm with the palms of their hands in ampli-
fied water basins. The percussionists’ splashing and dripping of water creates
a sensation that is mundanely ordinary, but with a new narrative power. It is
followed by water-­performing techniques that have become familiar in Tan
Dun’s work: water drums, drainers, and gongs that give “water” the complex-
ity of a character.
In the opening, the prominent position of the percussionists and water
basins on stage and the movement of the waterphone performer walking
among audience members toward the stage exemplifies what Joy Calico refers
to as “spatial dramaturgy,” namely, sonic spatialization with a storytelling
role.26 As Calico notes, the distribution of sound can define and sculpt spaces
of the opera theater, a practice that has grown more significant and varied
with the digital age. The mobility of both the ethereal sound of the water-
phone and its player moving from the seating area occupied by the audiences
toward the stage activated a sense of movement to and from the lost time and
place, the subject matter of the prince/monk’s opening lines. The palpable
sense of the lost past is continued by the percussionists placed on stage per-
forming on the water basins, with their performing hands, the water sound,
and the movement of the water itself. Featured at the beginning of the opera,
these sonic, bodily, and material movements in the spatial design provide a
bridge between the present and the past.
In act II, the voyage of the search for Lu Yu and The Book of Tea, paper
screens are hung vertically in midair, and the sounds of its blowing and drum-
ming are accompanied by the rhythm of loud page-­flipping of the orchestra
and other manipulations of the papers by performers on stage. With different
tensile strength and rustling qualities, the papers provide a rich and subtle
variety of sound. It gestures to the fragility of life. Far from simply a sound
source, the papers signify the famous sutra that has come to be the center
of the drama; in a later production, paper panels filled with scripts or callig-

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 Inter-­Asia Sensibility 163

raphy form the backdrop.27 Furthermore, the materiality and action of the
“instrument” (paper)—­large paper panels and uniform page turning back and
forth by the large orchestra—­brings visual components into a critical part of
the opera experience. In act III, the hard and dull sound of earthenware and
stone depicts the somber mood of death as well as the spirit of fate. Tan Dun’s
signature organic music thus comes to “life” by representing their spiritual
and natural selves. Importantly, the materiality of water, paper, stone, and
earthenware plays the part that tells a story, whose vital quality—­a liveliness
and a livingness—­takes an expressive role.28
The sensibility of spiritual life emanating from these sonic creations was
readily legible to his Asian counterpart. Japanese composer Shinichirō Ikebe
expresses this sentiment in his review of Tea: “there are a whole host of pieces
of music that make use of paper and pebbles, although such an approach
is still considered avant-­garde. But there was no quirky avant-­garde feel to
Tan’s work. The music was performed naturally and matter-­of-­factly, and the
audience enjoyed listening to it.”29 In other words, for this listener, the use of
organic music in the opera is connected to the inter-­Asia sensibility such that
it feels “natural” rather than merely artificial, experimental, or abstract. The
“naturalness” of the sound also belies the sophistication behind its creation:
the meticulous scoring that produces the subtle, varied, and effective sonority
of the “nature” befitting the inter-­Asia imaginings.
The second aspect of Tan’s musical innovation is vocality, namely his use
of a wide range of human voice, breath, and bodily/physical action to pro-
duce sound, such as breathing, whistling, slapping, ghost-­like whispering,
etc. It forms an important sonority of the opera and gives much symbolic
power to the very malleable male chorus who play multiple storytelling roles.
Furthermore, it adds timbres that expand the orchestra’s dramatic power in
the opera. The sonority is again familiar yet foreign all at once. As Mariusz
Kozak reminds us, “Human breath is characterized by its special status as a
marker of bodily effort and intimacy, its power to signify life in general, and
its close link with musical expression.”30 The potency of Tan Dun’s usage of
breath and control of air comes from the unique power of breath in making
bodily intimacy and inner vitality audible. Whereas breath is often concealed
and controlled in musical performances, such as in the performing technique
of bel canto, here they are forcefully enunciated to be heard. By transforming
the sound of intimate physical activity from one that is a sonic byproduct of
human activity into patterns of sound as aesthetic object and expressive agent,
Tan foregrounds the power of human vitality in the telling of the story of Tea.31

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 164 contemporary opera in flux

This constitutes a human-­body-­as-­instrument approach that transforms

the opera orchestra’s traditional mode of signification. Rather than convey-
ing expression through conventional means, he directs singers and orchestra
players to follow patterns of vocalization in the manners of his own “oral
tradition,” to borrow Christian Utz’s term.32 With this “oral tradition,” Tan
creates a distinctive model for the role of the voice in generating performa-
tive meaning. For example, in a rehearsal with Philadelphia Opera, Tan Dun
instructed the singers, “Add more colors of all kinds of air from your instru-
ment [voice]. Combine all the colors of your air calligraphy, half air and half
pitch, and then gradually return to pitch [. . .] control your breath.” Through
Tan’s repeated demonstrations and coaching, the singers achieved the pow-
erful effect of breathy vocalization.33 There’s always a subtext to his vocaliza-
tion, he told the musicians. For the vocalization they rehearsed that day, it
was connected to the questioning, “How!” Tan’s breathy vocalization is thus
situated hermeneutically in a cultural tradition.
Placing emphasis on various modes of vocalization—­ such as over-
tone singing, enunciated microtonal slides, articulated “t” and “s” sibilants
in word endings, the persona/emotion underlying unpitched breath/voice,
etc.—­constitute an important part of Tan’s musical language. With breathy
vocalization kept simple and used sparingly in the opera, it forms effective
human expression rather than radical innovation. Unlike the sonic material-
ity of structured breath and voice used in work such as Helmut Lachenmann’s
temA (1971), which explores new sounds outside of an instrument and vocal-
ist’s normal repertory, Tan’s vocal methods build on an “oral tradition.”
Calico’s discussion of the wide range of vocality in Czernowin’s opera
Infinite Now (chapter 6) provides a good point of comparison. When con-
sidering Czernowin’s three modes of vocal writing (breathing, singing, and
talking), Calico notes that breathing “is least indigenous to opera.” The notion
of “indigeneity” might be the key to Tan’s writing for the voice in this opera.
He not only brings vocal modes that are not indigenous to the European
opera tradition, but he brings replacements that are indigenous to a different
performance tradition. At least it appears so. His “oral tradition” is often a
composite, rather than one whose origin is necessarily traceable. Through his
demonstrations and coaching, singers absorb his “oral tradition” to produce
what can be experienced as “natural” to a culture. So when the physical sound
and vocalization replace conventional lyricism to express emotive content,
not only are the performers “moved and defined through these practices,” as
Nina Sun Eidsheim notes, they also draw the audience closer to the sounds of

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 Inter-­Asia Sensibility 165

the human, of nature, etc.34 John Cage alluded to this characteristic of Tan’s
music when he said in 1992, “What is very little heard in European or Western
music is the presence of sound as the voice of nature.[. . .] It is clear in the
music of Tan Dun that sounds are sounds central to the nature in which we
live, but to which we have too long not listened.”35 Along the same mode of
sonic designs, the vocalizations in Tea are performed in an utterly unadorned
way by choir or orchestra musicians, exuding a sense of community and
everydayness.
In act II, Tan’s avant-­garde sensibility is in full view, one that he put in ser-
vice of the inter-­Asia sensibility.36 The protagonists’ journey in search of the
Chinese tea sage and truth is sonically carried out with papers: by crinkling,
tearing, whistling, blowing, beating, shaking, waving, and fanning papers in
bowls and paper screens, as well as the orchestra’s vocalization and page flip-
ping. For its first ninety measures, the string section does not play any pitch
with their bows. Instead, the players fade in with the vocalization of “m” on
a low A to form the backdrop for the singers’ lyrical lines. Later, rather than
the accompaniment of typical lush strings, the lyrical melodies of the sensual
love duet are accompanied by the sparse and unostentatious timbre of an
extremely soft and low-­register glissando on the strings, as well as the bass
flute. The climactic section depicting the lovemaking explicitly (mm. 164–­
189) is created by the orchestra’s free improvisation in tutti: wind instruments
blowing head joints and mouth pieces to create wavy, bending pitch, percus-
sionists blowing paper bags and drumming paper screens in “a sensual and
violent passion,” harpists playing slide on the strings with guitar picks, as well
as strings’ vocalizing “m” while flipping pages rapidly and loudly to create the
sound of wind and rustling trees.
Notably, with all players of the string section flipping pages fervently to a
monotonous beat pattern, a Chinese sense of the materiality of paper comes
alive, as Tan noted: “The ideas [of page flipping] find their origin in the ani-
mistic notion that material objects have spirits residing in them; an idea ever-­
present in the old village where I grew up in China.”37 This reckoning with the
nonhuman echoes with the notion of vibrant matter and thingness that Jane
Bennett has drawn our attention to in recent years.38 Yet “the active role of
non-­human materials in public life” that Bennett seeks to theorize is given
here a visible and audible form.39 The loud page flipping of the orchestra ren-
ders audible the paper’s power to comment on the fate of the lovers. Further-
more, the choreography of seated orchestra players fervently flipping pages
also adds corporeality and physical appeal to the emotional content of the

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 166 contemporary opera in flux

scene. That these sections free of pitched sonorities are performed by pitched
instruments embraces the sensibility of Tan’s experimental theater aesthetics.
In this opera, they seem most befitting, not only of the particular moment in
the plotline, but also of the spirit of the opera as a whole.

Gestures and Inter-­Asia Sensibility

Tan Dun’s employment of musical gestures also draws significantly from the
inter-­Asia sensibility. Gesture is, for Tan Dun, the basic unit of compositional
procedure, which he discussed in 1992 regarding his work Death and Fire.40
He defines “gesture” as “a short phrase in which various musical parameters
cooperate to create a distinctive emotive effect,” and he continues, “Gesture,
then, is a composite which becomes an independent whole. . . . Character,
shape, rhythm, timbre, and dynamic combine in the creation of gesture.”
While in recent years concepts of musical gesture have received significant
scholarly attention in music studies, Tan Dun’s notion of gesture is distin-
guished by its compositional perspective and an emphasis on its emotive con-
tent and holistic nature. He adds, “Character [of gesture] refers to emotional
content or expressive intent, for instance, longing as distinct from shouting.”
As a composer, he considers gesture to belong to the “primary material cat-
egory,” whereas pitch, rhythm, contour, etc., in the “secondary material cate-
gory.” Namely, gestures constitute the most basic kernel of his composition.
Four distinctive gestures stand out in Tea: “longing,” “filial piety,” “rogu-
ish,” and “doom.” The gesture of longing first appears in the melodies sung by
the shadow character and the monks. The components of the gesture include
the contour, rhythmic shape, and slide between notes in performance (fig.
7.1). Following the initial large ascending leap is the first long note (G), on
which the “sighing” of the descending second lands. Then a similar contour
appears again, followed by another long note also on the second beat. With
its nonproportional shape, the emotion of anguish is expressed through both
the placement of the two long notes that disrupt metrical stability and the
series of three consecutive descending seconds. This gesture shape’s gradual
narrowing of the outer interval span and absence of metrical stability conveys
a decrease in energy. At its close, the use of letters such as “s” or “t” rein-
forces the sense of stillness. This is also often performed with sliding between
notes, much in the style of Chinese traditional music. This gesture appears
frequently in the opera, which gives the sense of always trailing behind, long-
ing, lamenting, and void.

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 Inter-­Asia Sensibility 167

Fig. 7.1. Gesture of longing. (Copyright © 2002 by G. Schirmer, Inc. International

Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.)

In contrast, the gesture of “filial piety” uses the regularity of two-­bar tight-­
knit phrases, accompanied by a lively syncopated rhythm, to express unity
and elation (fig. 7.2). The symmetry of the melodic contour and diatonic
characteristics depict the joyful feel and exuberant mood, and the cycling
through of the two-­bar syncopated rhythm propels the forward motion. The
regularity of the hypermeter aids the sense of flow and ease. Together they
work as the “filial piety” gesture. The story of mise-­en-­scène—­Journey to the
West—­in the form of puppet theater and the story’s protagonist monkey king
both add to the bubbly mood. The echoing sound of the short-­long figures
(also in tight-­knit two-­bar phrases but forming a phrase overlap with the end
of the filial piety gesture) add to the mood of festivity. With the lively rhythm,
it recalls the common scene of vibrant temple fairs for deity birthdays in
Chinse society, where puppet theater is typically performed.

Fig. 7.2. Gesture of filial piety. (Copyright © 2002 by G. Schirmer, Inc. International
Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.)

Later when the gesture of “filial piety” resurfaces during the conflict
between the enraged prince and Seikyo, the accompanying syncopated rhyth-
mic figure is dropped and its jovial effect is weakened by the juxtaposition of
Japanese Ritsu and Ryō scale, as well as the instrumentation of muted trum-
pet (fig. 7.3). Here the gesture of “filial piety” loses its symbolic integrity, and

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 168 contemporary opera in flux

the repeated distorted gestures signal the rise of tension (m. 354). In act III,
the prince’s abrupt appearance is again accompanied by the gesture, but only
by its two-­bar syncopated rhythm; the gesture all but drained of its emotive
content.

Fig. 7.3. Gesture of filial piety varied. (Copyright © 2002 by G. Schirmer, Inc.
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.)

The gesture of “roguish and puckish” is expressed through a crashing,

energetic percussive burst from the Chinese small gong and large cymbals
(pulse rhythm and usually in tight-­knit two-­bar units). It is characterized by
the distinctive combination of their timbre, the crash and scraping sound
of cymbals and the ringing sound of the small gong (fig. 7.4). This gesture
accompanies the puppet theater, expressing the monkey king’s general puck-

Fig. 7.4. Gesture of roguish. (Copyright © 2002 by G. Schirmer, Inc. International

Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.)

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 Inter-­Asia Sensibility 169

Fig. 7.5. Gesture of doom. (Copyright © 2002 by G. Schirmer,

Inc. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.)

ish ways, which underlies the prince’s challenge to Seikyo. It returns in act
III and repeats continuously when the roguishness finally turns into a cruel
fatal blow. While the rhythmic figures change with its return, sometimes the
distinctive timbre signals the gesture unfailingly.
The gesture of “doom” is readily recognizable and has probably since
become Tan’s idiomatic doom gesture: a two-­note figure of a descending
tritone, where the first note in soft and tremolo falls dramatically onto the
second note in fortississimo (fig. 7.5). The gesture is often amplified: in the cli-
max of the conflict, Tan lengthens the first note in tremolo to twice or thrice
as long to enhance suspense and give the second note additional potency.
This gesture is repeated incessantly, with increasingly shorter intervals to tre-
mendous emotive power in the fatal scene.
Each of these gestures comprises a particular sense of energy, shaping,
and timbre that is central to their expressive power in this opera, much in
the same way as patterns of percussion in Chinese opera that denote emo-
tive content and communicate meaning in the drama. The roguish and doom
gestures in particular connote an affinity, albeit aloof, that correspond to ges-
tures of similar emotive content in Chinese opera.

Productions

Tea was performed nearly annually from 2002 to 2010 with six distinct pro-
ductions by innovative directors in highly visible venues. The premiere pro-
duction of Tea directed by Pierre Audi at Suntory Hall’s has been memorial-

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 170 contemporary opera in flux

ized through excellent cinematic choreography in an award-­winning DVD,

which, despite its nods to Asian sensibility in stage designs, situates the story
in a mythical world.41 In addition to Audi’s production, I have seen a video
recording of Chiang Ching’s production in 2007, and attended Miyamoto’s
production in Philadelphia. These two latter productions will be discussed
below.
At Stockholm’s Royal Hall, Chiang Ching’s 2007 production combined
realism supported by historical research with the symbolism of Chinese the-
ater. An accomplished modern dancer, choreographer, and producer, Chiang
has been a longtime collaborator with Tan (dating back to 1980 in Beijing) and
also served as a consultant to Franco Zeffirelli’s 1987 production of Turandot
at the Metropolitan Opera. With a profound knowledge of Chinese culture,
Chiang was intent on conveying the essence of the ancient city of Chang An,
the capital of the Tang dynasty, and based her design on historical research
in complex ways. Tang dynasty terracotta sculptures inform the design of
all costumes, and Tang banquet style is created for the entertainment scene
at the palace. Rectangular boxes stand in for palace and monastery similar
to the usage of tables and chairs in Chinese opera, which also inspires the
choreography of stage movement in act II. The mise-­en-­scène uses a Chi-
nese folk dance “running-­on-­land-­boat,” Chinese zodiac animals, and delicate
puppetry to portray the playfulness. Act II uses a modern ink painting of
erotic theme by famous painter Walasse Ting as backdrop. This production,
rich with Chinese signifiers, made it to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games.
The Santa Fe 2007 production, the American premiere, was directed by
Miyamoto, with stage design by Rumi Matsui. It was distinguished by the
sharper theatricality of musicals, Japanese sensibility, and shared Asian cul-
ture. Through an enormous red peony, the production not only references
nobility, bravery, and honor, as well as the golden age of China’s Tang dynasty,
but it also creates the elegant, distilled image of passion, the lovers and their
earnest pursuit. The complexity of the inter-­Asia sensibility shone through, as
critic Heidi Waleson astutely notes: “Masatomo Ota designed opulent, richly
colored Chinese and Japanese robes and headdresses, and director Amon
Miyamoto gracefully melded ritual and reality in the staging, giving equal
weight to the tea ceremony and the passions of the characters.”42
Miyamoto also had a keen sense of the opera’s physicality, enlivening
Journey to the West with entertaining shadow puppetry on a prominent red
circle screen at the center of the stage. The famous Chinese story is carried
out on the circle screen by the cutout shapes of the legendary monkeys and

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 Inter-­Asia Sensibility 171

monk characters. The richness of the interpretation of the scene with shadow
play theater was a sharp contrast with the rendition in Audi’s production
at the premiere, where the cultural complexity of the famed story is muted:
crouched nondescript choir members hop around the planks in their monk
costumes referencing monkey. As for the subject of the opera, tea, whose cer-
emony Miyamoto has enjoyed since childhood and which became a refuge
when he was a young adult, he presented it with the aura of a ritual.43
Since 2007, Miyamoto’s production has been brought to Philadelphia and
Vancouver.44 The inter-­Asia imaginings allow the audience to engage with a
multifaceted Asia. In the words of Jonathan Pell, the artistic director of Dallas
Opera, who saw the production in both Santa Fe and Vancouver, “[I] was
again struck by the extraordinary ‘sound world’ created by the composer. [. . .]
It was inventively staged in what appeared to be an authentic fusion of Chi-
nese and Japanese theatrical conventions.”45 A production where inter-­Asia
sensibility is featured through nuanced representation undoubtedly contrib-
utes to making Asia visible on the opera stage, which, hopefully, can in time
lead to the erasure of stereotypes and orientalist tropes.

Conclusion

Paradoxically, while relying on operatic conventions, Tan creates an

expressive form that is compelling precisely because it is direct and often
unbounded by stylized convention, offering its viewers opportunities to lib-
erate their imagination of ritual, landscape, and nature in profound ways. Tan
did not leave the opera tradition behind altogether, however. The powerfully
fresh sonority drawn from the materiality of organic music and the expres-
sive vocalization derived from oral tradition are coupled with the conven-
tional dramatic force of musical gestures and vocal lyricism. One might say
Tan deftly weaves elements indigenous to opera into his work built on the
inter-­Asia sensibility. “A richly textured soundscape that spoke to something
universal,” noted a blogger in Vancouver.46 As a focal point of the opera, the
subject of tea encapsulates many quintessential material and spiritual aspects
of the inter-­Asia cultural sphere, reaching deeply into a multitude of cultural
expressions: from The Book of Tea to the vocality of proclamation chants, the
materiality of organic music, and musical gestures drawing from instruments
and modes of different Asian traditions. It is into this mix that the bel canto
lyricism is blended seamlessly.

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 172 contemporary opera in flux

By creating an opera deeply rooted in inter-­Asia sensibility, Tan Dun’s

Tea is one of the first works on the contemporary opera stage to give a long
overdue voice to the nuances and creative expression within the region’s
histories and culture. Other early works of these decades include Wolf Cub
Village (1994) by Guo Wenjing; Silk River (1997) by Bright Sheng; Wenji: Eigh-
teen Songs of a Nomad Flute (2001) by Bun-­Ching Lam; Hanjo (2004) by
Toshio Hosokawa; and Madame White Snake (2010) by Zhou Long. Many
more operas have been written by these prolific composers and their younger
counterparts since. Together they constitute an important revolution in the
world of contemporary opera, much in the spirit that Glass had noted in the
1988, as quoted above.47
To this revolution in contemporary opera, one might ask; How should the
analysis of opera respond? If, as Tan Dun noted, the production of an opera
could be constrained by the calcitrant notion of “mysterious” Asia, does a
similar danger arise for opera analysis? What might be at stake? And what
might be the analysts’ approaches? The answers to these questions are yet to
be worked out. But a focus on the locality and specific cultures of Asia pres-
ent a starting point.
This chapter trains an analytical lens on inter-­Asia sensibility, with an aim
to connect opera analysis to the region. The inter-­Asia sensibility of Tea is
inseparable from the locale of its inception and the shared cultural sphere
that formed its primary inspiration. The connection is profound. As Suntory
Hall’s chief producer, Keiko Manabe noted pointedly after the premiere, “it
can be said that the history of the hall created this work.”48 Manabe was refer-
ring to more than the physical space. Both the characteristics of the hall—­no
barrier between the stage and the audience, and the orchestra as one of the
protagonists on the stage—­and its historical significance as a revered cultural
institution in Japan shaped Tan’s Tea.49 Its premiere garnered such critical
acclaim in Japan that Suntory Hall brought the production back four years
later in 2006, as its annual hall opera performance. Future studies of this
work might look further into the connection between the opera and tradi-
tional Japanese theater, as well as Japanese receptions of the opera in both
years of its performance, and the impact that this opera might have on the
music scene in Japan. Inter-­Asia expression has constituted the voice of many
prominent actors in the ever-­changing international scene of contemporary
music and opera production that operates under the dictates of a global cul-
tural industry, different forms of representation—­visual, virtual, sociopolit-
ical—­as well as institutional and economic forces at work. While compre-

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 Inter-­Asia Sensibility 173

hending the expressive means, hermeneutics, and storytelling roles of the

fascinating timbre, vocality, and sonic designs in these operas is an important
pursuit of knowledge production, the analysts also bear a particular respon-
sibility to make the silent Other, Asia, be seen and heard.
Notes
1. See Ashley Thorpe, Performing China on the London Stage Chinese Opera and
Global Power, 1759–­2008 (London: Palgrave, 2016).
2. There are very few exceptions. One is the analysis of Tan Dun’s First Emperor, in
Yayoi Uno Everett, Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Operas: Osvaldo
Goliov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, Tan Dun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2015).
3. Nancy Yunhwa Rao, Chinatown Opera Theater in North America (Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 2017), 8.
4. The use of the term “inter-­Asia” draws from the field of Inter-­Asia Cultural Studies
that gives voice to a global intellectual community that is concerned about the inter-­Asia
connection, exchange, and historical processes.
5. Heidi Waleson, “The Hun Wears Prada,” Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2010.
6. Nancy Yunhwa Rao, “Sonic Imaginary After Cultural Revolution,” in Listening to
China’s Cultural Revolution Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities, ed. Paul Clark, et
al., 213–­38 (London: Palgrave, 2016).
7. Edward Rothstein, “Classical Review: A Shaman Without Religion,” New York Times,
December 15, 1991. This review in the Sunday Arts & Leisure section was preceded by
Rothstein’s earlier review of the same concert on December 2, “An Eastern Sonic Ritual in
an Imaginary Religion.”
8. The numbers are drawn from study of data available in OPERA America: The
National Opera Center, [Link]
9. Philip Glass, “Philip Glass. Composer. New York City,” ARTSREVIEW 5, no. 1:
America’s Opera, ed. Dodie Kazanjian (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the
Arts, 1988), 18.
10. Takemitsu served as its artistic director until 1998, followed by Joji Yuasa and Toru
Hosokawa. For the role of Suntory Hall as music institution and its international program
for composition, see Bonnie C. Wade, Composing Japanese Musical Modernity (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014), 88–­89.
11. Toshio Hosokawa, [Link]
vie/
12. Tan Dun on Tea in Conversation with Keiko Manabe (Chief Producer at Suntory
Hall), [Link]
13. Ken Smith, “Tan’s Brew of Eastern, Western and Elemental Styles Is a Lyrical Tri-
umph,” [Link]
14. In addition to its use for actors’ entry and exit, hashigakari also functions as another
playing area. As opposed to the main stage, the hashigakari is linearly laid out and conse-
quently aids in creating a sense of spatial and psychological depth. Kalman’s spatial design

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 174 contemporary opera in flux

of the angled walkways connotes the feeling of depth and expression of multiple mental
states. See Tan Dun on Tea in Conversation with Keiko Manabe.
15. This point is supported by the subsequent performances in more traditional opera
space, where Tan often requested that the orchestra pit be raised to allow visibility.
16. For a synopsis of the opera see the publisher’s website, [Link]
[Link]/work/33592/Tea-A-Mirror-of-Soul--Tan-Dun/
17. Douglas S. Fuqua, “Classical Japan and the Continent,” in Routledge Handbook of
Premodern Japanese History, ed. Karl F. Friday (New York: Routledge, 2017), 38–­52.
18. Fuqua, “Classical Japan and the Continent,” 40.
19. Lu Yu’s treatise Cha Jing is generally translated as The Classic of Tea, but the Chinese
title could also be translated as The Book of Tea. It is quite clear that by “The Book of Tea”
Tan Dun is referring to Lu Yu’s version and not that of Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea
(New York: Putnam’s, 1906).
20. James A. Benn, Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History (Honolulu: Univer-
sity of Hawai’i Press, 2015).
21. Okakura, The Book of Tea, 12.
22. Benn, Tea in China, 200. The information here is derived from Benn, as well as Bret
Hinsch, The Rise of Tea Culture in China: The Invention of the Individual (New York: Row-
man & Littlefield, 2015).
23. Chiang Ching, “From Fu fu fu to Tea—­Duet with Tan Dun in Music and Dance,” in
I Sing I Chant (Taipei: Erya chuban she, 2020).
24. The discussion here is much shaped by Kuan-­Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward
Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 214.
25. Joanna C. Lee, “Opera Around the World: Japan-­Tokyo,” Opera 54, no. 3 (2003):
323–­24.
26. See Joy Calico, chapter 6 in this volume.
27. The Lyon production and Stockholm production.
28. I discuss this topic more fully in Nancy Yunhwa Rao, “Materiality of Sonic Imagery:
On Analysis of Contemporary Chinese Compositions,” Music Theory Spectrum 45, no. 1
(2023): 151–­55.
29. Shin’ichirō Ikebe, “Moving from Cutting Edge to Mainstream,” Daily Yomiuri and
The Yomiuri Shimbun, December 19, 2002.
30. Mariusz Kozak, Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 64.
31. Tan would use in his next opera, The First Emperor, the sound patterns from slap-
ping in the opening to great effect.
32. Christian Utz, “The Rediscovery of Presence: Intercultural Passages through Vocal
Spaces between Speech and Song,” in Vocal Music and Contemporary Identities: Unlimited
Voices in East Asia and the West, ed. Christian Utz and Frederick Lau (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2012), 56.
33. “Tan Dun Rehearses TEA with the Opera Company of Philadelphia Chorus,” [Link]
[Link]/watch?v=yAD_2vDPMxA
34. Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 20.

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 Inter-­Asia Sensibility 175

35. John Cage and Joan Retallack, Musicage: CAGE MUSES on Words * Art * Music
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 187. The interview was conducted
July 15–­17, 1992.
36. For Tan Dun’s avant-­garde approaches, see Nancy Yunhwa Rao, “Cultural Boundary
and National Border: Recent Works of Tan Dun, Chen Yi, and Bright Sheng,” in Contempo-
rary Music in East Asia, ed. Hee Sook Oh (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2014),
211–­40.
37. Tan Dun on TEA in Conversation with Keiko Manabe, in “Dialogues with Tan Dun,”
translated by Leo Alexander Imai; October 2, 2002, [Link]
-a-mirror-of-soul-opera-in-three-acts/
38. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2010).
39. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 177.
40. Tan Dun, “Death and Fire: A Dialogue with Paul Klee” (DMA diss., Columbia Uni-
versity, 1992), 12–­14.
41. Tan Dun, Tea: A Mirror of Soul, dir. Frank Scheffer (Hamburg: Deutsche Grammo-
phon, 2004).
42. Waleson, “The Hun Wears Prada.”
43. David Patrick Stearns, “The OCP Prepares to Serve ‘Tea,’” Philadelphia Inquirer,
February 16, 2010.
44. The opera was produced by Opera Philadelphia at the Academy of Music in March
2010; it was produced by Vancouver Opera at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in May 2013.
45. Jonathan Pell, “From the Desk of Artistic Director Jonathan Pell, Vancouver and
Toronto,” [Link]
ver-and-toronto/#more-4575
46. Hadani Ditmars, “Tea—­a Mirror of the Soul Speaks to Vancouver’s Spiritual Possi-
bilities,” Huffpost, May 14, 2013, [Link]
-of-the-soul-_b_3267983
47. Glass, “Philip Glass. Composer. New York City,” 18. For discussion on the historical
process facing contemporary Chinese composers, see Nancy Yunhwa Rao, “Asian Ameri-
cans in Opera: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of
Asian American Literature, edited by Josephine Lee, 1344–67 (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2020).
48. Naka Mamiko, “‘Listening to the Colors and Seeing the Sound’—­The Soundscape
Projected in Tan Dun’s Hall Opera Tea,” Minzoku Geijutsu 21 (2005): 153–­59. She also
reported that the premiere received many reviews in Japan, including a twenty-­six-­page
article in the prominent magazine Mostly Classic. I am indebted to Kumiko Reichert for the
translation and other help on the article.
49. Photos of the same production by the Netherland Opera show that spreading out on
a spacious opera stage, the large wood planks denote a less intensive feeling of the opera’s
psychological space.

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 8

Of Sense and Sirens

Ana Sokolović’s Svadba and Six Voix Pour Sirènes

Colleen Renihan

In recent work by women composers, new opera—­often defined with the

broader “music theatre” to indicate its refusal to adhere to traditional generic
markers and values—­is being reclaimed as a site of feminist expression
and power. In this post-­#MeToo era, these composers push against opera’s
fraught history as a form where women sing to their death and are shame-
lessly exploited by men (both on-­and offstage) in order to reimagine it as
a feminist mode of expression and hearing. Often these works experiment
with divergences from opera’s traditional structural and aesthetic tropes in
the interest of reconceiving what opera offers to women in the twenty-­first
century as a rich mode of representation.
Many of these composers’ key works—­such as Chaya Czernowin’s Infinite
Now (2017), Ellen Reid’s p r i s m (2018), Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves
(2016)—­explore the visceral and affective dimensions of sonic experience,
novel evocations of time and temporal experience, and new approaches to
language and vocal sound. In each case, the experiences and voices of women
are brought to new heights by original compositional approaches that
empower women in new musical and theatrical ways. In each, traditional
modes of operatic hearing and seeing are upended. In this chapter, I exam-
ine Serbian-­Canadian composer Ana Sokolović’s unusual music theater work
Six Voix Pour Sirènes (2000) and her internationally acclaimed opera Svadba
(2011) as two Canadian examples of how the form is being reimagined to
allow for new, timely modes of relationality. Sokolović’s is a truly original
compositional voice, with self-­identified influences in Ligeti, Kurtág, Bartók,
and Stravinsky, because of what she describes as their “visceral music,” a

176

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 Of Sense and Sirens 177

description often used in reference to her own music.1 Through a supportive

and fruitful collaboration between Sokolović and Toronto’s Queen of Pud-
dings Music Theatre between 2000 and 2011, Sokolović focused nearly exclu-
sively on composing for a cappella female voices, employing playful extended
vocal techniques, unexpected vocal textures and colors, and a strikingly
affective approach to text. Unlike many feminist pieces including the ones
listed above, Sokolović’s works focus not on trauma or oppression, but rather
serve as joyful celebrations of female exuberance.

Visceral Opera

Since its premiere run at the Berkeley Street Theatre in Toronto in 2011, which
I attended, Ana Sokolović’s most popular work, Svadba, has achieved inter-
national status. Significantly, it is most often described as a powerful, visceral
work of music theater; according to Lydia Perovic, it is “visceral as a pagan
ritual.”2 And as Opera Philadelphia general director David Devan described
Opera Philadelphia’s warehouse production of Svadba 2013—­which nota-
bly involved audience members in an immersive production that included a
wedding reception featuring traditional cuisine and Balkan dance music by
the West Philadelphia Orchestra—­the opera made possible “a very intimate,
visceral experience with a very interesting, different opera.”3 Canadian opera
director Wayne Gooding labeled it “music theatre at its innovative best,” and
Christopher Hoile in Opera News wrote that the piece will appeal “not just
to new music enthusiasts but to those interested in the wider possibilities of
music theatre in general.”4 The piece has had a remarkable life, having now
been performed throughout Canada, and also internationally in London,
Perm, Belgrade, Paris, Festival de Provence, Milwaukee, at the Bard Festival,
Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, and beyond, an impressive list for any
new (chamber) opera. Sokolovic’s vocal works ignite the imagination—­they
have a capacious sense of possibility about them. In the case of Svadba, this
can be seen in the wide variety of productions of the opera that have emerged
across the globe over the past decade. Productions range from those more
minimalist in nature, such as the 2020 production streamed by Perm Opera
Ballet—­a semi-­(mostly un)staged production that featured all six singers in a
semicircle formation, all dressed in black.5 By contrast, the 2022 Boston Lyric
Opera film production of Svadba features a completely reimagined scenario
and set on a wispy Cape Cod beach, with each singer being paired with a

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 178 contemporary opera in flux

corresponding dancer double in a production that capitalizes on Sokolovič’s

penchant for temporal and narrative nonlinearity.6
The opera has garnered praise from some of the world’s leading opera
companies as a work that harbors a strange power in its effect on audiences:
its impact, like Czernowin’s Infinite Now and indeed many of Sokolović’s
vocal works, is primeval in nature. I see much of this primeval power deriv-
ing from the unique composition of vocal textures in the piece. As a listener-­
viewer, I am ensnared by Sokolović’s vocal works; I find them to be intimate,
fresh, and raw. The vocal works of Ana Sokolović written during her years
collaborating with Queen of Puddings Music Theatre have an affective power
or force about them, an elusive force in many ways. They are captivating,
spellbinding, they resonate unusually, and viscerally. And yet though they
seduce by way of intense vocal power as so many of their operatic coun-
terparts, they also do so in unexpected and untraditional ways in that they
require us to attend to the ways they generate an unruly emanating force, or
what Michelle Duncan describes as “how a resonant voice acts and how it
participates in the creation, disruption, or dissolution of registers of meaning
independent of linguistic signification.”7 Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s work
on the relationality of voice, Steven Connor’s work on vocal phonetics, and
Nina Sun Eidsheim’s work on singing as intermaterial vibrational practice, as
well as on interviews with performers and producers of the opera, I consider
the source of the work’s power and provide a feminist reading of its impact.8
I argue, ultimately, that the materiality of the vocal writing in Svadba and Six
Voix Pour Sirènes provides the opportunity for operatic women to command
attention in its expression of what I interpret as a refreshing physicality and
unavoidable presence—­an immediacy—­albeit one that remains difficult to
pin down.

Queen of Puddings Music Theatre and Ana Sokolović

The development of Ana Sokolović’s vocal works is imbricated with the his-
tory of the innovative company Queen of Puddings Music Theatre, which
began in 1994 with an interest in supporting vocal commissions.9 Cofounders
John Hess and Dairine Ni Mheadra were interested in exploring the potential
of text and music in a theatrical context, Hess initially at the Banff Centre
and Ni Mheadra initially in Dublin. Through commissions of Canadian com-
posers, Queen of Puddings Music Theatre brought Canadian works of new

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 Of Sense and Sirens 179

music theater to international attention with the commission of pieces like

Beatrice Chancy (James Rolfe and George Elliott Clarke), Ana Sokolović’s
works, etc. Despite resistance from the larger Canadian opera companies,
Queen of Puddings Music Theatre put Toronto on the map as a center for
innovation in new music theater by commissioning new Canadian works.
Sokolović’s relationship with Hess and Ni Mheadra began in 2000 with the
work Six Voix Pour Sirènes (in English, less cleverly Six Voices for Sirens),
commissioned by Queen of Puddings as an a cappella work for six female
voices, followed by her first opera The Midnight Court Opera (2005), Love
Songs (2008) for solo female voice, and Svadba (2011), all of which toured
internationally.
Queen of Puddings commissioned Six Voix Pour Sirènes after Ni
Mheadra listened to a recording of Sokolović’s Pesma (1996/2005, a mono-
drama based on a Serbian text for mezzo-­soprano and chamber ensemble)
and was entranced by the composer’s sound. Sokolović chose Montreal-­
based writer Natalie Mamias as librettist. The premiere of the piece occurred
at the Enwave Theatre at Harbour Front Centre, as the finale of a concert of
new Canadian music, all choreographed, and all to be sung by six women.
Sokolović’s piece was the finale of the concert. All dressed in extravagant
queen’s costumes, the six women (Laura Albino, Carla Huhtanen, Andrea
Ludwig, Shannon Mercer, Krisztina Szabo, and Jacqueline Woodley) linked
arms as they moved intentionally toward the audience through the duration
of the piece. As Tamara Bernstein described it: “It’s something like what you’d
hear from a Bulgarian women’s choir, but wilder, and more unpredictable.
Their voices have set up a forcefield of sound, on which they play fearlessly,
like shamans dancing on flames. The women appear to be having the time of
their lives, and in a way, so are you, though the distance between them and
the audience closes, the effect is both thrilling and slightly alarming.”10
The text for the piece is playful, using several plays on words that the
audience may catch if they can hear and understand the French text, which is
also playfully set to music:

Six voix-­ci les reines, voici les reines, six voix pour six rèines. Voilà la scene, six
voix sur scene. Sirènes. Six reines sans roi ni royaume, sans chat sans chaîne.
Six reines de la scene. Enchantées de chanter, avant de rejoindre l’éther, l’éter-
nité. Une reine ça ne s’amuse pas, une reine ça règne. Ça se tient droit et
ça fait face à tout! Haut, très haut. Étoiles des étoiles, Balises du ciel. Tchk,
tchk. Nous sommes les reines de l’éther, de l’éternité. Voix, nos voix. Caresses

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 180 contemporary opera in flux

scintillantes, elles font pétiller les yeux, palpiter le souffle, courber les coeurs.
L’orsqu’elles roulent dans nos gorges, s’enroulent dans nos bouches. Grâces
cristallines, ells voltigent. D’éclat en reflet, de pointe en pente, de pente en
pic! Défiant le vertige qu’elles donnent à ceux qui les endonnent. Vertige . . .
Nos voix de sirenès, nous les reines de la scene. Voix de la scene. Et si nous
perdions la voix? Qu’adviendrait-­il? Et d’une scene sans ses sirènes? Qu’advi-
endrait-­il si? Silence!

The English translation of Mamias’s text for Sirènes is as follows:

Six Voices, six voices here, six voices for sirens, here is the scene, here are
the queens. Sirens. Six queens without a king, nor a kingdom, without a cat
nor a castle. Six queens without chains. Six queens of the stage. Delighted to
sing, before meeting ether, eternity. A queen does not play, a queen reigns.
She stands upright and faces everything! Up, high up. Stars of stars, buoys
in the sky. Check, check. We are the queens of ether, eternity. Voices, our
voices. Scintillating caresses, they make eyes shine, chests bend, breath palpi-
tate, hearts curve, when they roll in our throats, turn around in our mouths.
Gracious crystal lines, they fly away, from sliver to reflection to point to slope.
From slope to peak! Defying the vertigo that those who heard them are under.
Vertigo. . . . Our voices of sirens, we, queens of the stage. And if we lost our
voice? What would happen? What would happen to sirens without a voice?
And of a stage without sirens? What would happen if? Silence!11

Svadba was commissioned by Queen of Puddings as an expansion on Six

Voix Pour Sirènes; Hess and Ni Mheadra were interested in further explor-
ing the potential of a group of solo women on stage. Thematically, the opera
depicts the evening before the marriage of one of the girls, and to this end,
Sokolović draws on the marriage customs of her Balkan heritage, with bits
of Serbian poetry woven throughout.12 Still, the designers of the premiere,
namely, director Michael Cavanagh and designer Michael Gianfrancesco,
eschew any folkloric approach to the piece. Rather they articulate it as a uni-
versal rite of passage shared across cultures. As the composer shares in her
interview with Lydia Perovic, the popularity of the work is owing partly to
this universal appeal of the story: “I think part of it is that a wedding is a near-­
universal experience and a universally understood phenomenon. But here it’s
told through a very local perspective. That quote attributed to Tolstoy, ‘If you

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 Of Sense and Sirens 181

want to be universal, start by painting your own village?’ It’s that.”13 Though
Hoile notes the similarity between the iconic Bulgarian folk-­choral album
Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares (1975) and the score of Svadba, Sokolović’s
approach is more playful, irreverent, modern, as she plays with words and
their meaning by breaking melodies and phrases down into separate words,
sounds, even individual consonants using techniques from Stravinsky, Berio,
and Ligeti.14
Svadba is the fourth of Sokolović’s ventures into opera.15 More music
theater than opera, the work unfolds in a series of interconnected numbers
or tableaux that reveal the singers’ voices melding into one another and,
alternately, performing nontraditional sounds that could be characterized
as guttural and onomatopoeic through the composer’s deployment of non-
sense syllables and extended vocal techniques. Influences for Sokolović’s style
include folk, pop, and Balkan choral singing. She also cites Stravinsky’s Les
Noces (1923) as an influence, which one can hear off the top, with its harsh
dissonances, exploitation of percussive potential in the text, and mixed meter.
Yet unlike in Les Noces, the male voice does not come in. In fact, the piece can
be heard as a jubilant celebration of womens’ voices through a closer exam-
ination of Sokolović’s vocal writing.

