This is a chamber opera for five voices, an orchestra of ten instruments, and computer-generated sound. I started work on this in the summer of 1994, completing the libretto collaboratively with its main author, my wife Dr. Suzanne Rahn, and developing the software that enabled composing the computer-music Overture and computer-music part to the First Narration. In 1995, I wrote music for voices and orchestra that brings the total work done to date to over 40 minutes of music, perhaps one third or one fourth of the whole. The opera was completed in 2000.
A long-forgotten Victorian author, Lucy Clifford has attracted recent critical attention (particularly from feminists) for the power and psychological horror of her fairy tales for children. In ªThe New Mother,º two children live happily with their mother in a cottage in the woods, till a gypsy girl tempts them into naughtiness, telling them that she will show the little dancing man and woman in her box only to really naughty children. Itching with curiosity, the children set out to be disobedient, and each day the gypsy assures them that they have not yet been naughty enough. Their mother warns them, in tears, that if they persist, she will have to leave them-- ªand send home a new mother, with glass eyes and a wooden tail.º But the gypsy girl makes light of this threat, and in a frantic attempt to win her approval, the children embark on a rampage of destruction. Weeping, their mother walks away from the cottage and does not return. And that night the new mother comes, her glass eyes flashing, smashing down the front door with her wooden tail. The terrified children flee into the forest. Sometimes, in the darkness, writes Clifford, they creep back to the cottage to watch and listen; ªsometimes a blinding flash comes through the window, and they know it is the light from the new mother's glass eyes, or they hear a strange muffled noise, and they know it is the sound of her wooden tail as she drags it along the floor.º
The story, which employs a remarkable knowledge of child psychology to bring to life a child's worst nightmares, is fascinating to the adult reader. Like many folktales, it uses fantasy to express the unspeakable--the fear and loathing linked inextricably with the mother-child relationship. It evokes the ideal of Victorian motherhood, only to transform the mother into a monster. ªThe New Motherº can be read as a revelation of a mother's deep ambivalence toward her children--as a parable of the Fall--as a vision, inspired by industrial technology, of the ªnew motherº of the twenty-first century. Today, when so many questions are being raised about violence in the home, the future of the family, the causes and long-term effects of child abuse, the role of the mother, and the nature of parenting itself, ªThe New Motherº seems more topical than ever.
The technical side of the project is at this point mostly well-achieved, but partly speculative. I have been composing works using sound generated digitally in software for many years, and since around 1988 I have been using a Lisp environment I wrote called the Lisp Kernel, which has over the years developed into a powerful and flexible composing environment, and one within which I can comfortably work on large projects. Most recently (1992-4) I completed a 48-minute long ªsymphonyº in two parts called Sea of Souls (1. Sea, 2. City). This work has been presented at the International Computer Music Conference in Denmark in 1994, and the Spanish national computer music conference in 1995, leaving me ready for another large project.
The speculative part of the technical side involves the integration during performance of the live acoustic sources with the precomposed electronically produced sounds. There are several ways to approach this. Ideally, it would at some point involve devising algorithms so that a digital soundfile could be ªconductedº along with the live performers, using some instrument such as a dataglove. Dr. Duisberg, formerly at the UW School of Music, has developed such a dataglove conductor and its software, with an intended use using MIDI technology (as have some others elsewhere). My idea, still to be developed, is to write software to stretch or compress more complex precalculated audio soundfiles in a graceful, musical way so that the file can be played back at tempo varying minutely, in time with the live performers, according to the directions of the (live) conductor who will be wearing the dataglove. This will allow the real-time interactive performance of sounds which are much more complex than is possible using MIDI technology. Unfortunately, all of the compressed sound representations known to me now, such as those based on a "noise plus harmonic component" analysis and resynthesis, do not represent the very complex sounds I am creating with sufficient fidelity. If anyone knows of some killer algorithm, please do let me know! I do know about the UCB and Serra work, but may not be current about it.
One alternative is to have the sounds generated in real time by software running on some computer much faster than the usual workstation. Within the next year some such technical alternative to precalculated soundfiles may become feasible. Or, I may end up playing the existing sound back in the usual inflexible manner.
As for the singing and the orchestra, I needed to find a style that would contrast dramatically with the initial computer music of the opera, which sets an eerie, sinister, otherworldly tone. My strongest criterion was to write music which the singers would find idiomatic for their instrument, that is, the voice and its tradition. As the opera progresses, there is a dramatic working-out of the tension between these two poles, and a melding and transformation of the whole that reflects and amplifies the story being told.