OPERA (2022) by Leonie Hermansen

From "A lifetime caste of judged people detail the human opera".

Premiered on June 12th of 2022 on PBS Australia
(Interview and premiere still up until September 12th)
https://www.pbsfm.org.au/program/the-sound-barrier

This is a proxy upload, buy the album on dead hound records unless you wanna give me your money directly.

Program notes:

Fixed media composition, roughly 80 Minutes

For computer, virtual orchestra + choir and synthesized soloists

A satirical glitch opera inspired by dreams, dread and the internet.

Dedicated to Bella Samuel, love you very much <3

Realized between May 20th - June 9th of 2022
Thank You. P*H 2022

Characters:
- Arbuckle (Soprano, Noisebox) a young bot
- Garfield (Alto, Angel choir) the demiurge, a wrathful deity
- Cantorbot (Bass/Baritone, sampled pop singer) direct communicator to Garfield
- Garbler, the Meshugganah (Wordless Tenor, Casio glitch) a confused bot who runs Bot-Bar
- Gerobot (Wordless singing) an old bot on his deathbed
- Churchbots (Pseudo-gregorian choir, 12tone-greg soloists)
- Monkbots and Nunbots with digital rölmö orchestra (Pseudo-tibetan monks and Nuns)

Composition by Paul* Hermansen
Libretto by Paul* Hermansen collaged from copypastas, bot generated text and Umair Haque articles

Regarding the Music:
Written and realised between May 20th and June 4th of 2022.
This piece was an exercise for me in balancing boredom with my typical chaotic, catastrophic style of composing. My teacher Gianluca Castelli always tells me that I have to use more boredom in my pieces to set up a contrast to the huge Nitschian excesses.
So I chose a rather long form and tried creating as much contrast as I could while I somehow try to retain some sense of cohesion.
The layers of contrast I can identify myself are: Unrealistic Digital vs. Hyperreal Sampled Sound; Minimalism, Spectralism and Drone vs. Serialism, Jazz and Glitch; Polytemporal vs. Atemporal; Harmonic vs. Inharmonic sounds in spectral-speak.
The focus on boredom enabled me to develop material at a glacial space and allowed for surprising developmental possibilities since when something happens over a long time you can get kinda drastic with it.
There are for example many hidden quarter tones in the arrangement but most of the time they’re not super noticeable because I often made the synth drones drift between neighbouring quarter tones over a stretch of many seconds or even minutes sometimes. This creates a slightly obscured, psychedelic bedding for the soloists and orchestra on which 12 tone melodies, minimalist language and spectral arias all feel more or less fitting.
Also this is the very first time I’ve ever written for piano in such a setting, actually often it’s 2 pianos offset by a quarter tone, with one playing a stretched canon to the other.
Another thing that really interested me was poly- and atemporality which is of course incredibly hard to realise live but an easy thing to pull off with a computer, synths and a digital orchestra.
A large part of the orchestral music had already been written before, lying around as sketches. I have also used parts of my compositions “Das Licht geht aus”, sketches for an upcoming 3rd string quintet and a few moments from my first string quintet “Erlöse mich!”.
Then I basically created the synthetic music and collaged the written pieces into there, made overdubs out of a sample session I did with Bela Pruscini playing a broken Casio keyboard, and wrote piano, percussion and some chamber parts using 12 tone technique.
I enjoyed the challenge of getting serial and modal minimalist music together somehow.
Often I used spectral language to mediate, because it allowed me to go out from the minimalist segments with modal harmony and then twist it within the overtone series until it becomes pantonal.

The vocal lines for the opera were either simple minimalist material, plugged from the string quintet sketches, generated through serialist processes or improvised. All of the voices are text-to speech apps, I mainly used Plogue Alter Ego although many online t2s engines were also used.

Here is an incomplete list of software used on this project:

Audacity (for Montage)
Musescore (for Chamber writing and sometimes crappy General Midi rendering)
Jim Singh software (for chaos)
Berna 2 (for Drones)
Orchidea (for Orchestrating non-tonal material)
Ableton Live/Max 4 Live (for generating sound objects and 12 tone orchestra parts)
Plogue Alter Ego (for vocal synthesis)
Various online vocal synths and sound applications
SPEAR (for spectral analysis and resynthesis)
Sonic Pi (for live coding in Act 3)
Max MSP (bell and large metal sounds)
Caotica (unpredictable audio fuckery)

No computers were harmed in the making of this recording.
No real instruments were used.

Bela Pruscini performed improvisatory noisebox and circuit bent Casio keyboard.
I then used parts of this 2-hour glitch session for the opera.

Regarding the plot:
Well, it’s not much of a plot is it?
I’ve been very interested in dream analysis these days, even though this opera was never dreamt up, it operates on a kind of irreal hypnagogic dream-logic that is hard to explain but I hope that it’s relatable and easy to feel.
In the monologue in the first act I used an Umair Haque article talking about humanity’s incapability to deal with the threat of climate change effectively because of our perceptual limitations as chimpanzees and the west’s utter ignorance in face of the issue, preferring to obsess over the lives of Hollywood actors and watching Propaganda ridden comic book movies made by a multi-million dollar industry that could be described as the advertisement section of the military-industrial complex.
So basically I’m trying to illustrate our non-understanding of impending catastrophe through a dreamy, illogical landscape with this bot-opera.