Vocal Materiality, Feminist Presence

I am interested primarily in exploring how voice participates in the creation

of relational energy and acoustic power in Six Voix Pour Sirènes and Svadba.
The voice was also central to Queen of Puddings’s mandate. Ni Mheadra
describes their early creations as focusing particularly on exploring the
potential in the voice:

We decided to found this company, Queen of Puddings, that would essen-

tially focus on the voice and would get rid of extraneous trappings. The voice
was really the centre of the thing and that’s what the spotlight had to be on.
[. . .] We were trying to get away from the big operatic model and really focus
it because we thought that the human voice if it was really good one is incred-
ible. And we didn’t want anything in the way of that. And we felt sure that
people . . . It’s a very visceral thing and that people would be captivated. And
also the form had to be intimate. It wouldn’t do well in huge spaces.16

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 Fig. 8.1a. Svadba, mm. 1–­6. (Copyright © 2011 by Boosey & Hawkes. International Copyright
Secured. All Rights Reserved.)

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 Fig. 8.1b. Ana Sokolović, Six Voix Pour Sirènes, mm. 1–­4. (Copyright © 2000 by Boosey &
Hawkes. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.)

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 184 contemporary opera in flux

Hess and Ni Mheadra speak about the primacy of voice in their works,
and often an unaccompanied voice at that. As they explain, “We were not
interested in big sets. We commissioned very few things for electronics. We
like the idea of this kind of ‘real’ voice. The human voice. And the audience’s
proximity to it.”17
Focusing on the materiality of the voice is key to understanding the power
at the heart of Sokolović’s vocal works. As Tamara Bernstein writes, “Wel-
come to the vocal music of Ana Sokolović—­a universe where words may
at any moment detach themselves from meaning and become pure sound;
where women’s voices take the word ‘enchantment’ back into their ancient
sources.”18 Voice, after all, has always been a compelling and productive site
for feminist inquiry. Vocal expression has historically been coded as feminine
(the voice of the mother, the many instances of womens’ song in Classical and
mythological references such as the Delphic Oracle, Homer’s sirens, mer-
maids, Echo, even operatic heroines, and the like). And yet, as Linda Fisher
writes, “[as a woman], being associated with the voice did not necessarily
translate into having one.”19 Sokolovič’s exploitation, thus, of the female voice
at powerful extremes (dynamic, signifying, and expressive extremes) in a con-
text where an audience is required conventionally but also compelled to listen
to them is a powerful response to this social reality. The archetypal figures of
the dangerous but compelling female voice are of course the sirens, whose
singing lures men to their destruction. Though different versions of this myth
exist (including Clément’s theory of mens’ desires to control anxieties sur-
rounding women’s voices through their (mis)representation or silencing of
them), Sokolović’s version includes humor, which is not what the Sirens are
usually associated with. As Cavarero writes, “it is feminine song that is at
stake. This is precisely why it is so disturbing. [. . . and it becomes] all the more
disturbing by the absence of speech.”20
Although the piece can and has been heard as a feminist statement and
celebration of the power of the female voice, it speaks beyond essentialist
constructions of gender, in my view, to the power of creative vocal writing
to bring about a special and rare form of relationality. Indeed, by focusing
exclusively on the gendered identity of the voice rather than the materiality
of the voice and the relationality that it facilitates, we lose the opportunity to
understand the multifarious ways that the voice reads and expresses intersec-
tionally. As Jennifer Logue writes, “sexuality needs to be centered and read
intersectionally alongside race, class, gender, etc., in analyses of disciplinary
and other forms of exclusion.”21 This approach to Sokolović’s work under-

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 Of Sense and Sirens 185

scores what Everett and Stevens express in the introduction to this volume
about the transformational potential of opera that works against its history of
elitism and exclusivity, “when it becomes a means for rhetorical and symbolic
resistance to power, especially for the oppressed.”
Though Sokolović’s works are texted, her aversion to traditional operatic
narrative forms and conventions, and the nature of her vocal writing, disrupts
signification as it celebrates the potential for the female voice to perform an
intense form of presence. The opening of these two pieces, as seen in fig-
ures 8.1a and 8.1b, produce a similar effect, one that can be heard throughout
both pieces. In them, womens’ voices pierce, affect, and demand attention.
The score markings in both pieces communicate her intention for the sound.
For example, the double forte dynamic indication, marked in Sirènes as senza
vibrato, with “throat voice” and unconventional notation of pitch wavering
indicates that we are in vocal territory unlike the traditional operatic one. In
my analysis of the significance of the voice and of vocality in these pieces, I
follow Julia Kristeva’s, Michel Poizat’s, and Roland Barthes’s distinction of its
signified or pheno-­song from its sonorous, bodily geno-­song.22 I also draw
on Judith Butler’s and Cavarero’s attention to the materiality and relational-
ity of voice. Cavarero, for example, writes that the voice “has a reality and a
communicative power that precedes and exceeds the linguistic elements.”23
Indeed, in both figures above, the communication of text is far from the focus
of these moments.
Cavarero also writes about the materiality in the voice as an expression of
its singularity, which becomes an important caveat to the reading of the pro-
totypical operatic women, who serve as stand-­ins to be ultimately exposed,
exhausted, and expired by men. While Cavarero writes of the individuality of
the voice—­that “the voice [. . .] subjectivizes the one who emits it, even when
it is an animal. The voice belongs to the living; it communicates the pres-
ence of an existent in flesh and bone; it signals a throat, a particular body”—­
she points to the intense presence of the singing subject, the space that that
female performer insists on taking in that moment.24 Walter Ong reaffirms
this reading: “Since sound indicates an activity that takes place ‘here and in
this moment,’ speech as sound establishes a personal presence ‘here and in
this moment.”25 In the case of Sokolović’s works, however, this is made more
powerful vis-­à-­vis a feminist reading that takes into account the collectivity
of the sound that is produced by these women singing in ensemble. Their
sound, a kind of sonic shield as seen in figure 8.1a, is heard as nothing less
than a forcefield of sound, as Bernstein described it, despite the loss of indi-

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 186 contemporary opera in flux

viduality in these moments. In these instances, the power that emanates from
these singers, in ensemble, is powerfully more than the sum of its parts. As
Feldman and Zeitlin write, referencing Cavarero, music is “commensurate
with unique souls interacting within an ‘interrelational plurality,’ one which
also constitutes a utopian feminist space that accommodates difference.”26
This is the energy that is forged in Sokolović’s vocal works, particularly in
these moments where voices meld, combine, and, for a glimmer of a moment,
become beautifully indistinct.27
Eidsheim’s recent approach to singing as vibrational practice, and
her focus on the animate and material human body, inspires much of my
approach here. Eidsheim is interested in reframing the art of singing as one
that is about forging relationships with one another; as in the work of Cava-
rero, there is a strong relational aspect to her work. She writes about singing
as a multisensory act and a vibrational practice, a practice brought to life in
Sokolović’s vocal works in their more-­than-­simply-­sonic texture. Eidsheim
writes, “singing and listening are not confined to the audile register but rather
permeate it. At its base, the ontology of singing and listening is material prac-
tice.”28 Michelle Duncan, who dismantles opera studies’s long-­standing insis-
tence on theories of vocal disembodiment, notes how in opera studies, voice
has managed “to slip surreptitiously into a position of silent alterity, strangely
disenfranchised from corporality and unable to resound.”29 This materiality of
the voice in Six Voix Pour Sirènes and Svadba is powerful because of the lack
of textual and thus direct signifying interference of the pure vowel sounds
when sung, as in the extended pitches that open both pieces. But their mate-
rial power also emanates as the result of Sokolović’s exploration of the poten-
tial for the voice to communicate power and presence in other ways.
This intense materiality can be managed and explored to various ends in
production. In the Boston Lyric Opera production on [Link], for exam-
ple, film director Shura Baryshnikov, conductor Daniela Candillari, screen-
writer Hannah Shepard, and production designer Ana Novačić employ these
material voices as background music to several of the opera’s scenes of action,
such as near the beginning of the opera where the women are decorating the
cottage for the upcoming nuptials.30
The voices even underscore shots of the women in conversation. Most
significantly, in this production, the mixed sound features a reverb that hints
at technological mediation and in many ways interferes with the immedi-
ate, raw impact that the voices have in live performance. As vocal sounds
surround the listener from the screen and emerge from unknown locations

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 Of Sense and Sirens 187

and origins in stereo, vocal emanations are not able to be traced back to a
specific body, thus giving them a more ethereal, unearthly quality. This alien-
ating effect is amplified through the technique of splitting each role into a
singer and corresponding dancer. As Jane Forner so aptly points out in her
review of this production, “Unseen sound sources in film are unremarkable
in themselves, but this production goes further, eschewing all direct connec-
tions between what we see and hear: not only do we not see singing, mimed
or otherwise, there are no occasions on which musical sound is presented as
existing in any form in the filmed world we are watching.”31
There is also a sense that the staging is pointing to a utopian reality of
sorts, perhaps because the score does not signal a particular time or place for
the piece’s action to occur, thereby affirming the initial production’s director
(Cavanagh) and designer (Gianfrancesco), who conceived of the piece as ref-
erencing a universality in nuptial traditions across cultures and times.
Despite this certain utopian universality that many productions of Svadba
have capitalized upon, in the critical reception of Sokolović’s work, the focus
has primarily been on parsing the Serbian folk influences in her composi-
tions. Bernstein writes that “The extended vocal techniques in Sokolović’s
music are rooted not in the avant-­garde music of the twentieth century, but
in the oral traditions and poetic voice of Serbia.”32 She notes that the “yelps,”
the micro-­ornaments, the small downward slides at the ends of phrases, as
well as the minor and major seconds she writes in her music were acous-
tic elements that enabled Balkan peasant women to communicate with one
another across large outdoor distances.33 Sokolović’s vocal settings also often
include unsung, unique speech-­sounds, which are effectively nonnarrative
utterances that disrupt semantic meaning as they display the materiality of
the female voice. Indeed, though these works are texted, partly as a result of
their Serbian folk poetry, Bernstein writes, “It’s difficult to think of another
‘contemporary music’ composer who is exploring female power through tra-
ditional vocal techniques particular to women.”34 And while Bernstein and
others write about the “nearly supernatural” power that is expressed through
these women’s voices, I want to think about their expressions as more earthly-­
bound and present.
As the figures themselves demonstrate, vocal energy and power in both
pieces are not predicated exclusively on the extension of vowel sounds,
though that is what emerges at the beginnings of both pieces to initially seize
the listener. There is a strong tradition in linguistics and opera studies of see-
ing the vowels as the soul or essence of language, spoken or sung. This is of

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 188 contemporary opera in flux

course particularly true of the focus of the bel canto training that is founda-
tional to the training of opera singers the world over. The voice proper, in
singing, is distinguished from—­often pitted against—­the work of the articu-
lators. Indeed, in opera studies, debates about the metaphysics of voice play
out nearly exclusively (if implicitly) through considerations of (primarily, or
perhaps ideally!) extended vowels.35 The physical presence of the women in
both Sirènes and Svadba is heightened by the propensity of what Barthes in
another context has called “language lined with flesh, a text where we can
hear the grain of the voice, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of
vowels, a whole carnal stereophony.”36 Both of these works are replete with
moments that celebrate the fleshiness of these women’s voices, what Dun-
can calls “carnal voices,” made more complicated by an additional figure in
their (conspicuous, I wonder?) female authorial voice. While the voiced and
embodied vowel sounds are important for referencing the presence and rela-
tionality or acoustic link that is at the core of the power of these works, the
many consonant sounds that are capitalized upon also point to the fleshiness
of the expression at hand. Indeed, I would argue that because of their not-­
quite meaning and their foregrounding of the performers’ body and vocal
mechanisms, these aspects work to amplify what Cavarero describes as a
“convoking of mouths and ears” in its invocation of vocalic relation, perhaps
even more powerfully than their nonarticulated counterparts.37 The noisiness
of speech also performs interference and nonlanguage in a way that signals its
lack and interruption of meaning.
Most of the score involves writing that exposes and celebrates the vocal
and articulatory organs at work. Others, like the many passages of hissy and
air-­induced sounds, remind the listener of the breath in these women, their
lifeline, their life.38 As a result of this vocal writing, the female performers of
these works perform with voices that escape their fate as representations,
conduits, or stand-­ins and become present both temporally and physically
with what I hear as an intense presence articulated in the vocal writing and in
the use of language.39 Connor provides a useful phonometrical perspective to
understand the many resonances of the many unconventional sounds used in
Sokolović’s writing. As Connor writes, the noisiness of speech performs non-
language, but in a way that signals its lack and its interruption of meaning.
Connor believes we are powerfully influenced by conscious and unconscious
assumptions about the relations between sounds and sense, a reading that
is also (of course) problematized in that it is the Serbian language that is in
question, a language unfamiliar to many listeners. As Connor writes:

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 Of Sense and Sirens 189

The early anatomists of voice had two competing theories for the structure
and function of the larynx. One saw the voice as a wind instrument, as reed,
flute, or organ pipe. The other saw the voice as a stringed instrument. Eventu-
ally the explication of the function of the vocal cords meant that the dispute
ended in an honorable draw. [. . .] The voice as stringed instrument partook
of the lucidity and rational intervals of the Apollonian lyre. The voice as wind
instrument was full of reminders of the respiring and expiring human body.40

In brief, “the lyric voice is virile, virtuoso, inviolate, untouched by human

hand; the bagpipe voice is odorous, exhausted, and mortal.”41 And yet,
although these women sing with lyrical, trained, entirely operatic voices, the
moments where they are forced into bagpipe modes of singing is where they
become most human, where I feel their intimate presence and a stimulated
relationality most intently and impactfully. Sokolović believes that the dra-
matic sense of the language comes from the culture from which they derive.
The Serbian language has these characteristics. Words like “netish,” which
means “will not,” becomes, in one scene in Svadba, “‘netish etish tish tish
sh sh sh.’ It becomes percussive, and this is something we are doing in our
folklore. So, using the characteristics in the language is something that was
my goal.”42

Fearless and Uncompromising Sound

As Hess described Sirènes to me, “Once you [. . .] understood the quality of

sound [called for in Sokolović’s compositions]: slightly nasal; absolutely fear-
less and uncompromising—­it’s really a take-­no-­prisoners kind of piece—­it’s
easier to come up with metaphors for how the sound should be. So it changed
how we worked with the singers.”43 The prevalent nasalized sounds through-
out convey, for me, a primal energy. Because English has fewer naturally nasal
sounds than other European languages, the traditional culturally antagonistic
position was such that nasality came to “stand for the disgusting corporality
the English found in the French.”44 This exoticist reading is reminiscent of the
primal nature of Homer’s Sirens. In both Svadba and Six Voix Pour Sirènes,
the prevalent glissandi and yelps near the beginning of Six Voix Pour Sirènes
certainly suggest and then amplify this reading of the animalistic nature of
their voices.
In Six Voix Pour Sirènes, the materiality of the voice seems to assert itself

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 Fig. 8.2a. Ana Sokolović, Six Voix Pour Sirènes, mm. 45–­49. (Copyright © 2000 by Boosey &
Hawkes. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.)

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 Fig. 8.2b. Svadba, mm. 355–­364. (Copyright © 2011 by Boosey & Hawkes. International
Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.)

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 192 contemporary opera in flux

gradually. For example, in mm. 23 onwards, we have vowels [i] and [a] intrude
at the ends of words. Gradually, however, at m. 33 for example, the [m] and
eventually [ng] sounds intrude. Beginning in mm. 41–­44, we hear the [ng]
introduced in the ends of words, signaling the presence of the various parts
of the mouth and vocal articulatory organs. All are sense disrupting. This is
certainly Barthes’s “language lined with flesh.” Sokolović explains these inter-
ruptions as deriving from the playfulness of Serbian folk singing culture.
The dissolution of sense or of signification also plays out in scene 4, the
climax, of Svadba, which Sokolović has titled “Fight.” Here, in order to cre-
ate drama, the composer stages—­or composes out—­the very undoing of
meaning, “a revolutionary act,” according to Duncan, “that calls into question
the very sovereignty of reason.”45 Here, the singers’ percussive vocal sounds
work against traditional conceptions of percussion as a masculinized musical
space.46
Sokolović’s approach to the libretto is revealing. She talks about the libret-
to’s nonlinearity, and its identity as “text” rather than “libretto.” The barriers
of translation as a result of the Serbian text are unimportant for Sokolović;
indeed, she operationalizes this aspect of the piece. As she explains:

It’s not to think we don’t care [about the text]. It’s that (again referring to the
universality of the story), we will understand the meaning of this word, we
will know when she is excited, we will know when someone is sad, we will
know when there is conflict, you know? We don’t need the words for that. So,
in the libretto, well, there is no libretto. What Stravinsky did for his Noces–­I
put original texts from different regions and different eras. So, the text which
was used for these situations and I just used it as a text and composed the
melody for it. There is no dialogue, just texts. Texts for combing hair, songs
while making flowered wreaths, while bathing, etc. And then, and more than
that, I knew from this dramatical side, that I would need a conflict, because
the opera cannot be everything beautiful. And I knew how I would put it,
where I would put it, but I didn’t know which text. I couldn’t find any song
where the people will be in conflict before the wedding—­it doesn’t exist. So
I used the Serbian alphabet. First of all, you don’t need to know which words
they are using. What is important to the audience that there is a conflict—­
that’s all. What we need is a text which is good to put in music for doing this
battle. So, I used Serbian. The weakness of the Serbian alphabet is that it is
not singable. In Serbian, our language is phonetic. So, you see, in a dramatic
sense, you don’t need too much text, you need intention.47

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 Of Sense and Sirens 193

The ring in the voices throughout both of these pieces, described by

nearly all listeners as something guttural, physical, and probing, is a material
force. Traditional modes of analysis do not account for observations about
materiality: these distinctions are for the most part unrecorded in the score.
They are also incredibly difficult to describe. The range of timbres and reg-
isters of this singing, the straight tone, and indeed the intense modulations
of tone that are asked of the singers, requires a commitment to the vocal
expression that itself registers as intentional and passionate. Sokolović hears
this as a result of the drama of the piece. The piece to her describes a rite of
passage; it is something that audiences everywhere understand. Some of the
singing, sustained and often static in many ways, seems from the listener’s
perspective to be taxing to the singers, the materiality of their instruments at
stake in the requirements of this intense sound production. Mezzo-­soprano
Krisztina Szabo, for one, who workshopped and premiered both pieces with
Queen of Puddings, spoke about the “beltissimo” timbre required of her in
the two lowest parts and remarked upon its taxing nature. The tessitura of
both pieces, being slightly lower than one might expect of traditional operatic
singing, also impacts the materiality that one hears in the voices, since head
voice singing betrays less evidence of the vocal mechanism and body than
does singing involving more of the middle and lower vocal registers.
The intersubjective power of breath plays out powerfully in Sirènes most
directly at the end of the piece, when the singers sing and speak about their
heartbeats, but also of their breath, their mouths (“bouches”), voices (“voix”),
and finally throats (with the exquisite French “gorges”), producing sounds
that allow for the articulators to make noisy interruptions in an already busy,
hectic swirl of sound. As Mariusz Kozak writes, hearing breath is about
acknowledging reciprocity, and it takes on an “important subjective, psycho-
logical, and even spiritual dimension.”48 As though to enact the seduction of
the sirens in a final gesture in Six Voix Pour Sirènes, Sokolović asks the singers
to whisper, as she does throughout Svadba. In fact Svadba begins with the
alternation of intense, visceral pitch clusters and short, articulated whisper-
ing of the bride’s name “Milice.” Six Voix Pour Sirènes ends with the sirens
whispering questions that reference the possibility of their disappearance, a
presence that is located in their voices with the text: “Et si nous perdions la
voix? Qu’adviendrait-­il? Qu’adviendrait-­il de sirènes sans voix? Et d’une scêne
sans ses sirènes? Q’adviendrait-­il si? Silence Silence Silence Silence Silence Si.”
Whispering, for Connor, is a mode of communication that crosses the
linguistic gulf separating human from animal (think of horse whisperer, dog

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 194 contemporary opera in flux

whisperer, or even baby whisperer!). The whisper, especially in the context

of the powerful singing that surrounds it, is a powerful lure. How can mere
mortals resist the power inherent in a sound that invites one to incline so
intently, as Jean-­Luc Nancy has described it, towards its meaning? As David
Lang has explained of his the whisper opera (2013), he created the piece as the
result of his interest in the intimacy and fragility of live performance, of life
itself. The intimacy of the whisper and its visceral insistence on relationality,
or an intersubjective way of being, are perhaps particularly salient in the here
and now, since recent restrictions on live performance and on gathering in
the age of Covid-­19 have made us long for this quality of operatic perfor-
mance even more intently.
Recent feminist research and writing from the Global South has also
challenged Western notions of voice as the ultimate sign of power, which
Sokolović’s works also support. The implications for the playfulness with
which she explores various kinds of vocal sounds—­including hushed vocal
sounds, highly unusual in opera—­challenge the notion that silence need be
a sign of disempowerment and of lack of agency and seem to suggest that
silence can also be subversive.49 The extended exploration of these post-­
operatic approaches to vocalism position Sokolović’s piece as representative
of post-­operatic experiments that use traditionally non-­operatic vocalism to
explore complex subjectivities characteristic of the twenty-­first century.
According to Michel Poizat, we are always in search of the lost materiality
of the voice, a materiality we knew before we were engulfed in the symbolic
order, which Lacan situates as the order of narrative and language. We are
always trying to get back to that. This is the lost object of opera. Or, rather,
a lost effect. If music has been traditionally made to fit the symbolic, there
is always a tension wherein it tries to get back to its originary way of being,
what Tia DeNora says it is already trying to “achieve, silently.”50 I would posi-
tion Sokolović’s creative use of consonant sounds and other “carnal” noises in
Six Voix Pour Sirènes and Svadba as extensions of Eidsheim’s assertion that
intention and vibrational energy are key to materiality. Indeed, though the
operatic form is built on the idea that the vowel communicates the true voice
and subjectivity of the heroine, her deepest emotions and instincts (though
not her thoughts) carried through the primordial (yet stylized) “ah” that per-
vades the canon, Six Voix Pour Sirènes and Svadba prove that there is also
value in listening to other extra-­vocal, contra-­logos sounds as powerful com-
municators of womens’ irreducible, often unnameable, power and presence.

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 Of Sense and Sirens 195

Notes
1. See Holly Harris, “Ana Sokolović Wants You to Enjoy Her Imagination,” Musicworks,
Issue 134 (2020), available at [Link]
-you-enjoy-her-imagination
2. See Lydia Perovic, “In Conversation: ‘It’s a necessity, creation,’” The Whole Note,
December 7, 2021, [Link]
/31533-in-conversation-it-s-a-necessity-creation-composer-ana-sokolovic
3. See Shaun Brady, “Philadelphia Opera Unveils ‘Svadba-­Wedding,’” Metro Philadel-
phia, September 19, 2013, [Link]
dba-wedding/
4. Wayne Gooding, “Opera in Review: Toronto,” Opera Canada 52, no. 3 (Fall 2011):
40–­41; 39–­41. See also Christopher Hoile, “In Review—­North America: Svadba—­Wedding,”
Opera News 76, no. 3 (September 2011).
5. See [Link]
6. This production was available as of January 2022 at [Link]
ucts/svadba. Opera Philadelphia also streamed the opera through its Opera Philadelphia
channel. Jane Forner’s review of this film production also addresses the fascinating tensions
between what is heard vocally and what it seen visually in this particular rendering of the
work. See Jane Forner, “Svadba on the Beach: Opera for the Streaming Age,” Opera Quar-
terly, 2022. kbac006, [Link]
7. Michelle Duncan, “The Operatic Scandal of the Singing Body: Voice, Presence, Per-
formativity,” Cambridge Opera Journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 284.
8. See Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal
Expression, trans. and with an introduction by Paul A. Kottman (Redwood City: Stanford
University Press, 2005); Steven Connor, Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters, and Other
Vocalization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing
Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham: Duke University Press,
2015).
9. See Laurie Fyffe, “Queen of Puddings Music Theatre,” The Canadian Encyclopedia
(April 7, 2008), available at [Link]
-puddings-music-theatre-emc
10. Tamara Bernstein, “The Vocal Music of Ana Sokolović: Love Songs for the Twenty-­
First Century,” Circuit, 22, no. 3 (2012): 19–­35; 27. [Link]
11. English translation by Francine Labelle.
12. For an excellent interview with Sokolovič about the cultural and ethnic influences
and inspirations for Svadba, see Perovic, “In Conversation: ‘It’s a necessity, creation.’”
13. Perovic, “In Conversation: ‘It’s a necessity, creation.’”
14. Hoile, “In Review—­North America: Svadba—­Wedding.”
15. The score for Svadba is available for purchase through the Canadian Music Centre
website and through Sokolović’s new publisher Boosey & Hawkes. See [Link]
[Link]. The score for Six Voix Pour Sirènes is available from the composer.
16. Dairine Ni Mheadra and John Hess, interview with the author, April 17, 2018.
17. Dairine Ni Mheadra and John Hess, interview with the author, April 17, 2018.
18. Bernstein, “The Vocal Music of Ana Sokolović,” 19.

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 196 contemporary opera in flux

19. Linda Fisher, “Feminist Phenomenological Voices,” Continental Philosophical Review

43 (2010): 86.
20. Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, 105.
21. See Jennifer Logue, “Beyond Binaries: Reflections on the ‘Feminine Voice’ in Philos-
ophy and Feminism,” Philosophy of Education Archive 2018, no. 1 (2018): 136–­39.
22. Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image, Music, Text, essays selected and
translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 179–­89; Cavarero, For More
Than One Voice, and Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
23. Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, 152.
24. Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, 177.
25. Walter Ong, Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).
26. Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin, eds. The Voice as Something More: Essays
Toward Materiality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019): 14.
27. Krisztina Szabo talked about the “weirdly emotional” way she got when she talked
about the process of doing the piece, indicating that the connection wrought between the
women through the rehearsal and performance processes of this piece was something spe-
cial, binding, and visceral. The force of this “interrelational plurality” can be heard in the
rawness of the voices in the 2020 Perm Opera Ballet Theatre production. It is also empha-
sized in the indistinct nature of voices in the BLO film of the opera.
28. Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 148.
29. Duncan, “The Operatic Scandal of the Singing Body,” 287.
30. This production starred Chabrelle D. Williams as Milica the bride-­to-­be, Brianna J.
Robinson as Lena, Maggie Finnegan as Danica, Mack Wolz as Zora, Vera Savaage as Nada,
and Hannah Ludwig as Ljubica. Actor/dancers embodying each character include Victo-
ria L. Awkward (Milica), Jackie Davis (Lena), Jay Breen (Danica), Sarah Pacheco (Zora),
Emily Jerant-­Hendrickson (Nada), Sasha Peterson (Ljubica). Olivia Moon makes a special
appearance as The Betrothed, a character who does not appear in Sokolovič’s score.
31. Forner, “Svadba on the Beach,” 8.
32. Bernstein, “The Vocal Music of Ana Sokolović,” 18.
33. Bernstein, “The Vocal Music of Ana Sokolović,” 20. See also Aaron Gervais, “Ana
Sokolović: Made in Canada (Sort of ),” Music on Main (December 2012), [Link]
[Link]/ana-sokolovic-made-in-canada-sort-of/
34. Bernstein, “The Vocal Music of Ana Sokolović,” 29.
35. Michelle Duncan’s work comes to mind here, as does Carolyn Abbate’s work, spe-
cifically the analysis of Lakmé’s vocalizing in the first chapter of Unsung Voices: Opera
and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991). Abbate writes, “In opera, we rarely hear the voice both unaccompanied and stripped
of text—­and when we do (in the vocal cadenzas typical of Italian arias, for instance), the
sonority is disturbing, perhaps because such vocalizing so pointedly focuses our sense of
the singing voice as one that can compel without benefit of words” (4).
36. Roland Barthes, “The Pleasure of the Text,” trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1975), 27.
37. Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, 182.

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 Of Sense and Sirens 197

38. Joy H. Calico explores breath as sound and concept brilliantly in her contribution to
this volume, and her thinking around this issue has both inspired and confirmed my own
thinking around the significance of breath in Sokolović’s works.
39. The history of extended vocal techniques is in many ways imbricated with an interest
in the materiality of sound. Pauline Oliveros and Joan La Barbara were intensely interested
in these not only as compositional or sonic experience, but also as vibrational ones. Pauline
Oliveros writes, for example, about her initial explorations into extended vocal techniques,
writing, “I began to do this localization [writing about Sonic Meditations] because I wanted
to explore [. . .] the sensation, how it felt and what the resonance was in the body in mind.
How it could change your mind. And changed your thought patterns and so on” (Gelsey
Bell and Pauline Oliveros, “Tracing Voice through the Career of a Musical Pioneer: A Con-
versation with Pauline Oliveros,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies 2, no. 1 [2017]:
69).
40. Connor, Beyond Words, 35.
41. Connor, Beyond Words, 35. The story of the contest between Apollo and Marsyas
enacts this distinction. See “Windbags and Skinsongs,” [Link]
.html
42. Ana Sokolović, interview with the author, May 31, 2019.
43. Dairine Ni Mheadra and John Hess, interview with the author, April 17, 2018.
44. Connor, Beyond Words, 88.
45. Duncan, “The Operatic Scandal of the Singing Body,” 291.
46. Thanks to Michael Kinney for this observation during the presentation of a shorter
version of this chapter at the conference Opera in Flux: Identity, Staging, Narrative in
October 2020, hosted virtually by the University of Illinois at Chicago.
47. Ana Sokolović, interview with author, May 31, 2019.
48. Mariusz Kozak, Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 57.
49. This is the topic of Jane L. Parpart and Swati Parashar, eds, Rethinking Silence, Voice,
and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains (New York: Routledge, 2019). The book fea-
tures several examples from the Global South that reveal silence as symbolic of womens’
strength, power, and often political agency, challenging Western notions that speech and
silence are polar opposites.
50. Tia DeNora, “Interlude 54: Two or More Forms of Music,” in International Hand-
book of Research in Arts Education, ed. Liora Bresler (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer,
2007), 801. Cited in Nina Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 160.

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 9

Sex, Myth, and Power

Reclaiming the “Dark Feminine” in Anthony Davis’s Lilith

Jane Forner

“You were an accident of femininity, witchcraft, and maternity. The Creator

is sorry for His mistakes.” With these words, the “Voice” reveals to Lilith
her origins, during divorce proceedings from Adam in Eden. An angel and
spokesman for the Almighty, the ominously named Voice attempts to assert
divine patriarchal authority over the wayward woman, deemed an aberration
in what should have been the creation of the ideal first man and woman. Lilith
is cast as a mistake soon to be rectified by the arrival of Adam’s new wife,
Eve, the original woman 2.0. With music by Anthony Davis, and a libretto by
Allan Havis based on his 1990 play of the same name, the opera Lilith offers
a comic and provocative interrogation of sexual equality and women’s power.
I situate it both as a representation of twenty-­first-­century feminist strategies
of engaging with myth and as an important—­and overlooked—­component
of how Davis’s political commitment is expressed through his operatic work.
Surprisingly, given its long-­standing attachment to “transgressive” women
with suspiciously devilish and seductive intentions, opera has rarely featured
Lilith as a character. Despite her strong imprint on the Western cultural
imagination throughout literature, visual art, theater, film, television, popular
music, and even video games, feminist approaches to new opera have also
generally overlooked this quintessential figure. Of the few Lilith operas, those
debuted in the United States include Deborah Drattell’s Lilith, premiered in
concert version at the 1998 Glimmerglass Festival and subsequently staged by
the New York City Opera in 2001. Joshua Horowitz’s Lilith, The Night Demon
in One Lewd Act, a “part burlesque, part chamber folk opera” in English,
Hebrew, and Yiddish, was produced at the Osher Marin Jewish Community
Center in San Rafael, California, in 2014.1 Outside North America, Péter Eöt-

198

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 Sex, Myth, and Power 199

vös and Albert Ostermaier’s Paradise Reloaded (Lilith) (Neue Oper Wien,
2013), which I have analyzed elsewhere, is perhaps the most high-­profile con-
tribution to a Lilith opera corpus since it was staged at multiple major opera
houses in Europe. The opera presents an elusively feminist take on the myth-
ological demoness, inserting Lilith into a reinterpretation of a classic work
of Hungarian literature, Imre Madách’s 1861 eschatological, Milton-­esque
prose play Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man).2 In their work, Davis
and Havis constitute a vital part of this roster of operatic reimaginings of the
Lilith myth, which they position explicitly as a feminist act that scrutinizes
society’s conceptions of “what a woman is . . . what a modern-­day woman is”
and how Lilith’s story “could reflect on today.”3
Premiered in 2009 at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD),
Lilith represents, on the surface, a diversion from Davis’s focus on narratives
drawn from modern American—­and especially African American—­history,
but its feminist critique nonetheless grapples with parallel mythologies of
power and inequality. The stage works of Davis, who has a robust operatic
oeuvre spanning four decades, have only lately enjoyed widespread acclaim,
accelerated by winning the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Music for The Central Park
Five (2019, libretto by Richard Wesley), and through several high-­profile
revivals of his first opera, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1985, libretto
by Thulani Davis) at the Detroit Opera and the Opera Omaha in 2022 and at
the Metropolitan Opera in 2023.4 This renewed attention to Davis’s operas—­
undeniably encouraged by Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of
2020—­has centered his inclination for staging recent history, especially mar-
ginalized stories and topics of racial injustice. As George E. Lewis sums up,
“an important part of every Davis opera involves a hard, socially committed
look at race.”5 This focus is present also in the opera Amistad (1997, libretto
by Thulani Davis), narrating the 1839 slave revolt on the eponymous ship,
and Wakonda’s Dream (2007, libretto by Yusef Komunyakaa), which tells the
story of a “Native American family struggling to find their place in contem-
porary society.”6
Lilith is among a group of Davis’s chamber operas that continue to address
complex social and political questions in different directions, including Tania
(1992, libretto by Michael John La Chiusa), based on the 1974 kidnapping of
Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and Lear on the Second
Floor (2013, libretto by Havis), a twist on Shakespeare’s King Lear exploring
the degenerating mind of a woman with Alzheimer’s and her relationships
with her three daughters. All three feature intimate ensembles; directed at

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 200 contemporary opera in flux

its premiere by Cuban bandleader and percussionist Dafnis Prieto, Lilith

comprises three principal and three secondary vocal roles and a chamber
orchestra of clarinet and bass clarinet, string quintet, percussion (vibraphone
and marimba), drums, and keyboards (piano and Kurzweil synthesizer). My
analyses of Lilith are based on the concert premiere in 2009, at which Cynthia
Aaronson-­Davis sang Lilith/Claire, Susan Narucki as Eppy, Ruff Yeager as
Adam, Jonah Davis as Earl, and Philip Larson as the Voice, and a semi-­staged
2015 workshop production consisting of five scenes, [Re]Creating Lilith, the
latter also at UCSD. This featured Bonnie Lander as Lilith/Claire, Hilary Jean
Young as Eppy, Alvin Almazan as Adam, and Larson reprised his role as the
Voice; direction was by Keturah Stickann, set design by Victoria Petrovich,
lighting by Gwikyoung Ko, and visual/interactive design by Peter Torpey.
After giving a brief overview of the history of Lilith and the opera’s gen-
esis, I focus on three key aspects of the opera’s feminist reclamation: sex and
power, motherhood, and confronting a Lilith-­Eve duality, throughout which
I emphasize the creators’ dominant expressive mode of satire and dark com-
edy. I demonstrate how the narrative is shaped by features of Lilith mythology,
influences from post-­Freudian and feminist psychoanalytical perspectives,
and allusions to twentieth-­century popular culture from Hollywood femmes
fatales to video games. Addressing Davis’s signature freedom in his compo-
sitional approach, I argue that stylistic plurality functions as an important
strategy to disrupt racially coded politics of operatic genre. I aim here to
build musicological discourse on Davis’s operas, especially establishing Lilith
as occupying a crucial position—­that of a turn to distant pasts rather than
recent history—­in his long-­term efforts to sustain his politics through musi-
cal practice.

Creating Lilith

The dramatic structure and narrative of Lilith are largely drawn from Havis’s
original play, although he and Davis worked collaboratively to adapt it for
operatic form. Havis, of Jewish background, was familiar with the figure of
Lilith but undertook considerable research into her mythological history,
augmenting his existing knowledge through research in New York at a Yid-
dish Library on the Upper East Side and at the YIVO Institute for Jewish
Research in Chelsea. Lilith’s symbolic resonance for feminists in the 1960s
and 1970s, “who claimed her,” Naomi Wolf writes, “as their own personal one-­

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 Sex, Myth, and Power 201

woman Act Up guerrilla fighter,” also strongly impacted Havis and Davis’s
approach.7 Lilith is based most directly on the midrash in the Alphabet of
Ben Sira (ABS), an anonymous collection of proverbs and stories written in
Aramaic and Hebrew, dating from somewhere between the eighth and tenth
centuries CE.8 Here Lilith precedes Eve as Adam’s first wife, and her refusal
to submit sexually—­“I will not lie below,” she proclaims—­leads her to flee,
pursued by angels, and thereafter live a cursed existence.9 In an even longer
history of folk mythology, she belongs to lineages of goddesses and spirits
coded as seductive and demonic.10
The opera unites influences from across centuries of mythological and
popular culture, addressing “the ironic ever-­changing image of Lilith through
history, from the mysterious, dark-­haired, winged creature of ancient mythol-
ogy to the irresistible blonde sex goddess as portrayed in 20th century media
ranging from Jean Harlow and other Hollywood femme fatales to the rock
stars Madonna and Shakira.”11 It focuses especially on examining critically her
mythological reputation as a nocturnal seducer of unsuspecting men, whose
semen she steals (“You gotta give back his semen,” insists the Voice in scene
2), as a threat to children, and the broader trope of the femme fatale. Both
Davis and Havis mentioned Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (1987) to me as
a key reference point, and Havis described taking inspiration for both play
and libretto from classic Hollywood actresses of the 1940s and 1950s. One of
the most pertinent was J. R. Salamanca’s 1961 novel Lilith and the subsequent
1964 film adaptation directed by Robert Rossen, starring Warren Beatty as
Vincent Bruce, a young man who returns from serving in the Korean War
and becomes infatuated with Lilith Arthur (played by Jean Seberg), a myste-
rious and seductive inpatient at a Maryland psychiatric home.
These many influences amalgamate to form the opera’s narrative, which
is set in two places, the Garden of Eden and modern-­day New York City.
Havis’s play was divided into two parts corresponding to these locations,
titled “Before Eve” and “Agunah: Bound Woman,” but the libretto introduces
more fluidity of time and place.12 The opera begins in the present, moving
to Eden for scenes 2–­5, before returning to the present for scenes 6–­15. In
scene 1, we encounter Claire and Eppy, modern manifestations of Lilith and
Eve: Claire, a seductive and threatening stranger, meets Eppy in a café, and
the two develop a warring but intriguing connection. It transpires that Claire
has been watching Eppy’s husband, Arnold (a modern Adam); a predictably
disastrous affair ensues, with Eppy and Arnold’s son Earl used as a pawn in
the fraught love triangle. Claire eventually abducts Earl, and the opera ends

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 202 contemporary opera in flux

with a dramatic confrontation between her and Eppy. Nested within this plot
are the Eden scenes, where we witness divorce proceedings between Adam
and Lilith, presided over by an angel (“The Voice”)—­Eve is never actually
present—­and the aftermath of Lilith’s banishment to the Red Sea.
Two important consequences arise from the structural changes that
Havis introduced for the opera: the Eden scenes untether the narrative from
fixed and linear chronology, but furthermore, because the characters in the
“present” function symbolically, a doubling ensues where past and present
fluctuate and refract, and Eden projects a mythical atemporality. In our con-
versations, Havis offered a vivid analogy to how he sees the concept of iden-
tity in Lilith; I was curious as to what happens when Claire and Arnold seem
to “remember” that they are Lilith and Adam in the present. Havis often used
the word “jolt” to describe these moments, implying something that forces
the modern-­day characters into a memory state where they become aware
that their identities are not fully their own. He also suggested an analogy to
experiencing a (good) psychedelic trip, as shedding your name and identity,
which falls away “like a jacket” falling off your body, knowing that your exis-
tence is both now and infinitely part of the universe.
Throughout the opera, Havis’s predilection for linking temporal and psy-
chological ambiguity is a core strategy through which the varied potential
subjectivities of the Lilith-­Eve archetypes manifest (I omit Adam deliberately
here, as it is first and foremost the multiplicities of women’s identities that are
explored). His approach in Lilith builds on a precedent established in his ear-
lier plays of exploring interpersonal dysfunction, such as Mink Sonata (1986),
where stepmother and daughter are positioned in a narrative counterpoint
of beautiful/disturbed. In an interview regarding his play Haut Goût (1987),
Havis noted his attraction to portraying confrontation and dramatic ambi-
guity through psychological prisms: “whatever the tapestry, I like an unusual
conflict. I also like either the fantastical or things that are very much real—­but
because of some deep-­seated psychology, they reverberate and don’t become
realistic.”13 Boundaries between the real and the fantastical, and between an
Edenic “past” and a modern “present” in Lilith, are similarly tested. Charac-
ters frequently reference past and future events that, if they were persons
tethered psychologically to one time frame (rather than unstable prisms of
archetypal identities), they should have no business knowing. That the same
performers sing all roles only magnifies, of course, this sense of doubling that
bends time, where mythical and symbolic personas confront one another.

