Hold Your Breath

This summer marks the third act of my very sudden and intensive involvement in the world of opera! The invitation to join INO’s 20 Shots Project at the height of the pandemic in August 2020 took me by surprise as my experience was predominantly in choral writing. Luckily the project’s intention was to bring together a whole range of different Irish artists with varied backgrounds so I didn’t feel out of place at all. The duration length was also 5-6min, not a full scale opera! It was a joy to compose Rupture due to the stylistic freedom offered by INO - I wrote my own text and linked my piece to an existing body of work. This first ‘dip of the toe’ into the world of opera was incredibly rewarding. It was a joy to work with the INO team as well as meet a ream of new artists; singers, conductors, directors, designers etc.

Fast forward to April 2021 and the Rupture video pops up in the search for a composer for the third edition of the Bregenz Festival Opera Studio. Another email lands in, this time from a dramaturg working with the festival, looking to see if I’d be interested in working on a collaborative opera - a full scale one this time… I’m again surprised that I’m being approached with this size of opportunity due to my limited experience in the field. The premiere date however is 3 years away, there is time! The following three years would turn out to be extremely educational, and I’m finding it hard to believe that I’m now on the other side of it. Working on a full scale work (our final run time ended up being around 70min), over such a long period of time, in collaboration with artists living in different countries presented me with many challenges. I met with David Pountney, our director and librettist, and Hugo Canoilas, our visual artists, every 6 months or so to work on the piece and present our developments to the public through ‘insight’ events. These meetings were very important to give us goals to achieve as a group throughout the three year timeline, but I found myself at a loss comparatively during the time in-between once I would return home.

Re-enter Irish National Opera! I felt incredibly supported by INO during the course of this project, and being brought onto their Opera Studio in August 2021 proved invaluable. I went to see and hear more opera in the subsequent two years than I ever had before! I also now found myself with two opera commissions… Initially I thought it would be a great idea to separate them completely, two different operas around completely different themes, but that ended up being incredibly overwhelming. Going from one 5min filmed opera to two full evening’s worth in the space of a year was madness. Thankfully INO were very empathetic and patient, allowing me to mould my commission into a smaller sibling of the Bregenz opera. Thus Breathwork was born, a 20 min immersive piece involving 3 singers, pre-recorded musicians, electronics and only 10 audience members per viewing. The score utilised a selection of text from the Bregenz libretto but mainly focused on one text written by Abraham Cowley in the 17th century, Beware, O Cursed Land.

I am very proud of Breathwork as a standalone piece, but it also proved incredibly helpful as a litmus test for certain logistical and musical approaches to Hold Your Breath. The two operas have completely different visual landscapes but their soundscapes are similar. In both cases I have made a big effort to play with sound localisation and identification. The singers were not amplified in Breathwork, but their voices did appear in the underlying electronics jumping between all four corners of the room. The audience were also seated in a circle with the singers surrounding them, allowing for each audience’s visual and auditory experience to be slightly different from one another. Both the scale of the room and audience were much larger for Hold Your Breath but I wanted to achieve the very same thing; to play with the amplification location of each sound/singer/musician and allow for each audience member’s auditory experience to be different. I think this may have been more successful in Breathwork as in Hold Your Breath we had a combination of both seated and roaming audience. The scale of the venue in general was a big challenge with Hold Your Breath, and I don’t think the performance would have functioned without conductor Karen Ní Bhroin. Karen was brought on as a conductor and musical director for Breathwork, and although the final performances didn’t require a conductor in the room, Karen’s involvement was invaluable in rehearsals. I very quickly realised that her skill sets would be very necessary in the Bregenz production, and thankfully she was available and willing to jump on board.

The five week production period in the lead up to our premiere date in Bregenz could not have been more polar opposite an experience than the previous three years. I felt incredibly anxious any time I worked on Hold Your Breath in the confines of my Dublin studio space, but I couldn’t pinpoint why. Once I got to Bregenz and found myself in the rehearsal room with everyone I felt this huge sense of release. Finally, people in a room. I still had to supply scores well ahead of time so there wasn't much room to dramatically change any material five weeks out, but I did write the music with flexibility in mind. Text was added here and there, and we were able to shorten and lengthen sections to best serve the movement. My main takeaway from this dense project has been that I do not work well alone, over a long period of time, without stimulus. A small glimpse into the way Caroline Finn, our amazing choreographer, works with her dancers, creating ‘with’ them instead of ‘for’ them really showed me what type of environment I think I will thrive in going forward, regardless of the artform!