Hèctor Parra: Hypermusic Prologue

[Tassilo]

Hèctor Parra (b. 1976):
Hypermusic Prologue, a projective opera in seven planes (2010)
Charlotte Ellett, soprano
James Bobby, baritone
Ensemble InterContemporain
Clement Power, conductor
Recorded June & October, 2009
Kairos 0013042KAI, (P) 2010

I’m writing not to review this hour-long opera or this performance but
simply to disseminate knowledge of their existence. To date the opera
has been performed in Paris and Barcelona in a production by set
designer Matthew Ritchie, who collaborated with Parra and Randall from
the beginning.

Hèctor Parra is a young Catalan composer who studied with the British
composer Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943), among others. I only recently
heard of Parra, whose Caressant l’horizon (2011) was included on a
Musica Viva program conducted by Emilio Pomaríco. If Caressant
l’horizon is derivative of anything, it’s derivative of Ferneyhough,
whose style is rooted in the most complex Stockhausen pieces of the
late 50’s and early 60’s. All I can say about Caressant l’horizon is
that I find its intricate chirping and gurgling post-Ferneyhough micro-
polyphony (and resorts to wispy post-Punkte violin harmonics, another
Ferneyhough trademark) very impressive, hence my curiosity about
Hypermusic Prologue.

The libretto of Hypermusic Prologue was written by Harvard physicist
Lisa Randall, whom Parra asked to collaborate with him after reading
her popularizing book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the
Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, “which uses plain language to describe
how hidden dimensions may explain some of physics’ greatest quandaries—
such as why the gravitational force is so weak.” (Randall, a
cosmologist, has posited the existence of certain hidden dimensions on
the basis of her study of string theory. As for me, I’ve long since
forgotten whatever Newtonian physics I may have learned in high
school, although a close friend of mine is a string theorist who’s
made valiant attempts to explain string theory to me.)

In composing the opera, Parra invented musical equivalents for the
physical parameters of space/time in Randall’s theories: “From the
very start when we began working with Lisa Randall on this project,
the development of the libretto was accompanied by the creation of an
extensive fabric of sound connections that structure a parallelism
between the music and her fascinating and suggestive physics model.”
It remains an open question to what extent the listener can be
expected to hear these equivalents as such and whether that matters.
One thing, at least, is immediately perceptible by the listener: the
digital modification, when it occurs, of the sounds produced by the
singers and instrumentalists: “With Lisa we agreed from the first
moment that the electronics in this opera would act as the fifth
dimension in the physical world, warping elements of a more standard
or a more natural sonic world—classical ways of singing or traditional
ways of playing instruments.”

In the opera, the soprano, a composer and scientist, imagines
experiencing other dimensions beyond the four we’re accustomed to,
thereby alienating the skeptical, mystified, and all too passionate
baritone, who is in love with her. The soprano’s sounds are digitally
modified in real time and space, surrounding the baritone, whose
singing is not transformed. As for the quality of the text itself, it
strikes me as naïve—although by no means too naïve to serve the
composer. At one point, for example, the soprano sings:

I will describe this strange landscape:
flesh out its properties,
deduce the geometry
that embraced me!
that I wandered through.
Let me understand the math.
How to compose my music,
Let me model this world!

There are several clips introducing Hypermusic Prologue on Youtube
including these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqEcitjWE_w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhFyhEzck8g

-Tassilo