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 Sex, Myth, and Power 203

Sex and Power

Siegmund Hurwitz concludes his historical and psychoanalytical study of

Lilith with the question: “What does the confrontation with the dark aspect
of the feminine mean to people today?”14 Lilith, Wolf argues, “offers us a vision
of pure female autonomy”: for Havis and Davis, the answer is one of rehabili-
tation and reclamation of this “dark feminine,” where feminist empowerment
is predicated on challenging entrenched associations between women’s sex-
uality and transgression.15 Surrounded by the judgment of men during her
divorce proceedings in scenes 2 through 4, Lilith rebuffs Adam’s complaints
that their problems “began in bed . . . she demands to be on top, always”:

Voice: Adam is supposed to take the missionary. LILITH: Because he’s a

man? Where’s it written? ADAM: Because I am man. LILITH: Why should
you precede me? We were born at the same time.16 (scene 2)

The Voice here acts as ventriloquist for God, and as a henchman—­

mirroring the angel messengers in the midrash—­sent to regulate sexual dis-
obedience, to clean up the mess of Lilith before her marriage yields a human-
ity that might risk women being on top.
That these demands are ludicrous is made clear through the text’s witti-
cisms (“Only the missionary”; “I get nosebleeds!”) and Davis’s vocal writing,
particularly for the Voice, for whom he writes a sententious, contrapuntal
line, parodying a serious fugal style to highlight the archaic absurdity of the
angel’s position as divine enforcer. (In [Re]Creating Lilith, the character is
represented visually by shifting lights on stage rather than physical pres-
ence, emphasizing the concatenation of the Voice and God’s authority).
Such passages also serve an important function of affording Lilith a voice
denied to her in mythology. Her speaking back to patriarchal power parallels
other reclaimed voices of mythological or medieval women in contemporary
opera, such as Clémence in Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf ’s L’amour de
loin (2000), where the usually silent domna of troubadour poetry is not only
given a voice, but uses it to attack the pedestal upon which she has been
placed by Jaufré Rudel (“Mais de quel droit parle-­t-­il de moi?” “What right
does he have to speak about me?”).17
As Judith Baskin summarizes the midrash, “the very notion of an auton-
omous woman, co-­existent with the first man and dangerous to submissive
men and their children, was a source of significant social, spiritual, and sexual

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 204 contemporary opera in flux

Fig. 9.1. Lilith pronounces the Ineffable Name, scene 2, Lilith, mm. 301–­309.
(Score excerpt from Lilith, copyright 2009, reprinted with permission from Episteme
Music, administered exclusively worldwide by Schott Music Corporation.)

anxiety to the collective rabbinic psyche.”18 The opera caricatures these anx-
ieties in emphasizing that Lilith is by default Adam’s equal, and that there is
no justification for the inhibition of her freedom. Lilith is also situated not
only as Adam’s peer, but surpassing him in strength and, more importantly,
rivaling God’s power. Davis articulates this musically in two ways: first, by
setting Lilith on equal footing with the two male characters. In the divorce
scenes, he typically clusters the three voices closely, differing in register but
sharing melodic figures and rhythmic patterns, and all lines drawing pitch
material primarily from octatonic collections, a backbone of Davis’s melodic
palette in Lilith. On other occasions, Lilith’s superior strength is empha-
sized through musical difference. For instance, when she utters the “Ineffable
Name” in scene 2, she causes a great sonic rupture: shown in figure 9.1, her
vocal line, dominated by glissandi through ascending tritones, soars to land

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 Sex, Myth, and Power 205

on D ♭6, matched by the strings and piano’s syncopated, increasingly rapid,

and loud patterns. Both voice and ensemble outline markedly the C-­C ♯ (D ♭)
octatonic scale, landing on a thick cluster chord.19 Lilith’s blasphemy is signi-
fied through its effect alone, wordlessly vocalizing on vowels “Ah-­ee-­uh-­ee.”
Followed by the Voice’s angry demand, “Who said the Ineffable Name?,”
the score then instructs all instrumentalists here to “improvise harmonic
texture with space” and “improvise soft texture, use harmony”: in the 2009
premiere, Aaronson-­Davis added fierce whispered noises, while electronic
distortion was added in Lander’s 2015 performance to emphasize the anar-
chic quality of Lilith’s sound. We understand that she possesses superior,
forbidden knowledge—­of the Ineffable Name—­and thus we hear it only as
phonemic content.
Lilith’s wordless singing tears through an invisible line between the per-
missible and the blasphemous, but I interpret it also as the sounding of sex-
ual abandon, rising to the excessive boundaries of the voice, reflecting David
Stern’s suggestion that in the Zohar, in which Lilith also features, “divinity
itself is eroticized.”20 Crossovers between an erotic dimension of medieval
Jewish mysticism and contemporary influences are also evident here, in that
Davis sought inspiration from blues traditions for these scenes of Edenic
divorce banter:

There’s this incredible battle of the sexes that’s always implicit in the blues . . .
I studied all this music, and that came out in Lilith too, especially the kind of
dirtiness, the salaciousness of it, and also the raw, emotional aspect, the fact
that it’s laying bare these feelings and this anxiety about sexuality, which is
basically at the root of Lilith . . . Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, all these people,
they really negotiated those things in their songs, so it seemed natural to me
to draw on that idea, even though it’s unnatural for an opera singer.21

Echoing Angela Davis’s analyses of women’s blues as subversive of gen-

dered expectations, Davis’s deployment of a blues-­inflected “battle of the
sexes” undermines heteropatriarchal norms, with Lilith’s erotic resistance
functioning as both a challenge to male sexual demands and a sonically dis-
ruptive force.22 This works both on a narrative level and as a play with operatic
genre, wherein Davis considers his use of rap and blues as a subversive inter-
vention matching Havis’s provocative text: “Sometimes he would have in the
libretto things that cut away, you feel the rage, the crudeness of the language.

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 206 contemporary opera in flux

It’s almost like a fissure, something that breaks open, even from something
that would usually be in the blues paradigm, something you wouldn’t say—­
you create expectations, and sometimes there are fissures, disjunct aspects.”23
Davis’s approach speaks to a spirit of stylistic plurality and openness that
runs throughout Lilith as well as his other works. While his rejection of the
label “jazz” has been well-­documented, his key role in Black musical exper-
imental traditions and translation of his practice to the operatic stage illu-
minates the politics of genre.24 Davis’s “sense of play” in Lilith25—­described
by a reviewer as “genre-­leaping”26—­represents a compositional freedom that
works as a disruptive strategy, producing those “fissures” not only in the
immediate horizon of musical expectations in the opera but as an interven-
tion into the form. I pressed further on this idea in our conversations:

Jane Forner: I’m interested in this idea of play: do you think of it as a kind
of openness, a mobility to be able to freely move between things?
Anthony Davis: You could say a kind of postmodern way of looking at
it, using reference, something recognizable yet mediated into something
I’m creating, but I’m thinking about these forms when I’m creating it. . . .
Sometimes the references I use may be unrecognizable to the audience . . .
but it gives me pleasure, because it’s also establishing my connection to
the past . . . sometimes it’s subversive too. . . . It’s an assertion of my iden-
tity, who I am, where I come from, for me.27

In Lilith we hear blues, free jazz, video game music, Cuban jazz, rap, hip-­
hop, and more; it offers fertile ground to explore how Davis’s stylistic mobility
reflects his background in experimental practices and a musical politics of
what, for Lewis, is a form of “genre refusal.”28 It calls to mind Fred Moten’s
scrutiny of “how the idea of a black avant-­garde exists, as it were, oxymo-
ronically—­as if black, on the one hand, and avant-­garde, on the other hand,
each depends for its coherence upon the exclusion of the other.”29 Davis’s con-
nections to many diverse musical traditions exist in an exciting ever-­shifting
sonic dialogue; I see his operas reflecting what Lewis asserts are ways that
“African-­American composers have explored what it means—­ and could
mean—­to be American, helping to foster a creolized, cosmopolitan new
music for the 21st century.”30
I conceptualize Lilith’s rehabilitation in the opera as a further expression
of Davis’s attention to empowerment of marginalized or maligned voices.

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 Sex, Myth, and Power 207

Musically, this is facilitated by his allocation of substantial solo sections

exclusively to Lilith, Claire, and Eppy: Lilith is afforded two, in scenes 3 and
5; Eppy’s aria comes in scene 9, representing the moment “Eve” can speak
freely, and Claire sings several aria-­like passages in scene 15. Text and music
in these moments tend to shift away from the prevailingly satirical and comic
mode. For Lilith’s soaring, meditative aria in scene 3, Havis offers a lyrical
poetic mysticism: “These aren’t mere arms, these are wings of a fiery spirit.
The sun, the moon, and the earth became triumvirate. I too have a magic
amulet against them and their kind.”
Moving away from the bass and piano beat-­driven writing that underpins
the Eden court scenes, Davis articulates for the first time in this aria a musical
identity associated primarily with Lilith, a beguiling web of undulating white-­
note cluster chords (fig. 9.2), producing dense modal sonorities, which con-
tinually thicken as black notes are added. Overlapping triplets weave together
to create a pulsing texture, encapsulating the magic and universal unity of
which she sings, and the spreading of her powerful “wings.” We hear in Lilith’s
soliloquy what Quincy Troupe calls “a symphonic elocution of elegant voices
/ a cecil taylor bedazzlement of lyrical, discordant chords.”31 These passages
indeed specifically echo influences from Cecil Taylor’s signature modal piano
clusters, which he described as “four or five bodies of sound existing in a
duality of dimension.”32 Davis’s writing is a “tribute” to the musician that also
emphasized his experience as an improviser.33
Musical allusions to the distribution of power and agency among the
three characters in Eden also work deliberately to shore up Adam’s weakness
as well as Lilith’s strength. This parallels Wojciech Kosior’s recent analysis of
“the ruthlessly parodic tone” of the midrash as primarily a criticism of Adam,
“who turns out to be weak and ineffective in his relations with his wife.”34 The
opera, however, strikes a balance, mocking Adam’s deficiencies and empha-
sizing Lilith’s strength without erasing the harm she and all women endure.
For example, in scene 4, Adam cannot penetrate Lilith, but his literal and
figurative impotence is marked by the discovery that she has been “sewn up
from side to side”; Lilith responds that “They’re bringing surgical tools that
will cut open our flesh. My ovaries, your ribcage, ripped with ease.” Havis’s
libretto oscillates between straightforward comedy, dark humor, and devas-
tating lines like this that reiterate Lilith’s humanity and strength simultane-
ously, while avoiding the pitfall of the misogynist trope of men as “powerless”
when faced with seductive women.

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 Fig. 9.2. Lilith’s aria, scene 3, Lilith, mm. 205–­212. (Score excerpt from Lilith,
copyright 2009, reprinted with permission from Episteme Music, administered
exclusively worldwide by Schott Music Corporation.)

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 Sex, Myth, and Power 209

“Divine Whore, Terrible Mother”

As spectators, we are not asked to believe that Lilith is morally right, but
to understand her and Claire’s actions in the opera always as performing a
critique and parody of patriarchal notions of what it means to be “good,” as
woman and mother. Hurwitz proposes two “aspects” of Lilith: when she is
faced with a man, “the aspect of the divine whore, or, psychologically speak-
ing, that of the seductive anima, comes to the fore. To a woman, however,
she will present above all the aspect of the terrible mother [emphasis in orig-
inal].”35 I have pointed to depictions of Lilith’s sins as chiefly concerning the
sexual, but her identity as (bad) mother is central to the opera’s interrogation
of how patriarchal structures fear and seek to pathologize women’s sexual
agency. Lilith refuses normative sexual roles specifically cast within the con-
text of proper marital relations, thus establishing the sphere of her transgres-
sion as inherent to the family and to proper social reproduction.
Perceived sexual transgression is inseparable from perceived maternal
neglect and perversion. “Fear of the archaic mother,” writes Julia Kristeva,
“turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power. It is this power, a
dreaded one, that patrilineal filiation has the burden of subduing.”36 The crux
of Lilith’s punishment, as told in the ABS and manifesting in the Eden scenes
in Lilith, concerns her children: “Said the Holy One to Adam, ‘If she agrees to
come back, fine. If not, she must permit one hundred of her children to die
every day.’”37
God’s judgment will not permit Lilith to assume the role of a mother who
is also sexually liberated and independently powerful. Fear of this happening
ushers in her banishment, where she is not only removed from Eden but also
forced perpetually to live out a cursed motherhood, one that will then be
turned upon her again as she is transformed into a folkloric symbol of evil
against other mothers and children. In the opera, Claire’s relationship with
and abduction of Earl, Eppy and Arnold’s son, further casts her as the “ter-
rible” or abject mother. This largely dictates the narrative of the latter half of
the opera, in which Claire/Lilith’s sexuality is most threatening when directed
toward the child: “[Earl] will worship me . . . he will confuse mother and
whore” (scene 15). The opera’s scrutiny of society’s exigencies on motherhood
is often deliberately uncomfortable. Claire seems to take perverse delight in
children’s sexual pleasure and to wield an uncanny influence over Earl, fore-
shadowed first by Lilith’s rap interlude in scene 3, taunting that she will haunt
Adam and Eve’s offspring: “I tickle little boys in their sleep / They never stir, or

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 210 contemporary opera in flux

make a peep / Before they awake, their sheets are wet /Their flannel pajamas
are drenched in sweat.”
Over a jagged, syncopated bass-­piano riff, Davis requires the singer to
alternate between rapping and singing these lines. In the premiere, the angel
beatboxes in the background, while in [Re]Creating Lilith Lilith’s voice is elec-
tronically distorted, parodying threat. I find this passage difficult, recoiling at
hearing the character revel in causing young boys’ nocturnal emissions. But
we are supposed to feel uneasy and to use that discomfort to probe societal
biases, particularly those that reinscribe associations between sexual “devi-
ancy” and child-­focused “perversion.” These biases continually manifest, for
instance, in queerphobic rhetoric surrounding child molestation, what Ian
Barnard has examined in depth as one of the twenty-­first century’s most
pervasive “sex panic[s].”38 This scene also parallels Salamanca’s Lilith novel
and Rossen’s film, from which Havis drew inspiration, where Lilith Arthur
appears several times in uncomfortable quasi-­erotic interactions with young
boys, musing, in the novel, “to possess a child—­oh, that would be exquisite.”39
The sexually deviant predator stereotype is also subjected to more obvi-
ous satire, however, evidenced in scene 14 in the hotel room and hostage site,
where Earl plays a video game titled Lilith, the Succubus Bitch, sonically ren-
dered by a Kurzweil synthesizer. Shocking his mother (“Nice language!” Eppy
comments on the game’s title), the passage neatly elides paranoia of child
perversion with entrenched societal anxieties over the (perceived) damaging
effect of video games on children. (An added layer of irony comes from the
fact that Davis was inspired by the playing of video games by his own son
Jonah, who sang Earl in the premiere.) In the game, Earl defeats an angel in
a battle over the Red Sea, and the Voice speaks to Eppy through the game,
telling her she can use an amulet to ward off Claire. The shimmering synth
texture here musically renders this mind-­bending dissolving of temporalities,
with myth, operatic narrative, and game all colliding in one dramatic space.
Again recalling how Havis’s text continually emphasizes the cruelty of
Lilith’s treatment, the opera’s rehabilitation of Lilith-­as-­mother lies both in
her ability to voice her own resistance and in exposing the brutality of the
forced loss of her child and its emotional impact: “Lilith, before your body
swells, we will abort this child, a young soul defiled” (Voice, scene 4). “I don’t
want them,” Adam grumbles; “I want my babies returned,” Lilith pleads. The
Voice speaks: “Never . . . you will never see them again.” Responsibility for
her demon children and their daily abortion is placed exclusively on Lilith,
exposing, I suggest, the haplessness of Adam as a vehicle for a more serious

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 Sex, Myth, and Power 211

criticism of men absenting responsibility for pregnancies and yet still met-
ing out punishment. When I first started writing about this opera in 2018,
I thought about how the impact of the public acceleration of the #MeToo
movement on the opera industry might shape a future staging. Returning to
the opera several years later, it’s this aspect of Lilith’s story that I felt deeply
in the wake of the devastation of reproductive rights in the United States
following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022. I
think now of what it would be like to revisit the opera’s feminist critique in
a staging of Lilith today, bearing in mind the contrast already in place in the
2015 production, which, in staging only five scenes, ends with a mournful
elegy to Lilith’s unborn child. Davis sets this new finale to the same texture
of shifting cluster chords heard in her scene 3 aria: “Little you, little me, in
the trees, on our knees / Little me, on the beach, out of reach / Under leaves,
without sleeves / Little you, little me.”
This ending considerably alters the original narrative arc, removing the
motivating subplot of Earl’s abduction, but although presenting only a third
of the full opera was initially a practical decision, Stickann’s direction also
offers an important alternative interpretation. [Re]Creating Lilith’s ending
focuses substantially on pathos and, most importantly, on the psychologi-
cal complexities of the Lilith-­Eve/Claire-­Eppy relationship, whose centrality
forms a connecting thread between the two versions.

Confronting Lilith-­Eve Duality

Havis asks, “What happens when Eve becomes Lilith?”;40 but who is Eve in
the opera? We only meet her as a modern manifestation of an archetype, as
fleetingly echoed in contemporary subjectivities and in the shadows of Eppy’s
psyche. We also learn about her through others: the Voice calls her “Lilith
without fire, she is Lilith without danger, nothing stranger” (scene 2), and
Lilith’s attitude during the divorce scenes is predominantly disdainful toward
the forthcoming “new woman,” replying “She has a vagina, Adam,” when he
asks, “Is she as sexy as Lilith?” Eve will be nothing more than a vessel to fulfill
Adam’s needs. But so too is it consistently implied that the two women are in
some way the same:

Lilith: The other woman is my enemy.

Voice: The other woman is still you. (scene 2)

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 212 contemporary opera in flux

...
Eppy: I am the natural female; you are the counterfeit.
Claire: You seem so much like me . . . (scene 15)

It is also strongly insinuated that Earl is, in fact, the product of Adam and
Lilith’s final sexual union, as well as Eppy’s son, which both continues to warp
the narrative chronology and strengthens the suggestion that Eve/Eppy is also
Lilith, as in this passage in scene 8:

Claire: We have given birth to the very same child.

Eppy: Get away! Fly to Hell!
Claire: We are beloved sisters . . .
Eppy: I will kill you!
Claire: . . . genuine mothers of one mystical uterus.
Eppy: If you come again, I’ll tear your fucking eyes right out from your skull!
This, I swear.

Eppy’s anger signifies a revulsion and rejection of Lilith that arises from
being confronted with a facet of her own identity that she is unable initially
to accept. The ongoing battle between Eppy and Claire could appear as a
simple case of protective mother versus child-­stealing psychopath, wife ver-
sus mistress, but even as the drama moves toward the final conflict, I see
a shift take place that refocuses their energies inwards, that is, away from
Adam/Arnold, to where their tension no longer holds men as its central ref-
erent. As mentioned, Eppy is also later afforded a substantial aria in scene 9,
matching Lilith’s in scenes 3 and 5, offering her a chance to speak freely and
establish an identity in her own right. It is a lament that draws attention to
another important dimension of the opera’s feminist critique, societal atti-
tudes towards postmenopausal women: “The petals of my flower bleed as if
time died. Look at the hourglass; listen to the red oriole. Am I aging need-
lessly when kisses turn to dust? Must I hemorrhage to please you?”
The move away from presenting Lilith and Eve as dueling opposites
toward highlighting their proximity is expressed on multiple levels. Musi-
cally, Davis tends to situate Claire and Eppy’s vocal lines in intimate musical
spaces, writing melodic lines in their dialogue scenes that mirror one another
either as repetitions or as literal mirrored motifs, each line a straightforward
intervallic inversion of the other’s. In Stickann’s directorial vision for [Re]
Creating Lilith, the ambiguity between the two identities was represented

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 Sex, Myth, and Power 213

Fig. 9.3. Video projections and mirrors emphasizing Eve-­Lilith duality, scene 5 in
[Re]Creating Lilith (2015). (Used with permission from Anthony Davis and Allan
Havis.)

through Victoria Petrovich’s set design, which used multiple mirrors to form
a triptych-­like tableau with Lander as Claire/Lilith at center stage and videos
of both her and Eppy projected onto the mirrors, conveying the “multiplicity
of both Lilith and Eve, as they replicate themselves through time”41 (fig. 9.3).
The videos change rapidly in the performance, reiterating continuously a dif-
fracted and splintered visual and sonic exploration of women’s subjectivities;
when Eppy demands, “Who are you?” upon meeting Claire in scene 1, the
latter replies simply, “I am you in the mirror late at night.”
Hurwitz’s Jungian framework perpetuates a Lilith-­Eve duality as two
opposing female archetypes and explicitly dismisses feminist approaches
to reinterpreting the myth. While his position is hardly mainstream, the
resistance to this line of argument from pioneering feminist writers of the
late 1960s is no less foundational now to our understanding of the failings
in post-­Freudian psychoanalytic approaches to Lilith. While acknowledging
the Lilith-­Eve binary as manifestations of specifically male anxieties, they
shift away from them in order to explore erotic potentials. Jewish theologian
Judith Plaskow writes, for instance, of her realization of the “potentially sex-
ual nature of the energy between Eve and Lilith” after coming out, a decade
after she wrote her important text The Coming of Lilith.42
Reading the opera’s two endings side by side, I hear two avenues opening

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 214 contemporary opera in flux

up that transcend the heteronormative patriarchal stereotype of Lilith and

Eve as a Janus-faced female dialectic of dark and light, Madonna and whore.
In closing with Lilith’s lament for her children and Eppy and Lilith absorbed
in mirror reflections, [Re]Creating Lilith encourages empathy and a focus
on self-­love and acceptance. The impact of the original finale, meanwhile,
lies in its undoing of this oppositionality and its exploration of the “poten-
tially sexual nature” of the women’s relationship. The direction reads, “Eppy
is caught in Claire’s spell. Their lips touch”; Claire implores “Kiss me, Eppy,
end my pain.” In my hearing, it is this morphing in the final passages away
from the Eden narrative and an opening up of a queered potential that is the
opera’s most powerful feature in its mythological rewriting. I perceive the
Lilith-­Adam-­Eve triumvirate to be destabilized in favor of what Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick calls an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and
resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements
of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to
signify monolithically.”43 It functions as a new starting point that is gestured
to only as the action ends ambiguously, upending clichéd concepts of conflict
between two opposing “aspects” of woman, beginning to dissolve a binary
and to transcend heteronormative archetypal identities. Adam—­perhaps
man altogether—­is irrelevant to the dramatic tension of the finale, exiting
without fanfare and with unwavering weakness on his final line “Eppy, my
chest.” As Eppy and Claire then face one another, I see and hear Lilith’s power
engaged as a form of queered speculation, where narrative uncertainty opens
the way for her sexuality to be recast as an all-­absorbing celebration of a
female erotic energy. It reflects Audre Lorde’s assertion of the feminist possi-
bilities of an erotic that “offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to
the woman who does not fear its revelation”; like Lilith herself, “the erotic has
often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into
the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.”44
For the final forty or so measures of the opera, Davis again deploys the
sound world used earlier to signify Lilith’s mysticism, a swelling chordal tex-
ture that begins with those signature white-­note clusters and is slowly infil-
trated with dissonances. Importantly, this begins the measure after Lilith
sings “Come, kiss me goodbye” to Eppy, the music thereby signifying and
reinforcing the shift in their relationship. Much of this queered, woman-­
focused erotic potential that I draw out in my own listening lies under the
surface, not foregrounded explicitly in the opera. I think here of Ellie Hisa-
ma’s longstanding assertion that “hearing pieces of music as feminists may

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 Sex, Myth, and Power 215

lead us to reject our traditional analytical tools and encourage us to develop

new ones . . . because some works might exceed our received ways of hearing,
theorizing, and criticizing.”45 When I listen to Claire’s final lines, I hear the
unreserved replenishing force of women’s erotic energy that Lorde describes,
drawn out through the subtle suggestions of the text and Davis’s expansive,
lyrical vocal writing; when I sing through the passage myself, I feel not only
the physical satisfaction of the sustained, sinuous line but also a gratifying
tension between Davis’s fondness for large leaps, open fifths and fourths, and
tritones, the “invisible pleasures,” in Lawrence Kramer’s term, of the operatic
voice, audible but invisible.46 I see this mode of analysis as especially neces-
sary for understanding Lilith in the absence of many vocal performances,
where I rely as much on my own embodied experience of hearing and singing
as I do on recordings.
The speculative possibilities opened up for Lilith and Eve never quite
materialize, however. Claire seems to gesture toward a future for them that
might manifest in a new, different kind of Eden, one where they’ll unite in
the face of God: “When we next meet, we’ll drink, laugh and eat, raise crys-
tal glasses to our Supreme Host. . . . Eppy, you’re so beautiful, know that I
envy you.” But Claire/Lilith apparently disintegrates into the ether, shouting
“BITCH!” as she fades away; the instruction reads “Claire covers her face.
Lights radiate from Claire’s hands. Her arms slowly extend like wings.” Ulti-
mately, the meaning of the ending is left open in both music and narrative:
the final passages swirl in ambiguous harmony, while Lilith seeming to dis-
solve into a white-­light energy and primal force. In some ways, the ambi-
guity is frustrating and tantalizing: the opera could more decisively outline
possibilities for transcending the perennial duality—­beloved of the genre—­
between woman’s vice and virtue. Given that there has yet to be a fully staged
performance of Lilith, there is much that a future production could explore
in terms of bringing a queered, feminist perspective to the Lilith-­Eve relation-
ship, which reaches its apex in this finale.
Psychology, wrote Naomi Weisstein in 1968, “has nothing to say about
what women are really like . . . because psychology does not know.”47 When
Claire and Eppy see themselves and each other in the mirror, they come face
to face with an open future—­and a potentially rewritten past—­that will allow
them to write their own stories, not the myths of men; they are nothing the
world has tried to tell them they are. As a source of empowerment, Lilith can
be many things, and Davis and Havis’s Lilith shares this with all those who
have drawn succor from “great tradition of dangerous women.”48 What work

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 216 contemporary opera in flux

might Lilith do for feminism and feminist music in the twenty-­first century?
Future stagings of Lilith might draw on intersectional possibilities; while her
presence in twentieth-­century feminist movements already represents mul-
titudes of overlaps between religion, politics, sexuality, and gender, so too
have others mobilized Lilith as a powerful figure of resistance that addresses
silencing and erasures in histories of Black women in modern feminism, for
example in Octavia Butler’s science-­fiction trilogy Lilith’s Brood (1987–­89).
In building a critical mass of music scholarship on Davis’s operas, I find it
imperative to consider how his own self-­positioning as well as the reception
of his works interacts with broader discourse on Black opera in the United
States. At the turn of this century, Davis asserted that his goal “is to be the
American composer who helps to define opera for the next century, to give
opera its unique American voice, and leave a legacy of works that do that.”49
Paying attention to the full spectrum of Davis’s operas will yield rich explo-
rations of his ongoing dedication to political fights for equality as a multidi-
mensional phenomenon. “I’m in this box,” he said,

everyone wants to produce my operas that deal with the black experience—­
Lilith is not about that, and Lear on the Second Floor is in the same boat.
But I’m very attached to those works, because it was important for me, par-
ticularly as an African American composer, that I’m not just writing about
African American characters, just about the political struggle and civil rights,
I wanted to do something that expanded that, that brought me out of that.
And it’s funny because for producers, it’s hard for them to accept my pieces
that don’t fulfill a certain social function for them, and that’s unfortunate.50

The attention in Lilith to erased and silenced narratives and voices must
be seen as contiguous with Davis’s focus on political struggles, joined in
this case by Havis’s engagement with Jewish mythology and folklore. Lilith
reflects a preoccupation manifest in all Davis’s operas with oppressed, alien-
ated subjects who strain against the imposed boundaries of a (white) het-
eropatriarchal society. The disruptions and fissures I identified in Lilith on
musical, linguistic, and narrative levels also reposition the opera as another
iteration of how Davis mediates connections to cultural and musical pasts
through his work. Henry Louis Gates Jr., writing in 1997 about X, located art-
ists like Davis as an important part of a “movement” characterized by a “cer-
tain openness . . . [and] by its deep self-­confidence in the range and depth of
the black experience as a source for art”51; Naomi André affirms that “Davis’s

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 Sex, Myth, and Power 217

operas tell a story of American life encompassing multiple experiences and

vantage points.”52 But as the above interview excerpt demonstrates, repre-
senting these narratives through his works and commitment to social justice
is in tension with being pigeonholed as a one-­dimensional spokesperson for
“the black experience”; following X, Davis “had to fight to overcome the insti-
tution and transform it, to make a white institution serve a black person.”53
Lilith is invigorated by potential for a revitalization of operatic approaches
to myth that intersect, through webs of musical, textual, and dramatic allu-
sions, with aesthetics of freedom and openness. Choosing to situate her at
the center of an opera offers a compelling strategy to confront, from within,
a genre whose empire has been built on punishing women. Davis and Havis’s
rehabilitation of the “dark feminine” continues centuries of Lilith empower-
ment to work against erasures of many kinds, and its spirit of openness and
freedom represents a formidable future for the modern operatic stage and
power for all “those females who can wreck the infinite.”54

Notes
1. Jodie Shupac, “Lilith Comes to Life at Ashkenaz Festival,” Canadian Jewish News,
August 12, 2014, [Link] My thanks to
Nathan Friedman for directing me to Horowitz’s work.
2. Jane Forner, “‘Hinter den Spiegeln warten nur Spiegel’: Myth, Dystopia, and Utopia
in Peter Eötvös’s Paradise Reloaded (Lilith),” ACT: Zeitschrift für Musik und Performance
10 (2021): 1–­29.
3. Anthony Davis, “Talking ‘Lilith’: The Creators,” University of California San Diego
Television (UCSD-­TV), December 15, 2009. [Link]
wID=18555
4. The Central Park Five is a substantial new version of Davis’s earlier and shorter opera
Five on the same subject, which was performed in Newark, New Jersey, in 2016 by Trilogy:
An Opera Company.
5. George E. Lewis, “The Dancer of All Dancers: Anthony Davis and Amistad,” in Com-
posing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today/Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute,
ed. Harald Kisiedu and George E. Lewis (Hofheim: Wolke-­Verlag, 2023), 145.
6. Synopsis on Opera America North American Works Directory. [Link]
[Link]/applications/NAWD/newworks/[Link]?id=713. The opera takes inspi-
ration from the trial of Ponca chief Standing Bear in 1879 in Omaha, Nebraska, during
which he successfully argued that Native Americans should be granted civil rights under
the law, which was recognized as significantly impacting the advancement of human rights
for Native Americans under federal law.
7. Naomi Wolf, introduction to Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Re-­Create the World’s
First Woman, ed. Enid Dame, Lilly Rivlin, and Henry Wenkart (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aron-
son Inc., 1998), xii.

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 218 contemporary opera in flux

8. Other written sources for Lilith myths include a brief reference in the Hebrew Bible
(Isaiah 34); the Babylonian Talmud; the Zohar, the key text of Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah):
and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
9. I use Norman Bronznick’s translation of relevant excerpts of the Alphabet Ben Sira
throughout, in David Stern and Mark Jay Mirsky eds., Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative
Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society,
1990), here 183.
10. Lilith can be traced to Assyrian, Babylonian, and Sumerian cultures. Raphael Patai
notes the earliest mention of Lilith in the Sumerian version of the Gilgamesh epic, ca.
2000–­2400 BCE, in The Hebrew Goddess, 3rd ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1990), 221–­22.
11. Lilith website, [Link]
12. “Agunah” (‫עגונה‬, meaning “anchored,” “tied,” or “chained” in Hebrew), refers to a
woman who is unable to obtain a get (rabbinic divorce) under Jewish law (halakhah) and is
thus trapped in a marriage.
13. Allan Havis, quoted in Janice Arkatov, “Havis Develops ‘Haut Goût’ for Confronta-
tion,” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1987, [Link]
rtainment/ca-6748_1_allan-havis
14. Siegmund Hurwitz, Lilith—­the First Eve: Historical and Psychological Aspects of the
Dark Feminine, trans. Gela Jacobson (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon Verlag, 1992), 229.
15. Wolf, introduction to Which Lilith?, xii.
16. This comment reflects Lilith’s declaration in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, “We are equal
to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.” Rabbinic Fantasies, 184.
There is much written on the varying accounts of Lilith’s provenance; see Patai, The Hebrew
Goddess, 230.
17. I also think of the end of act IV, when Jaufré refers to himself as “Adam” and casts his
“love from afar” as the forbidden fruit: “Pourquoi fallait-­il que je tende la main vers le fruit?”
(“Why must I reach toward the fruit?”). Translations my own.
18. Judith R. Baskin, Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Litera-
ture (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2015), 60.
19. In Jewish traditions, God’s name is sometimes called “The Ineffable Name,” or
“explicit name.”
20. Stern, introduction to Rabbinic Fantasies, 23.
21. Anthony Davis, interview with the author, January 26, 2020.
22. Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie
Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage, 1999), 11.
23. Davis, interview, January 26, 2020.
24. See Robert Tanner, “Olly Wilson, Anthony Davis, and George Lewis: The Lives,
Works, and Perspectives of Three Contemporary African American Composers” (DMA
diss., Ohio State University, 1999), and David Gutkin, “American Opera, Jazz, and Histor-
ical Consciousness, 1924–­1994” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2015), and Gutkin’s pro-
gram notes for the 2022 Detroit Opera revival of Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm
X, “Anthony Davis’s X,” Detroit Opera Website, April 11 2022, [Link]
hony-daviss-x/

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 Sex, Myth, and Power 219

25. Davis, interview, January 26, 2020.

26. George Varga, “‘Lilith,’ a Family Affair: In This Family, You Start Young,” San Diego
Union-­Tribune, November 29, 2009.
27. Davis, interview, January 26, 2020.
28. Lewis, “The Dancer of All Dancers: Anthony Davis and Amistad,” 135.
29. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 32. I think here also of George E. Lewis’s
discussion of genre and mobility in the experimental practices of the AACM in A Power
Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2008).
30. George E. Lewis, “Lifting the Cone of Silence from Black Composers,” New York
Times, July 3, 2020, [Link]
-[Link]
31. Quincy Troupe, “Words that Build Bridges Toward a New Tongue,” Transcirculari-
ties: New & Selected Poems (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2002), 307.
32. Cecil Taylor, in J. B. Figi, “Cecil Taylor: African Code, Black Methodology,” Down
Beat (April 10, 1975), quoted in John Litweiler, The Freedom Principle: Jazz after 1958
(Poole: Blandford Press, 1985), 216.
33. Davis, interview, January 26, 2020.
34. Wojciech Kosior, “A Tale of Two Sisters: The Image of Eve in Early Rabbinic Liter-
ature and Its Influence on the Portrayal of Lilith in the Alphabet of Ben Sira,” Nashim: A
Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues 32 (2018): 115.
35. Hurwitz, Lilith—­The First Eve, 229.
36. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: A Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 76. I think here also of connections drawn between
Kristeva and Lilith in Alejandro Hugo Del Valle and Micaela Julieta Del Nero, “La Abyec-
ción de Lilith: sobre feminismos y binarismos,” Novapolis 18 (2021): 31–­54.
37. Excerpts from Alphabet Ben Sira, trans. Bronznick, in Stern and Mirsky, Rabbinic
Fantasies, 184.
38. Ian Barnard, Sex Panic Rhetorics, Queer Interventions (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2020).
39. J. R. Salamanca, Lilith (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961; reprint Welcome Rain,
2000), 324. Page citations refer to the Welcome Rain edition.
40. Allan Havis, interview with UCSD-­TV.
41. Keturah Stickann, Director’s Note, Program for [Re]Creating Lilith (2015), n.p.
42. Judith Plaskow, “Lilith Revisited” (1995), reprinted in The Coming of Lilith: Essays
on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972–­2003, ed. Donna Berman (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2005), 82.
43. Eve Kosofsky-­Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 8.
44. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press,
1984), 54.
45. Ellie M. Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Mar-
ion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 13.

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 220 contemporary opera in flux

46. Lawrence Kramer, “The Voice in/of Opera,” in On Voice, ed. Walter Bernhart and
Lawrence Kramer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 46.
47. Naomi Weisstein, “‘Kinde, Küche, Kirche’ as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs
the Female,” Paper read at meeting of the American Studies Association, University of Cal-
ifornia, Davis, October 26, 1968. Reprinted in Robin Morgan ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful: An
Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage, 1970),
208.
48. Havis, interview.
49. Davis, in William Banfield, Musical Landscapes in Color: Conversations with Black
American Composers (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 347.
50. Davis, interview, January 26, 2020.
51. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Harlem on Our Minds,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (1997): 8.
52. Naomi André, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (Urbana: University of Illi-
nois Press, 2018), 11.
53. Davis, in Trey Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” Callaloo 38 (1989): 240.
54. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 157.

