Why Poets? Gerard Pape at Sound Scotland

Carl Faia has been collaborating on an opera project with composer Gerard Pape to be premiered this Wednesday at the Woodend Barn in Sound, Scotland’s Festival of New Music Scotland Festival. Brunel Alumnus, Oliver Doyle — last year’s recipient of the Jonathan Harvey Sonic Arts Prize — has been assisting the team in preparing the new work.

Pape writes about the opera:

POURQUOI DES POETES ? (WHY POETS ?) is the first opera from my four opera-cycle-in-progress SUNSET TIME. In this opera, the poet (Hölderlin) and the philosopher (Heidegger) speak of our time as the time of the ʻevening of the worldʼ. Things have reached such a state in our world that we don’t even realize what we have lost. All seems normal to us, even excellent, in our time of great technological progress. We are headed towards a spiritual and cultural abyss and we don’t even know it. Therefore, it is the task of the poet to explore the abyss, to tell the others what it is and how it might be overcome.

Especially developed for this opera is my “halo harmony live electronics”. The goal, thanks to these innovative live electronics, developed in collaboration with Carl Faia at Art Zoyd Studios — commissioners of the work — is to be able to shape the macro-form of the opera’s composition by literally acting upon the sound environment that encloses a live theatrical performance. By creating a variable virtual space-time-timbre as a “halo” around the live performers, the hope is that the public will have an enriched experience of the music via these halo-harmony live electronics that do not just decorate the surface of the music, but which extend the music into the depths of the space-time wherein the public experiences the “live” performance.