Although many opera libretti are based on novels and short stories, only a few have used a science-fiction story as their main subject. The first opera of the Japanese composer Dai Fujikura was written in 2013–14 to a libretto by Saburo Teshigawara and is developed from Stanisław Lem's acclaimed novel Solaris (1961). By analysing passages from the score, this article will explore both the different strategies used by the composer and his librettist to create a new version of the story and the ways in which they have renewed the genre of opera.

In this transcription of an interview between the former Editor of New Music at BBC Radio 3 and the composer Justin Connolly, Connolly discusses his life as a composer. He traces his development from childhood to studies at the Royal College of Music and Yale University and the influence of the composer Roberto Gerhard. Connolly's Poems of Wallace Stevens IV, his most recent work at the time of the interview, is considered in particular detail. The interview took place at the former British Music Information Centre in Stratford Place, London on 14 April 1993. TEMPO gratefully acknowledges the work of the Estate of Justin Connolly in transcribing the interview and permitting its publication.

This article describes a design process for a composition system based upon the quarter-tone scale. As the semitone and quarter-tone scales share the same properties, a musical grammar based upon the former is used as a model to construct an analogous musical grammar based upon the latter. Within the scope of diatonic modal music, the organisation of pitches and durations is analysed from a scientific perspective. Several parameters are taken into consideration: scale, mode, chord, cadence, metre and rhythm. The one-to-one mapping of each facet of diatonic modality onto quarter-tonality results in diahemitonic modality.

This article investigates the prolific deployment of images in Pascal Dusapin's scores of the mid to late 1990s. Using Edwin Gordon's concept of ‘audiation’ and Siglind Bruhn's concept of ‘musical ekphrasis’, as well as Neal Curtis’ ideas on the agency and liveness of images, interdisciplinary interpretations of three Dusapin works are offered, using the score image as the main analytical starting point. Beginning with his Piano Études and Loop, these analyses will demonstrate how the score images, derived from the study of ‘catastrophe theory’, prefigure the control of various musical parameters relating to the relationship of variables in this mathematical concept and its forms. An analysis of String Quartet No. 4, notable for its use of both a score image (of a machine) and textual quotation (from Samuel Beckett's Murphy), will then demonstrate how the visual can interact with the verbal to construct a plurality of musical metaphors. The article concludes by positing that Dusapin's elusiveness on the role and function of the images within his work could amount to what W. T. J. Mitchell describes as ‘ekphrastic fear’: an anxiety that the composer's success amalgamating image and music might have broken down the ontological boundary between them.

This article focuses on three recent works by the American composer Michael Hersch: the script of storms (2018), for soprano and orchestra, the chamber opera Poppaea (2019) and the 11-hour trilogy of works that have the overall title sew me into a shroud of leaves (2001–16). A discussion of aspects of these three scores will consider Hersch's deployment of a stylistically consistent musical language, his involvement with the work of the writers Fawsi Karim and Christopher Middleton and his articulation of often substantial spans of time.

The world of opera is well known as a professional community in which egos often clash, yet the complexity of the operatic artwork is often heavily dependent on collaborative practice. This article discusses the co-creative dynamics that gave rise to the premiere production of the comic opera Je suis narcissiste, by composer Raquel García-Tomás, librettist Helena Tornero and stage director Marta Pazos. Through a series of interviews with this artistic team, and a scrutiny of the libretto, score and documentary video recording of its premiere, three significant features of this collaboration are flagged, particularly in Act VIII. These are: a quest for balance in the convergence of the disciplines involved; a mitigation of undesired redundancies in the representation of some elements in the action of the opera; a consideration of the capacity of the human and material resources available for the premiere. The article will also discuss how these anticipatory strategies helped to optimise time during rehearsals.