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 10

Narratives of the Self in Thomas Hyde’s

That Man Stephen Ward
Edward Venn

Contemporary manifestations (at least in the Western world) of the “crisis of

masculinity” are conventionally traced back to the 1960s, when liberation-
ist movements served to make the power relationships around white mas-
culinities culturally visible.1 Nevertheless, it was not until the 1990s that a
sufficiently stable scholarly vocabulary emerged to enable critical analysis of
masculinities to move into the mainstream.2 The field of opera studies was
slow to respond: the conscious engagement with poststructural tendencies
“within post-­1990 feminist and ‘queer’ writing on opera” positions Philip Pur-
vis’s Masculinity in Opera (2013) as a significant moment in the coming of age
of the study of operatic masculinities.3
The subtitle of Purvis’s volume (Gender, History and New Musicology)
points to its predominantly retrospective gaze.4 Indeed, of the twelve con-
tributions to the volume, only Purvis’s concluding chapter addresses mascu-
line crisis directly, and even then, it is both historicized and in scare quotes.5
Nevertheless, his argument that Francis Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias
(1945) offers “a piquant record of the many challenges to male hegemony
posed by wartime and post-­liberation France” points to the ways in which the
operatic literature might present, and critique, masculine norms and power
relationships.6 From this perspective, other canonic operas emerge as can-
didates for historical critiques of masculinity. To take but two examples, the
titular character of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1914–­22), for instance, is at once
“unmanned” by the patriarchal systems in which he moves (represented by
the authority figures of the Captain and the Doctor) and by the greater virility
and prowess of the Drum Major.7 The critique inheres within the extent that
the audience are encouraged to identify with Wozzeck’s struggles over the

221

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 222 contemporary opera in flux

representation of patriarchal and hegemonic systems. A similar reading can

be teased out from Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945), in which Grimes’s
outsider status—­commonly interpreted in the critical literature as a com-
mentary on the status of the artist and/or homosexuals in society—­can also
be understood in terms of socially acceptable roles that males are allowed to
adopt. In Deborah Warner’s production for Teatro Real Madrid (2021) and
the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (2022), the visceral distance between
Allan Clayton’s traumatized Grimes and the toxic masculinity on display by
the mob that hounds him becomes part of the dramaturgy. It is significant
that both of these works display expressionist qualities; Warner’s staging for
Peter Grimes leans into this, not least in the recasting of the opening trial
scene as an expressionistic fever-­dream.8 The use of expressionistic musical
and dramaturgical techniques to symbolize and provide access to subjective
experiences under intense psychological stress has remained a dominant (if
not the dominant) part of an opera composer’s tool kit throughout the twen-
tieth and twenty-­first centuries.
Such precedents demonstrate that operas from the canon offer the poten-
tial for otherwise “invisible” presentations of masculinity (which is to say,
masculinity as an unmarked gender) to be read through theoretical lenses
derived from the scholarship on gender from latter decades of the twentieth
century.9 Nevertheless, it is only in the wake of post-­1960s liberationist move-
ments and such scholarship that masculinity became a visible script, available
for thematization within dramatic works.10 To take three British examples,
Mark-­Anthony Turnage’s Greek (1988), a retelling of the Oedipus myth in
1980s London, taps into contemporary portrayals of working-­class British
(and more specifically, English) masculinity under threat.11 Greek’s musical
language, drawing together influences from Berg, the broadly expressionist
operas of Michael Tippett (King Priam, 1962; The Knot Garden, 1970) and
Dmitri Shostakovich (Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District, 1934), the high
modernism of Harrison Birtwistle, and popular rhythms associated with
English soccer (derived from the popular television series World of Sport,
ITV [1964–­85]), is typical of the eclecticism of the British opera compos-
ers emerging at that time.12 Turnage returned to soccer in his second opera,
The Silver Tassie (2000), in which Harry, a professional soccer player, returns
from the First World War in a wheelchair, losing in the process both his mas-
culine status as a sporting hero and his girlfriend to his best friend in the final
act. An even more eclectic mix of genres and styles can be heard in Benedict
Mason’s knowingly (and prescient in its tabloid-­like treatment of celebrity)

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 Narratives of the Self in That Man Stephen Ward 223

Faustian depiction of the fall (and hence unmanning) of a professional soccer

player in Playing Away (1993).13
In all the above British examples, the masculinities under threat are pre-
dominantly associated with the (white) working class. Far less common are
operas that train their focus upon middle-­class masculinities (and especially
the way in which such masculinities contribute to, and intersect with, power
dynamics within society). This is perhaps surprising, given the relatively rigid
class-­bound system within the United Kingdom, and in particular the con-
centration of political and economic power among white, privately educated,
middle-­class males. (Or perhaps it is not so surprising, if one of the tools of
perpetuating hegemonic practices is to render them invisible and unavailable
for critique.) This is not to say that operas that represent middle-­and upper-­
class British masculinities don’t exist, but rather that the means by which the
hegemony is sustained remain unchallenged.
One notable exception can be found in Thomas Hyde’s That Man Stephen
Ward (2006–­7), to a libretto by David Norris and scored for solo baritone
and small ensemble. The opera charts the events leading up to the suicide of
the British osteopath Stephen Ward (1912–­1963). Ward had been a key figure
in the Profumo affair, a political scandal that led to the resignation of the
then-­British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and that contributed
to the downfall of the Conservative government. The Profumo affair, a heady
blend of sex, showgirls, and Cold War politics, captured the imagination of
the press, but it was ultimately Ward, who introduced Profumo to the model
Christine Keeler, who provided the necessary establishment scapegoat.
Accused of profiting from immoral earnings, Ward killed himself when it
became clear that he was to be found guilty. The perceived miscarriage of jus-
tice has given rise to numerous dramatic portrayals (including the 1989 film
Scandal and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2013 musical Stephen Ward). But rather
than give prominent roles to all the key protagonists of the affair (Lloyd Web-
ber, for instance, had ten leads in his musical), Hyde and Norris offer instead
a one-­man opera in order to present a psychological portrait of Ward.
Given the social and historical milieu of the opera—­and with it the care-
fully modulated, ironically detached modes of emoting common to male
middle-­class subjects of the early 1960s—­the type of searing, expressionistic
writing for a single voice and the dreamlike narrative logic of Arnold Schoen-
berg’s Erwartung (1909) simply was not available to Hyde. But it was another
work by Schoenberg—­his intentionally satirical and ironic Pierrot lunaire of
1912—­and a range of pieces that followed in its wake, that can be heard to

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 224 contemporary opera in flux

inform That Man Stephen Ward’s instrumentation, tone, form, and narrative
techniques.14 As Jonathan Dunsby has observed, the traditions that nurtured
Pierrot lunaire, including cabaret and the commedia dell’arte, were both con-
nected to popular culture but also to popular critique (notably, the “harsh
European commedia cult . . . was often tinged with a symbolic challenge to
heterosexual hegemony, and perceived at the time as a most threatening
homosexual haemorrhage”).15
Such traditions, according to Dunsby “could not hope to survive” in the
musical environment that followed Pierre Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître
(1955)—­one of Pierrot’s most influential descendants—­following Boulez’s
rejection of those commedia-­ like qualities that distinguished Schoen-
berg’s work: “narration and acting, ambiguities of perceived style and aes-
thetic, the knowing nod.”16 But however true Dunsby’s claim might be for
the Schoenberg-­Boulez axis writ large, it is possible to trace within British
musico-­dramatic practices a more-­or-­less unbroken line from Schoenberg to
Hyde in which such qualities are preserved.17 Significant works in this lineage
(though not necessarily direct influences on Hyde) include William Walton’s
Façade (the original version of 1922 was scored for a flexible ensemble very
close to that of Pierrot lunaire); 1930s film scores by Benjamin Britten; the
music theater works written by Peter Maxwell Davies for various versions
of the Pierrot ensemble (most notably Eight Songs for a Mad King [1969]);
and the multiple roles played by the unaccompanied solo soprano of Judith
Weir’s ten-­minute opera, King Harald’s Saga (1979).18 Although these works
differ greatly from each other in expressive language, they manifest a cluster
of dramaturgical elements inherited from Pierrot lunaire (and cabaret) that
include abrupt juxtapositions of both style and vocal delivery and (often) the
use of pastiche popular music as a means of interrogating the protagonist’s
psyche. To this, Ward adds non-­naturalistic dramatic techniques derived
from the television dramas of Dennis Potter (1935–­1994) to offer moments in
which the singer on stage breaks into stylized song or addresses the audience
directly.19 Such moments, which in their employment of popular stylistic
references generate “shifts in the level of discourse,” signal transitions from
Ward’s external performances of masculinity to his internal narrations of his
self, the man that he wants to be.20
And here we reach the nub of the psychological drama of That Man Ste-
phen Ward, as well as the specific dramaturgical means by which it is realized.
The hierarchies implicit within the discursive shifts of the opera suggest that
these might in turn be interpreted in the light of the stratified hierarchies

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 Narratives of the Self in That Man Stephen Ward 225

within the patriarchal pyramid, and thus hegemonic masculinity. Although

not intended as a direct commentary on the crisis of masculinity, the opera,
written during the current period of crisis, nevertheless lays bare the issues
that underpin it. With a caveat that such a reading was neither anticipated by
the creators of the opera nor the only possible response to the opera, I shall
consider in the next section some of the interpretive affordances of the for-
mal and narrative organization of music and text in the light of masculinity.
Because masculinity is so often defined in relation to its Others (including
othered masculinities), consideration is given too to its intersections with
race, class, and gender (and the musical and social hierarchies that variously
support and marginalize such identities), and to Ward’s continually mediated
musical response to these in his self-­narration.21 In the final section, I con-
sider how the varied vocal demands of That Man Stephen Ward, as exempli-
fied in the performances to date of the opera, play a vital role in supporting,
communicating, and nuancing the work’s specifically operatic presentation
of multiple masculinities.

Narrating Profumo, Narrating Masculinities

Although the political import of the Profumo scandal was exacerbated by

Cold War tensions, the manner by which it captured the collective imagina-
tion of the United Kingdom is almost certainly a reflection of its particular
historical moment. Had Profumo’s affair with Keeler happened a few years
earlier, it would undoubtedly have been covered up. But in the wake of an
obscenity trial in 1960 over Penguin Book’s publication of an unexpurgated
edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, public interest had been
fueled in sex scandals. The poet Philip Larkin wrote that “Sexual intercourse
began / In nineteen sixty-­three / (which was rather late for me) / Between the
end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.”22 In this context, when
faced with revelations over the sexual misconduct of a government minister,
the press reported as much as they dared.23 Were the affair to happen later in
the decade, it would in all likelihood have attracted far less attention.
The Profumo affair provided more than just gratification of the public
desire for sexual scandal. Richard Farmer describes it as:

[a]political, media and cultural event [. . .] linked to the decline in deference

that facilitated or followed on from the “satire boom” of the early 1960s, and

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 226 contemporary opera in flux

many of the cultural products that deal specifically or obliquely with the affair
intersect with people or institutions or places associated with those who
sought to use humour to challenge the established sophistries of the Mac-
millan government and the static, elite society it was believed to represent.24

This historical moment also coincided with the final years in which hege-
monic masculinity—­represented by the “typical Enlightenment subject: ana-
tomically male, white, heterosexual and middle-­class” (which in Britain, had
additional emphasis on social class)—­could be said to maintain its cultural
invisibility, prior to the social upheavals of the 1960s and subsequent “crisis.”25
The power relationships that emerge from such a hegemony are clear, not
least in the treatment by the middle-­and upper-­class men of the working-­
class female call girls, or in the way that the involvement of a different type of
masculinity in the figure of Edgecombe—­a Black, working-­class immigrant—­
set in motion the public unraveling of the affair.26 In this context, it is reason-
able to speculate that at least some of the public interest in the Profumo affair
was driven by an awareness (no matter how unconscious) that the headline-­
grabbing mix of sex, spies, and corruption were simply the perceptible trem-
ors of a more fundamental seismic shift within society.
But what of Ward? His rise and fall brings to light the shifting dynamics of
hegemonic masculinity, and in particular that which R. W. Connell describes
as the “patriarchal dividend” (which is to say, the ways in which men contrib-
ute to, and draw power from, the patriarchal structure).27 David Buchbinder,
placing this idea within a “patriarchal pyramid,” notes that the exercise of
such power leads to inequalities not just between men and women, but also
between men (especially those who do not conform to dominant masculini-
ties): “[t]he uneven distribution of power means that the benefits and advan-
tages of accessing power encourages individual subjects to wield as much of
it as possible, whether to maintain their current position in the pyramid, to
reach a higher one, or even only to fend off the more aggressive applications
of power by other men.”28
As one such nondominant masculine subject (Ward exhibited none of
the virility of his peers, apparently not engaging in intercourse with the girls
he oversaw), Ward’s access to power came from his ability to connect those
above him in the patriarchal pyramid with other high-­ranking members of
the patriarchy, as well as with women. Yet his power and status were only
ever conferred upon him temporarily: the withdrawal of support from his
high-­powered “friends” at his trial demonstrated the provisional nature of his

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 Narratives of the Self in That Man Stephen Ward 227

position in the pyramid, and Ward proved a suitable sacrifice for the mainte-
nance of the hegemonic structure.
It is the ways in which Ward presents and identifies himself in terms of
his (primarily but not exclusively) male relationships that brings matters of
masculinity to the fore. Indeed, the performance of Ward’s masculinities is
irreducibly bound up with the musico-­dramatic techniques of the opera.
The libretto makes frequent reference to what it is to be a man, and the par-
ticular affordances of homosocial relationships within Ward’s social milieu.
But more telling is the way in which contrasts and juxtapositions of musical
styles, on both small and large scales, draw attention to the conflicts and con-
tradictions within social and individual conceptions of masculinity.
The key events of the Profumo affair are represented indirectly in the
opera (see table 10.1).29 Certain liberties taken with historical accuracy can
be attributed to operatic expediency and the need to present the drama as
concisely as possible (for instance, the dating in Scenes 3 and 4 of the meet-
ing between Profumo and Yevgeny Ivanov,30 a naval attaché at the Soviet
Embassy).31 But the fact that That Man Stephen Ward is a one-­man opera
results in the presentation of Ward (the solo baritone) as the sole narrat-
ing agent, so that his interpretation of the events (at least as imagined by
Hyde and Norris) becomes the lens through which the audience experiences
them. Significant in this respect is the interspersal through the opera of the
Potter-­esque fantasy sequences involving popular pastiche, of which the most
important are the cabaret songs of scenes 1 and 4, the Cold War fantasy dance
scene of scene 3, and the swan song of scene 6. These sequences recall the
discursive shifts and (often) the ironic tone of the post-­Pierrot tradition and
provide the most prolonged explorations of Ward’s multiple masculinities.
Masculinity is foregrounded at the start of the opera. The opera opens in
1963 as Ward tends to Lord Bill Astor, one of his clients.32 In the background,
a taped simulation of a BBC news radio broadcast is heard. The news report
provides for the audience a handy overview of Ward’s trial; it includes the
police charges that “he, being a man, did on diverse dates between January
the first 1961 and June the eighth 1963, knowingly live wholly, or in part, on
the earnings of prostitution.”33 The first words we hear from Ward echo the
report, interspersing a bitter mockery of the report with justifications of his
actions to Lord Astor, who Ward chummily calls “Bill” (see fig. 10.1a). What
follows consists of Ward narrating his version of events in a bid to both clear
his name and restore his social standing. He attempts the latter by making
frequent reference to the numerous weekend parties Ward held at Astor’s

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 Table 10.1. Overall Scene Analysis of That Man Stephen Ward
Section Rehearsal # Content/CD track # and timeline
Scene 1 –­Consultation
Intrada Start –­A [CD 1: 0:00–­0:43] Fanfare-­like flourishes in orchestra. Prere-
corded radio report begins shortly before end of section.
Walking Tune A –­D [CD 1: 0:43–­2:28] Cello has tune (based on pitch cycle);
orchestra has nonsynchronized material above. Radio
report continues.
[Ward talks D –­E [CD 1: 2:28–­3:25] It is 1963. Ward is attending to Lord Bill
to Astor] Astor in his Harley Street practice. Ward alternates his
responses to the radio with comments directed to Astor.
E –­J [CD 1: 3:25–­7:11] Ward continues speaking to Astor; topic
of conversation turns to mutual friends as Ward reminds
Astor of their connections and increasingly desperately
tries to get a response.
J –­L [CD 1: 7:11–­8:17] Astor holds out his hand: Ward mistakenly
takes it at first as a gesture of friendship, only to realize
Astor is asking for the keys to Spring Cottage.
Cabaret Song L –­end of [CD 1: 8:17–­10:12] Opening material reworks Intrada flourish,
scene. now alluding to 1920s cabaret topic (but clearly contempo-
rary). Ward sings of Spring Cottage and the parties he once
enjoyed there.

Scene 2 –­Conversation
[Ward talks to Start –­C [CD 2: 0:00–­2:12] It is 1960. Ward is in Spring Cottage,
Keeler] sketching Christine Keeler and discussing their meeting
and relationship. Material alludes briefly to Walking Tune
(scene 1); orchestra is similarly non-­synchronized. Keeler’s
material is accompanied by flute.
C –­E [CD 2: 2:12–­3:43] Shift to more lyrical and metrically regular
accompaniment as Ward describes Keeler’s beauty. Ward’s
over-­the-­top desire to mould Keeler ends comically, with
Keeler laughing at him.
Tutorial E –­H [CD 2: 3:43–­6:29] Generally rhythmically free; Keeler and
flute continue to be associated. At first Ward seems to be
telling her how to hold herself; it is clear he is grooming
her for how to act around John Profumo and the music
becomes increasingly metrical.
Duet H –­J [CD 2: 6:29–­7:58] Baritone now alternates between falsetto
(to represent Keeler) and natural tone to create a dialogue;
orchestral accompaniment reinforces the distinction. Keeler
is worried about her boyfriend, Johnny Edgecombe, and his
reaction. Ward, ignoring her concerns, returns to his mem-
ories of how they met. Keeler’s material from this point is
restricted to a descending D major triad –­the restriction
here might be due to her capitulating to Ward’s topic of
conversation, or else his memory of the conversation being
erroneous.

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 Enjambement J –­K [CD 2: 7:58–­8:41] Ward sketches Keeler; she moves to kiss
him. Flute, once again, appears to be associated with Keeler.
K –­end [CD 2: 8:41–­9:07] Ward, to audience, claims he only kissed
her forehead.

Scene 3 –­Congregation
News-­flash Start –­E [CD 3: 0:00–­1:19] Orchestral introduction. At B, a pre-­
music recorded tape part begins, describing the mounting of Cold
War tensions.
[Party] E –­L [CD 3: 1:19–­3:50] It is October 1962; Ward is hosting a party at
his home in Wimpole Mews; he introduces the guests and
jokes with them. The jaunty rhythms of the accompaniment
portray Ward as a jovial socialite.
L –­N [CD 3: 3:50–­4:16] John Profumo arrives (the orchestra refers
back to the Cold War tensions of the news-­flash music).
Ward ushers over Keeler to accompany Profumo.
N –­S [CD 3: 4:16–­5:41] Ward, to the audience, wonders if the
guest of honor –­an unnamed member of the royal family
–­will arrive. Then, back in character, and a little drunk, he
imagines how wonderful it would be for his party to receive
such a guest.
A Hymn of S –­T [CD 3: 5:41–­7:19] Ward sings a hymn of praise; his thanks are
Thanks for earthly pleasures.
T –­Y [CD 3: 7:19–­8:47] Eugene Ivanov arrives; the radio report
begins again to reinforce the political tensions. Ward offers
to help; he introduces Ivanov to Profumo. There is the
sound of a gunshot.
Cold War Y –­CC [CD 3: 8:47–­9.50] A change of lighting indicates that we are
Fantasy witnessing Ward’s fantasy. Profumo and Ivanov break
into a dance as Ward imagines how he might resolve the
international crisis.
CC [CD 3: 9:50–­10:03] The gunshot is repeated; the fantasy is
over.

Scene 4 –­Consternation
‘Disaster!’ Start –­F [CD 4: 0:00–­2:35] The scene follows on from the previous.
Music Police whistles are heard. Ward shifts between reading (and
commenting upon) newspaper reports of the shots and
enacting the scene as it occurs, impersonating Edgecombe
(who fired the shot at Ward’s front door). The setting is
largely in the manner of accompanied recitative.
F –­N [CD 4: 2:35–­7:37] Ward now also impersonates a policeman
who arrives on the scene. The policeman is by turns ingra-
tiating (to high-­profile guests) and suspicious (to the girls).
He notes the presence of Profumo and Ivanov, and cautions
Keeler.
N –­P [CD 4: 7:37–­8:50] The party broken up, Ward reads again
from the newspapers and of the growing scandal associated
with his name. Back in the policeman’s voice, Ward is asked
to go to the station.
(continues)

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 Cabaret Song P –­end [CD 4: 8:50–­10:30] Another change of mood and lighting.
Ward sings of his expectations for his friends to telephone
to offer support.

Scene 5 –­Condemnation
Paparazzi Music Start –­A [CD 5: 0:00–­0:25] Skittish sixteenth notes in the orchestra
generate mounting excitement.
[Preparing for A –­I [CD 5: 0:25–­4:09] It is Summer 1963. Ward is dressing in
court] front of a mirror for his trial. He sings of his innocence, and
of how he was simply doing favors for friends. There are
sporadic interjections of the paparazzi music.
Twitching I –­N [CD 5: 4:09–­6:12] Orchestral interlude. Ward continually
Tintinnabulations checks the telephone; the music is as fragmented as Ward
is twitchy. He eventually trips on the telephone and falls to
the floor.
N –­O [CD 5: 6:12–­6:42] A brief flourish in the orchestra and a short
reprise of the walking tune. Ward is retreating into his
memories.
[Childhood O –­T [CD 5: 6:42–­10:01] Ward recalls a childhood incident in which
memory] he and some friends were caught in a “rumpus.” His voice
moves between speech, sprechstimme and operatic lyricism.
Ward recounts how he took the blame for the incident for
his friends.
T –­end [CD: 10:01–­10:42] Varied reprise of the opening of the scene
1 cabaret song, as if Ward is now thinking of his current
friends.

Scene 6 –­Consummation
Start –­D [CD 6: 0:00–­2:20] Orchestral introduction.
[Suicide note] D –­G [CD 6: 2:20–­4:24] July 30, 1963. Ward is writing his suicide
note, vodka and pills to his side. The musical textures recall
his opening dialogue with Astor; the implication is that
Ward is writing to his friends.
Recollections G –­I [CD 6: 4:24–­6:00] The reference to the walking tune is the
first in a series of recollections of material heard earlier in
the opera.
Swan song I –­M [CD 6: 6:00–­9:24] The texture changes to a lyrical melody
(with pauses) accompanied first by piano alone; the reference is to a
quasi-­Handelian aria. Ward sings of an idyllic day at the
beach; his attempts to project happiness faltering with
every pause.
Collapse M –­end [CD 6: 9:24–­12:19] Ward, silently, pours himself a drink and
swallows the pills. The opera ends with ticking claves
and increasingly isolated gestures in the orchestra. Ward,
briefly, imagines one last party; he takes another drink and
the music is cut off.

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 Narratives of the Self in That Man Stephen Ward 231

cottage (these parties attracted high-­profile guests, including politicians, dip-

lomats and—­rumors had it—­royalty), as well as the fraternal support freely
given to those within this social circle.34
Ward’s material switches between pitched, albeit “almost speech-­like,”
echoes of the news report (quarter note = c. 80, accompanied by piano),
with spoken text, directed at Bill (quarter note = c. 112, accompanied by clar-
inet, violin, and cello). The contrasting types of music mirror the differently
constructed masculinities that Ward is presenting: one that appeals to the
homosocial norms of the hegemonic masculinity of the day (“You know,
Bill . . . Being a man”), and the other that outlines the insalubrious activities
of a high-­class procurer, a role that is required by the hegemony but which
confers shame upon the individual if made public. The first of these is how
Ward imagines himself, secure in his placement in the patriarchal pyramid;
the second is how society sees him, sundered from his former position of
power. Such shifts of perspective also recall the flexible treatment of subject
positions and vocal delivery found Pierrot lunaire and Eight Songs for a Mad
King; they can be found too in the ways that Ward narrates his encounters
with other figures.
Scenes 2 through 4 are set chronologically prior to this opening scene,
offering both a potted history of the events that resulted in the Profumo affair
being made public as well as a forensic account of Ward’s positioning within
the various social hierarchies in which he moved. Scene 2 of the opera, set
at Astor’s cottage in 1960, is something of a lyrical interlude, exploring how
Ward and Keeler met and how he began grooming her for Profumo. It was
at one of Ward’s parties in the cottage in July 1961 (in the opera, the location
and date is changed to Ward’s London home in October 1962) that the real-­
life Profumo first met Keeler, and the next day the two of them, along with
Ivanov, met again at the cottage for fun and games in the swimming pool.
Ivanov was considered by British intelligence to be a potential defector, with
Ward having been approached to act as an intermediary and Keeler consid-
ered as a possible honey trap. By the summer of 1962 stories were circulating
that both Profumo and Ivanov were having affairs with Keeler (and with it,
the possibility that official secrets might have been inadvertently passed on).
In December 1962, Johnny Edgecombe, Keeler’s Antiguan then-­boyfriend,
fired a gun outside Ward’s house after he was prevented from seeing Keeler,
who was inside (scene 4; the opera elides this with the party depicted in scene
3). Edgecombe’s subsequent trial in March 1963 (on charges of attempted
murder) took place against a background of increasing political rumors and

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 232 contemporary opera in flux

Fig. 10.1a. That Man Stephen Ward. Scene 1 (reh. D–­E). (© Thomas Hyde, used with
permission.)

denials. Profumo eventually resigned on June 5, 1963, having admitted lying

to the House of Commons about the affair; four days later, the tabloid The
News of the World published “The Confessions of Christine,” in which, amidst
the anticipated sexual revelations, Ward was portrayed as being in cahoots
with the Soviets.
There is a strong correlation in scenes 2 through 4 between the fre-
quency with which a particular social group is referred to and the hierarchies
within Ward’s musical sense of self. Neither race nor class are mentioned
directly in the libretto (in the next section I discuss how they are reflected
in performance), but the role of Edgecombe and the (probably lower-­class)
policeman in bringing to an end the party in scenes 3 and 4 situates them
in opposition to Ward’s own white, middle-­to upper-­class circle. It is note-
worthy that Edgecombe and the policeman are denied physical presence in
the score (they are not specifically allocated dancers in the score); only the

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 Narratives of the Self in That Man Stephen Ward 233

Fig. 10.1b. Continuation of Scene 1 (reh. D–­E) from That Man Stephen Ward.
(© Thomas Hyde, used with permission.)

sound of police whistles and gunshots gives them any material substance
beyond Ward’s report of what they say. (Ward’s performance of multiple roles
again recalls the fluid approach to narration found in the Pierrot tradition.)
And even in this reported speech, they barely figure musically: Edgecombe’s
words are either shouted or restricted to a semitonal motion from B to A ♯ .
The policeman fares little better: the recitative-­like material given to him pro-
vides little scope for him to assert any sort of musical individuality, though
the orchestral accompaniment suggests his alternately deferentially obse-
quious and insinuating responses to the party guests. Ward’s musical narra-
tion of these characters, when contrasted with his own, full-­bodied musical
self-­portraiture (see below), therefore, reinforces their inferior status within
hegemonic masculinity (in Ward’s eyes, at least, in comparison to his own
perceived standing).
The next level of the social hierarchy concerns gender, and in particu-

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 234 contemporary opera in flux

lar the role of women. Christine Keeler (“Chrissie”) has the most prominent
role: she is represented by a dancer in scene 2, often in conjunction with a
lyrically seductive flute, and the dancer mimes along with Ward when he, in
falsetto (yet another instance of the opera’s flexible and varied approach to
vocal delivery), presents her words in a manner somewhere between arioso
and recitative. We thereby learn that Keeler affords Edgecombe a gendered
identity (“But what about Edgecombe? / He’s a man. My man now.” Scene 2),35
something that Ward pays scant attention to. Nevertheless, the policeman
(scene 4, rehearsal F+6), repeating Edgecombe’s statement, reveals that Keeler
“Looks down on him,” which could either be taken literally (Keeler viewing
Edgecombe from a first-­floor window of the party) or more likely figuratively,
as Edgecombe’s station in 1960s British life was below her own.
The lyricism that infuses Ward’s (musical) relationship with Keeler
reflects the way he presents himself to her as benevolent benefactor and
chaste admirer. He is clearly infatuated with Keeler, pithily describing their
physical relationship as “We often share a bed. / But that’s all” (scene 2),36
the final two syllables pointedly accompanied by claves for emphasis. His
descriptions of Keeler in scene 2 frequently lapse into rapt admiration; even
when he is speaking,37 the accompaniment is sonorously lyrical.38 Yet Ward
objectifies her no less than any of the other girls he mentions in passing in
the party (scene 3, CD track 3: 2:35): (“And Linda. / So lovely. / So slim and so
beautiful.”). For Ward, Keeler remains, ultimately, a means to an end. Ward
duets with the flute (Keeler’s instrumental surrogate) in the middle of the
scene 2 “Tutorial” (CD track 2: 6:13) as he anticipates Keeler’s meeting with
Profumo (“Call him John. / And afterwards . . . Johnny. / He’s your man. / I
promise.”).
While Ward’s performance for Keeler presents one type of masculinity, it
differs significantly from those he presents to men in power. Here one must
distinguish between the perceptions of Ward himself and of those around
him. Ward regularly draws attention to his friendship with high-­ranking
members of the patriarchy, as if to sustain and maintain his own privileged
position. Frequent assertions of friendship, and Ward’s immersion within
such circles, punctuate the opera. The high point, and perhaps the moment
where Ward’s self-­image most closely maps onto those of his “friends” occurs
in scene 3 (CD track 3: 1:19–­3:50), as Ward converses with his party guests.
Here the music is characterized by jaunty, dance-­like rhythms and witty har-
monic sleights of hand. Ward’s sociability culminates with a mock Hymn of
Thanks (CD track 3: 1:19–­3:50), delivered “in the style of a church psalm” (the

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 Narratives of the Self in That Man Stephen Ward 235

real-­life Ward was the son of a vicar): “My father who is in Heaven—­/ Isn’t
Heaven like this? / Isn’t it? / Friendship and laughter, / Here and hereafter; /
Familiar faces, / Friends in high places . . . / Girls and Earls! / Isn’t it? / Isn’t this
Heaven?” The mixture of allusions to musical topics—­gregarious dances and
communal, quasi-­religious experiences—­situates Ward (at least in his own
mind) as the leader of the dance and high priest of parties.
Yet all is perhaps not what it seems. In his efforts to drop names, Ward
recounted how Winston Churchill, on learning that Ward had provided
osteopathic treatment to Jawaharlal Nehru, asked “Why didn’t you shtrangle
[sic] the bugger? Any gentleman would!” (scene 3, CD track 3: 2:00). Only
too late in the telling did Ward realize that Churchill did not consider him a
gentleman. More pertinently, the scene opens with “news-­flash music,” char-
acterized by assertively repeated eighth notes that underpin radio reports of
mounting Cold War tensions. This music recurs with the arrival of Profumo;
it is a harbinger, too, of Ward’s own demise. Contrasted with the “news-­flash
music,” we hear the dance music and religious topics as part of the last hur-
rah of a particular type of masculine hegemony, just as the social world they
portray in the opera are situated against the background of historical inevita-
bility: the Profumo affair, the downfall of the Conservative government, the
death of Ward, and, perhaps, the encroaching crisis of masculinity.
Scenes 5 and 6 follow on, chronologically, from scene 1. As speculation
grew about the extent to which the ruling classes were engaged in affairs—­
not least with girls affiliated with Ward—­he was charged with profiting off
immoral earnings. In the opera, Ward continues to frame his actions, past
and present, and indeed his sense of self, with respect to his homosocial circle
of friends, acquaintances, and benefactors. Inevitably left unsupported by his
former high society friends, Ward knew that a guilty verdict was guaranteed,
and he took his own life (scene 6).
The discrepancies between Ward’s vision of homosocial friendship and
those of his associates heard in scenes 1 and 3 are most pronounced in these
final two scenes. In scene 5 (CD track 5, 9:47), Ward recalls how once at
school he took the blame for a misdemeanor to protect his friends, resulting
in a thrashing from the headmaster: “I own up. / I take the fall. / One for all.
/ And all my friends . . . / Behind me.” In this instance, skittish pizzicato fig-
ures in the strings and hollow piano chords undermine any sense of nobility
behind Ward’s gesture. Mostly spoken, Ward’s delivery suddenly breaks into
a rising D major fanfare-­like figure of “One for all.” But there is no answering
“And all for one”: Ward’s friends are as silent in this childhood reminiscence

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 236 contemporary opera in flux

as they are during his 1963 trial. No matter how Ward attempts to convince
himself otherwise, he has never been in a secure position within the patriar-
chal pyramid, and his performances here are of victim, not savior.
It is thus only in the Dennis Potter–­like fantasy sequences that Ward
is fully able to enjoy his illusory status within masculine hegemony. Corre-
spondingly, it is here that the music of the opera takes full flight. This includes
the already-­mentioned dance sequence in scene 3 between Ward, Profumo,
and Ivanov as Ward imagines his intervention preventing war (the distance
between the extent of his real influence and that he fantasizes for himself
is telling), and, above all, the rapt quasi-­Handelian aria in scene 6 as Ward
allows himself one final idyllic image before his death. The two cabaret songs
of scenes 1 and 4 are pastiche 1920s settings, alluding to melodic and rhyth-
mic shapes but filtered through twenty-­first-­century musical sensibilities.
Unlike Maxwell Davies’s use of, say, foxtrot, there is no ironic or critical com-
mentary on the musical topic; rather the almost unbearable, crushing irony
inheres in the contrast between Ward’s inner world (represented by the song)
and external reality.
The second cabaret song, heard in scene 4, is perhaps the most affecting
in this regard. Critics have noticed a similarity between the opening orches-
tral gesture (fig. 10.2) and Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer”; while this is unin-
tentional, the inadvertent intertext certainly speaks to Ward’s image of him-
self as someone who can connect his male friends with girls at parties.39 But
Ward’s jaunty expectation that his friends will rescue him (“You can always
rely on the powers that be. / Or even / A word in the judge’s ear” (CD track 4,
9:21)) is at odds with reality; perhaps the continually shifting orchestral colors
hint at this instability. The conclusion of the song “We’re a club. / We dine,
we drink, we agree about things; / Bill . . . He will . . . / won’t he?” ends with
a devastating moment of self-­awareness as the harmony deflects away from
the anticipated cadence.40 He is always the scapegoat. He is not the man he
thinks he is or wants to be.41

Performing Masculinities

The previous section demonstrates how particular dramaturgical techniques

can be interpreted as “composing in” masculine performativity and hege-
monic hierarchies into the score.42 These techniques might be thought of as
a blueprint—­or rather, as potentialities—­when mapping out Ward’s operatic

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 Fig. 10.2. That Man Stephen Ward. Scene 4, rehearsal Letters P–­Q-­1 (some
percussion omitted for clarity) [CD track 4: 8:50–­9:12]. (© Thomas Hyde,
used with permission.)

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 238 contemporary opera in flux

narrative of his self. When realized on stage, however, such potentialities may
be amplified or inhibited, or even placed in dialogue with new and unantici-
pated interpretive layers brought to bear by a director. The resultant actual-
ized meanings are thus emergent in the act of performance.
To date, That Man Stephen Ward has been staged twice. The premiere
was given on May 11, 2008, at the Hampstead and Highgate Festival, London,
directed by Yvonne Fontane. Ward was performed by the baritone Andrew
Slater, with George Vass conducting the Festival Ensemble. The opera was
revived in 2015 by Nova Music Opera, again conducted by George Vass, with
Damian Thantrey in the title role. Although only the latter is publicly avail-
able (via a studio CD recording made by the same performers the following
year), I will in this section demonstrate how the two productions inflect the
masculinities of the opera.
The score is notably restrained in its stipulation of stage directions. Those
that exist serve primarily either to suggest particular physical gestures in
response to the music, or (less frequently) to offer staging suggestions. In the
former category, we can include indications of Ward’s mounting desperation
in scenes 1 and 5, and clarifications that musical pauses in scene 6 correspond
to Ward’s own increasing inability to speak as his suicide looms. Even in the
latter case, stage directions are there to illuminate Ward’s internal thoughts
rather than to prescribe external actions as such. Thus the stage directions for
both cabaret songs indicate “A sudden change of mood (and lighting). Ward
turns directly to the audience.” The Cold War fantasy notes “A change of light-
ing to show we are in Ward’s fantasy world in which he is bringing Profumo
and Ivanov together to save the world from nuclear war!” In the final scene,
“Ward seems lost in his own thoughts and recollections. Then, he turns to the
audience directly for his last song—­his swansong—­a lyrical farewell to the life
that once he lead—­or thought he lead [sic].” Specific productions, therefore,
have considerable license in how they might realize the opera.
Both productions made use of simple staging in a theatrical black box.
The orchestra was positioned stage right; minimal furnishing provided a sense
of place. The 2008 production had three dancers—­two male (representing at
various points Astor, Profumo, Ivanov, and Edgecombe, as well as the judge
and headmaster figures from scene 5) and one female (mainly Keeler, but in
scene 3 the dancer could stand in for the girls at the party en masse). In fact,
there was little dancing: for the most part, the figures bore silent testimony
against Ward, and allowed him (in, for instance, scene 4) to play the role of
the policeman, interrogating the party guests. Nevertheless, the presence of

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 Narratives of the Self in That Man Stephen Ward 239

the dancers could be used for significant purposes. During scene 2, Slater’s
body language for Ward was reserved; even towards the end of the scene, as
Keeler placed a leg provocatively over the back of the chair on which Ward
was seated, Slater leaned away. His final kiss on Keeler’s forehead was point-
edly nonsexual, his eyes training afterwards on the audience, as if to say “I told
you so.” During Ward’s swan song, the female dancer briefly comes on stage
to dance tenderly, but again unromantically, with Ward as he imagines his
perfect day. Fontane’s production thus emphasizes Ward’s sexually restrained
masculinity in a nonsensationalist, but theatrically powerful, manner.
Ward’s address to the audience when kissing Keeler’s forehead is one
of numerous such modes of delivery. The opera offers a dense network of
directed speech: sometimes Ward is talking to himself, at other times to his
friends; there are moments in which Ward is enacting an event and else-
where fantasizing about imaginary scenarios; and there are the aforemen-
tioned breakings of the fourth wall. Both productions observed these shifting
addressees faithfully, responding to indications written in the vocal line in
the score, but also the musical implications of manner of delivery (as in fig.
10.2) and shifting musical topics. This is a quality that was especially notable
in Thantrey’s performance. More so than Slater, Thantrey responded care-
fully to the nuances of the score, bringing out the distinctions between the
various vocal demands. He also demonstrated an ability for accents, whether
in the cod-­Churchellian impression of scene 3, or in the scene 4 recreation
of the policeman with a lower-­class regional accent and Edgecombe with a
pronounced West Indian accent.43 These latter two examples are notable for
the way they give particular emphasis to the underlying racial and class-­based
constructions of masculinity in the opera; accents were not specified in the
score. Such performance decisions also lean into the cabaret tradition that
nurtures the Pierrot lineage of music theater works to which That Man Ste-
phen Ward belongs.
Thantrey’s ability to convey so compellingly the multiple, distinctive char-
acters inhabiting Ward’s world (and mind) was reflected in certain staging
decisions. Only two dancers were employed for the 2015 production, and
in place of the readily identifiable stage furnishings of the premiere run, the
props in the revival were covered in white sheets. Stripping away the material
aspects of Ward’s life (such as they were in the 2008 performance) served
to heighten the psychological qualities of the work, intensifying the focus
on Thantrey’s performance and with it, by implication, the performance of
Ward’s multiple masculinities.

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 240 contemporary opera in flux

Legitimizing Masculinity, Legitimizing the Self

Scholars have often drawn on Foucauldian notions of power and discourse

when framing the performance of masculinities.44 Foucault’s association of
the dominant discourse and social privilege uncovers the ways in which hege-
monic masculinity might be legitimized through language. But the shifting
discursive and narratological strategies of That Man Stephen Ward, com-
posed into the score and realized in performance, challenges this hegemony
by making visible the performative and conferred nature of masculinity, the
hierarchical structures within which it operates, and alternatives to the hege-
monic norm. The frequent addresses to the audience, derived from the the-
atrical practices of the Pierrot tradition and Dennis Potter, neatly implicates
the audience within the hegemony, confronting and challenging their own
assumptions and behavior. In this sense, the opera is a model of how contem-
porary opera more broadly engages with such topics.
But just as discourse can legitimize social practices, it can be placed in
the service of legitimizing the self. Viewed as a psychological self-­portrait,
the opera tells us much about “that man” Stephen Ward and the ways in
which he sought to maintain his own precarious position of power within
the patriarchal pyramid. This he attempted through narration, and with it
the attempt to rewrite his own history. We need not know the historical res-
onances of the Pierrot ensemble to hear that Ward’s self-­narration is con-
testable, undermined by the shifting orchestral colors, rapid shifts of musical
topic and musical perspective, and alternative subject positions that arise. In
failing to conform to the hegemonic masculine norms, Ward was Othered,
unmanned; ultimately, he fulfilled the traditional role of the tragic operatic
heroine. His actions only served to reproduce structural inequalities. Ward
fails in his self-­legitimation because he never stood a chance of succeeding:
the hegemonic structures that he sought to benefit from were too rigorously
patrolled to allow otherwise.

Notes
1. See David Buchbinder, Studying Men and Masculinities (London and New York:
Routledge, 2013), 20.
2. Kate Whittaker, “Performing Masculinity/Masculinity in Performance,” in Mascu-
linity in Opera: Gender, History, and New Musicology, ed. Philip Purvis (Abingdon: Rout-
ledge, 2013), 9–­30.
3. Philip Purvis, ed., Masculinity in Opera: Gender, History, and New Musicology
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).

