Speechless opera by Cat Hope

Abstract

Speechless is a wordless, animated notation opera intended as a personal response to the experiences of refugees around the world. The opera premiered at the Perth Festival in 2019 and the performance at the Ligeti Festival was the European premiere of the chamber concert edition. The starting point for the opera was Hope's observation of the political response to the Australian Human Rights Commission's 2014 report "The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention". A close examination of this document and the damning facts it contained inspired a radical idea for a libretto about the voicelessness of asylum seekers and refugees seeking protection. Rather than setting the words to music on the 315 pages, as one would expect from an opera, the material was extracted from the account to create an animated, graphic score. Colour schemes, drawings, tables and photos from the report were copied and manipulated to create the score, leaving the singers without words. In this way, the score provides the libretto and the music at the same time. The opera is responsive to the environment and people in each place where it is performed, but the soloists are always women or non-binary people preferably from different cultural backgrounds.

The animated digital score of the opera was both a central system of cues and controls for all the various parts such as lighting, spatialization and video as well as the distributor of individually animated parts to the musicians, diffusion engineer, live electronics musician and lighting operator. The original parts of the animated score were created in Illustrator but with help from Python script programming by Aaron Wyatt, the score and parts were distributed in Decibel ScorePlayer to individual players’ iPads via AirDrop. The music features long, pulseless tones, and as such many 'lines' feature in the score. The Decibel ScorePlayer facilitates reading this information as music notation. The score is made up of a range of colours (as parts). Performers choose a pitch, but the movement of that pitch is described in the score. In addition, the conductor is required to guide the musicians in their interpretation of the score, giving them cues and breath marks for entry as well as shaping the content of musical lines.