Output details

My Mother Told Me Not to Stare

An opera for children. Composition of 90' operatic score to text written by Finegan Kruckemeyer.

Commissioned jointly by Theatre Hullabaloo and Action Transport Theatre following a colloquium at the 2008 TakeOff Festival, Harry composed the music for his children’s opera, My Mother Told Me Not To Stare (MMTMNTS), to a libretto by Finegan Kruckemeyer. MMTMNTS exploits Harry’s concept of ‘opera devising ensembles’, drawing on techniques from physical-based theatre (Complicité, DV8, KneeHigh), where the composition emerges out of the physical and musical characteristics of a performance group. Each performer in the MMTMNTS ensemble was chosen for their ability to sing, play an instrument, be a children’s theatre actor, and, by the final stages of production, manipulate puppets. A central research question for Harry’s work was how to unify the various ‘voices’ of this core ensemble. At the same time, the opportunity to compose for a devising ensemble of professional musicians enabled Harry to develop a number of compositional techniques explored in his instrumental works. Scene 2 unfurls a pitch sieve (after late Xenakis) that serves as a reference point for future scenes. Scene 3 introduces a harmonic sequence subjected to recursive chord multiplication processes (after Boulez) in Scenes 5 and 10. The Prologue interrogates different approaches of articulating musical time (through concepts of ‘cloud’, ‘chord-pylon’ and canon that were developed with children in outreach workshops); and Scenes 2, 4, 9 and 10 integrate live performance with a backing score (recorded for the second production and future CD release at Air Studios in London). The original version of MMTMNTS lasted 90 minutes. After its highly-acclaimed premiere in 2010, it toured nationally giving 43 performances in 22 venues. A second version of MMTMNTS was then commissioned with funding from Arts Council England. The two productions reached a total of 2,931 people, with a further 800 six- to eight-year-old children benefitting from the accompanying workshops.

My Mother Told Me Not To Stare was the result of a sustained period of work, from 2009 to July 2012. The project required Harry to attend auditions for two productions, a process that took six months. He acted as producer for the opera’s backing tracks (the second of which was recorded at Air Studios in London). The entire opera was recomposed in 2011 for its second tour. The opera hence meets panel criteria for double-weighting in terms of the production of an output that required a particularly complex and extensive period of workshop and studio practice.