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 Narratives of the Self in That Man Stephen Ward 241

4. Only one of the twelve chapters in Masculinity in Opera considers a contemporary

opera, and even then at least equal weight is given to Mozart. See Martin Iddon, “Giving
Adam Voice: Troubling Gender and Identity in W. A. Mozart’s Zaide and Chaya Czernow-
in’s Adama,” in Purvis, Masculinity in Opera, 167–­93.
5. Philip Purvis, “The ‘Crisis’ of Masculinity in Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias,” in
Purvis, Masculinity in Opera, 236–­53.
6. Michael S. Kimmel has defined hegemonic masculinity as “the image of masculinity
of those men who hold power, which has become the standard in psychological evalua-
tions, sociological research, and self-­help and advice literature for teaching young men to
become ‘real men.’ The hegemonic definition of manhood is a man in power, a man with
power, and a man of power.” “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame and Silence in the
Construction of Gender Identity,” in Theorizing Masculinities ed. Harry Brod and Michael
Kaufman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 125.
7. Instances of operatic “unmanning” in the scholarly literature tend to focus on the
Othering of male subjects by means of race, age, and fool-­like qualities (see Catherine
Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing [St. Paul: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988], 118–­36) or voice type (e.g. countertenor, falsetto) and sexuality
(see Philip Brett, “Britten’s Dream,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in
Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], 270).
Wozzeck, as a white, heteronormative cis male, performed by a baritone (a Fach conven-
tionally associated with authority), is unmanned primarily by his lower status compared to
other males within the patriarchal system.
8. See, for instance, Tim Ashley, “Peter Grimes review—­Compelling, Unsettling, and
Ravishingly Sung,” The Guardian, March 18, 2022, [Link]
/2022/mar/18/peter-grimes-britten-review-royal-opera-house-deborah-warner
9. Michael S. Kimmel opens his survey of American and British masculinities with the
chapter “Invisible Masculinities.” See The History of Men: Essays in the History of American
and British Masculinities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 3–­15.
10. For an equivalent discussion of how the contemporary crisis of masculinity has
shaped theater practices post-­1990, see Finton Walsh, Male Trouble: Masculinity and the
Performance of Crisis (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
11. In scene 3, the parents of Eddie (the modern version of Oedipus) form a Greek cho-
rus to describe the plague ravishing the land. Their examples—­industry and infrastructure
falling into decline, political power battles, violence and fighting—­link with examples of
working-­class racism and police brutality to reflect closely the Britain in the 1980s. On a
more humorous note, the gentrification of typical working-­class social spaces (the local
pub) in the form of wine bars illustrates another way by which traditional social norms
were being undermined.
12. See Andrew Clements, Mark-­Anthony Turnage (London: Faber and Faber, 2000),
12–­17.
13. See Anthony Bateman, “Playing Away: The Construction and Reception of a Football
Opera (interview with the Composer Benedict Mason).” Sport in Society 17, no. 3 (2014):
358–­70.
14. That Man Stephen Ward employs a small orchestra constituted of a flexible Pierrot

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 242 contemporary opera in flux

ensemble that is augmented by percussion and doublings (the pianist, for instance, also
plays electric organ and harpsichord; the flautist doubles on both piccolo and alto flute, and
the clarinetist on bass clarinet).
15. Jonathan Dunsby, Schoenberg: Pierrot lunaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), 7.
16. Dunsby, Schoenberg, 9. Dunsby notes that Harrison Birtwistle’s opera Punch and
Judy (1967) offers a rare post-­Marteau engagement with the commedia tradition (Dunsby,
Schoenberg). The aesthetic connections between Birtwistle’s opera and Pierrot lunaire,
however, are less pronounced than other works considered in this chapter.
17. For a history of this tradition see, in particular, Christopher Dromey, The Pierrot
Ensembles: Chronicle and Catalogue, 1912–­2012 (London: Plumbago Books, 2012).
18. King Harald’s Saga was written for Jane Manning, a notable interpreter of Pierrot
lunaire. A related instrumental work, King Harald Sails to Byzantium (also 1979) uses
instruments from the Pierrot ensemble.
19. For instance, see Potter’s Pennies from Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective
(1986), both of which feature actors miming to popular music. A recent example of this
dramatic technique can be found in “Waterloo,” the seventh episode of season 7 of Mad
Men (2014), in which the lead character Don Draper witnesses the recently deceased Bert
Cooper perform a song and dance to “The Best Things in Life are Free.” This is of a different
order to the dreamlike states encountered in, say, Erwartung or the operas of Sciarrino (see
Bertola, chapter 12, this volume).
20. See Robert Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and
Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 174–­88.
21. David S. Gutterman highlights the relational nature of the multiple identities of the
self in his “Postmodernism and the Interrogation of Masculinity,” in Theorizing Masculini-
ties, ed. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 219–­38.
22. Philip Larkin, “Annus Mirabilis” (1967), first published in High Windows (London:
Faber and Faber, 1974). The unsuccessful public prosecution of Penguin Books took place
between October 20 and November 2, 1960. The Beatles released their first LP, Please
Please Me on March 22, 1963. This period of sexual awakening for the nation almost exactly
coincided with the Profumo affair: John Profumo met Christine Keeler in July 1961; Ward’s
trial began on July 28, 1963, and he took the overdose that eventually killed him two days
later.
23. In part, this was in response to the strained relationship between the press and the
government due to the 1962 publication of allegations about the sexuality of an Admiralty
clerk, John Vassall (who had been caught up in a spying scandal), which led to the resigna-
tion of a government minister as well as the imprisonment of two journalists who refused
to reveal their sources on their stories about Vassall. On learning of Profumo’s affair, the
British prime minister Harold MacMillan wrote in his diary (March 15, 1963), “I was forced
to spend a great deal of today over a silly scrape (women this time, thank God, not boys)”
(cited in Martin Kettle, “Profumo: A Scandal That Keeps Giving, Even after 50 Years,” The
Guardian, January 4, 2020). MacMillan was presumably thinking of the imprisonment of
the MP Sir Ian Horobin the year before on multiple charges of indecent assault on children
under sixteen.

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24. Richard Farmer, “The Profumo Affair in Popular Culture: The Keeler Affair (1963)
and ‘the commercial exploitation of a public scandal’” Contemporary British History 31, no.
3 (2017): 452–­70 (at 452–­53).
25. Whittaker, “Performing Masculinity,” 12.
26. Edgecombe maintained that “the idea of a black man sleeping with a white woman
who was also sleeping with a government minister was too much for the times.” See Mark
Olden, “Johnny Edgecombe Obituary,” The Guardian, September 30, 2010.
27. Raewyn Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005), 79.
28. Buchbinder, Studying Men and Masculinities, 72
29. Score references refer to the composer’s score, which is unpublished at the time of
writing. CD track timings refer to That Man Stephen Ward, Damian Thantrey (bar.) and
Nova Music Opera Ensemble cond. George Vass, Resonus Classics RES10197, 2017, com-
pact disc.
30. The opera refers to Ivanov by his anglicized name of Eugene.
31. One might attribute Ward’s lines “We must be correct. After all, this may be history”
at the start of scene 4 as Hyde and Norris’s wry meta-­commentary on the historical liber-
ties they took at this moment in the opera.
32. The dates given to scenes in the opera are taken from the synopsis in the CD liner
notes to the recording of the opera. That Man Stephen Ward, Resonus Classics, 5.
33. There is a similarity here to Swallow’s accusations against Peter Grimes in the Pro-
logue of Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945). My thanks to Bryan White for this observation.
34. Kimmel notes that “We are under the constant careful scrutiny of other men. Other
men watch us, rank us, grant our acceptance into the realm of manhood. Manhood is
demonstrated for other men’s approval.” “Masculinity as Homophobia,” 128. In this con-
text, he cites the literary critic David Lerenz, who claims that “ideologies of manhood have
functioned primarily in relation to the gaze of male peers and male authority” (Kimmel,
“Masculinity as Homophobia,” 129). Ward’s self-­narration here can be viewed precisely as
his response to (what he perceives to be) Astor’s male gaze (and by extension, the gaze of
hegemonic masculinity).
35. CD track 2, 6:29.
36. CD track 2.
37. CD track 2 to 2:12.
38. The composer notes that Ward’s admiration is expressed using deliberately “second-­
rate words and cliched images.” Thomas Hyde, personal communication with author,
August 28, 2020.
39. Thomas Hyde, personal communication with author, July 13, 2020.
40. Ben Knights, surveying male narratives in fiction of the past century, notes that
the “textual figure” of the “male unravelling under his own gaze, recurs repeatedly in the
twentieth century.” Hyde and Norris’s treatment of Ward aligns closely with this literary
tradition, and his ensuing overdose links too with Knight’s later observation that “[o]ne
recurrent motif of masculine narrative is the desire to anticipate the vengeance of the
universe by a pre-­emptive strike. The victim role in the ensuing narrative is apt to move
around, and may even gravitate towards the hero himself. (As suicide figures demonstrate,

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 244 contemporary opera in flux

male violence is after all frequently directed against the self.)” Writing Masculinities: Male
Narratives in Twentieth-­Century Fiction (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999), at 125, 128.
41. Nor could this be otherwise. As Berthold Schoene-­Harwood observes, the “hege-
monic configuration of masculinity is always bound to constitute an impossible, phantas-
matic ideal that ultimately no man can live up to or fulfil. As a result, all flesh-­and-­blood
masculinities must ineluctably find themselves in a position of either complicity, margin-
ality or subordination.” Writing Men: Literary Masculinities from Frankenstein to the New
Man (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), xii.
42. The classic text on the performativity of gender is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). Subsequent scholar-
ship on masculine performativity owes much to Butler’s work.
43. All these are readily audible in the Resonus Classics recording.
44. For instance, see Buchbinder, Studying Men and Masculinities, chapter 4.

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 11

Narrative Agencies in Annie Proulx and

Charles Wuorinen’s Brokeback Mountain
Yayoi Uno Everett

“Oppression and resistance and survival and heroic making are the stuff of
gay history,” John Clum writes, and “much of gay drama is an expression of
what might be called the ‘historical impulse’ in gay literature—­the impulse to
depict and define the collective past of gay men to affirm a sense of identity
and solidarity and to educate the dominant culture about the brutal effects
of its heterosexism.”1 This may well be the dominant trend that defines post-­
Stonewall gay male literature and its representation in popular culture. If so,
then it’s all the more shocking to read Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story Broke-
back Mountain, which works against this impulse by depicting gay protago-
nists in a deeply homophobic setting in rural Wyoming circa 1960s. In the
story, Ennis and Jack meet as young men at the fictional Brokeback Mountain
and carry out their relationship away from prying eyes over the course of
twenty years; while Ennis remains closeted due to the childhood trauma of
witnessing gay cowboys being brutally murdered, Jack expresses a desire to
live together openly and own a ranch, which ultimately costs him his life.
Ennis’s mantra, which he repeats to himself even after Jack’s death, is: “if you
can’t fix it, you ought to be able to stand it.” Survival, for Ennis, trumps fight-
ing for one’s true desires: he is unable to shake off the belief that either one
plays within the rules of heteronormative society or ends up dead on the side
of the road.
There is a reason why this story appealed to Charles Wuorinen as the
stuff of opera. Contemporary operas that feature gay protagonists (e.g., Stew-
art Wallace’s Harvey Milk (1989), Gregory Spears’s Fellow Travelers (2016),
Nico Muhly’s Two Boys (2013), Terence Blanchard’s Champion: Opera in Jazz
(2013), Jorge Martin’s Before Night Falls (2010)) more often than not portray

245

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 246 contemporary opera in flux

gay protagonists as tragic heroes or martyrs in the vein of victimized heroines

in nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century verismo operas, e.g., Violetta in
Verdi’s La Traviata, Carmen in Bizet’s Carmen, or Cho-­cho san in Puccini’s
Madame Butterfly.2 In adapting the story to opera, Wuorinen envisioned the
theme of Brokeback Mountain (2014) as “the impossibility for a man to accept
himself, to express his feelings, to communicate. It also speaks of oppression,
of the inability to escape by people who are trapped in a world they don’t
like.”3 The story centers on Ennis’s resistance to acknowledging his gay iden-
tity, while embracing his love for Jack and his commitment to be a rancher.
Because he is neither capable of standing up for himself nor of escape from
rural Wyoming (he rejects Jack’s idea to move somewhere else), Ennis must
live with a fragmented self. What role does the orchestral music assume in
underscoring the Brokeback Mountain’s agency in this story centered on
societal oppression?
Drawing on the feminist theorist Seyla Benhabib, Sarah Lucas claims
that “narrative agency refers to the subject’s capacity to construct a mean-
ingful narrative, and not to the actual content of the narrative.”4 She further
breaks down narrative agency into three categories: primary (the capacity
of an individual to say “I am. . . .”), relational (“I” in relation to others), and
generative (in the sense of contributing to or transforming collectively con-
structed norms), and she emphasizes that the capacity for agency should
not be confused with assumptions about what a self ought to do think or
do, which results in conflating narrative capacity with content. In Brokeback
Mountain, the narrative content is shaped by the homophobic rural society
and the inhabitants who reinforce this attitude, while the subject’s capacity
is expressed through the character’s actions that resist and/or comply with
the social norm. Stemming from a traumatic childhood experience, Ennis is
convinced that the only way to survive in Wyoming as a rancher is to remain
closeted, while Jack—­unrestrained and idealistic—­wishes to live openly as a
couple and own a ranch together. The dramatic conflict arises from their fun-
damental disagreement over how to live their lives; during their twenty years
together, Jack becomes increasingly more impatient with their long-­distance
relationship and travels to Mexico to seek sexual gratification. When Ennis
hears about Jack’s accidental death, he constructs a narrative of victimization
by insisting that Jack died from a rigged tire explosion. Jack’s capacity for
agency rests with his desire to live openly, Ennis’s with his conflicted self and
his inability to change.

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 Narrative Agencies in Brokeback Mountain 247

Narrative agencies in Brokeback Mountain operate at multiple registers

when one considers the two protagonists’ agencies as primary, the collec-
tive society’s agencies as relational, and the mountain’s role as generative and
relational. Aguirre (keeper of Brokeback Mountain), Alma (Ennis’s wife),
Lureen (Jack’s wife), Hogboy (Lureen’s father), and the townspeople exert
their agencies by expecting the men to conform to societal norms. Alma is
especially unforgiving when she finds out about Ennis’s tryst with Jack and
lashes out at him (act II, scene 6). The mountain’s agency is generative in the
sense that it supposedly casts a spell over the two men; as Ennis says to Jack,
“You got some kind of power over me. You and that damn Brokeback” (act
II, scene 2). It is also relational in the sense that Wuorinen’s music for the
mountain provides shifting points of reference, first as material indices of
the “evil” mountain and later as an expressive signifier of Ennis’s trauma over
Jack’s untimely death.
By distinguishing the opera text (music, libretto, and stage directions
prior to production) from the performance text (production components),
David Levin argues that contemporary operatic productions generate “a sur-
feit of signifying systems” that are inherently polylogical: more often than
not, operatic productions lend expression to “multiple, sometimes conflict-
ing expressive registers.”5 In Ivo van Hove’s scenography for the Teatro Real
production, the stage is laterally divided into non-­overlapping sections, juxta-
posing the domestic lives of women on two sides of the stage while situating
the two men carrying on a tryst at Motel Siesta in the center; while the char-
acters do not see each other, the divided stage makes visible to the audience
the irreconcilable nature of the situation. To this end, I introduce the concept
of focalization to refer to the “point of view” the scenography establishes for
the audience as opposed to what the characters see.6
Finally, the polylogical construction of the opera extends to Wuorinen’s
atonal and dodecaphonic musical idioms, which hark back to early or mid-­
twentieth-­century expressionistic operas (e.g., Strauss’s Salome (1905), Berg’s
Wozzeck (1914–­ 22) and Lulu (1929–­ 35), Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909),
Shostakovich’s Lady MacBeth from the Mtsenk District (1934)), while van
Hove’s stage direction recreates scenes from Wyoming and Texas circa 1967
with a minimal, postmodern flair. Anthony Tommasini, for example, in his
review of its American premiere in 2018 found the “unabashedly atonal,
fiercely complex music” ineffectively intricate and too “brainy” in depict-
ing the lives of two unsophisticated cowboys.7 Similarly, James Jorden com-

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 248 contemporary opera in flux

mented in his review of the premiere that “Wuorinen’s expertly crafted music
sounds dated and limited in its emotional response to the action (however
internal) of the drama.”8
Notwithstanding such criticisms, I argue that Wuorinen’s musical style
serves a broader dramaturgical purpose in giving voice to societal oppres-
sion that impinges on the protagonists’ selfhood. Paralleling topics common
to twentieth-­century expressionistic operas, the story revolves around the
oppression and inescapability of a subject trapped in a patriarchal and het-
eronormative society. Ennis’s fractured subjectivity is articulated through his
dualistic modes of singing: he sings in Sprechstimme when expressing his
outward, disgruntled self and in lyrical mode when he is attuned to his inter-
nal desires.
Moreover, I claim that the orchestral music in expressionistic operas by
Berg, Schoenberg, and Shostakovich conveys the unconscious desires and
emotions of the protagonists more poignantly than the sung utterances. The
mood established by the orchestra, be it yearning, anguish, mockery, and so
forth, steers the listener toward examining the psychological underpinning of
an “inner reality” of the character and of the situation.9 Applied to Brokeback
Mountain, the ominous and dissonant theme of the mountain constrains the
viewer’s construction of meaning in a specific manner, while van Hove’s sce-
nography shapes the viewer’s focalization with a broader range of associa-
tions and implications—­what I refer to as omniscient narration—­as will be
discussed.
From the start of the opera, the mountain theme presents its persona as a
place of dark magic. And this theme takes on narrative agency (or persona) in
shaping the viewer’s interpretation through its acousmatic function. Michel
Chion defines acousmatic sounds in film as those that tell a story in lieu of
visual presentation; it has “the ability to be everywhere, to see all, to know all,
and to have complete power.”10 The unsettling sound of the Brokeback Moun-
tain theme, at first a descriptive marker of the mountain, becomes inter-
twined with Ennis’s psychological fear of oppression. Through its recurrence,
it shapes the opera’s musico-­dramatic structure and the range of meanings
we attribute to it.11 There are other instrumental motives and vocal themes
associated with the men’s desire for freedom and their love for one another.12
But these auxiliary themes do not unsettle because they have an embodied
presence in the singing voices and the physical gestures that accompany
them. In stark contrast, the Brokeback Mountain theme acquires narrative
agency through its disembodied, acousmatic expression; the sounding of the

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 Narrative Agencies in Brokeback Mountain 249

low C1 drone in the bass is all it takes to convey its omnipresence, that some-
thing much larger than people determines the fate of these characters. The
acousmatic significance of the mountain theme is, I believe, one of the key
elements that distinguishes the opera’s dramaturgy from its counterparts in
film and literary form.
What exactly did Proulx and Wuorinen have in mind when they collab-
orated on the operatic adaptation of Brokeback Mountain? How does the
acousmatic function of the mountain theme play out in relationship to other
themes and motives? How do Wuorinen’s sketches for the opera (e.g., twelve-­
tone rows) provide a framework for understanding the opera’s hidden musical
logic? And, finally, in what sense does the opera’s narrative relate to expres-
sionistic and modernist operas that pit an individual against an oppressive
collective environment?
In shedding light on such questions, this chapter proceeds with a back-
ground for preparing the operatic adaptation and compares it with Ang Lee’s
filmic adaptation of Brokeback Mountain, then discusses the acousmatic
function of the mountain theme in relationship to the opera’s dramaturgy
as well as the significance of the scenography. It concludes with some obser-
vations about the opera’s intertextual references to expressionistic operas.
Wherever relevant, I will refer to specific tracks from Teatro Real’s DVD
recording of its production.13

Background and Adaptations

As the youngest composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for the electronic work
Time’s Encomium (1970), Charles Wuorinen was recognized as a prolific
composer who wrote more than 260 works. After composing a large-­scale
setting of Dylan Thomas’s A Winter’s Tale (1991), he devoted increasing atten-
tion to vocal works. Prior to Brokeback Mountain, he composed an opera set
to a novel by Salman Rushdie called Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1997–­
2001), which premiered in 2004. Critics praised the comic opera for its “scin-
tillating theatricality” and “wittily inflected vocal lines” that lead to a happy
conclusion.14
Then came an opportunity to write a much darker opera on the subject
of Brokeback Mountain. In 2006, Gerard Mortimer, then general director of
the New York City Opera, commissioned Wuorinen to compose the opera,
beginning a long and laborious process (over eight years) that culminated in

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 250 contemporary opera in flux

the premiere in Madrid at the Teatro Real on January 29, 2014. A second pro-
duction at the Landstheater in Salzburg in 2016 followed, then a U.S. premiere
took place at the New York City Opera on May 31, 2018. Proulx was at first
reluctant to work with Wuorinen, as she was not pleased by Ang Lee’s film,
which sweetened and softened the hard life in the Big Horn Mountains of
Wyoming, where she lives to this day. It was only after Wuorinen visited the
writer and toured those cold, harsh, imposing mountains that she agreed to
write the libretto for the opera.15 Suffice it to say, in adapting the short story
into an operatic libretto, Proulx did away with the romantic impulse in the film
in order to focus squarely on the oppressive environment of rural Wyoming.
In fact, the role of the mountain keeps shifting in the different versions of
the story. In Annie Proulx’s short story from 1997, the mountain assumes a
metonymic role in identifying the place where the men first meet and work
together as ranchers, but not a place where they ever return to visit. Over
the course of twenty years, the men travel to other mountains and camp out-
doors, exchanging stories about their children and the inconsequential affairs
they carry on with people other than their wives.
The 2005 blockbuster film (directed by Ang Lee) dramatizes the men’s
forbidden relationship and their attachment to the mountain as a place of ref-
uge from the outside world. Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, comments,
“It is the story of a time and place where two men are forced to deny the only
passion either one will ever feel. Their tragedy is universal. It could be about
two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups—­any ‘forbid-
den’ love.”16 The soundtrack for Ang Lee’s film features an acoustic guitar and
Hawaiian steel guitar; set to a lilting triple meter, the melody imparts a sweet
and mellow mood in G Mixolydian mode. The mountain becomes associated
with the soundtrack, which comments on the men’s nostalgic memories of
the times they spent together.
In the operatic adaptation, the mountain acquires a dual signification as a
place of threat and of refuge. The opera divides into two acts, the first span-
ning four years since the men’s first encounter at the Brokeback Mountain,
and the second chronicling the remaining sixteen years in which they main-
tain a long-­distance relationship. Within act I, scenes 1 through 5 and 7 and
8 take place at the Brokeback Mountain, where the men meet in the summer
of 1963. Interspersed between are scenes that deal with the women’s lives:
Alma’s aspiration prior to her marriage to Ennis (scene 6) and Jack’s encoun-
ter with Lureen in Texas (scene 9). The two women can’t be more different
from one another: Alma is headstrong, resists being married to a rancher,

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 Narrative Agencies in Brokeback Mountain 251

and willfully pursues Ennis to change his occupation so that she can live in
town and enjoy a lifestyle Ennis does not care for. Lureen, a college gradu-
ate, is more inward and tolerates Jack’s indifference toward her. Scene 10 fast
forwards to Alma and Ennis’s married life together in Riverton four years
later. Within act II, scenes 1 and 2 are focused on Ennis and Jack’s reunion
in 1967, then scenes 3 through 6 track their subsequent trips back to Broke-
back Mountain, Lureen’s disenchantment with Jack, and Ennis’s divorce from
Alma. The last five scenes (7 through 11) take place in 1983, beginning with
Ennis’s altercation with Jack, the latter’s unexpected death, Ennis’s visit to see
Jack’s parents and pay homage, and his final pledge to himself.
The characters’ dispositions are expressed through Fach (vocal type)
and styles of singing: Ennis Del Mar (bass-­baritone), Jack Twist (lyric tenor),
Ennis’s wife Alma (soprano), Jack’s wife Lureen (mezzo-­soprano), the bar-
tender (alto), and the mountain keeper Aguirre (bass). Lureen’s father, Hog-
boy (bass), appears as a ghost, an additional character Wuorinen and Proulx
inserted in the opera, along with Jack’s father (tenor) and mother (alto) at the
end of the opera. Ennis is at first unable to connect with his emotions and
often sings in Sprechstimme, while Jack, idealistic in nature, is more com-
municative and sings in a lyrical, vibrant manner. Only when Ennis expresses
his desire openly does he adopt a lyrical singing style, as demonstrated in the
duets they sing about their desire to be free. Compared to the original short
story, the women in the opera are given substantial roles; they express their
hopes, desires, and disenchantments with emotional candor and depth, so
that the viewer is made to empathize with them. Alma’s materialistic aspi-
rations are brought out when she shops for a wedding dress that is far more
expensive than what she can afford (act I, scene 6). Lureen is more gracious
and accepting of Jack’s aberrant behaviors, yet she is haunted by the ghost of
her father who reminds her of his fundamental mistrust for Jack (act II, scene
4). Aguirre, along with the townspeople and Jack’s parents, reinforce the
oppressive, heteronormative standard of life in Wyoming during the twenty
years of their relationship.

Narrative Agency of the Brokeback Mountain Theme and

Related Themes

Anyone who has heard the opera may be captivated by the dark and ominous
orchestral prologue. The long, sustained drone on C1 is played simultaneously

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 252 contemporary opera in flux

by the contrabass, contrabassoon, piano, and tuba and is amplified by the

rumbling bass drum prior to the entry of trombone’s motif. But why invoke
the notion of acousmatic music? Most importantly, one hears the theme
against the projected image of the mountain, but its source (what the music
refers to) remains ambiguous. At some point, the theme no longer serves as
indices of lightning and storms of the mountain, but rather psychological
indices of oppression and brutality in the society inhabited by Jack and Ennis.
In describing the music, Wuorinen comments: “Sometimes the score evokes
the icy clarity of the high-­altitude freedom the characters enjoy there. But the
mountain also breathes and storms, and the music projects this turbulence as
well, especially when it transfers into the interior lives of the characters and
their interactions in the human world.”17
The Brokeback Mountain theme foregrounds the dark and threatening
nature of the mountain, but also its serene, ethereal nature. The theme can
be divided into alternating textures, labeled X and Y, as shown in figure 11.1.
X is characterized by the tremolos in the low strings, piano, timpani and bass
drum rolls, anchored to the low C1 drone, punctuated by the motive [C, D ♭ ,
B] played by trombone and timpani. This is answered by Y, with its ethereal
texture made up of sustained woodwinds and string harmonics in the high
register. The first time it is presented, it is punctuated by the harp’s descend-
ing trichord, [D ♯ , F, E]. The structure of the prologue alternates between the
two textural types three times with a slight variation in Y.
Wuorinen’s sketches indicate that the theme is derived from the twelve-­
tone row in its S0 (prime form), as shown below the reduced score. The row
is composed of four trichords, labeled (a) through (d), which appear out
of order in the prologue. As indicated by the circled passages, trichord (a)
maps onto the melody in the trombone and timpani at the end of X, while
the trichords (c) and (d) make up the initial statement of Y, and trichord (b)
appears within the string harmonics at m. 18, where an aggregate is formed.
Furthermore, Wuorinen’s sketches contain a macrocosmic plan for struc-
turing the entire opera based on various transformations of the row, often
pairing one transposition of the row against another, as shown in figure 11.2.
Surface gestures (vocal and instrumental) are most often derived from the
combination of the four trichords in the row.18 Although Wuorinen deploys
the four trichords as building blocks for composing out surface gestures, the
frequent repetition of pitches and auxiliary materials render the presence of
the twelve-­tone rows nearly invisible at the foreground. At the macrocosmic
level, the structure of scenes within acts I and II are governed by row trans-

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 Narrative Agencies in Brokeback Mountain 253

Fig. 11.1. Brokeback Mountain theme and twelve-­tone row structure. (Edition
Peters; Howard Stokar, used with permission.)

positions that reflect the succession of pitches within S0; that is, successive
scenes in act I are transposed to begin on subsequent pitch of S0, so that fol-
lowing the prologue that begins on C, scene 1 begins on D ♭ , scene 2 on B, and
so forth, until all twelve pitches of the row are exhausted, while the accom-
panying retrograde rows are neither rigorously ordered nor complete. Act II
reverses the ordering to create a palindrome; note how the pairing of S and R
rows is flipped. Wuorinen uses the retrograde of each row beginning with R7
and concludes with R0. It is as if the “hidden” logic underlying the row struc-
ture of the mountain theme governs the destiny of the two men: the music
of this opera begins and ends with the S0 row, associated with the mountain.
Within act I, the Brokeback Mountain theme functions mainly as a
descriptive marker of the mountain. In scene 1, for example, Aguirre, the
keeper of the Brokeback Mountain, sings a solo passage that speaks of the

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 254 contemporary opera in flux

Fig. 11.2. Formal plan of Brokeback Mountain (based on the twelve-­tone rows)

magical power the mountain possesses as follows: “Brokeback Mountain, old

and hard, knife blade rising from the earth. Dark power. Lightning, blizzard,
avalanche and flood, storm and falling rock, stones like skulls, jet streams,
lion’s claw, an evil place that kills men.”
The elaborating sonic gestures function as material indices of the destruc-
tive forces of the mountain.19 This is one of the few times when the angular
vocal melody explicitly draws from the first hexachord of the S0 row over
the words “Brokeback mountain, old and hard,” then loosening the order of
the second hexachord, while anchoring the angular melody to the sustained
drone on C1 from the prologue. On the words “dark power,” Aguirre’s vocal
melody repeats the first trichord [C, D ♭ , B], accompanied by rapid figura-
tions in the strings and woodwinds that offer sonic images to the destructive
power of the mountain: “lightning, blizzard, avalanche and flood.” Slightly
later, when the two men are introduced to each other, the mountain theme
recurs with the low drone, providing sonic images of darkened sky, lightning,
and rumble of thunder.
Countering the ethos of threat associated with the mountain is the ten-
der duet in which Jack and Ennis express their desire to be free, as shown in
figure 11.3. As they look up at the sky, Ennis sings a lyrical melody outlining
a succession of thirds (E ♭-­G-­B-­D) on the words “we are like eagles, Jack.”20
Continuing on, hearing the hawks cry, Ennis reflects on his own desire for
freedom: “sounds like that hawk is sayin, ‘Free, we are free, you are free.’”21
Note how the same ascending tertian motive connects the hawks with the
idea of freedom. When the orchestral accompaniment is taken into consid-
eration, an extended chord based on tertian construction emerges as shown

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 Narrative Agencies in Brokeback Mountain 255

Fig. 11.3. “Freedom” theme (act I, mm. 544–­545; mm. 553–­555)

to the furthest right of figure 11.3. The “freedom” motif returns later in act II
(scene 2) when they carry on a tryst at Motel Siesta away from prying eyes.
Reminiscing over the summer they spent together on the mountain, Ennis
wistfully sings, “Ev’ry time I heard a hawk cry, I thought about us upon the
mountain. They say Brokeback is a bad place. But for us it was good.”22 It is
no coincidence that later when Ennis and Jack sing a duet confirming their
feelings for one another, their contrapuntal voices feature thirds as the main
harmonic building block (act II, mm. 260–­268).
The darker resonances of the mountain theme return at a critical turning
point when Ennis and Jack become lovers (act I, scene 5). In the beginning,
they are stationed at opposite ends of the post and come together only to
share a meal at the end of the day. One night, Ennis is too drunk to go back
to his own tent and falls asleep by the campfire. The C1 drone reappears with
the chromatic trichord at the point when Ennis utters “freezing cold” (m. 621)
and Jack quickly pulls him inside the tent. Soon afterward, we see the silhou-
ette of the two men making love inside the tent. As Proulx writes “In the dark
the mountain’s power swells and throbs” (m. 625), rapid figurations in the
orchestra suggestive of storm and lightning accompany this turbulent scene.
For the remainder of the summer, their bond deepens while they respond
differently to their feelings for one another: Jack wonders whether they can
embrace this feeling, while Ennis flat out denies it as he reminds himself of his
impending marriage to Alma. They leave the mountain without any indica-
tion that they will see each other again. Fast forward to four years later, Ennis
and Jack are now married with children. One day, while cradling his newborn
baby, Ennis receives a postcard from Jack that he will be coming into town
for a visit. The final scene in act I closes with a note of anticipation of their
reunion.
Act II begins with Jack’s visit (scene 1), where Alma catches them kissing
at the bottom of the staircase before Ennis brings Jack up to the apartment
for an introduction. Over the course of the next sixteen years, the men carry

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 256 contemporary opera in flux

on their affair from prying eyes, meeting at first in Motel Siesta and later
retreating to the mountain as a place of refuge. By the sixth year, Alma, fed up
with Ennis, who remains closeted and unwilling to change his ways, divorces
him and marries a grocer named Bill. At a Thanksgiving dinner (scene 6),
Alma provokes Ennis about his secret life, which I refer to as the first moment
of reckoning. The accompanying music builds up to a frenetic speed as she
confronts Ennis about his relationship with Jack: “Jack Twist? Jack Nasty! You
and him. . . . You and him. . . . You and him . . . It makes me sick! That’s why
you don’t want to get married again. Why should you?”23 Ennis responds by
shouting back at her, but upon seeing his children, flees from the scene.
The Brokeback Mountain theme returns as acousmatic music when Ennis
confronts the source of his psychological trauma (act II, scene 5). Soon after
Ennis breaks the news about his divorce from Alma, Jack proposes that this
will be an opportune moment for the two to start a ranch together, an idea that
is met with a staunch refusal by Ennis. Ennis then tells Jack about his child-
hood experience of witnessing a couple of gay cowboys who were dragged to
their death until they were turned to “meaty pulps.”24 The C1 drone in the bass,
associated with the mountain theme, returns at this salient moment once
again. They argue over the enduring message of this incident: Ennis expresses
his fear of meeting his death by “ordinary people” in this way, while Jack tries
to shake off Ennis’s fear by insisting that times have changed. The two men
part ways without reconciling their views on how to move forward.
In scene 8, Ennis receives a postcard about Jack’s unexpected death
through a tire explosion and surmises that Jack was murdered in much the
same way old gay ranchers were mutilated and dragged to their deaths. The
townspeople gather around him and lay judgment on him as Ennis hurriedly
calls Lureen to find out what happened.25 This is also the moment when the
acousmatic function of the mountain theme surfaces as a signifier of Ennis’s
internalized trauma. The reduced score shown in figure 11.4a illustrates
the scene when Ennis finds out about Jack’s death; struck at triple forte, C
is played in unison across three octaves, then branches out to C ♯ and B to
form the first trichord associated with the mountain theme. As Ennis’s voice
cracks down and he screams “No! No! Jack! No!,” the bass drum’s pounding
rhythm, followed by fragments of glissandi in the trombone, and the crashing
dissonant chord at the piano, embody his psychosomatic response to Jack’s
unexpected death.
As Ennis collapses to the ground and writhes in agony, the townspeople
of Riverton (SATB chorus) surround him and criticize him for not fitting in:

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 Narrative Agencies in Brokeback Mountain 257

Fig. 11.4a. Ennis’s response to Jack’s death (act II). (Edition Peters; Howard Stokar,
used with permission.)

“What is wrong with him? Who is he? Works for Stoutamire. Bad news. He
keeps to himself. Somethin’ not right. He’s a hard man. Always lookin’ for a
fight. Somethin’ not right.”
Proulx modeled the chorus after the Furies in Greek mythology, who are
known for punishing men who commit crimes against the natural order. Emu-
lating its role in Greek theater as external narrator, the chorus addresses the
audience rather than speaking directly to Ennis. Curiously, when the chorus
sings “to himself ” and “not right,” the dyad [F♯ , G] is exchanged between the
linear and vertical configurations of choral writing to form a quasi-­crucifix
over C (mm. 1204–­1206).26 When Lureen tells Ennis that Jack “drowned in his
own blood,” the chorus echoes the phrase with the chromatic trichord [C ♯ , D,
E] (mm. 1249–­1250), reinforcing the punishment that falls upon those who
stray from the path. By connecting the pitch structure of the choral writing
to those of the mountain theme, Wuorinen tells us that the townspeople and
the mountain come from the same musical source.
Following Jack’s death, Ennis visits Jack’s parents’ home to ask for their
permission to spread his ashes in Brokeback Mountain, and with the encour-
agement of Jack’s mother, he enters Jack’s childhood room, where he dis-
covers that Jack has kept the two shirts they wore when they first met over

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 258 contemporary opera in flux

Fig. 11.4b. Closing scene (act II). (Edition Peters; Howard Stokar, used with permission.)

twenty years ago. He takes them back to his trailer (scene 11), and in his part-
ing words, Ennis pledges his love to Jack.27 As shown in figure 11.4b, the sus-
tained, “spectral” chord heard in the conclusion is derived from the R0 form
of the twelve-­tone row associated with the mountain theme, and its spacing
recalls textures X and Y from the prologue. The chord crescendos to a thun-
derous volume. Ennis’s ascending vocal melody signifies his commitment to
honoring his love for Jack, although the music denies any sense of real closure
as his melody ends on C ♯4 against the sustained bass C1.
In summary, my reading of the opera focuses primarily on the narrative
agency accorded to the mountain through the orchestral music’s acousmatic
function. Both the libretto and the music participate in anthropomorphizing
the mountain in this way. As a place of dark magic, Proulx bestows human
qualities by saying that “its power swells and throbs,” and so forth. The theme
evolves from its initial signifier of the harsh, foreboding mountain into an
entity that encompasses Ennis’s trauma and the social mores of rural Wyo-
ming circa 1960s. As Chion puts it, “its voice comes from an immaterial and
non-­localized body, and it seems that no obstacle can stop it.”28 Furthermore,
Brian Kane, in Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice,
claims that the ontology of acousmatic sound comes into being only when
its source, cause, and effect are spaced in time, a condition which he refers to
as acousmatic spacing.29 While the source of the unsettling theme associated
with the mountain is uncovered early on, its cause and effect are revealed in
due course by intertwining fragments of the theme with Ennis’s conviction

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 Narrative Agencies in Brokeback Mountain 259

that nothing will change as history will repeat itself. By connecting the source
of his trauma (witnessing the brutal deaths of gay cowboys) with the cho-
ral singing by the townspeople to various transformations of the mountain
theme, the opera arguably conveys the message that human nature, as with
the mountain, is unforgiving to those who stray from its norm.

Tropes of Expressionism

Aside from the prominent role the Brokeback Mountain theme plays with
respect to narrative agency in this opera, there are intertextual references
to Expressionism and musical tropes of Expressionism that are worthy of
mention. Regarding his “Four Orchestral Songs,” op. 22, Arnold Schoenberg
famously proclaimed that “a piece of music does not come into being out
of the logic of its own material but [is] guided by the feeling for internal or
external processes, bringing these to expression, supporting itself on their
logic and building on this.”30 Furthermore, David Metzer calls upon Schoen-
berg’s music and Expressionist arts in general for “removing some of the
last-­standing barriers, social or artistic, placed on expression, so as to have
utterances spring unfettered from dark psychic regions.”31 In foregrounding
oppression as a central theme in Brokeback Mountain, the music and libretto
adopt familiar tropes of musical expressionism, notably the role of orchestral
music in giving voice to the unconscious realm of a character, an uncanny
symbolism associated with nature imagery (e.g., the moon), among others.
Returning to the scene of Jack’s death and Ennis’s psychosomatic
response, the orchestral accompaniment in this scene subtly alludes to the
murder scene from Berg’s Wozzeck (act III, scene 2, mm. 100–­109). In the
chilling moment leading up to Marie’s death, she looks up at the moon and
remarks how red it is (“Wie der Mond roth aufgeht!”), as Wozzeck replies that
it is like a bloody iron (“Wie ein blutig Eisen”) and begins to repeatedly stab
her with a knife. The timpani’s accelerating beats mimic Wozzeck’s heartbeat
as he perpetrates the act of murder and watches her body sink to the bottom
of the pond. The embodied sensation induced by the “heartbeat” music and
accompanying orchestral gestures (such as the tritone motive in the harp)
generate the utmost suspense. Although the narrative context is different, the
erratic rhythms in the bass drum and timpani in Wuorinen’s scoring of the
comparable scene present a physical embodiment of Ennis’s trauma in much
the same way. The sounding of the Brokeback Mountain theme, the C drone

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 260 contemporary opera in flux

and the chromatic trichord, becomes inextricably linked to Ennis’s psycho-

somatic expression of trauma in this way. In short, the vocality of the moun-
tain theme becomes subjectivized by being brought into contact with Ennis’s
trauma. Sonic effects of the mountain theme, which started out as descriptive
indices of the mountain, are absorbed into and merged with Ennis’s fractured
subjectivity.
Additionally, orchestral music may assume an anthropomorphic role
when it makes a satirical or ironic commentary on an event. For example,
Wuorinen deploys short, solo motives in the violin and woodwinds to poke
fun at Ennis and Jack, as if someone eavesdrops and mocks them. When they
first get acquainted in a bar at the foot of Brokeback Mountain, Wuorinen
introduces a quasi-­comical rhythmic pattern (suggestive of laughter) in the
accompaniment; he then interpolates a violin obbligato with triplet figuration
(act I, scene 2, mm. 191–­92) when Ennis awkwardly engages in a conversation
(using Sprechstimme) with Jack about his humble working-­class upbringing.
The solo violin melody bursts into the scene as if it is a character that mocks
Ennis’s lack of ease at social interaction. While the context differs, it recalls
the fourth scene in Shostakovich’s Lady MacBeth of Mtsenk District, in which
a sinister, chromatic melody played by the solo violin satirizes the situation in
which Katrina sets out to kill her father-­in-­law, Boris, with poisoned mush-
room soup. As the violin’s chromatic figurations hovers above the pounding
bass ostinato, Boris, oblivious, comments on how good the mushroom soup
tastes (mm. 253–­57). The instrumental obbligato emerges as a musical trope
of Expressionism when it subtly or overtly undermines the protagonist’s
action and cast it in a sinister light.
Finally, a prominent musical imagery associated with Expressionism is
the symbolism associated with the moon. In Schoenberg’s Erwartung, the full
moon is anthropomorphized repeatedly in the protagonist’s irrational state
of mind, turning her surroundings into phantasms in the depth of night; the
deranged woman alternately describes the moon as “full of terror” (m. 105),
“pale” (m. 133), “treacherous” (m. 160), and “swaying” (m. 320), as she imag-
ines seeing a ghostly apparition. Similarly, in Strauss’s Salome, the moon casts
a strange spell on people; while Salome looks at the moon and compares it
to a chaste woman who does not defile herself, Herodias’s page sees “a dead
woman,” and John the Baptist recognizes it as an omen. In Berg’s Wozzeck,
Marie notices how the moon is “bloody” red before she meets her demise in
the hands of her beloved. Although it does not reference death, the image

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 Narrative Agencies in Brokeback Mountain 261

of the moon is similarly associated with the mountain’s dark power and its
capacity to cast an evil spell on people in the operatic adaptation of Brokeback
Mountain.

