She

She is a chamber opera about an inner life. Where larger operas tend to externalise their conflicts - kingdoms, families, public catastrophes - She stays inside one woman's imagination, watching the way thought, memory and longing rearrange themselves over the span of an evening. The piece is a study, not a narrative: it accumulates rather than progresses.

The instrumentation was chosen to give the opera a strange, hovering acoustic that does not quite settle. At its centre is the theremin, the only standard instrument that is played without being touched. Its glissando, controlled by the proximity of the player's hands to the antennae, is closer to the voice than to a keyboard, and like the voice it is impossible to fix in tune; it slides between pitches in a way that mirrors the way memory itself slides. Around it, a prepared piano with a Magnetic Resonator Piano [MRP] system gives long, sustained, organ-like resonances that ordinary piano notes cannot. The voices - soprano, tenor, baritone, and a small chamber choir - move across this surface.

The opera was written for the Fabbrica - Young Artist Development Program of Opera di Roma, which I won in 2017, and was premiered at the Teatro Nazionale in Rome in October of that year. In the same year, in collaboration with Hans-Peter Gasselseder, She became one of the first complete operas to be documented as a 360° 3D virtual-reality recording with full third-order ambisonic spatial audio. Gasselseder's set-up uses an "unmixing" paradigm to focus on or isolate individual voices in the recorded field, so a listener wearing headphones can move their head inside the performance and have the soundscape recompose itself around them.

I see She as the immediate predecessor to Croak (2017-18, with Markku Klami) - both written close together, both recorded in VR ambisonics, both interested in what the operatic form can hold once you stop assuming the orchestra has to be in front of you and the audience has to sit still.