This article scrutinises the composer Jonathan Harvey's remark that ‘most of my colleagues see me as wearing two hats: one a church music composer's, the other an avant-garde instrumental/electronic composer's. I wish I could say it was one hat. I think of all my music as sacred in a sense.’ The article considers Harvey's church and concert works as linked worlds in order to propose a more holistic appreciation of his stylistic and technical innovations and that, far from being occasional pieces, his music for the church played an active role in the development of the composer's language, in part because singing was a formative experience for Harvey, and in part because collaborative work with choirs, church musicians and associated artists and thinkers was so frequently fertile. Based on the composer's own notes to the author, the article concludes with an account of the composition process involved in the creation of Plainsongs for Peace and Light (2012), a work for unaccompanied mixed choir or 16 solo voices, which the composer described as ‘elaborations’ of chant.

In her two recent operas, Heart Chamber (2017–19) and Infinite Now (2015–16), Chaya Czernowin uses vocal ensembles to embody a single character. In a 2016 article, she explained that she wanted to liberate the individual voice from its fixed emotional, social and individual conventions (especially its ingrained pathos), and to work with the voice as a free imaginative sonic material, using the ensemble technique to achieve this. This article argues that the voice ensemble technique amplifies and intensifies the pathos of the voice rather than eliminating it. Recognising that the voice has strong somatic qualities since it is produced in the body, I suggest a material-musical analysis, based on the theories of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Brian Massumi, that focuses on the body, the sensual experience and the physical space, and rejects the hermeneutic tradition that refers to meaning and interpretation only. What emerges is that the voices, instrumentation and electronics of the ensemble are designed to embody the inner body and the outer space at the same time. The voice ensemble may split and produce multi-layered mental–physical states, and express how traditional dichotomies, such as culture/nature, body/mind and subject/object, can meld into multi-perspective processual movements. It is in this intersection of sound and drama, manifesting the corporeal, that the unique power of opera is evinced.

This article does not attempt to paint a complete picture of Michael Wolters (b.1971) as composer, teacher or researcher. Rather, it is a collection of comments and reflections drawn from a number of recent conversations with him. In these conversations we considered the work he has produced across his career, with a particular focus on his ideas about conceptual working, his outsider position and the essential part that accessibility plays in his creative decision-making.

This article traces the creative process of six to five, a work for 20 guitarists with a special role for the conductor, premiered by the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp's guitar ensemble. The piece was commissioned by the author from the American composer Jessie Marino as part of research into the role of the instrumentalised conductor. The article explores the ways in which Marino deployed the conductor to meet her artistic goals, testing at each step the extent to which her utilisation rises to the level of instrumentalisation. Applying political theories offered by, among others, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the article also considers the extent to which Marino deployed the conductor as a tactical leader in both the rehearsal process and the performance of six to five.

This article provides an overview of compositional practices that invoke representations of the human voice by acoustic means, without the presence of actual human speakers, and, in identifying the limitations and deficiencies of extant practice, proposes a new method or methodological basis for achieving the same phenomenon, to different ends. Clarence Barlow's seminal synthrumentation method forms a central point of discussion; when considered alongside the work of, among others, Mayuzumi, Grisey and Ablinger, it becomes clear that, in existing synthrumental (or instrumental synthesis) practices, the innate inharmonic components of target material for reproduction have largely been discarded or overlooked. After a brief overview of the basic linguistic and perceptual features of speech, a new method designed to evoke whispered speech, with inharmonicity in mind, is demonstrated.

The education and outreach departments that coordinate community and participation projects have become a ubiquitous component of opera houses in the UK over the last 40 years yet rarely do their productions appear on the main stage. This article considers recent projects run by Opera North, English National Opera, Opera Holland Park and Glyndebourne and asks whether opera houses are genuinely committed to connecting communities with opera or treat outreach as no more than a means of obtaining funding. The article explores the history of the development of outreach departments and the potential that community involvement offers as a revitalising force for the operatic artform. A series of interviews with opera professionals brings the debate up to date.

This article discusses the use of extended techniques by Luciano Berio (1925–2003), focusing on his Sequenza XIV, for cello, finished in 2002. Our analysis attempts to demonstrate how Berio uses new ways of playing the instrument to create a kind of polyphony. The article references a large number of writings by Berio himself, including sketches, drafts and early manuscripts of Sequenza XIV, including exchanges between the composer and Rohan de Saram, for whom he wrote the piece.