Scenography and Omniscient Narration

Van Hove’s scenography of Brokeback Mountain complicates the viewer’s

understanding of the narrative. In act I, each scene is compartmentalized
into its specific location: the men’s initial meeting with Aguirre, drinking at
the bar, various scenes that take place on the mountain, Alma at a dress shop,
Lureen in Texas in the machinery shop, and so forth. In act II, however, van
Hove’s scenography juxtaposes the domestic lives of women on both sides
of the stage while showcasing the reunion of men at the center of the stage.
Take, for example, the scenography for the men’s tryst at Motel Siesta in act II.
At first, the lighting focuses on Alma, holding her baby, who reacts to Ennis’s
sudden departure with Jack in disbelief, muttering to herself, “I thought Jack
will be a friend to both of us, but he hardly said a word.” The silhouette of the
two men in embrace appears against the darkened center of the stage while
she sings at the front of the stage. A couple of minutes later, the lighting shifts
its focus to reveal the intimate exchange carried on by the two men, while the
women on both sides of the stage are steeped in darkness.
From the perspective of focalization, a “split” scenography of this sort
draws attention to the irreconcilable position in which the male protagonists
find themselves given the homophobic society around them. Aguirre is found
spying on the two men in the mountain, condemning their behavior while
remaining silent. When Alma catches sight of Ennis kissing Jack, she quickly
shakes off the idea that there is anything wrong. The wives, for the most
part, tolerate being abandoned rather than questioning the men’s behavior.
Instead of privileging one position over the other, the viewer is confronted
with scenes in which the men’s actions clash with the heteronormative and
religiously conservative behaviors and expectations of their society. In this
manner, van Hove exposes all positions at once, which in literary theory is
known as omniscient narration, because it captures the feelings and thoughts
of multiple characters at once. In act II, Ennis and Jack celebrate their reunion
at Motel Fiesta, while the abandoned women carrying out domestic affairs
are shown to the right and left of the stage. The situation flips when Ennis and

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 262 contemporary opera in flux

Jack fight over whether to have a life together following Ennis’s divorce (act
II, scene 5); behind them, we see Alma happily remarried and saying grace
before a meal with her new family.32
The final two scenes, in contrast, resort to a minimal staging that involves
Ennis’s interaction with Jack’s parents. The stage is darkened except for the
projection of the Brokeback Mountain and focalizes on Ennis’s act of griev-
ing. In lieu of a split scenography, the mise-­en-­scène in this concluding scene
is minimized as if to shine light on Ennis’s solitary acknowledgment of his
enduring love for Jack. There is no bonding with his older daughter, no prom-
ise of a better future nor a nostalgic remembrance of the past, as depicted in
Ang Lee’s film. In the closing scene, Ennis hangs the two shirts that Jack saved
from the summer when they first met, as he pledges his enduring commit-
ment to loving Jack. This moment signifies a kind of spiritual catharsis, when
the two shirts slowly rise to the top of the stage as Ennis sings his last word. It
is as if the shirts have ascended to “heaven” and the men can finally be at peace
with one another. The dissonant spectral chord in the accompanying music,
however, suggests otherwise. This is just one instance of how the performance
text (production components) and the opera text (music and libretto) operate
at conflicting registers and fail to provide closure, embodying the unease in
Ennis’s mantra that “if you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it.”33

Concluding Thoughts

How does the operatic narrative of Brokeback Mountain compare with that
of Thomas Hyde’s That Man Stephen Ward (Venn, chapter 10, this volume)
and other operas that involve a persecuted subject? Ennis clearly emerges as
the tragic hero who chooses to bear the burden of his conflicted self, torn
between his love for Jack and his fear of being ostracized and persecuted.
Like Stephen Ward, Ennis fails to legitimize himself in the patriarchal society
of rural Wyoming, yet he stoically carries on with his life as a rancher after
Jack’s death. Ennis’s role, in this respect, may be similar to Hawk’s in Gregory
Spears’s Fellow Travelers (2016) in the latter’s outward denial of homosexual-
ity that is driven by a strong desire to conform to societal pressure following
the McCarthy-­era interrogation. For both Ennis and Hawk, survival trumps
striving for an authentic selfhood. Ennis is deliberate in the choices he makes
and is willing to deal with the consequences of his actions, however flawed
they may be.

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 Narrative Agencies in Brokeback Mountain 263

Returning to the critics’ rejection of Wuorinen’s music as being too

complex, I think they misread the opera’s narrative as driven by a roman-
tic impulse, centered on the men’s forsaken love affair. If that were the case,
Wuorinen would have chosen to set the music differently—­perhaps giving
more space to developing the lyrical duets the men sing and the tertian
music that signifies their longing for freedom. If, instead, we were to honor
Wuorinen and Proulx’s intention that the opera is about oppression, then
the essence of the narrative shifts the focus away from the men to the very
source the oppression. Rather than pointing to the homophobic society as
the source of evil, the mountain emerges as a metonym for all things good and
evil. Brokeback Mountain, as a place of refuge, offers peace and solitude for
the two men on the one hand. It exerts, on the other hand, its “dark magic” on
people and, like nature itself, is unforgiving to those who stray from the path.
Its ambivalence or dualistic significance is the narrative engine that drives the
opera’s dramaturgy.

Notes
1. John Clum, Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1991), 200. Clum mentions idealized TV dramas from the 1990s such
as Northern Exposure, where a gay couple fits comfortably within the heterosexual commu-
nity in Alaska.
2. For example, Stewart’s Harvey Milk is a documentary opera that chronicles the life of
San Francisco’s first “unofficial” gay mayor from childhood to his assassination. Blanchard’s
Champion is about the real-­life story of Emile Griffith, who tried unsuccessfully to recon-
cile his homosexuality in a hyper-­macho world of boxing.
3. “Opera de Madrid. Esterno mundial” (Madrid Opera. World Premiere). In Opera de
Madrid (February 2014), 68–­77, 72.
4. See Sarah Drews Lucas, “The Primacy of Narrative Agency: Re-­reading Seyla Ben-
habib on Narrativity,” Feminist Theory 19, no. 2 (2018): 127. Lucas claims that the subject’s
agency precedes norms and narratives, which are arrived at collectively through social
interaction.
5. See David Levin, Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 12.
6. Focalization is Gérard Genette’s term that refers to a restriction of narrative infor-
mation in relation to the experience and knowledge of the narrator in the story world. See
Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Here I repur-
pose it to refer to the range of information conveyed in the production’s scenography and
what it offers to the audience. Mieke Bal comments: “whenever events are presented they
are always presented from within a certain ‘vision.’ A point of view is chosen, a certain way
of seeing things, a certain angle, whether ‘real’ historical facts are concerned or fictitious
events” (142). See Bal, Narrotology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 1997).

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 264 contemporary opera in flux

7. See Anthony Tommasini, “Review: ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ the Opera, Falls Short of
its Potential,” New York Times, June 1, 2018, [Link]
/music/[Link]
8. James Jorden, “‘Brokeback Mountain’ Opera Sings of Gay Love—­Minus the Passion,”
Observer, June 1, 2018, [Link]
okeback-mountain-lacks-passion/
9. “Inner reality” was the term often used by Kandinsky, who was in search of a truth
that broke through a “lie” of convention and tradition. See David Fanning, “Expressionism,”
Oxford Music Online, January 20, 2001, [Link]
[Link].09141
10. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999), 24.
11. In a previous publication, I have described Kaija Saariaho’s music for the rape scene
in Adriana Mater as acousmatic music. In the absence of visual representation, the music
embodies the act of rape through the structured repetition and gendering of sound tex-
tures, and the same music returns later to signify moments of traumatic rupture. See Yayoi
U. Everett, Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Operas: Osvaldo Golijov,
Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, Tan Dun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015),
102–­3.
12. The men participate in a lyrical duet, expressing their desires to be free like the
hawks that circle the sky (DVD track 8, 25:10–­40). The music returns when they see each
other again in the Motel Siesta (DVD track 15). Ennis, in a rare moment of bliss, sings a
lullaby to his daughter to lull her to sleep.
13. References in this chapter will be made specifically to scenes from the DVD of this
production. See Charles Wuorinen and Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain (BelAir Media:
DVD BAC111, 2015).
14. “Charles Wuorinen.” Accessed on September 7, 2020. [Link]
.com/biography/
15. Charles Wourinen, “Opera de Madrid. Esterno mundial,” Program notes for Broke-
back Mountain (Madrid Opera. World Premiere 2014), 72.
16. Roger Ebert, “Love on a Lonesome Trail,” [Link], [Link]
.com/reviews/brokeback-mountain-2005
17. “On Brokeback Mountain,” [Link]
-mountain/
18. I am grateful to Howard Stokar for making the sketches to this opera available fol-
lowing Charles Wuorinen’s unexpected death in March 2020.
19. DVD track 3, 4:40–­5:27.
20. The tertian motive is derived from the string harmonics (m.18) from texture Y’ of
the opening prologue, signifying the serene and ethereal beauty of the mountain. Motives
based on a string of ascending thirds frequently appear in the orchestral writing preceding
the two men’s reunion.
21. DVD track 7, 25:10–­25:40.
22. DVD track 15, [Link]–­1:05.
23. DVD track 19, [Link]–­[Link].

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 Narrative Agencies in Brokeback Mountain 265

24. DVD track 18, [Link]–­[Link].

25. DVD track 21, [Link]–­[Link].
26. Given Wuorinen’s affinity for Schoenberg’s music, I think the vertical and linear
exchange of dyads that form a crucifix is hardly coincidental.
27. DVD track 24, [Link]–­[Link].
28. Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 24.
29. Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 165.
30. David Fanning, “Expressionism.”
31. See David Metzer, “Modern Silence,” Journal of Musicology 23, no. 3 (August 2002):
373.
32. It may be worth mentioning that in the Salzburg production, scene changes were
made by rotating sets around a central axis, so that the viewer experienced them in succes-
sion rather than via juxtaposition.
33. In Ang Lee’s film adaptation, the older daughter, Alma Del Mar Jr., visits Ennis to tell
him that she is getting married, he gives her his blessing, and father and daughter part on
an optimistic note as the nostalgic theme song is heard once again. It begins and ends on
this romantic tenor.

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 12

From Subjectivity to Biopolitics

The Dream in Salvatore Sciarrino’s Music Theater

Mauro Fosco Bertola

Over the past three decades (1990s–­2020s), the Italian composer Salvatore
Sciarrino has become one of the leading figures in Europe’s contemporary
operatic scene. Susan McClary, in her one-­sided condemnation of the avant-­
garde experience of the 1950s and 1960s, has included Sciarrino among com-
posers such as Kaija Saariaho or George Benjamin, who have “returned to
techniques and sonorities pioneered by Messiaen, Boulez and others” but
nevertheless “openly acknowledge the expressive and rhetorical power of
their strategies” and thus “humanize its post-­tonal idiom, making its power
intelligible to audiences.”1 David Metzer also highlights Sciarrino’s expressive
use of silence as a fitting example of the fluidity that music has achieved at
the turn of the twenty-­first century; by dialoguing with tradition (modernist
or otherwise) and articulating anew its expressive power, Sciarrino recalls
the allegedly historical category of the subject.2 According to readings such
as McClary’s and Metzer’s, Sciarrino’s more fluid approach to the avant-­
garde and the operatic genre allows him to return opera to its Monteverdian
roots; the operatic spectacle again becomes a privileged means for expressing
human passions and their psychological intricacies.
The beauty of this reading so brilliantly summarized by McClary and
Metzer is that it offers what seems an intuitively coherent explanation for
the expressive power of Sciarrino’s music while, at the same time, blatantly
refuting (again) Fredric Jameson’s famous thesis on the alleged “death of the
subject” concerning aesthetic production from the 1980s onwards.3 This
reading, however, also seems to explain the strong ties between Sciarrino’s
music theater and the expressionism of the early twentieth century, especially
as embodied in works like Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909) or Die glückliche

266

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 From Subjectivity to Biopolitics 267

Hand (1910–­13).4 Through this reading, Sciarrino embodies a broader schol-

arly discourse that has gained momentum in recent years and frames music
composed over the last three or four decades as “late modernism.” Charac-
terized by a sense of loss and alienation in the face of the failed promises of
the post-­1945 musical avant-­garde and its logic of innovation, late modernism
marks a kind of nostalgic return to the early modernist experience, especially
to expressionism.5
At the end of the 1990s, Hans-­Thies Lehmann coined the label “postdra-
matic theatre” for designating a significant part of the theatrical production
of the Western avant-­garde since the end of the 1960s, a category that has also
been adopted more recently within the opera studies.6 In downplaying the
centrality of plot and dramatic action in favor of the materiality and bodily
dimensions of performance on stage, postdramatic theater, as Lehmann
points out, builds on the early expressionist experience. In the expressionist
theater of the early twentieth century, as he writes:

The sound is intended to transport affects rather than messages. It [the early
expressionist theater] wants to go beyond drama as interpersonal dramaturgy
of conflict and beyond the motifs inherent to it. It emphasizes the forms of
monologue and choir and a more lyrically than dramatically determined suc-
cession of scenes [. . .]. Expressionism seeks ways of representing the uncon-
scious whose nightmares and images of desire are not bound to any dramatic
logic.7

Sciarrino’s operatic works, like those by Michel van der Aa, Charles Wuo-
rinen, Chaya Czernowin, Olga Neuwirth, and others undoubtedly display
all these features. And Lehmann’s words with respect to Oskar Kokoschka’s
1907 play Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (“Murder, Hope of Women”) as a work
where the dramaturgical structure relies on “the model of the casual and
kaleidoscopic succession of images and scenes of dream” and “the human
being [is shown] as a creature of drives” seem to perfectly apply to Sciarri-
no’s musical theater from Amore e Psiche (1973) onward as well. Sciarrino’s
theater also shares with the contemporary music-­theatrical scene an ongoing
exploration of extended vocal techniques like breathing, Sprechgesang, glottal
sounds, screaming, coughing, and so forth. As the Italian theorist Adriana
Cavarero has pointed out, the voice is a powerful instance of subjectiviza-
tion.8 It brings about a material, bodily presence that exceeds meaning.9 By
adopting these extended vocal techniques, contemporary musical theater

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 268 contemporary opera in flux

frees the operatic voice from past conventions and restores its bodily dimen-
sion. The voice thus becomes a powerful tool for expressing subjectivity. In
some cases, as in Czernowin’s Infinite Now or in Sciarrino’s Lohengrin, it even
makes possible for the composer—­in a kind of music-­theatrical equivalent of
the literary technique of the stream of consciousness—­to “tell” the story only
from the perspective of the protagonist, immersing the audience within his
or her psychic inner life.10
Nonetheless, upon closer analysis, some questions arise: What kind of
subject has returned, and in what sense? Who or what is expressed by this
music, and to what end? Or, to put it closer to the central theme of this chap-
ter: In what sense does Sciarrino rearticulate expressionism?
In this chapter, I tackle these and related questions by approaching Sciar­
rino’s music theater from the perspective of dream. My aim is not to reject
the focus on subjectivity that characterizes standard readings of Sciarrino’s
work, like those of McClary and Metzer mentioned above, but rather to shift
this focus and therefore to reconsider Sciarrino’s ties to the early Expression-
ist experience of the 1910s. After briefly explaining my reasons for choosing
dream as a path of inquiry, I will outline Sciarrino’s specific oneiropoetics
(i.e., his understanding of dream as expressed in his writings). Subsequently,
I will consider two music-­theatrical works in more detail: Lohengrin, which
Sciarrino composed in 1984, and Superflumina, a later work which premiered
in 2010 and shares musical and dramaturgical features with the former. By
comparing the two works along the shared topic of dream, I will highlight
how Sciarrino has, over the decades, shifted the main focus of his music the-
ater: If Lohengrin relies on a specific link between dream and (a somehow
Lacanian kind of ) subjectivity, three decades later, in Superflumina, Sciarrino
frames dream as a sociopolitical, rather than subjective space, creating a new
kind of music theater akin to the biopolitical reflections of the contemporary
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

Why Dream?

At first, considering Sciarrino’s music theater from the perspective of dream

may appear an odd choice. His works contain very few explicit references to
dream, and he employs neither explicit dream scenes nor dream narrations.
Even in his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (2002), Sciarrino limits the

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 From Subjectivity to Biopolitics 269

references to dreams to a single fleeting mention and focuses instead on the

interaction between sleeplessness and hallucinations that ultimately ruins the
Macbeths. Only Da gelo a gelo (2006) seems to represent at least a partial
exception in this respect. Nevertheless, the libretto consists of extracts from
the writings and poems of the Japanese poet Izumi Shikibu (ca. 976–­1033).
The unusual abundance of dream references must, thus, be ascribed to the
specific function of dreams in medieval Japanese literature.11 As for Sciarri-
no’s poetological stances in his essays, interviews, and public lectures, some
references to the topic of dream can be identified, although such references
are mostly highly metaphorical.12
The lack of explicit references in Sciarrino’s work, however, is only half
of the story. Indeed, Sciarrino’s theater contains all the features characteriz-
ing the presence of dreams within an aesthetic work as identified by Stefanie
Kreuzer in Traum und Erzählung (2014). These features include temporal
and spatial instabilities, the suspension of logic and causal laws, unclear iden-
tities, unreliable narrations, and discontinuities; all have been consistent ele-
ments of Sciarrino’s music theater since its very beginning. Sciarrino’s the-
ater is a perfect example of what Kreuzer calls autonome Traumdarstellungen
(“autonomous dream representations”). Autonomous dream representations
are aesthetic artifacts that are not explicitly identified as dreams but are nev-
ertheless structured using dream logic (e.g., most of Kafka’s short stories, or
Buñuel and Dalí’s short film Un chien andalou).13 Of course, as Kreuzer high-
lights, the aforementioned criteria for identifying the presence of dreams are
quite broad and can easily apply to other aspects, such as madness, illness,
and alternate realities.14 Sciarrino, for his part, often seems to consciously
exploit this ambiguity by choosing operatic subjects that revolve around psy-
chologically complex protagonists on the verge of madness or mental break-
down. So, why, and to what end, is dream a recurring feature in the works of
Sciarrino, acting as a structural element informing the musical and drama-
turgical core of his oeuvre, while at the same time consistently defying any
clear demarcation and mixing with other aspects?

Sciarrino’s (Oneiro-­)Poetics: The Liminality of Dreams

In one of Sciarrino’s longest poetological essays, Origini delle idee sottili (The
origin of subtle ideas) from 1984, the composer writes,

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 270 contemporary opera in flux

Music lives in a liminal region. Like in dreams, where one thing is at the same
time here and not here and [is] even another thing entirely. [. . .] These are sounds
retrieved on the edge of perception, the sounds of the intra-­uterine purgatory.15

The reference to dream at first appears unspecific or vague. Examining

the quote more closely, however, enables the identification of three elements
that are fundamental to Sciarrino’s entire oneiro-­and musical poetics:

1. An analogy established between dreams and music. In this respect, he

positions his works within a longstanding musical and aesthetic dis-
course, which highlights the semantic openness shared by music and
dreams and considers both as key elements for gaining a privileged
access to some kind of deep (metaphysical, anthropological, psycho-
logical etc.) “truth” beyond Logos.16
2. A shared liminality that establishes a link between music and dream.
Both elements are located on the edge of perception, that is, at the
tipping point where perceptual categories like space and time fall
apart. Dreams feature spatial inconsistencies and undermine identi-
ties. On its part, Sciarrino is aiming at an acoustic space where—­as for
the unborn baby in the womb—­the divide between sound and vision,
inside and outside, does not apply.
3. The liminality of both dreams and music points toward a prelapsarian
unity with the world before subjectivization, that is, before the divide
between subject and object, ego, and the outer world.

As we can see, Sciarrino’s understanding of the oneiric cannot be easily

reduced to the Freudian dialectic between conscious and unconscious; for
Sciarrino, dreams are not the distorted voice of past traumas, unspeakable
desires, or unconscious thoughts. Instead, by emphasizing dreams’ liminal
status, he seems more interested in highlighting their alienating power, their
ability to blur the dreamers’ perceptual categories and thus to rewrite the
way people understand the world and interact with it. Nevertheless, at least
in the early stages of his career, when he wrote the text quoted above, Sci-
arrino seems to have been unwilling to completely reject the link between
dream and the subject: the above-­mentioned reference to the “intra-­uterine
purgatory” points to a somehow paradoxical form of subjectivity prior to
the very birth of the subject itself, an aspect I will discuss later in the chap-
ter. But how does Sciarrino’s oneiropoetics insert itself within his broader
musico-­poetic views?

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 From Subjectivity to Biopolitics 271

In his 2001 introduction to Sciarrino’s collected writings, Carte da suono,

Gianfranco Vinay points out two specific traits in Sciarrino’s musical idiom.
On the one hand, Vinay detects an “uncanny realism” as “a non-­descriptive
depiction of reality, based on deep analogical connections located between
the conscious and the unconscious, dreaming and waking states, madness
and normality.” On the other hand, there is also a “metaphysical uncertainty”
at work, consisting of “a transformation of single phenomena, through which
these phenomena become, ultimately, interchangeable.”17
It is not by chance that Vinay mentions dream here, even if only in pass-
ing. As the analysis in this chapter demonstrates, a deeper consideration of
the main tenets of Sciarrino’s musical poetic reveals that dream marks the
space in which Sciarrino’s entire music theater dwells, at both the poetologi-
cal and compositional levels.
As has often been highlighted, Sciarrino’s compositional starting point
is sensory perception.18 As the composer himself states: “In contrast to Fer-
neyhough, I think that the work has to be given [doit être donnée] as much
as possible to the listener. [. . .] Complexity is of no use, because, in the act of
listening, we simplify. All my pieces try to understand what happens when
somebody listens to them.”19
At the same time, Sciarrino advocates a specific understanding of sensory
perceptions based on the notion of synesthesia. As he writes in Figure della
musica (1998):

Human perceptions act simultaneously. While listening, we don’t cease to

see, to smell. We also have some taste in our mouths, or we feel the contact
of our skin [with a surface]. It is clear that the different senses mutually affect
each other [. . .]. In defining the basic quality of a sound, we don’t only adopt
acoustic principles, but criteria coming from the other senses. [. . .] Human
perception, thus, always consists of sensory globality [globalità percettiva]
and we can call this mutual influence between the senses synesthetic inertia.20

According to Sciarrino, this synesthetic flux of perceptions is sponta-

neously organized by the listener’s faculty of memory. Musical works thus
unfold in a sequence of singularly perceived acoustic events, which our mem-
ory compares and positions in relation to each other. Using this strategy, “we
bring ourselves out of the temporal dimension, of the present flow [of time],
and we connect and locate [things] according to a purely spatial logic. [. . .] The
field in which music takes place [prende corpo] is a strongly spatialized tempo-

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 272 contemporary opera in flux

rality.”21 In particular, according to Sciarrino, starting with Beethoven’s classi-

cal symphonies, music began to be conceived more and more according to an
architectural, and thus eminently spatial, logic. Music “doesn’t become visible,”
it remains something that listeners perceive with their ears; nevertheless, “its
organization, its logical connections flow to our minds from the visual, spatial
world.”22 Ultimately, for Sciarrino, our experience of a musical work is based
on a blurring together of space and time, of the acoustic and visual.
With his notion of figura [figures], Sciarrino intends to analytically grasp
this complex interaction between the bodily dimension of our sensory expe-
riences and the intellectual work of memory unfolding along a spatial logic.
Under figura, Sciarrino understands organizational principles that structure
and further activate the liminality that our entire experience of music relies
upon.23 According to the synesthetic nature of sensory perceptions, these fig-
ures operate across all artistic media. For instance, the figure based on the
principle of accumulation can be observed in Rossini’s crescendos; in the rep-
etition of the same musical phrase by stepwise growing instrumentation; or
in the introduction of Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps (1913), which unfolds
through the accretion of heterogeneous blocks of sound.
At the core of Sciarrino’s entire poetic universe lies the concept of an
ecologia sonora [sonic ecology], an exploration not of sound as such (as in
the modernist tradition of Edgard Varèse or Giacinto Scelsi) but of the ways
sound is perceived by listeners.24 Composing, thus, becomes an inquiry into
human perception, aiming not at discovering timeless perceptual archetypes
but at exploring the ambiguity and multisensory ambivalence at the core of
our acoustic experiences. Ultimately, Sciarrino’s music and oneiropoetics go
hand in hand, both music and dreams being conceived by the composer as
located in a common space of perceptual and conceptual uncertainty.
Thus it is clear why dreams never stand alone for Sciarrino as specific
dramaturgical and poetic spaces in their own right. In his theater, the oneiric
functions as an implicit structural logic underlying the explicit dramaturgical
level, where other aspects like madness, hallucination, and illness are prom-
inently featured. But this does not indicate a lack of interest in the oneiric.
On the contrary, this approach perfectly reflects the way in which Sciarrino
understands dream as being located in an ontological, perceptual, and con-
ceptual in-­between. In his works, dreams are blurred, implicit, and embedded
in different contexts because Sciarrino considers that these are precisely the
features that define the dream phenomenon as such. Dream thus becomes
the embodiment of both Sciarrino’s musico-­poetics; Sciarrino’s ultimate goal

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 From Subjectivity to Biopolitics 273

is to frame this open, ontologically undetermined space between mind and

body where dreams dwell and use it as a viable tool for writing musical works.

Pathologizing the Dream: Sciarrino’s Lohengrin

One of the earliest works in which Sciarrino consciously explores this under-
standing of dream is Lohengrin. Composed between 1982 and 1984, this azi-
one invisibile [invisible action] for female voice, male choir, and orchestra
represents an early milestone in Sciarrino’s theatrical oeuvre. Lohengrin con-
tains all the stylistic and compositional features that characterize Sciarrino’s
music theater over the next four decades, although his understanding of the
oneiric is not yet fully formed here.25
Sciarrino’s aims in rewriting Lohengrin’s sujet were straightforward; as
he writes in the introductory notes to the work: “‘to evoke the inner space,’
this may be the epigraph to the new Lohengrin. In order to achieve this, the
music [la vicenda musicale] is woven within Elsa’s mad eyes.”26 Transformed
into a monodrama, Lohengrin becomes the psychotic dream of a protago-
nist on the verge of madness. To accomplish this, Sciarrino based his work
on a short novel titled Lohengrin, fils de Parsifal by the French poet Jules
Laforgue (1860–­1887).27 In the latter work, Laforgue satirizes Wagner’s ide-
als of redemption. In the first part of the novel, Elsa dreams of Lohengrin,
and soon afterward the knight appears and rescues her from Ortrud’s and
Telramund’s schemes. In the second part, the newly married couple quarrel,
Lohengrin rejecting Elsa on the ground that she has limited sex appeal. In
the end, he leaves her before they have even spent the night together. For
Laforgue, in contrast to Wagner, love does not lead to redemption; the mun-
dane spectacle of the numinous couple arguing about very human concerns
effectively undermines Wagner’s grandiloquent fantasies. Sciarrino, for his
part, adopts Laforgue’s text as the source for his libretto, although he doesn’t
share its satirical approach. The composer inverts the two parts of the novel;
after the miserably failed wedding night and Lohengrin’s angry departure,
the audience witnesses Elsa’s dream and Lohengrin’s arrival. Sciarrino thus
introduces the dreamlike logic of an open-­ended non sequitur into the plot
itself. Sciarrino’s oneiropoetics, however, also deeply informs the very com-
positional structure of the work.
For instance, in the short, purely instrumental prologue (see fig. 12.1), the
composer demands from the various instruments an utterly unconventional,

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 Fig. 12.1. First page of the score from Lohengrin, music by Salvatore
Sciarrino. (Copyright © 1982 by Casa Ricordi Srl, International Copyright
Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of Hal
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Leonard Europe Srl / Casa Ricordi Srl. 1.)
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 From Subjectivity to Biopolitics 275

impure sound, a sound imbued with noisiness. As Metzer describes it, Sci-
arrino’s peculiar instrumental sound is grounded in the “residues of perfor-
mance,” employing various techniques, from tongue stops to key clicks, and
from knocks, breaths, or tongue noises to the scrape of bow against string.28
Sciarrino thereby constructs from the very start of the work an uncanny
acoustic experience that exists at the crossroad between sound and noise.
The work does not contain any passages fully grounded in a more traditional
symphonic sound but, conversely, it also does not contain any moments of
pure noise. Sound and noise are only virtual archetypes, their presence felt
only as ghostly points of reference. Listeners of the work experience an acous-
tic in-­between suddenly interrupted by isolated sound-­events, all abruptly
silenced. From the very beginning, therefore, the acoustic space of the work
is positioned as a no-­man’s-­land between presence and absence, rooted in a
deep sense of unreality.
At the end of the short prologue, the voice of the female soloist on stage,
portraying Elsa, is heard, although she is not singing. Instead, the soloist
mimics several times the barking of a dog, each time using a different vowel.29
Moreover, her voice constructs the depth of the imaginary space in which
the invisible action occurs, as the different barks suggest different degrees of
remoteness. All elements of the section are meticulously written in the score
by Sciarrino, who adopts his own proportional notation.
Throughout the work, Elsa mimics different natural and mechanical
sounds, including the rushing of the wind on the sea, the chirping of a dove,
and the ticking of a clock.30 The composer also repeatedly requires the singer
to use a more corporeal dimension of her voice, demanding that she cough,
inhale, or exhale in various ways.31 All these moments seamlessly flow into
one another, generating a dreamlike process of continuous metamorphosis.
Elsa’s voice also takes over Lohengrin’s part, creating the paradox of a mono-
drama punctuated by a series of highly emotional (imaginary) dialogues.
Ultimately, being created exclusively by Elsa’s voice, all the persons, ani-
mals, objects, and even the space of the opera itself share an uncanny status,
floating between inside and outside, presence and absence, dream and reality.
In the foreword to the score, Sciarrino writes, “These sounds are already per
se theatre. They don’t need further illustration or to be dressed [rivestiti] by
means of images.”32 In Lohengrin, Sciarrino is thus striving for an unsettling
hybrid of the visual and acoustic that, by remaining structurally and seman-
tically open, generates the uncanny, dreamlike liminality that deeply charac-
terizes this work. Sciarrino’s understanding of dream, his musical poetic, and

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 276 contemporary opera in flux

the compositional structure of the work all align, but it is also worthwhile
to consider Sciarrino’s ultimate goal in retelling the Lohengrin sujet. In this
respect, the short epilogue of the work turns out to be crucial.
The epilogue represents a significant break within the overall structure
of the work. The audience suddenly realizes that they are in a mental hospi-
tal, as Sciarrino’s stage directions in the libretto make clear. All the previous
scenes were just Elsa’s nightly delirium. She is mentally ill and secluded in an
institution. Here, at the end of the work, there is no longer any in-­between,
no dream. Reality, in its everyday sense, is here. The epilogue thus retroac-
tively gives a perfectly intelligible meaning to all the uncanny atmospheres
and strange sounds characterizing the previous scenes. Significantly, it is
only in this instance that a conventional song is heard: Elsa sings a childlike
melody describing the beauty of the sounds of bells and the smell of clean
laundry on Sunday. At the end of the work, the dream and its liminality are
dramaturgically and musically explained, that is, they are led back to the cat-
egories of our commonsense understanding of the world; Elsa is mentally ill
and the dreamlike soundscape heard so far is just the sonic expression of this
madness. Dream’s liminality and its acoustic embodiment in Sciarrino’s work
are retroactively pathologized, marked as a psychological dysfunction; but,
again, to what end?
In reassuming the topos of the hysterical woman on stage, Sciarrino over-
turns Wagner’s own Lohengrin, as well as Wagner’s understanding of dream.
In her dream, Wagner’s Elsa sees the truth of a noumenal dimension. Lohen-
grin is the embodiment of the redemptive power of love, which—­guarded
by the knights of the holy grail in a metaphysical region outside time and
space—­rescues her when the phenomenal world fails.33 In contrast, for Sci-
arrino, Elsa’s dream represents the realm of psychotic fantasies, of failed
attempts at assuming a subjective position and thus at gaining the ability to
distinguish between subject and object, between herself and the world. As
Sciarrino writes in his notes on the work: “What torments [Elsa]? She is sick
of unreality. Elsa identifies with the things [around her], with the night, with
the sounds of the night, and we [the listeners] are not able to understand
if they are true or if a glimmer of reason [barlume] remains in the depths
of her eyes.”34 In Lacan’s terms, Elsa becomes the stand-­in for what is lost
by going through the mirror stage and assuming a psychologically defined
persona (i.e., the Real of an undivided oneness with the world). She is unable
to accomplish the process of subjectivization and drifts from one fantasy to
another, incapable of constructing a meaningful reality. Elsa’s dream marks

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 From Subjectivity to Biopolitics 277

the blind spot of the Real at the core of Lacan’s barred subject, that blind spot
that will unabashedly hunt the constituted ego in the form of phantasmatic
sublime objects to which its psychic energy is attracted.35 Thus, for Sciarrino,
Elsa dwells in the perilous no-­man’s-­land of the presymbolic domain, unable
to become a subject, trapped in what Slavoj Žižek (referring to Hegel) calls
“the night of the world.”36
Ultimately, in Lohengrin, Sciarrino frames the liminality of dream in psy-
chological terms. The work embodies the archetypal drama of the birth of the
barred Lacanian subject. Dream, subjectivized and pathologized, becomes
one pole within a binary opposition between objective reality (the mental
institution) and subjective fantasy (Elsa’s dream world). Vocality itself is
divided between (children’s) song and a mimetic approach that exists out-
side conventional operatic singing. The ambiguity that was evident in Sciar-
rino’s early poetic reflections on the link between music and dreams greatly
informs the work; the epilogue suddenly brings to the fore the subjectivity
of a full-­fledged—­even if pathologically mad—­individual character, thus ret-
roactively neutralizing the uncanny liminality of the dream logic explored
by the composer up to that point. Three decades later, with Superflumina,
Sciarrino abandons this focus on subjectivity, no longer using the stage as a
magnifying glass to examine the protagonist’s psyche.

An Oneiric Zone of Inclusive-­Exclusion:

Sciarrino’s Superflumina

Superflumina is Sciarrino’s twelfth opera, and at first glance it may appear

that not much has changed over the almost thirty years separating the work
from Lohengrin. In terms of dramaturgical structure and plot, the two works
share many features. Superflumina consists of a monologue by a homeless
woman who is wandering through a train station in contemporary Italy from
dusk to dawn. Interjections by a young man, a policeman, a distant voice, and
various passersby, as well as announcements from the station’s PA system,
fleetingly punctuate the woman’s random stream of thoughts, anxieties, and
memories. A close reading of the libretto enables a tentative reconstruction
of the contours of the trauma the woman has previously experienced. After a
one-­night stand with a man she believed to be her ideal lover, the woman fell
pregnant. While she was giving birth, the man suddenly reappeared and took
the baby away from her. This deception shattered the woman’s aspirations

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 278 contemporary opera in flux

of love and caring, leading to her present predicament. As in Lohengrin, the

basic idea of this opera is an extended, highly disconnected monologue. Simi-
larly, as in Lohengrin, dream is not overtly present, but—­mingled with trauma
and a kind of grief dangerously close to madness—­it forms the underlying
structure of the entire work. At the compositional level, too, the work adopts
a musical style very similar to that of Lohengrin, with the exception of one
aspect that will be discussed later in this section.
Despite these similarities, however, in Superflumina, there is a radical dif-
ference: dream is no longer one pole within a binary opposition. On the con-
trary, the oneiric represents a zone of indistinction, a non-­lieu of exclusion/
inclusion between reality and fantasy that Sciarrino primarily frames not in
psychological but sociopolitical terms. In this respect, three key aspects dif-
ferentiate Superflumina from the early work:

1. The music-­dramaturgical construction of Superflumina does not rely

on a contrast between dream and reality. The associative, elliptical,
and fragmented nature of the woman’s inner monologues applies
equally to her short dialogues with the policeman, the passersby, and
the young man. The opera’s realistic setting (e.g., the train station, the
PA announcements, etc.) is also alienating, evoking a deep sense of
uncanniness that is achieved mostly through fragmentation of plot and
dialogues and an estranged musical setting. Even the short intermezzo
con annunzi at the end of the first scene, which features an unaccom-
panied series of train announcements that Sciarrino himself recorded
in different Italian stations, is deeply unsettling. The oneirism at the
core of Sciarrino’s uncanny realism is the only musical-­dramaturgical
principle governing the work.
2. The protagonist of Superflumina is by no means pathologized. Instead,
as a homeless woman, she lives at the margins of society, occupying a
borderline zone of inclusive-­exclusion; although she is no longer an
active part of the social body, she is not completely lost to it. She inter-
acts with it, but ex negativo (i.e., in the form of her exclusion, rejection,
and—­at least potentially—­reclusion); her interactions with the other
characters make this clear.
3. The overall vocal gesture in the work is not structured along a distinc-
tion between song and a mimetic kind of vocality, painfully laboring
with the sounds of the singer’s body and the exterior world. In Super-

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 From Subjectivity to Biopolitics 279

flumina, the protagonist’s voice features a unified gesture based on a

more articulated form of expression, in which the pure bodily dimen-
sion of the voice fades into the background. For instance, the second
of the three songs at the center of the work displays not only a tradi-
tional, operatic ABA form with a concluding cadenza, but also con-
sists of nothing but alienated references to the stereotypical gestures of
operatic singing, such as messa di voce or coloraturas. These gestures
mingle with silence, parlando passages, and even the sound of break-
ing glasses, resulting in an enhanced expressiveness with clear ties to
the operatic topos of the lament.37 The dimension of operatic singing
in the work is, thus, inherent to vocality itself, albeit in a disjointed,
broken form. It represents a continuous reference to an operatic song
tradition, but it never freely resounds as such.

