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74 Degrees North : Full Opera Score

74 Degrees North is a chamber opera that combines live instrumental and vocal music with a live and pre-recorded electroacoustic score. Beginning with an electroacoustic installation exploring arctic sounds and recordings that surrounds the audience, the opera flickers into life with my orchestral score commenting upon and developing the electro-installation’s gestures and themes. Harmony and line is governed by gesture throughout. Structurally, my score is constructed using Fibonacci numbers to decide musical climaxes and harmonic changes. Also, a slow-moving, ever-descending and transposing harmony (harmonic fields of groups of hexachords) is set against a whirlwind of virtuosic chromatic passages throughout. In my imagination, this represents both the melting snow and the psychological state of the main protagonist.

Towards the end of the work (page 92 onwards) the music disintegrates and the harmony breaks apart as the protagonist laments upon his journey. Here, stasis and harmonic repetition is the driving force of the musical discourse, and at the very end, the harmony breaks down completely as harmonic glissandi in the stings lead the music into silence with only the human voice remaining. For me, this musical collapse represents the collapse of the psychological state of the protagonist, Andrew and, as the music freezes in time, so does he, literally