According to Metzer, Sciarrino’s mature form of vocality unfolds in two

ways: against a screen of silence through which the voices have to break to
emerge, as in Infinito nero (1998), and as a song unabashedly haunted by “rings
of indifferent silence” that represent the ultimate horizon to which singing
is doomed to perpetually return, as in Luci mie traditrici (1998).38 In both
cases, silence is, for Metzer, “a floating realm existing outside of the vocal
music,” and vocality, through its own conflict with silence, marks the return
of the subject and its depth model.39 Sciarrino’s vocality, with its “utterances
spring[ing] unfettered from the dark psychic regions,” is thus a direct heir of
Expressionism. By establishing an additional screen of silence that the voices
have to contend with, Sciarrino’s singing ultimately strengthens the “emo-
tional blasts” that lie at the core of Expressionism.40 Marcelle Pierson detects
at the core of Sciarrino’s vocal writing a nostalgic vision “of an almost pre-­
modern voice, a voice before modernity usurped its magic.”41 By causing the
song to be “only able to emerge out of its own negation,” Sciarrino’s vocality
ultimately rehabilitates a long-­standing discourse in Western thought that
links voice to subjectivity.42 The song becomes, once again, a place of truth
and self-­presence, though a noumenal one (i.e., it is “underdefined, unknown,
and in a constant state of becoming”).43
Metzer’s and Pierson’s writings constitute in-­depth attempts to interpret
Sciarrino’s vocality beyond merely describing its compositional characteris-
tics. They highlight important traits of Sciarrino’s vocal writing and poetics,
including its strong ties to the ideal of an unbounded, directed expressivity at

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 280 contemporary opera in flux

the core of Expressionism and the nostalgia for an undivided (or unbarred)
subject that informs, to some degree, Sciarrino’s overall oneiropoetics, as well
as works like Lohengrin. Nevertheless, they ultimately fail in their analyses
by reading these traits in isolation, rather than in relation to one another.
Metzer fails, for instance, to grasp the interplay between silence and song;
the expressive quality of Sciarrino’s vocality lies not only in his song but also
in its intermingling with silence. Pierson aptly highlights the way in which
silence is a constitutive element of song itself, but reads the dialectic between
the elements in terms of circularity, interpreting their entanglement as a con-
tinuously failed attempt at reaching a noumenal state of pure presence.44 By
reading Sciarrino’s music theater as a stand-­in for an aesthetic of subjective
expression or impossible longing, both Metzer and Pierson transform it into
a skillful but ultimately nostalgic attempt at looking back at previous musical
experiences and understandings of the world.
Analyzing Sciarrino’s mature vocal writing from the perspective of his
oneiropoetics leads to a different conclusion. As highlighted above, Sciar-
rino’s vocality in Superflumina exists outside the binary logic of traditional
song versus bodily singing that characterizes Lohengrin. Instead, it is located
in a no-­man’s-­land between the two poles of silence and operatic song. These
two poles are both suggested but are never reached. This vocality thus fully
embodies the zone of indistinction in which, according to Sciarrino, the spe-
cific quality of dream (and of music itself ) resides.
This does not mean, however, that the work exists in an amorphous,
muddled vocalic space where anything is possible. Sciarrino’s vocality in
Superflumina subsists only so far as it is excluded from, or exists in a ban
relationship to, operatic song. Like dream, which is not pure fantasy but lives
in the in-­between space of a distorted relationship with the reality of our
conscious experience of the world, Sciarrino’s mature vocality seeks to frame
a very specific kind of oneiric space: a space structured along a logic of inclu-
sive exclusion concerning the operatic tradition. Ultimately, like the protag-
onist of Superflumina, whose defining trait is her exclusion from society and
its promises of love and care, Sciarrino’s music theater exists only insofar as
it is excluded from opera, to which it continuously refers ex negativo, in a
distorted, uncanny way.
Overall, the liminality at the core of Sciarrino’s oneiropoetics fully informs
both the dramaturgy and vocality of Superflumina. The last section of this
chapter will further investigate this liminal zone of inclusive exclusion, briefly
sketching the contours of a different approach to Sciarrino’s music theater.

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 From Subjectivity to Biopolitics 281

Sciarrino and the Biopolitics of Dreams

Since the 1990s, Giorgio Agamben has emerged as one of the philosophers
most concerned with the logic of inclusive exclusion as constituting the very
core of Western political culture. For Agamben, sovereignty consists not of
making concrete political decisions, but rather of drawing a line between
zoē—­pure, unhampered biological life—­and bios, the proper political life of
a man, his membership of a political system, his citizenship. The sovereign
(or the law) is the one who decides what is included in and excluded from the
political body.45 As Agamben aptly emphasizes, however, what is excluded
from political life is not life as such; it is not a free state of nature, untrou-
bled by politics and power. From the moment the sovereign draws the line
between political and biological life, zoē is lost. Biological life becomes some-
thing that does not exist in its own right, but rather is defined by its existence
outside the law.46 The sovereign’s decision thus defines not only what is within
the law but also what is outside of it, in the form of an inclusive exclusion,
of a ban. As Agamben puts it: “the rule applies to the exception in no longer
applying, in withdrawing from it.”47
Ultimately, Western politics is, at its core, biopolitics. Its defining
moment consists of the factual and juridical creation of a form of life that is
neither inside nor outside the law. Agamben identifies one of the first jurid-
ical formalizations of this zone of exception as the concept of homo sacer in
Roman law, where a person may be killed with impunity but not sacrificed
in a ritual.48 Nevertheless, for Agamben, the most stunning embodiments of
homo sacer in modernity are the Muselmänner in Nazi concentration camps,
meaning those prisoners who, through starvation and exhaustion, became
resigned to their impending deaths. Of such prisoners, Agamben writes, “one
hesitates to call them living. One hesitates to call their death, death.”49 Though
not included in the life of the polis, of the (in this case Aryan) community,
the Muselmänner do not represent pure, unhampered biological life. Instead,
they eke out what Agamben calls a vita nuda [bare life], a life situated in the
zone of indistinction between political and biological life.50
Sciarrino’s music theater shares with Agamben a concern with the logical
figure of inclusive exclusion. At least in a mature work like Superflumina,
there is more than a common interest in a logical figure; Sciarrino also par-
takes of the sociopolitical significance that Agamben attributes to this logic.51
The protagonist of Superflumina is a homeless woman, who occupies the
same sociopolitical zone of inclusive exclusion that informs Agamben’s entire

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 282 contemporary opera in flux

philosophical effort. She is not free but is abandoned by the law, exposed
to the arbitrariness of being simultaneously outside and within the law. She
can be interrogated without valid reason by the police, she can be insulted
with impunity by the passersby, she feeds on waste, and so on. Ultimately,
Superflumina is both musically and dramaturgically an Agambian reflection
on Western power and its biopolitical roots.
From this vantage point, the conventional reading of Sciarrino’s theater
as a return of the subject must be reconsidered. In her vocalic expressiveness,
the homeless woman is by no means a subject, neither in the more traditional
sense nor—­as in Lohengrin—­in the Lacanian sense. The woman’s expressive-
ness refers to neither the suffering of a psychologically defined persona nor
an unconscious realm within the subject, stifled by the contemporary world.
The woman is neither Ego nor Id. Rather, she is nothing but a sociopoliti-
cal entity. She is a further embodiment of the homo sacer, a sociopolitical
stand-­in expressing not a subject but the zone of indistinction at the core of
Western sovereignty.
Although the connections to the Expressionist experience of the early
twentieth century can be discerned in Sciarrino’s theater, the composer is
not looking back nor offering an updated version of the “depth model” at the
core of Expressionism, which relies on the split between ego and es, between
the mask of our social persona and the “truth” of our hidden desires. The
tension structuring Sciarrino’s theater is not that between conscious versus
unconscious regions of the psyche. Through the oneiric, Sciarrino is instead
reflecting on the socio-­and biopolitical space framing contemporary life.

Notes
1. Susan McClary, “The Lure of the Sublime: Revisiting the Modernist Project,” in
Transformations of Musical Modernism, ed. Erling E. Guldbrandsen and Julian Johnson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 22.
2. David Metzer, Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-­First Century (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 24–­26; 101–­3.
3. See David Metzer, “Modern Silence,” Journal of Musicology 23, no. 3 (2006): 372–­74;
and Metzer, Musical Modernism, 101–­3.
4. See Metzer, “Modern Silence,” 373.
5. For the link to the early modernist experience, see Julian Johnson, “Return of the
Repressed. Particularity in Early and Late Modernism,” in Transformations of Musical
Modernism, ed. Erling E. Guldbrandsen and Julian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2015), 36–­52; and Metzer, Musical Modernism, 103.
6. Hans-­Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. by Karen Jürs-­Munby (New
York: Routledge, 2006). As for the reception of Lehmann’s monograph within the opera

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 From Subjectivity to Biopolitics 283

studies, see Jelena Novak, Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-­Body (London: Ashgate, 2015),
3–­40.
7. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 65.
8. Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expres-
sion, trans. and with an introduction by Paul A. Kottman (Redwood City: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2005), 152. Cavarero’s argument unfolds along a complex rereading of the
entire history of Western metaphysics, starting with Aristotle’s Politics, which understands
man as a rationally speaking animal. According to Cavarero, this conflation of the phonic
and semantic qualities of the human voice is highly misleading because it lies at the very
core of the logocentric tradition of Western metaphysics, which privileges the mind over
the body, the visual over the acoustic, and meaning over sound. Rather, the vocalic, the
sonorous quality of the voice, is highly singular, belonging to a specific individual, located
in specific spatial and temporal coordinates, as opposed to the “objective,” impersonal
dimension proper to rational meaning. For Cavarero, operatic singing represents a kind
of “counter-­history” in which the objective immateriality of meaning is defeated by the
embodied, singular voice of the singer. For a critical reading of Cavarero’s argument about
the singularity of the voice and its political consequences, see Stuart J. Murray and Sarah
K. Burgess, “Review of Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy
of Vocal Expression,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 39, no. 2 (2006): 166–­69.
9. See Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, 177.
10. See Joy H. Calico’s chapter on Chaya Czernowin’s opera Infinite Now, chapter 6
in this volume. A first, paradigmatic example of this music-­theatrical counterpart of the
stream-­of-­consciousness technique is, of course, Schönberg’s expressionist monodrama
Erwartung.
11. See Hayao Kawai, “Bedeutungsvolle Geschichten. Träume in der japanischen Litera-
tur des Mittelalters,” in Die Wahrheit der Träume, ed. Gaetano Benedetti and Erik Hornung
(München: Fink, 1997); and Jörg B. Quenzer, “Traumwelten. Zur Medialität des Traums im
japanischen Mittelalter,” in Mediale Wechselwirkungen. Adaptionen—­Transformationen—­
Reinterpretationen, ed. Iris Höger; Christine Oldörp, and Hanna Wimmer (Berlin: Reimer,
2013).
12. See Miriam Henzel, “Salvatore Sciarrinos Werkkommentare—­Ansatzpunkte für die
Analyse?,” in Salvatore Sciarrino ‘Vanitas’. Kulturgeschichtliche Hintergründe, Kontexte,
Traditionen, ed. Sabine Ehrmann-­Herfort (Hofheim: Wolke, 2018).
13. Stefanie Kreuzer, Traum und Erzählen in Literatur, Film und Kunst (Paderborn:
Fink, 2014), 89. On Kafka and dreams, see Kreuzer, Traum und Erzählen, 248–­56, 409–­37,
594–­613; Peter-­André Alt, Der Schlaf der Vernunft. Literatur und Traum in der Kultur-
geschichte der Neuzeit (Munich: Beck, 2002), 350–­67; and Manfred Engel, “Literarische
Träume und traumhaftes Schreiben bei Franz Kafka. Ein Beitrag zur Oneiropoetik der
Moderne,” in Träumungen. Traumerzählung in Film und Literatur, ed. by Bernard Dieterle
(St. Augustin: Gardez!, 2002).
14. Kreuzer, Traum und Erzählen, 84.
15. Salvatore Sciarrino, “Origine delle idee sottili [1984],” in Carte da suono (1981–­
2001), ed. Dario Oliveri (Palermo: Edizioni Novecento 2001), 53. This and the following
translations were done by the author of this chapter.

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 284 contemporary opera in flux

16. For a further discussion of this first aspect see Mauro Fosco Bertola, “Operatic
Dreams. The Dream in Contemporary Opera (Wagner, Saariaho, Sciarrino),” in Mediating
the Dream / Les genres et médias du rêve, ed. Bernard Dieterle and Manfred Engel (Würz-
burg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2021).
17. Gianfranco Vinay, “Le carte da suono di Salvatore Sciarrino,” in Carte da suono
(1981–­2001), ed. Dario Oliveri (Palermo: Edizioni Novecento, 2001), xix.
18. See Carlo Carratelli, “Il ‘Lohengrin’ di Salvatore Sciarrino: ‘Forma della coscienza.’
Un percorso attraverso la costellazione simbolica dello specchio,” Nuova Rivista Musicale
Italiana 40, no. 4 (2006); and Christian Utz, “Die Inszenierung von Stille am Rande ohren-
betäubenden Lärms. Morphologie und Präsenz in Salvatore Sciarrinos Kammermusik der
1980er Jahre,” Die Tonkunst 7, no. 3 (2013).
19. Martin Kaltenecker and Gérard Pesson, “Entretien avec Salvatore Sciarrino,” Entre-
temps 9 (1990): 136.
20. Salvatore Sciarrino, Le figure della musica da Beethoven a oggi (Milano: Ricordi,
1998), 61.
21. Sciarrino, Le figure della musica, 60.
22. Sciarrino, Le figure della musica. At first sight, Sciarrino’s argument seems to stum-
ble on its own words here: On the one hand, Sciarrino suddenly seems to hold to a con-
ception of music as an auditory phenomenon, while on the other hand, he stresses the
multisensory nature of musical experience. But at this point in his argument, by reminding
us of the acoustic moment of music, Sciarrino only wants to emphasize the purely “phys-
iological” fact that we detect sounds with our ears. The concrete act of perceiving these
sounds activates all the other senses.
23. For an overview of Sciarrino’s notion of figura, see Grazia Giacco, La notion de “fig-
ure” chez Salvatore Sciarrino (Paris: L‘Harmattan, 2001).
24. Salvatore Sciarrino and Stefano Nardelli, “Sciarrino, Per Un’ecologia Del Teatro
Musicale,” [Link]
atro-musicale (2019).
25. See Gianfranco Vinay, Immagini gesti parole suoni silenzi. Drammaturgia delle opere
vocali e teatrali di Salvatore Sciarrino (S.l. Ricordi, 2010); and Gianfranco Vinay, “‘Reine
Illusionen wecken’. Entstehung und Entwicklung von Sciarrinos Musiktheater,” in Salvatore
Sciarrino ‘Vanitas’. Kulturgeschichtliche Hintergründe, Kontexte, Traditionen, ed. Sabine
Ehrmann-­Herfort (Hofheim: Wolk, 2018), 5.
26. Salvatore Sciarrino, “Lohengrin. Azione invisibile,” in Carte da suono (1981–­2001),
edited by Dario Oliveri (Palermo: Edizioni Novecento 2001), 82.
27. Jules Laforgue, Moralités légendaires (Paris: Librairie de la Revue Indépendante,
1887).
28. Metzer, Musical Modernism, 96.
29. Salvatore Sciarrino, Lohengrin. Azione invisibile per solista, strumenti e voci (da J.
Laforgue) [score] (Milano: Ricordi, 1984), 4 ff.
30. Sciarrino, Lohengrin [score], 4–­5 (barking), 68 ff. (rushing of the wind at sea), 82
(ticking of a clock).
31. Sciarrino, Lohengrin [score], 82–­84.
32. Sciarrino, Lohengrin [score], unpag.

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 From Subjectivity to Biopolitics 285

33. For a closer comparison of Wagner’s and Sciarrino’s Lohengrin, see Mauro Fosco
Bertola, “An der Schwelle von Geburt und Tod: Elsas Traum in Salvatore Sciarrinos
‘Lohengrin’ (1983),” In An den Rändern des Lebens. Träume vom Sterben und Geborenw-
erden in den Künsten, ed. Mauro Fosco Bertola and Christiane Solte-­Gresser (Paderborn:
Fink, 2019).
34. Sciarrino, “Lohengrin,” 82.
35. According to Lacan (and Žižek), this original moment of pure oneness never existed;
it is only a retroactive fantasy of the subject itself. See Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies
(London: Verso, 2008), 11–­16.
36. Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing. Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
(New York: Verso, 2012), 353–­54.
37. On the link to the Lamento tradition, see Sabine Ehrmann-­Herfort, “‘Meine Musik
hat immer die Kraft, eine Bühne zu öffnen’. Zu Salvatore Sciarrinos Bühnenkonzepten,” in
Salvatore Sciarrino ‘Vanitas’. Kulturgeschichtliche Hintergründe, Kontexte, Traditionen, ed.
Sabine Ehrmann-­Herfort (Hofheim: Wolke, 2018), 164.
38. Metzer, Musical Modernism, 96; 100.
39. Metzer, Musical Modernism, 96.
40. Metzer, Musical Modernism, 103.
41. Marcelle Coulter Pierson, “The Voice under Erasure: Singing, Melody and Expres-
sion in Late Modernist Music” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2015), 80.
42. Pierson, “The Voice under Erasure,” 58. On this point, see also Amanda Weidman,
“Anthropology and Voice,” Annual Review of Anthropology 43, no. 1 (2014).
43. Pierson, “The Voice under Erasure,” 41.
44. In this respect, see Sciarrino’s preface to his 5th piano sonata, Salvatore Sciarrino, V
Sonata con 5 finali diversi per pianoforte (Milano: Ricordi, 1994), unpag.
45. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998), 7–­8. For an introduction to Agamben’s biopolitical theories, see,
in particular, Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s Uni-
versity Press, 2008), 59–­80. Although not part of this chapter, Agamben’s recent stance on
the response of the Italian government (and most of those in Western countries) to the
Covid pandemic cannot go unmentioned. Beginning with a short intervention on his blog,
aptly titled The Invention of an Epidemic in February 2020, Agamben has developed over
the last two years (2020–­2022) a coherent as well as persistent reading of the government’s
response to the Covid emergency. He understands it as a clearly pursued shift toward a
new paradigm of governance, in which the idea of a “security state, which was based on ter-
rorism, has now given way to a government paradigm that we can call ‘biosecurity,’ which
is based on health,” see G. Agamben, A che punto siamo, trans. MFB (Macerata: Quodlibet,
2020), 42. Agamben’s thesis on the pandemic as such, which he sees as no more dangerous
than the flu, and on government measures to contain the danger of infection, aligns him—­a
longtime, if sui generis, leftist—­with right-­wing movements and anti-­vaxxers. In partic-
ular, Agamben’s puzzling statements seem to emerge directly from the main body of his
philosophical thought and thus, as in the case of Martin Heidegger or, mutatis mutandis,
Richard Wagner, generate the suspicion of an internal aporia that taints the entire edifice
of his philosophy. I think Eric Santner at best summarizes the kind of impasse in which

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 286 contemporary opera in flux

Agamben found himself: “I see Agamben’s statements about the pandemic as a trans-
formation of his own work into a kind of ideology, something that makes him a far too
easy target for his critics” (Santner in Adam Kotsko, “What Happened to Giorgio Agam-
ben?,” Slate, February 20, 2022. Online under [Link]
[Link]). In this respect,
Adam Kotsko, who has translated several of Agamben’s writings into English, has provided
an interesting reading of Agamben’s cause celebre. Instead of getting caught up in the futile
attempt to assess the extent to which Agamben’s statements on Covid are connected to his
philosophy, he reflexively reads the troubled waters in which Agamben maneuvered as a
telling moment of truth in which the idiosyncratic understanding of freedom at the core of
contemporary Western society is exposed in all its internal contradictions (Kotsko, “What
Happened”; see also Adam Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons. On the Political Theology of
Late Capital [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018], 1–­10; 97–­126).
46. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 17–­20.
47. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 18.
48. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 71–­90
49. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 184–­86.
50. In this respect, Agamben’s further reflections on humanism and its “anthropological
machine” are particularly important: see Giorgio Agamben, The Open. Man and Animal
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), particularly 33–­38. Concerning the opera, see
also Mauro Fosco Bertola, “The Trouble with the Bee-­Keeper. Hans Werner Henze’s Aris-
taeus (2003) or: Operatic Metaphysics after Humanism,” International Journal of Žižek
Studies 3 (2017), 16–­52.
51. A similar reading can be advocated for La porta della legge from 2008 and Macbeth
from 2002; all works that have a strong focus on sovereignty and law.

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Discography
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by George Benjamin. Opus Arte, 2013. DVD OA1125D.
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3728. Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015.
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Everett, Yayoi U. Contemporary Opera In Flux.
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 Contributors

Amy Bauer is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Cal-

ifornia, Irvine, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on
music theory and analysis, ethnomusicology, popular music, and music aes-
thetics. She has published on the music of Ligeti, Messiaen, Chávez, Lang,
Lanza, Ádes, Tulve, the television musical, modernist opera, spectral music,
and the philosophy and reception of modernist music and music theory. Her
monographs include Ligeti’s Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism and the Abso-
lute (Ashgate, 2011) and the collections György Ligeti’s Cultural Identities
(Routledge, 2017), coedited with Márton Kerékfy, and The Oxford Handbook
of Spectral and Post-­Spectral Music, coedited with Liam Cagney and Will
Mason (Oxford, forthcoming).

Mauro Fosco Bertola studied philosophy in Italy and musicology in Hei-

delberg. He is the author of Die List der Vergangenheit. Musikwissenschaft,
Rundfunk und Deutschlandbezug in Italien, 1890–­1945 (Böhlau, 2014) and
coeditor of Žižek and Music (special issue of the International Journal of
Žižek Studies, 2017) and An den Rändern des Lebens. Träume vom Sterben
und Geborenwerden in den Künsten (Fink, 2019), as well as editor of The
Sound of Žižek: Musicological Perspectives on Slavoj Žižek (Lang, 2023). He is
currently leading a DFG-­funded project on the presence of dream in contem-
porary musical theater at the University of Tübingen.

Joy H. Calico is Chair and Professor of Musicology at the University of Cal-

ifornia, Los Angeles. She is past editor-­in-­chief of the Journal of the Ameri-
can Musicological Society and the author of two monographs, both published
by University of California Press: Brecht at the Opera (2008), and Arnold
Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw” in Postwar Europe (2014), the latter
of which was published in Italian translation from Il Saggiatore in 2024. Her

315

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 316 Contributors

current book project on operatic conventions is titled Opera since “Salome”:

A Theory of Scene Type Based on Kaija Saariaho’s “L’amour de loin.”

Ryan Ebright is Associate Professor of Musicology at Bowling Green State

University. His research and writing, which center on twentieth-­century and
contemporary opera, have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker,
Opera News, American Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, and Rethinking
Reich. His current project, Making American Opera after Einstein, exam-
ines the efforts of artists and institutions over the past forty years to redefine
American opera.

Yayoi U. Everett is Professor of Music at City University of New York

(CUNY) Hunter College and the Graduate Center. Her research focuses on
the analysis of postwar art music, film, and opera from the perspectives of
semiotics, multimedia theories, cultural studies, and East Asian aesthetics.
Her publications include Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary
Opera (Indiana University Press, 2015), The Music of Louis Andriessen (Cam-
bridge University Press, 2006), and a coedited volume, Locating East Asia
in Western Music (Wesleyan University Press, 2004). She is the recipient of
grants and fellowship from Bogliasco Foundation, Japan Foundation, Asian
Council, The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, and the
National Endowment for the Humanities.

Jane Forner is a musicologist whose work focuses on contemporary opera in

Europe and North America. Her research examines intersections of race and
gender, particularly the politics of multilingualism and interculturalism in the
context of migration and diaspora around the Mediterranean and feminist
approaches to contemporary music. Her publications include postcolonial
and feminist perspectives on twenty-­first-­century opera, analyses of novel
politicized approaches to mythological themes in new works and stagings,
and assessments of recent developments in digital opera, particularly the cre-
ative endeavors of historically marginalized artists. She completed her PhD at
Columbia University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University
of Toronto.

Jelena Novak is a researcher at CESEM (Center for Studies of Sociology and

Aesthetics of Music), Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. Her fields of interests
are modern and contemporary music, recent opera and musical theater,

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 Contributors 317

music and new media, capitalist realism, voice studies in the age of post-
human and feminine identities in music. Exploring those fields, she works
as a researcher, lecturer, writer, dramaturge, music critic, editor, and curator
focused on bringing together critical theory and contemporary art. She has
been a founding committee member of the Society for Minimalist Music and
a founding member of the editorial collective TkH [Walking Theory]. In 2013
she won the Thurnau Award for Music-­Theatre Studies from the University
of Bayreuth, Germany. Her most recent books are Postopera: Reinventing the
Voice-­Body (Ashgate, 2015), Operofilia (Orion Art, 2018), and Einstein on the
Beach: Opera beyond Drama (coedited with John Richardson, Routledge,
2019).

Nancy Yunhwa Rao is Distinguished Professor of Music at Rutgers Univer-

sity. Her work bridges musicology, music theory, Chinese opera, and Sin-
ophone studies. She has published on the use of musical gestures, singing,
and percussion patterns of Beijing opera in contemporary music by com-
posers of Chinese origin. Rao’s study of Chinese in North America has led to
writings on transnational issues in the production and opera performance in
Chinatown theaters. Her book, Chinatown Opera Theater in North America,
includes analysis of networks, playbills, aria, and spectacles. It has received
three book awards, from American Musicological Society, Society for Amer-
ican Music, and Association for Asian American Studies, as well as a Certifi-
cate of Merit from the Association for Recorded Sound Collection.

Colleen Renihan is Associate Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in

Music Theatre and Opera at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Can-
ada. She holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Toronto, as well
as an artist diploma in opera performance. Colleen has published chapters
in several edited collections on opera and in the journals Twentieth-­Century
Music, Journal of the Society for American Music, University of Toronto
Quarterly, and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image. Her book The Operatic
Archive: American Opera as History has just been published as the newest
volume in Ashgate’s Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera series. She is currently
at work on a second book on new music theater in Canada.

Alexander K. Rothe is a musicologist based in South Florida. Previously he

was a core lecturer at Columbia University, where he earned his PhD in his-
torical musicology in 2015. His research interests are performance studies,

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 318 Contributors

Regieoper, Wagner studies, and new music and diversity. He is currently writ-
ing a book on afterlives of 1968, global politics, and stagings of Wagner’s Ring
cycle in divided Germany. Rothe’s research has been published in The Musi-
cal Quarterly and Current Musicology, and he was awarded research grants
from the Fulbright Program and the German Academic Exchange Service
(DAAD).

Nicholas David Stevens is a musicologist at ArkivMusic, a division of Naxos

of America, Inc. His monograph Crisis Mode: Opera as Form and Medium
After the End of History is under contract with the University of Michigan
Press. He is also a contributor to Cambridge University Press’s Thomas Ades
Studies (2021), and his work has appeared in Opera Quarterly as well as non-­
academic outlets such as Van magazine and I Care if You Listen. He has pre-
sented his research at conferences across Europe and North America.

Edward Venn is Professor of Music at the University of Leeds and Editor of

the journal Music Analysis. His research focuses on the analysis and inter-
pretation of twentieth-­century and contemporary music. His second mono-
graph, Thomas Adès: Asyla, was published in 2017 by Routledge, who have
also recently issued his The Music of Hugh Wood (Ashgate, 2008) in paper-
back. With Philip Stoecker, he coedited Thomas Adès Studies for Cambridge
University Press (2022), winning the 2022 Society for Music Theory Award for
Outstanding Multi-­author Publication. In 2022–­23, he was the academic-­in-­
residence at Opera North (Leeds, UK) and, following a Leadership Research
Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United
Kingdom, is currently completing a monograph, The Operas of Thomas Adès.

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 Index

AACM (Association for the Advancement Alice in the Pandemic (Sosa), 137
of Creative Musicians). See Afterword All Quiet on the Western Front
(Lewis) (Remarque), 132, 145
Aaronson-­Davis, Cynthia, 200, 205 “All the Things You Are” (Kern and Ham-
Abbate, Carolyn, 196n35 merstein), 121
Abels, Michael, 14 Almazan, Alvin, 200
Abrams, Muhal Richard, 115–­16, 124 Amistad (Davis), 113, 199
absence, theater of, 50 amplification and breathy vocalizations in
acousmatic sound: acousmatic spacing, Infinite Now (Czernowin), 143–­44, 145,
258; in Adriana Mater (Saariaho), 147
264n11; in Brokeback Mountain (Wuo- An American Soldier (Ruo), 20n31
rinen), 17–­18, 248–­49, 252, 256, 258–­59; anamnesis, 110, 114
Eidsheim on, 38, 49; in Solaris (Fuji­ Andersen, Hans Christian, 135
kura), 29; and technology, 138 André, Naomi, 13, 126, 216–17
acoustic power: of ensemble vs. individual, Andriessen, Louis, 8
185–­86; in Sokolović, 181–­89 Angel’s Bone (Du Yun), 15
Adam and Eve: A Divine Comedy (Ore), 15 Annulla (An Autobiography) [Mann], 76
Adams, John, 67–­68, 84, 135, 139, 154 anthropocene and anthropocentrism,
Adriana Mater (Saariaho), 15, 264n11 11–­12, 17, 35
Adwan, Moneim, 15 aporia, 97
Afterword (Lewis), 9, 12, 17, 109–­27 archaeological kaleidoscope, 124
Agamben, Giorgio, 268, 281–­82 Are You Now or Have You Ever Been
agency: and avatars, 9, 118, 122, 125, 126, (Bentley), 76
127; narrative agency in Brokeback As One (Kaminsky), 20n38
Mountain (Wuorinen), 245–­63; plane- Association for the Advancement of Cre-
tary, 23, 27, 31; sexual, 209; and silence, ative Musicians (AACM). See Afterword
194; virtual agency, 118. See also decen- (Lewis)
tering of human agency Astor, Bill, 227
Ainadamar (Golijov), 136 ato-­za, 156
Akhnaten (Glass), 77, 135, 154 Attard, Joseph, 137
Alarma! (tabloid), 89, 90–­91, 94, 96, 97 Aucoin, Matthew, 24
Albert, Jean-­Michel, 36 Audi, Pierre, 156, 169–­70, 171
Albino, Laura, 179 “The Audition” (Johnson), 46, 47, 51–­57

319

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 320 Index

authenticity: and corridos, 92; and docu- interest in, xi, 14–­15; as shadow culture,
mentary opera, 67, 68, 71, 73, 83, 84; and 13
documentary theater, 75, 78 blackface, 13
avant-­garde: Black, 206; and development Blanchard, Terence, xi, 12–­13, 14, 245
of documentary theater, 75–­76; and Blanco, Griselda, 95
Sciarrino, 266, 267; and Tan, 163, 165 Blue (Tesori), 14
avatars: and Afterword (Lewis), 9, 12, 17, blues, 17, 205–­6
109–­27; vs. characters, 116; defined, 109; The Bluest Eye (Morrison), 111, 117
Hatsune Miku in The End (vocaloid body: as instrument in Tea (Tan), 10, 161,
opera), 46, 47, 57–­61, 62–­63; as term, 163–­65, 171; and voice-­body relationship
113–­14; and ¡Unicamente La Verdad! in The Force of Things (Fure), 34–­36; and
(Ortiz), 102 voice-­body relationships in Three Tales
Ayan, Atalla, 31 (Reich), 85n8
Az ember tragédiája (Madách), 199 Bolaño, Roberto, 95
Bolter, Jay David, 115, 116, 121–­22
Barnard, Ian, 210 The Book of Sand (van der Aa), 64n20
Barnhurst, Kevin, 81 The Book of Tea (Lu Yu), 157–­59, 160, 161
barred subject, 12–­13, 276–­77 borders and boundaries: and corridos,
Barthes, Roland, 185, 188, 192 90, 92, 94; and inclusive exclusion in
Baryshnikov, Shura, 186 Sciarrino, 278; role of opera, 103–­4; and
Baskin, Judith, 203–­4 ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Ortiz), 95, 96,
Bassi, James, 80, 81 98, 103–­4
Bauer, Amy, 8, 16, 17, 89–­104 Boston Lyric Opera, 177–­78, 186–­87,
Bauer, Christina, 29 196n27
Beatrice Chancy (Rolfe), 179 Braxton, Anthony, 113–­14, 137
Beck, Julian, 76 Bread and Puppet Theater, 76
Before Night Falls (Martin), 245 Breaking the Waves (Mazzoli), 15, 176
Benjamin, Walter, 114 breath and breathy vocalizations: in Guth,
Benn, James, 159 31; in Infinite Now (Czernowin), 10,
Bennett, Jane, 33, 37, 165 138, 143–­48, 164; and intimacy, 163; and
Bensman-­Rowe, Cheryl, 80–­81 machines, 62; in Sciarrino, 267, 275; in
Bentley, Eric, 76 Shiver Lung (Fure), 36; in Sokolović, 188,
Berg, Alban, 221–­22, 247, 248, 259, 260 193; in Tea (Tan), 163–­65. See also gasps
Berghaus, Ruth, 11 and gasping
Berlioz, Hector, 138 Brecht, Bertolt and Brechtian model, 61,
Bernstein, Charles, 114 104
Bernstein, Tamara, 179, 184, 185, 187 Britten, Benjamin, 222, 224, 243n33
Bertola, Mauro Fosco, 13, 17, 18, 266–­82 Brokeback Mountain (2005 film), 250,
bildungsroman, 116–­17 262
biopolitics and power, 281–­82 Brokeback Mountain (Proulx novel), 245,
Birtwistle, Harrison, 222, 242n16 249, 250, 251, 255, 257, 258–­59, 263
Bizet, Georges, 102, 246 Brokeback Mountain (Wuorinen opera),
Black Lives Matter, 2, 14, 199 13, 16, 17–­18, 245–­63
Black opera: Davis’s position in, 216–­17; Brooks, Daphne, 125

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 Index 321

Brown, Camille A., 20n30 239; and racism, 241n11; in That Man
Brown, Gwendolyn, 124 Stephen Ward (Hyde), 223, 226, 232,
Buchbinder, David, 226 239
Buddhism, Zen, 10, 159–­60 Clayton, Allan, 222
Bulgarian women’s choirs, 179, 181 Clément, Catherine, 15
Bussmann, Phillip, 132, 140 Close, Glenn, 201
Butler, Judith, 185 Clum, John, 245
Butler, Octavia, 216 coevolution, 126
Cohran, Philip, 115, 116
cabaret, 90, 224, 227, 236, 238, 239 Coleman, Beth, 113
Cadars, Sylvain, 132 collage: and aporia, 97; and The Cave
Cage, John, 154, 165 (Reich), 69, 84; and oscillation, 121–­22;
Calico, Joy H., 9–­10, 17, 131–­48, 162, 164, and ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Ortiz),
197n38 96–­97
Camelia la Tejana. See ¡Unicamente La colonialism: colonialist values in opera,
Verdad! (Ortiz) 13; and planetary voice, 23; and Solaris
Camelia María, 94–­95, 97, 99–­101 (Lem) adaptations, 38
Can Xue, 10, 132, 134, 145 Colosio, Luis Donaldo, 101
Candillari, Daniela, 186 Come Out (Reich), 71, 73
Car, Nicole, 31 Come to the Edge (Ore), 15
Carmen (Bizet), 102, 246 “The Comet” (DuBois), 14, 135
Cavanagh, Michael, 180, 187 Comet/Poppea (Lewis), 14, 135
Cavarero, Adriana, 11, 184, 185, 186, 188, commedia dell’arte, 224
267 composite libretti, 9–­10, 14, 131, 132–­
cave, allegory of, 125 35, 148. See also collage; Infinite Now
The Cave (Reich), 7–­8, 17, 67–­84, 154 (Czernowin)
The Central Park Five (Davis), 14, 199 Composition No. 126 (Trillium-­Dialogues)
ceremonies, theater of, 112 [Braxton], 113–­14
Champion (Blanchard), 245 Connell, R. W., 226
character: association with voice type, 15–­ Connor, Steven, 178, 188–­89, 193–­94
16; vs. avatar, 116; decentering of, 7–­8, 9, Connor, Timothy, 30
25; and planetary voice, 25; propositional consonants: in Czernowin, 145; and
character in corridos, 94 machine singing, 52; in Sokolović, 181,
Chen, Lingchei Letty, 134 188, 194; and whispering, 147
Chinese culture and inter-­Asia sensibility “Contrabando y Traición” (González), 89,
in Tea (Tan), 152–­73 90, 91–­94, 98, 101
Ching, Chiang, 160, 170 control societies, 110, 126
Chion, Michel, 258 Corregia, Enrico, 25
Chmel, Norbert, 29 corridos and narcocorridos, 8, 89, 90–­94,
Chung, Andrew J., 23, 35, 37, 38 96, 103–­4. See also ¡Unicamente La
Churchill, Winston, 235 Verdad! (Ortiz)
City Life (Reich), 68 costumes: in Six Voix Pour Sirènes
Clarke, George Elliott, 179 (Sokolović), 179; in Tea (Tan), 153, 170
class: and masculinity, 222, 223, 225, 226, courtly love, 102

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 322 Index

COVID-­19 pandemic, ix, 2, 3, 29, 137, Dennehy, Donnacha, 69

285n45 DeNora, Tia, 194
Cross, Jonathan, 138 The Desert Music (Reich), 79–­80
Crypton Future Media, 58 desynchronization, 50
Cultural Revolution, 154 Detroit Opera, 1–­3, 14, 136, 199
cybernetics and cyborgs, 55, 110 Devan, David, 177
Czernowin, Chaya: Infinite Now, 9–­10, Die glückliche Hand (Schoenberg), 266–­67
17, 131–­48, 164, 176, 268; Pnima . . . Different Trains (Reich), 68, 69, 71–­72, 73
ins Innere, 132, 151n42; on singing, 36; dislocation and sound design, 138–­43
Zaïde/Adama, 134–­35 Dittel, Kris, 46, 51–­52
Doctor Atomic (Adams), 68, 84, 135, 139
Da gelo a gelo (Sciarrino), 269 documentary opera: and authenticity, 67,
dark feminine in Lilith (Davis), 11, 12, 68, 71, 73, 83, 84; development of, 67–­68,
198–­217 71–­75; and gay protagonists, 263n2; and
Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern postopera, 7, 67–­68; and spatiality, 81;
(Lachenmann), 135, 147 and subjectivity, 16, 17, 69, 71, 78–­84,
Daughtry, J. Martin, 23, 32, 62 89–­104. See also The Cave (Reich); ¡Uni-
Davis, Angela, 205 camente La Verdad! (Ortiz)
Davis, Anthony: Amistad, 113, 199; influ- documentary theater: The Cave (Reich)
ence of and interest in, xi, 199, 216–­17; as, 67–­84; defined, 75; development
Lear on the Second Floor, 199; Lilith, and background, 75–­78; and Perceval,
11, 12, 17, 198–­217; on opera for all, 14; 132; and rise of documentary opera, 68;
position in Black opera, 216–­17; Recom- terms for, 75
binant Trilogy, 126; [Re]Creating Lilith, Dog Days (Vavrek), 141
200, 203, 210, 211, 212–­14; Tania, 199; dramaturgy: defined, 8, 131; dialogic
Wakonda’s Dream, 199; X, 14, 67, 112, dramaturgy in The Cave (Reich), 69,
154, 199, 216–­17 71, 81; and documentary opera, 68; and
Davis, Jonah, 200, 210 dreams in Sciarrino, 269, 272, 276–­82;
Davis, Thulani, 113, 199 and Expressionism, 222, 267; and inter-­
Death and Fire (Tan), 162, 166 Asia sensibility in Tea (Tan), 153, 161,
Death and the Powers (Machover), 6, 16 162; interventions in Solaris (Fujikura),
Death by Life (Jacobs), ix, 14, 137 22, 24, 29; and masculinity in That Man
Debussy, Claude, 11 Stephen Ward (Hyde), 222, 224–­25, 236–­
decentering of human agency: in The Cave 39; overview of innovations, 8–­11, 12, 17,
(Reich), 67–­84; in corridos, 94; and 18; and selfhood in Brokeback Mountain
definitions, 32; overview of, 4, 7–­8, 16–­ (Wuorinen), 248–­49; spatial, 9–­10,
17; and planetary voice and hyperobject, 135–­48, 162; and technics in Afterword
21–­39; and singing by machines, 45–­63; (Lewis), 109–­27; of trauma in Infinite
and technics in Afterword (Lewis), 109–­ Now (Czernowin), 131–­48
27; and technology, 5–­6, 7, 17, 68–­69; Drattell, Deborah, 198
in Twilight: Gods (Wagner), 5, 6, 16; in Dream of the Red Chamber (Sheng), 14
¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Ortiz), 16, dreams: autonomous dream representa-
89–­104 tions, 269; postopera as dreamlike, 8–­9;
Deleuze, Gilles, 110, 126 in Sciarrino, 266–­82

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 Index 323

Du cristal (Saariaho), 129n39 for New Bodies (Aucoin), 40n14; and

Du Yun, 15 postopera, 7; and Solaris (Fujikura), 22,
Duberman, Martin, 76 23, 26
DuBois, W. E. B., 14, 135 Enwave Theatre, 179
Duncan, Michelle, 10–­11, 178, 186, 188, 192, Eötvös, Péter, 199
196n35 Erwartung (Schoenberg), 223, 247, 260–­61,
Dunsby, Jonathan, 224 266, 283n10
Ethiopia (Living Newspaper), 76
earth, 154, 159, 160, 161–­62, 163 Etudes from the Anthropocene (Fure), 35,
Easton, Gene, 116, 121, 124 36
Ebert, Robert, 250 Europeras I & II (Cage), 154
Ebright, Ryan, 7–­8, 9, 17, 67–­84, 135–­36, Eve, 198, 200, 201, 202, 207, 211–­15
150n32 Everett, Yayoi U., 1–­18, 136, 245–­63
ecosophy, 20n27 excess, 150n32
Edberg, Mark, 94 Expressionism: and Brokeback Mountain
Edgecombe, Johnny, 226, 231–­32, 234, 238, (Wuorinen), 247–­48, 249, 259–­61;
239. See also That Man Stephen Ward and Peter Grimes (Britten), 222; and
(Hyde) Sciarrino, 266–­82; shift away from, 9;
Eelman, Vakil, 48 and That Man Stephen Ward (Hyde),
Eidsheim, Nina Sun, 37–­38, 49, 164–­65, 222, 223
186, 194
Eight (van der Aa), 45, 47, 48–­51, 61, 62–­ Façade (Walton), 224
63 fach, 15–­16
Eight Songs for a Mad King (Maxwell Farmer, Richard, 225–­26
Davies), 224, 231 Fatal Attraction (1987), 201
Einstein on the Beach (Glass), xi, 8 Favorini, Attilio, 75
Eisinger, Simona, 30 Feldman, Martha, 11, 186
“El Corrido” (Los Tigres del Norte), 92 Fellow Travelers (Spears), 245, 262
El Teatro Campesino, 76 femininity: dark feminine in Lilith (Davis),
El Tigre (singer), 89, 98–­99, 100 11, 12, 198–­217; and subjectivity in
El último sueño de Frida y Diego (Franks), Sokolović, 11, 176–­94. See also masculin-
14 ity; women
elements, in Tea (Tan), 154 feminism: Lilith as feminist symbol,
Elff, Jody, 136 11, 200–­201; and subjectivity in
empathic response and machines, 55 Sokolović, 11, 176–­94; and vocal
emptiness, 159–­60 materiality, 10–­11
The End (Shibuya), 46, 47, 57–­61, 62–­63 femme fatale trope, 201
Engel, Titus, 132 Fennolosa, Ernest, 135
Ensslin, Gudrun, 135 Ferneyhough, Brian, 114, 125, 271
“The Entertainer” (Joplin), 236 figura, 272
environment and climate change: ecocrit- Figus, Angelo, 156
ical theory, 17; environmental sustain- Filewod, Alan, 79, 90
ability of opera, 38–­39; and The Force “Finita iamsunt proelia” (Palestrina), 52
of Things (Fure), 22, 32–­38; and Music fire, 159, 160, 161

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 324 Index

Fire Shut Up in My Bones (Blanchard), Ghost Opera (Tan), 162

12–­13, 14 Gianfrancesco, Michael, 180, 187
Fires in the Mirror (Smith), 76 Giddens, Rhiannon, 14
The First Emperor (Tan), 10, 174n31 Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, 52
Fisher, Linda, 184 Girls of the Golden West (Adams), 68
flux, as term, 3 Glanert, Detlev, 22, 25, 32, 33, 44n83
focalization and scenography of Brokeback Glass, Philip: Akhnaten, 77, 135, 154;
Mountain (Wuorinen), 247, 248, 261 Einstein on the Beach, xi, 8; on growth of
Fontane, Yvonne, 238, 239 opera, 154–­55, 172; and melody, 62; and
The Force of Things (Fure), 21–­24, 32–­38 postopera term, 7; Satyagraha, 77; on
Forner, Jane, 11, 12, 187, 195n6, 198–­217 technology and hyperreality, 45; use of
Foucault, Michel, 111, 240 multiple texts in libretti, 135
“Four Orchestral Songs” (op. 22) [Schoen- Gob Squad, 5–­6
berg], 259 Goebbels, Heiner, 42n53, 50, 111
Franks, Gabriela Lena, 14 golden ratio, 117–­18
Free Southern Theater, 76 Golijov, Osvaldo, 136
FRONT, a Polyphony . . . (Perceval), 10, 132 González, Ángel, 89, 90, 91–­92, 96, 98
Fujikura, Dai, 22–­23, 25, 27–­32, 37 González-­Requena, Jesús, 81
Fujita, Saki, 58 Gooding, Wayne, 177
Fure, Adam, 21–­24, 32–­38 Gopinath, Sumanth, 73
Fure, Ash, 21–­24, 32–­38, 39 Götterdämmerung. See Twilight: Gods
Furies, 257 (Wagner)
Greek (Turnage), 222
Gaia hypothesis, 26 Greenaway, Robert, 8
gasps and gasping: in The Force of Things Grey, Mark, 137
(Fure), 35; in Infinite Now (Czernowin), Griffin, Sean, 111, 122–­25
10, 138, 145, 147–­48; and trauma, 147. See Griffith, Emile, 263n2
also breath and breathy vocalizations Grusin, Richard, 115, 116, 121–­22
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 129n42, 216–­17 Guattari, Félix, 12
gaze, male, 243n34 Guo, Wenjing, 172
gender. See femininity; masculinity; queer- Guth, Claus, 25, 30–­31, 38
ness and queering; women
generative agency, 246–­47 Hamilton (Miranda), 148
Gesamtkunstwerk, 3, 6 Hamm, Daniel, 73
Gesang der Jünglinge (Stockhausen), 46 Hammerstein, Oscar, 121
gestures: in Afterword (Lewis), 111, 120, Hanjo (Hosokawa), 172
121, 123–­25; in Brokeback Mountain Hannigan, Barbara, 55
(Wuorinen opera), 252–­53, 254, 259; Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Wuorinen),
defined, 166; and hypermediacy, 124–­25; 249
importance of, 11; in Sciarrino, 278–­79; Harvey Milk (Wallace), 16, 245
and singing by machines, 55, 57; in Tea hashigakari, 156
(Tan), 10, 154, 161, 166–­69, 171; and tech- Hatsune Miku (hologram), 46, 47, 57–­61,
nics, 109; in That Man Stephen Ward 62–­63
(Hyde), 236 Hatten, Robert S., 118

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 Index 325

Haut Goût (Havis), 202 in Brokeback Mountain (Wuorinen), 16,

Havelková, Tereza, 121 17–­18, 245–­63; and temporal ambiguity,
Havis, Allan, 198–­203, 205–­6, 207, 210, 211, 202; in That Man Stephen Ward (Hyde),
215–­17 221–­40; and trauma, 131. See also
Hayles, Katherine N., 109 subjectivity
Heinert, Jennifer, 116–­17 Ikebe, Shinichirō, 163
Hernández, Hernán, 91 Il tabarro (Puccini), 138
Hernández, Jorge, 90, 91, 96, 98–­99 Il trittico (Puccini), 138
Hernández, Raúl, 91 immediacy: hypermediacy in Afterword
Hess, John, 178, 180, 184, 189 (Lewis), 110–­11, 114–­22, 124–­26; logic of,
Hisama, Ellie M., 214–­15 115, 116; in Sokolović, 178
Hole, Christopher, 177, 181 In White America (Duberman), 76
“Homecoming” (Can Xue), 10, 132, 134, 145 inclusive exclusion in Sciarrino, 277–­82
homo sacer, 281, 282 The Industry, 39, 136
Hopscotch, 136 Infinite Now (Czernowin), 9–­10, 17, 131–­48,
Horobin, Ian, 242n23 164, 176, 268
Horowitz, Joshua, 198 Infinito nero (Sciarrino), 279
Hosokawa, Toshio, 155, 172 infrasound, 33
The Howling Girls (Ricketsen), 148 Ingraham, Mary, 13
Huber, Curvin, 137 Innocence (Saariaho), 15
Huhtanen, Carla, 179 inter-­Asia sensibility, 17, 152–­73
humanity: of people of color, 126; and interviews: and Afterword (Lewis), 111; and
uncanny valley, 26, 28, 50, 53; and voice The Cave (Reich), 7–­8, 68–­84; and rise
as human trait, 46, 51, 56–­57. See also of postopera, 68, 69; and ¡Unicamente
decentering of human agency; nonhu- La Verdad! (Ortiz), 90, 94–­96, 98–­99,
mans; posthumanism 101
The Hunger (Dennehy), 69 intimacy: and amplification, 143, 144, 147;
Hurwitz, Siegmund, 203, 209, 213 and breath, 163; and hyperobject, 28; and
“The Hut on the Mountain” (Can Xue), 134 virtual reality, 46; and whispering, 194
Hutcheon, Linda, 67 Inuit throat singing, 147
Hwang, David Henry, 20n31 The Investigation (Weiss), 84
Hyde, Thomas, 16, 17, 221–­40, 262 Irrgeher, Christoph, 29
hypermediacy, 110–­11, 114–­22, 124–­26 It’s Gonna Rain (Reich), 71
hyperobjects, 21–­39 Ivanov, Yevgeny, 227, 231, 236, 238. See also
hyperreality, 45, 63n2 That Man Stephen Ward (Hyde)
hypomnesis, 110, 114 Izumi Shikibu, 269
hysterical woman trope, 276
Jacobs, Adena, 148
Iddon, Martin, 135 Jameson, Fredric, 112, 266
identity: and decentering of human agency, Japanese culture and inter-­Asia sensibility
6, 7; destabilizing of with avatars, 9; in Tea (Tan), 152–­73
human voice as central to, 46; in Lilith Johnson, Tom, 46, 47, 51–­57
(Davis), 202, 209, 211–­15; and planetary Jones, Elfyn, 135
voice, 26; posthuman, 51; queer identity Joplin, Scott, 236

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 326 Index

Jordan, Stephanie, 125 Lady ideal, 102

Jorden, James, 247–­48 Lady MacBeth of Mtsenk District (Shosta-
Journey to the West (legend), 153, 159, 167, kovich), 222, 247, 248, 260
170–­71 Laforgue, Jules, 273
Jue, Melody, 24, 26, 28 Lam, Bun-­Ching, 172
Lamarre, Joelle, 124
Kafka, Franz, 47, 269 “The Lamentations of Orpheus” (Unander-­
kaleidoscope, archaeological, 124 Scharin), 46, 47, 56–­57, 62–­63
Kalîla wa Dimna (Adwan), 15 L’amour de loin (Saariaho), xi, 11, 149n14,
Kalman, Jean, 156 203
Kaminsky, Laura, 20n38 Lander, Bonnie, 200, 213
Kane, Brian, 258 Lang, David, 194
Kantor, Tadeusz, 112 Lara, Oscar, 91
Katz, Tamar, 12 Larkin, Philip, 225
Keeler, Christine, 223, 225, 228–­29, 231, Larson, Philip, 200
234, 238–­39. See also That Man Stephen Laurenzi, Carlo, 132, 139, 141–­43
Ward (Hyde) Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares (album),
Kemp, Kathrin, 29 181
Kenmochi, Hideki, 58 Lear on the Second Floor (Davis), 199
Kern, Jerome, 121 Lee, Ang, 250, 262
King Harald’s Saga (Weir), 224 Lee, Joanna C., 161
King Lear (Shakespeare), 199 Lehmann, Hans-­Thies: on blending of
Ko, Gwikyoung, 200 time, 124; on characteristics of post-
Kōbō, Abe, 20n28 dramatic theater, 8; on Expressionism,
Kokoschka, Oskar, 267 267; on move away from plot, 133; on
Kolk, Livia, 47, 49–­50, 51 omnipresence of media, 90; on polyglos-
Komunyakaa, Yusef, 199 sia, 111; and posthumanism, 6–­7, 35; on
Korot, Beryl, 7–­8, 17, 67–­84 tragedy, 91, 103
Kosior, Wojciech, 207 Leiris, Michel, 138
Kotsko, Adam, 286n45 Lem, Stanisław, 21, 22, 24–­28, 38
Kozak, Mariusz, 163, 193 Leonardo da Vinci, 135
Kramer, Lawrence, 67, 215 Les Mamelles de Tirésias (Poulenc), 221
Kreuzer, Gundula, 5 Les Noces (Stravinsky), 181, 192
Kristeva, Julia, 185, 209 Les Troyens (Berlioz), 138
Levin, David, 2, 31, 247
La Barbara, Joan, 144, 197n39 Lewis, George E.: Afterword, 9, 12, 17, 109–­
La bohème (Puccini), 21, 25, 30–­31, 38, 39 27; Comet/Poppea, 14, 135; on Davis, 199,
La Chiusa, Michael John, 199 206; A Power Stronger Than Itself, 111,
“La culebra,” 101 116, 219n29
. . . la fumée (Saariaho), 129n39 libretti: composite libretti, 9–­10, 14, 131,
La porta della legge (Sciarrino), 286n51 132–­35, 148; Sokolović on, 192
LaBelle, Brandon, 144 Lienbacher, Anna-­Sophie, 29
Lacan, Jacques, 12–­13, 91, 102, 194, 276–­77 Ligeti, György, 97, 176, 181
Lachenmann, Helmut, 135, 147, 164 Lilith (1964 film), 201, 211

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 Index 327

Lilith (biblical character), 11, 198–­99, 200–­ Madách, Imre, 199

201, 216 Madame White Snake (Zhou), 172
Lilith (Davis opera), 11, 12, 17, 198–­217 Magnat, Virginie, 32
Lilith (Drattell opera), 198 male gaze, 243n34
Lilith (Salamanca novel), 201, 211 Malec, Ivo, 61
Lilith, The Night Demon in One Lewd Act Malina, Judith, 76
(Horowitz), 198 Malkowsky, Helen, 29
Lilith’s Brood (Butler), 216 Mamias, Natalie, 179–­80
liminality in Sciarrino, 269–­70, 275–­76, Manabe, Keiko, 172
277, 280–­82 Mangano, Nick, 83
L’Incoronazione di Poppea (Monteverdi), Mann, Emily, 76, 77
14, 135 Manning, Jane, 242n18
Little, David T., 141 Marco Polo (Tan), 155
Living Newspapers, 76 Margulis, Lynne, 26
Living Theater, 76 Martin, Jorge, 245
Lock, Graham, 113 masculinity: and class, 222, 223, 225, 226,
Logue, Jennifer, 184 239; crisis of, 17, 221, 235; hegemonic
Lohengrin (Sciarrino), 13, 18, 101–­2, 268, masculinity, defined, 241n6; and homo-
273–­77 social relationships, 227; and male gaze,
Lohengrin (Wagner), 276 243n34; perfomativity of, 236; in That
Lohengrin, fils de Parsifal (Laforgue), 273 Man Stephen Ward (Hyde), 13, 16, 17,
Lorde, Audre, 214, 215 221–­40; and unmanning, 16, 221–­22. See
L’Orfeo (Monteverdi). See “The Lamenta- also patriarchy
tions of Orpheus” (Unander-­Scharin) Mason, Benedict, 222–­23
Los Tigres del Norte, 89, 90, 91–­92, 96, 98 materialism, new, 33, 37–­38
Love Songs (Sokolović), 179 materiality: and inter-­Asia sensibility
Lovelock, James, 26 in Tea (Tan), 10, 17, 161–­66, 171; and
Lu Yu, 157–­58, 159–­60 postdramatic theater, 7, 267; of tea, 157;
Lucas, Sarah, 246 vocal materiality in Sokolović, 11, 17, 178,
Luci mie traditrici (Sciarrino), 279 181–­94
Ludwig, Andrea, 179 Matsui, Rumi, 170
Lulu (Berg), 247 Maxwell Davies, Peter, 224, 236
lungs, 36–­37 Mazzoli, Missy, 15, 176
Lux, Sophie, 29 McCall, Steve, 115, 116
Lyric Opera of Chicago, 1–­3, 14, 113 McClary, Susan, xi–­xii, 266, 268
McMillan, Uri, 9, 122, 125
Maalouf, Amin, 203 media: omnipresence of, 90; and subjec-
MacAleavy, Garth, 141 tivity, 103; and ¡Unicamente La Verdad!
Macbeth (Sciarrino), 268–­69, 286n51 (Ortiz), 8, 89, 90–­91, 94–­95, 96. See also
machines, singing by, 45–­63 virtual reality
Machover, Tod, 6, 16 media opera, 137
MacMillan, Harold, 242n23 melody, shift back to, 61–­62
MacMurray, Peter, 150n32 memory and technics in Afterword
Mad Men (television show), 242n19 (Lewis), 109–­10, 114–­22, 126–­27

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 328 Index

Menke, Christoph, 91, 103 Müller, Heiner, 111, 112

Mercer, Shannon, 179 Murata Jukō, 158–­59
metamodernism, 67 Muselmänner, 281
Metamorphosis (Kafka), 47 Music, Marsha, 2
#MeToo movement, 15, 211 Music for New Bodies (Aucoin), 40n14
Metropolitan Opera, xi, 14, 199 My Square Lady (Gob Squad), 5–­6
Metzer, David, 129n39, 259, 266, 268, 275,
279–­80 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 194
Michaels, Bianca, 137 narcocorridos, 89, 90–­94, 96. See also
Michigan Opera Theatre, 1–­3. See also ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Ortiz)
Detroit Opera narration, omniscient, 261–­62
The Midnight Court Opera (Sokolović), narrative agency: in Brokeback Mountain
179 (Wuorinen), 245–­63; defined, 246–­47
Miller-­Heidke, Kate, 47, 48, 50, 51, 62 Narucki, Susan, 200
Mink Sonata (Havis), 202 national myth making, 67
Miranda, Héctor Félix, 92 natural world and Tea (Tan), 156–­57, 161–­
Miwa, Masahiro, 52 63, 165–­66
Miyamoto, Amon, 152, 170–­71 Netherland Opera, 175n49
mobility and sound design, 138–­43 Neue Oper Wien, 22, 29–­30, 38–­39, 199
Model Opera, 154 new materialism, 33, 37–­38
modernism: metamodernism, 67; Sciarrino Ni Mheadra, Dairine, 178, 179, 180, 181,
and late modernism, 267; and shift away 184
from melody, 61; and subjectivity, 12 Nixon in China (Adams), 67, 154
monster and the monstrous, 47 Noh, 8, 135, 156
Monteverdi, Claudio, 14, 46, 47, 56–­57, nonhumans: and animals, 5, 46–­47; and
62–­63, 135 hyperobjects, 21–­39; and mountain in
Moodley, Roy, 13 Brokeback Mountain (Wuorinen), 13,
Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Kokoschka), 247, 248–­49, 250, 252, 253–­60, 263; role
267 in human life, 165; role in opera, 5–­7;
Moreno, Eleazar Pacheco, 94, 96, 97, 101 and singing by machines, 6, 45–­63; and
Morris, Christopher, 137 spirits in Tea (Tan), 165; in Twilight:
Morrison, Toni, 111, 117 Gods (Wagner), 5; and uncanny valley,
Mortimer, Gerard, 249 26, 28, 50, 53. See also decentering of
Morton, Timothy, 22, 26–­27, 28 human agency; posthumanism
Moses und Aron (Schoenberg), 138–­39 Nono, Luigi, 9, 61, 135, 139
Moslet, Bibbi, 15 Norris, David, 223, 227
Moten, Fred, 206 Northern Exposure (television series),
MotorMouth (Riches), 52, 53 263n1
mountain in Brokeback Mountain Nouno, Gilbert, 27
(Wuorinen), 13, 247, 248–­49, 250, 252, Nova Music Opera, 238
253–­60, 263 Novačić, Ana, 186
mouth, 35–­36 Novak, Jelena, 6–­7, 17, 33–­34, 45–­63, 85n8,
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 134–­35 133, 140
Muhly, Nico, 245 NOW, 39

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observation, mobility of, 121–­22 Paper Concerto (Tan), 10

Obst, Michael, 22, 25, 27, 31–­32 Paradise Reloaded (Lilith) [Eötvös], 199
“Olimpia” (puppet), 63n7 patriarchy: and inequities between men,
Oliveros, Pauline, 197n39 226–­27, 231, 232–­33; and male gaze,
Omar (Giddens), 14 243n34; patriarchal dividend, 226; patri-
omniscient narration, 261–­62 archal pyramid, 226–­27, 231, 236, 240
On the Transmigration of Souls (Adams), Paul’s Case (Spears), 15
68 Pell, Jonathan, 171
One (van der Aa), 55 Pelléas et Mélisande (Debussy), 11
Ong, Walter, 185 Pennies from Heaven (television show),
Only the Sound Remains (Saariaho), 135 242n19
opera: adaptability of, 13, 18; death of, 4; Perceval, Luk, 10, 132, 140
funding of, 38–­39; growth of in late 20th Perkins, Roxy, 15
c., 154–­55; media opera, 137; opera text Perloff, Carey, 77–­78, 81–­83
vs. performance text, 18n3; as scholar- Perm Opera Ballet, 177, 196n27
ship subject, 4; as term, 3; underrepre- Perovic, Lydia, 177, 180
sented groups as opera subjects, 14–­15. Pesma (Sokolović), 179
See also Black opera; documentary Peter Grimes (Britten), 222, 243n33
opera; postopera Petrovich, Victoria, 200
Opera Philadelphia, 177 phanero-­technics, 118
Operamecatronica (Unander-­Scharin), phonemes, 144, 147, 151n42
63n7 photo-­collage, 121
Orchestral Theatre I-­IV (Tan), 10, 155 Pierrot lunaire (Schoenberg), 223–­24, 231,
Ore, Cecilie, 15 240
Origini delle idee sottili (Sciarrino), 269–­70 Pierson, Marcelle, 46, 61, 80, 279–­80
Ortiz, Gabriela, 8, 16, 69, 89–­104 Piscator, Erwin, 75
Ortiz Torres, Rubén, 8, 89–­91, 95–­96 planetary voice and hyperobject, 7, 21–­39
oscillation and collage, 121–­22 Plaskow, Judith, 213
Ostermaier, Albert, 199 Plastic Bag Landscape (Rolfsen), 37
Ota, Masatomo, 170 Plastic Haircut (Reich), 71
Other: and inter-­Asia sensibility in Tea Plato, 125
(Tan), 173; and masculinity in That Playing Away (Mason), 222–­23
Man Stephen Ward (Hyde), 225, 240; in Pnima . . . ins Innere (Czernowin), 132,
Solaris (Lem), 25–­26; in ¡Unicamente La 151n42
Verdad! (Ortiz), 102; and unmanning, Poizat, Michel, 185, 194
241n7 polyglossia, 111
Otis, Julian Terrell, 124 post-­anthropocentrism, 6, 7, 11–­12, 24, 35
postdramatic theater: and Afterword
p r i s m (Reid), 176 (Lewis), 12, 111–­12, 124, 126; blending
Paget, Derek, 78 of time in, 124; characteristics of, 8;
Palestrina (Giovanni Pierluigi da Pal- and desynchronization, 50; and Infinite
estrina), 52 Now (Czernowin), 133–­34; influence of
Palm, Reinhold, 25, 32, 44n83 Expressionism on, 267; move away from
paper, 10, 154, 161, 162–­63, 165–­66 plot, 8, 133; and omnipresence of media,

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postdramatic theater (continued) puppetry in Tea (Tan), 153, 157, 167, 168–­
90; and polyglossia, 111; and postmodern 69, 170–­71
theater, 9; and ritual, 103; and Tan, 10; Purvis, Philip, 221
as term, 6–­7; and tragedy, 91, 103; and
¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Ortiz), 90 Queen of Puddings Music Theatre, 177,
posthumanism: defined, 6; and 178–­79, 180, 181, 184, 193
hyperobject, 24, 32–­33; overview queerness and queering: and barred
and background, 6–­7, 12, 17, 18; and subject, 13; in Brokeback Mountain
prosthesis, 34–­35; and singing by (Wuorinen), 16, 17–­18, 245–­63; and
machines, 45–­63; and Twilight: Gods electroacoustic vocalities, 28; and
(Wagner), 3. See also decentering of homosocial relationships, 227; in Peter
human agency Grimes (Britten), 222, 243n33; in [Re]
postmodern theater, 9 Creating Lilith (Davis), 213–­15; in That
postopera: defined, 6–­7, 33–­34; and Man Stephen Ward (Hyde), 13, 16, 17,
documentary opera, 7, 67–­68; and 227, 234–­36; tragedy and gay protago-
dreams, 8–­9; and The Force of Things nists, 16, 246
(Fure), 33–­34, 35; and gap between the
natural and the artificial, 50; rise of, race and racism: Black Lives Matter, 2, 14,
67–­68 199; and class, 241n11; and humanity,
“Post-­Opera” (exhibition), 46, 51–­52 126; and inter-­Asia sensibility in Tea
Potter, Dennis, 13, 224, 227, 236, 240 (Tan), 17, 152–­73; racializing assem-
Poulenc, Francis, 221 blages, 126; and Solaris (Lem) adapta-
Pound, Ezra, 135 tions, 38; and subjectivity, 12; subversion
power: and biopolitics in Sciarrino, 281–­ of stereotypes in Afterword (Lewis), 9,
82; opera as resistance to, 2; and sex in 122, 125, 126–­27; and That Man Stephen
Lilith (Davis), 203–­15 Ward (Hyde), 226; yellowface and black-
power, acoustic. See acoustic power face, 13, 152. See also Black opera
A Power Stronger Than Itself (Lewis), 111, Ragland, Cathy, 92
116, 219n29 Ramírez, Agustina, 95, 97–­98
Prieto, Dafnis, 200 Rao, Nancy Yunhwa, 10, 17, 152–­73, 175n47
primary agency, 246–­47 the Real, 276–­77
Profumo, John, 223, 225–­29, 231–­32, 235, Recombinant Trilogy (Davis), 126
236, 238. See also That Man Stephen [Re]Creating Lilith (Davis), 200, 203, 210,
Ward (Hyde) 211, 212–­14
Profumo scandal, 16, 223, 225–­32. See also Reich, Steve, 7–­8, 17, 67–­84, 154
That Man Stephen Ward (Hyde) Reid, Ellen, 15, 176
Prometeo (Nono), 9, 139 relational agency, 246–­47
prostheses, 5, 22, 23, 34–­37 relationality: and nonhumans, 27, 32, 63;
Proulx, Annie, 245, 249, 250, 251, 255, 257, and vocal materiality in Sokolović, 176,
258–­59, 263. See also Brokeback Moun- 181–­89; and whispering, 194
tain (Wuorinen) Remarque, Erich Maria, 132, 145
Puccini, Giacomo, 21, 25, 30–­31, 38, 39, remediation, logic of, 116–­17
138, 170 Renihan, Colleen, 11, 17, 176–­94
Punch and Judy (Birtwistle), 242n16 Riches, Martin, 46, 47, 52–­57, 62–­63

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Ricketsen, Damien, 148 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 214

Rikyū, 159 Sellars, Peter, 135
ritual: and postdramatic theater, 103; and Senici, Emanuele, 134
theater of ceremonies, 112 sex and sexuality: and the erotic, 214, 215;
Robertson, Jon, 137 and Lilith (Davis), 198, 200, 201, 203–­15;
“Robocygne” (Unander-­Scharin), 63n7 and whore vs. mother dichotomy, 209–­
robots: and decentering of human agency, 11. See also queerness and queering
5–­6; singing by, 46, 47, 56–­57, 62–­63 Shadowtime (Ferneyhough), 114, 125
Roe v. Wade, 211 Shakespeare, William, 199, 268
Rolfe, James, 179 Sharon, Yuval, ix, 1–­3, 5, 6, 14, 136–­37
Rolfsen, Vilde, 37 Sheng, Bright, 172
Roman Dogs (Goebbels), 111 Shenkar, Nadine, 73
Ross, Alex, 33 Shepard, Hannah, 186
Rossini, Gioachino, 134 Sheu, Chingshun J., 26
Rothe, Alexander K., 9, 12, 17, 109–­27 Shibuya, Keiichiro, 46, 47, 57–­61, 62–­63
Rothstein, Edward, 154 Shiver Lung (Fure), 36–­37
Ruo, Henry, 20n31 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 222, 247, 248, 260
Rushdie, Salman, 249 shuang xi (double happiness), 153
Rzewski, Frederic, 84 Signifying Monkey, 129n42
silence: and agency, 194; and The Force of
Saariaho, Kaija, xi, 11, 15, 129n39, 135, Things (Fure), 34; in Sciarrino, 266, 279,
149n14, 203, 264n11 280; subversive, 194
Salamanca, J. R., 201, 210 Silk River (Sheng), 172
Salome (Strauss), 247, 260 The Silver Tassie (Turnage), 222
San Francisco Mime Troupe, 76 Simondon, Gilbert, 109–­10, 118
San Francisco Opera, 14 simulation: vs. hyperreality, 63n2; and
Sankaram, Kamala, 148 unease/uncanniness, 49–­50
Santner, Eric, 285n45 The Singing Detective (television show),
Satyagraha (Glass), 77 242n19
Scandal (1989), 223 Singing Machine (Riches), 46, 47, 52–­57,
scenography and Brokeback Mountain 62–­63
(Wuorinen), 247, 248, 261–­62 sirens, 184
Schneider, Hermann, 25 Six Voix Pour Sirènes (Sokolović), 176–­
Schoenberg, Arnold: Die glückliche Hand, 94
266–­67; Erwartung, 223, 247, 260–­61, Slater, Andrew, 238
266, 283n10; on Expressionism, 259; Smith, Anna Deveare, 76
“Four Orchestral Songs” (op. 22), 259; Smith, Ken, 156
Moses und Aron, 138–­39; Pierrot lunaire, So, Joseph, 13
223–­24, 231, 240; and sound design, Socrates, 125
138–­39 Soderbergh, Steven, 25
Schwartz, Arman, 138 Sokolović, Ana, 11, 17, 176–­94
Sciarrino, Salvatore, 13, 18, 101–­2, 266–­82 Solaris (1972 film), 25, 40n29
science fiction and planetary voice, 7, 17, Solaris (2002 film), 25
21–­39 Solaris (Corregia opera), 25

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Solaris (Fujikura opera), 22–­23, 25, 27–­32, Stickann, Keturah, 200, 211, 212–­13
37 Stiegler, Bernard, 109–­10
Solaris (Glanert opera), 22, 25, 32, 33, Still Life (Mann), 76
44n83 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 46, 61, 147
Solaris (Lem novel), 21, 22, 24–­28, 38 stone, 10, 161, 162, 163
Solaris (Obst opera), 22, 25, 27, 31–­32 Strauss, Richard, 247, 260
sound and sound design: audio sampling Stravinsky, Igor, 176, 181, 192, 272
in Reich, 69, 73; and dislocation, 138–­43; subjectivity: in Afterword (Lewis), 12, 112;
and Infinite Now (Czernowin), 131, 136; and barred subject, 12–­13, 276–­77; in
role of, 135–­36; and spatialization, 135–­ Brokeback Mountain (Wuorinen), 13,
48; technical documentation for, 141; 17–­18, 248, 260; in The Cave (Reich), 16,
and technology, 137; and Twilight: Gods 17, 69, 78–­84; in Czernowin, 176; death
(Wagner), 136–­37; and ¡Unicamente La of the subject, 266; and documentary
Verdad! (Ortiz), 96–­97. See also acous- opera, 16, 17, 69, 71, 78–­84, 89–­104; of
matic sound dreams, 270; feminine, 17, 176–­94; and
sovereignty, 281–­82 media, 103; overview of, 11–­13, 16–­17;
spatial dramaturgy, 9–­10, 135–­48, 162 and postdramatic theater, 103; role of
spatiality: and breathy vocalizations, voice in, 267, 279; in Sciarrino, 13, 18,
143–­48; in The Cave (Reich), 81; and dis- 101–­2, 266–­82; in Sokolović, 17, 176–­94;
location and mobility in sound design, in Tea (Tan), 17, 152–­73; and underrep-
138–­43; in Doctor Atomic (Adams), resented groups, 112, 184–­85; in ¡Unica-
139; in Infinite Now (Czernowin), 9–­10, mente La Verdad! (Ortiz), 16, 17, 89–­104;
17, 139–­48; opera’s effects on, 138; and and vowels, 194
Solaris (Lem) adaptations, 23; and sound sublimation, form of, 102
design, 135–­48; in Tea (Tan), 152–­56, Sullivan, Catherine, 111, 122, 123
162, 172; and temporality in Sciarrino, Suntory Hall (Tokyo), 155, 169–­70, 171, 172
271–­72 Superflumina (Sciarrino), 18, 101–­2, 268,
Spears, Gregory, 15, 245, 260 277–­82
speculative fiction and planetary voice, 7, A Survivor’s Odyssey (Jacobs), 137
17, 21–­39 Svadba (2022 film), 177–­78, 186–­87,
speech and speech-­sounds: in Sokolović, 196n27
187–­89, 193–­94; whispering, 143–­48, Svadba (Sokolović), 11, 17, 176–­94
193–­94, 205 Swan Lake (Tchaikovsky), 63n7
stage design: and inter-­Asia sensibility Sweet Land (Chacon), 136
in Tea (Tan), 152–­56; and That Man synesthesia, 271–­72
Stephen Ward (Hyde), 238–­39 Szabo, Krisztina, 179, 193, 196n27
Standing Bear, 217n6
Steigerwald Ille, Megan, 2, 39 Takemitsu, Tōru, 155
Stephen Ward (Webber), 223 Talking Machine (Riches), 52
Stephenson, Jenn, 83 Tan, Dun, 10, 17, 152–­73
stereotypes, subversion of with avatars, 9, Tang dynasty, 158, 159, 170
122, 125, 126–­27 Tania (Davis), 199
Stern, David, 205 Taoism, 10, 159–­60
Stevens, Nicholas David, 1–­18, 21–­39, 47 Tartovsky, Andrei, 25, 40n29

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Taylor, Cecil, 207 (Wuorinen), 258; blending of time in

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr, 63n7 postdramatic theater, 124; and desyn-
tea, 156–­59, 160 chronization, 50; and dreams, 269; and
Tea:A Mirror of Soul (Tan), 10, 17, 152–­73 hypermediacy in Afterword (Lewis),
technics in Afterword (Lewis), 109–­27 110–­11, 114–­22, 124–­26; lost time in Tea
technology: and The Cave (Reich), 68–­ (Tan), 162; and spatialized temporality in
69, 77–­78; and decentering of human Sciarrino, 271–­72; and temporal ambi-
agency, 5–­6, 7, 17, 68–­69; and docu- guity in Lilith (Davis), 202
mentary theater, 77; and hyperreality, “Time Falling” (van der Aa), 64n12, 64n20
45; mediation and singing by machines, Time’s Encomium (Wuorinen), 249
45–­63; mediation in Svadba (2022 film), Ting, Walasse, 170
186–­87; relationship to technics, 126; Tippett, Michael, 222
and sound design, 137–­39; and technics Tommasini, Anthony, 247
in Afterword (Lewis), 109–­27; and vocal Torpey, Peter, 200
processing in Solaris (Fujikura opera), tragedy: and gay protoganists, 16, 246; and
27–­32, 37; and Wagner, 5 ¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Ortiz), 91,
Tehillim (Reich), 79–­80 102–­3
temA (Lachenmann), 147, 164 trauma: in Brokeback Mountain (Wuo-
Teshigawara, Saburo, 22–­23, 25, 29 rinen), 259–­60; cultural trauma, 131; and
Tesori, Jeanine, 14 gasps, 147; in Infinite Now (Czernowin),
testimony, theater of: The Cave (Reich), 131–­48; in Rossini, 134; in Superflumina
7–­8, 67–­84; rise of, 68. See also docu- (Sciarrino), 277–­78
mentary theater Tri-­Axium Writings (Braxton), 113
Text and Commentary (Korot), 72 Trillium series (Braxton), 113–­14, 137
Thantrey, Damian, 238, 239 Triple-­A Plowed Under (Living Newspa-
That Man Stephen Ward (Hyde), 13, 16, 17, per), 76
221–­40, 262 Tripwire (Fure), 36
theater. See documentary theater; postdra- The Triumph of Death (Rzewski), 84
matic theater; testimony, theater of Trotz Allendem! (Piscator), 75
Theater of the Real, 75. See also documen- Troupe, Quincy, 207
tary theater Trump, Donald J., 14
Thomas, Dylan, 249 Turandot (Puccini), 170
Thompson, Tazewell, 14 Turnage, Mark-­Anthony, 222
Three Tales (Reich), 67–­68, 85n8 Tutti Remote, 137
throat, 35–­36 Tv Azteca, 90, 91, 95, 96
Thumbprint (Sankaram), 148 twelve-­tone rows, 252–­53, 258
Tiainen, Milla, 32 Twilight: Gods (Wagner), ix, 1–­3, 5, 6, 16,
timbre: and amplified breathing in Infinite 136–­37
Now (Czernowin), 143–­44, 145; and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (Smith), 76
body as instrument in Tea (Tan), 163, Two Boys (Muhly), 245
165; and gesture in Tea (Tan), 166–­69; in 2666 (Bolaño), 95
Sokolović, 193
time and temporality: and acousmatic Unander-­Scharin, Åsa, 46, 47, 56–­57,
spacing in Brokeback Mountain 62–­63

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Unander-­Scharin, Carl, 56, 63n7 vocaloids, 46, 47, 57–­61, 62–­63

uncanniness: and posthuman voice, 47; in voice: vs. articulation, 188; association with
Sciarrino, 275, 278; and Solaris (Lem) character, 15–­16; defined, 51; as human
adaptations, 25–­26, 28; uncanny valley, trait, 46, 51, 56–­57; planetary voice, 7,
26, 28, 50, 53; and virtual reality, 49–­50, 21–­39; and singing by machines, 45–­63;
61; and voice, 28 subjectivization with, 267, 279; throwing
¡Unicamente La Verdad! (Ortiz), 8, 16, 69, of, 140. See also breath and breathy
89–­104 vocalizations; vocality
Unreal Engine, 137 von Rhein, John, 67
Upload (van der Aa), 6, 16 vowels: and breathy vocalizations in Czer-
Utz, Christian, 164 nowin, 145; and machine singing, 52, 55;
role of in opera, 187–­88, 194
van der Aa, Michel, 6, 16, 45, 47, 48–­51, 55,
61, 62–­63 Wagner, Richard, 3, 5, 16, 276. See also
van Elferen, Isabella, 143 Lohengrin (Sciarrino); Twilight: Gods
van Hove, Ivo, 247, 248, 261–­62 (Wagner)
Vass, George, 238 Wakonda’s Dream (Davis), 199
Vassall, John, 242n23 Wald, Elijah, 90, 91–­92, 96, 98
Vavrek, Royce, 15, 141 Waleson, Heidi, 153, 170
Venn, Edward, 13, 16, 17, 221–­40 Wallace, Stewart, 16, 245
ventriloquism, 140 Walton, William, 224
verbatim theater. See documentary theater; Ward, Stephen, 223, 226–­40, 242n22. See
testimony, theater of also That Man Stephen Ward (Hyde)
Vinay, Gianfranco, 271 Wardle, Deborah, 33
virtual agency of music, 118 Warner, Deborah, 222
virtual reality: blending with physical Waseda Talker no. 7 (robot), 53
reality, 109; and Eight (van der Aa), 45, water, 10, 154, 159, 160, 161–­62
47, 48–­51, 61, 62–­63; and Trillium series Water Concerto for Percussion (Tan), 155,
(Braxton), 113; and uncanniness, 49–­50, 162
61 Water Passion After St. Matthew (Tan), 10,
viscerality and Sokolović, 176–­78 155, 162
vocal cords, 36 The Waves (Woolf ), 12
vocal folds, 37 Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 223
vocality: and body as instrument in Weheliye, Alexander, 126
Tea (Tan), 10, 17, 161, 163–­65, 171; as Weill, Kurt, 90, 104
convergence of processes, 62; in Infinite Weir, Judith, 224
Now (Czernowin), 10, 17, 138, 143–­48, Weiss, Peter, 84
164, 268; in Sciarrino, 267, 275, 277, Weisstein, Naomi, 215
278–­79; and singing by machines, 17, Wenji (Lam), 172
45–­63; vocal materiality in Sokolović, Wesley, Richard, 199
17, 178, 181–­94; vocaloids, 46, 47, 57–­61, “What a Dream” (van der Aa), 64n20
62–­63. See also breath and breathy the whisper opera (Lang), 194
vocalizations whispering, 143–­48, 193–­94, 205

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white noise, 60–­61 WTC 9/11 (Reich), 68

White Snake Projects, ix, 14, 137 Wuorinen, Charles, 13, 16, 17–­18, 245–­63
Williams, Roderick, 6
Wilson, Robert, xi, 8, 10, 124 X (Davis), 14, 67, 112, 154, 199, 216–­17
wind, 159, 160 Xiaohua, Deng. See Can Xue
A Winter’s Tale (Wuorinen), 249 Xu, Weiwei, 132
witnessing, 78–­84, 103 Xu, Ying, 156
Wlodarski, Amy Lynn, 83–­84
Wolf, Naomi, 200–­201, 203 Yeager, Ruff, 200
Wolf Cub Village (Wenjing), 172 yellowface, 13, 152
women: Bulgarian women’s choirs, 179, Youker, Timothy, 76
181; and dark feminine in Lilith (Davis), young, avery r., 1
11, 12, 198–­217; femme fatale trope, 201; Young, Hilary Jean, 200
hysterical woman trope, 276; overview Young, Katherine, 137
of women composers, 15; reclamation of Young, Miriama, 55
women’s voices in contemporary opera,
203; subjectivity of in Czernowin, 176; Zaïde (Mozart), 134–­35
subjectivity of in Sokolović, 17, 176–­94; Zaïde/Adama (Czernowin), 134–­35
whore vs. mother dichotomy, 209–­11 Zeffirelli, Franco, 170
Woodley, Jacqueline, 179 Zeitlin, Judith T., 11, 186
Woolf, Virginia, 12 Zen Buddhism, 10, 159–­60
Wozzeck (Berg), 221–­22, 247, 248, 259, 260 Zhou, Long, 172
Writing to Vermeer (Greenaway), 8 Žižek, Slavoj, 277

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