Also in preparation for the plot writing I read a lot of stories written by children which often go utterly bizarre.
My favourite one was the story about Jake, a toothbrush who aspired to become a lawyer for dinosaurs when he grew up. Written by a brilliant 8-year old, I should commission her for a libretto someday lol.

In a digital theocracy named Bot-bar, loosely based on abrahamic religions and tibetan buddhism, reside our bots, incapable of fixing or leaving their glitchy world and forced to first foresee and then experience the extinction event brought on by Garfield, the sadistic demiurge.
The way religious traditions magically recontextualise suffering has always interested me immensely and I’ve talked about it before with the album “Hermansen vs. Gott” but this time I’m really focussing on the idea of projecting the suffering of your kind onto an imagined other as we see it in antagonistic religious figures like the demiurge or satan in the abrahamic faiths or we see it contemporarily with conspiracy theories, usually antisemitic.
So yeah, this is a story about bots battling forces they are both powerless against and also incapable of even understanding, as they lose themselves in madness, fall into denial, peace out of the planet before shit hits the fan, dabble in escapism and watch as the world collapses.

PLOT:

Act 1 Scene 1: Glitches are happening in Bot-bar, the holy land of AI bots.
Glitches powerful enough to wipe out the entire bot population if not swiftly acted upon.
Arbuckle, a young bot is organising a protest warning about the upcoming extinction level event.
The Cantorbot, expert for metaphysical speculation is also there. The listening bots proceed to experience a logic glitch over the just learned information. They try to perform a system check.

Act 1 Scene 2: Even Cantorbot struggles with the sudden realisation of the world ending soon and sings an aria (at last I do believe), accidentally inviting Garfield, the vengeful demiurge into Bot-bar who joins the aria with a deafening cluster of angel voices.

Act 1 Scene 3: The young bots around Arbuckle are still trying to process the news of a cataclysmic event unfolding as they are speaking as they have a mental breakdown about the famous nonsensical copypasta “why do they call it oven when you off in the cold food off out hot eat the food” while trying to figure out their mode of action in the catastrophe (select your alter ego). At the end of this scene Garfield once again joins in, injecting themselves into the youth movement.
This is the ending of Act 1

Act 2 Scene 1: Cantorbot is in the holy place singing a holy song. (Cantorbot Aria)

Act 2 Scene 2: As Cantorbot recites, Garbler the Meshugganah arrives visibly agitated and speaks nonsense. After minutes Cantorbot finally understands what is happening: Garbler is trying to tell him to come along with him because Gerobot, an old senile bot is dying. They flee the scene.

Act 2 Scene 3: They arrive at Gerobot’s deathbed. He has a wordless aria and dies.
Young bots lament his death in chinese. Cantorbot is trying to arrange a spontaneous funeral, a few churchbots fade in and out of reality to provide some choral music, sadly the Monkbots who Cantorbot wanted to come are still too far away and have trouble downloading themselves to the location.

Act 2 Scene 4: As all this is happening, Garfield possesses the body of Arbuckle and forces her to ingest copious amounts of ketamine.
Arbuckle is dissociating as her singing voice is hijacked by Garfield and turned into a ridiculous alto, complete with dissociated angel choir, mocking the Cantorbot’s aria melody.

Act 2 Scene 5: Cantorbot finds the intoxicated Arbuckle, realises it’s Garfield demonically possessing her and performs an exorcism by reciting his holy aria.
The first monkbots finally arrive as they start to assemble a large brass-heavy ritual orchestra. This is the ending of Act 2.

Act 3 Scene 1: The young bots around Arbuckle lament their beloved home (domicile adoré) by singing Do Mi Si La Do Re as Monk bots slowly download one by one.

Act 3 Scene 2: Garfield descends from the heavens in bot-form and sings a mocking pop song about how they have given up Botkind once and for all now and is going to wipe them out. Garfield keeps messing up the tune because they’re an idiot god.
As Garfield switches back into angel mode, a single monk bot (represented by a Chang fo Ji) starts singing a Mantra.

Act 3 Scene 3: Many more Monkbots arrive and join in with the monk singing Mantras as we can hear digital waves crashing, computer-fire and data-thunder.

Act 3 Finale: Cantorbot sings over the bots (The light goes out) before scattering to save his ass while the monks sit surrounded by the digital ocean. For the last time before fading out to heaven he screams out “THE LIGHT GOES OUT!” as the Monkbots’ orchestra plays a last huge explosion and we are left with an open, unsatisfied feeling drifting in a polytonal fog.

Tracklist

1.	A1S1 Frogs	5:55

2.	A1S2 System check	6:58

3.	A1S3 Aria 1 at last I do believe	6:15

4.	A1S4 Aria 2 why do they call it oven	11:29

5.	A2S1 Prayer	4:03

6.	A2S2 Garbler aria	2:32

7.	A2S3 Gerobot's deathsong and funeral	5:46

8.	A2S4 Aria 3 I have just snorted ketamine	11:23

9.	A3S1 Domicile adoré	4:46

10.	A3S2 Garfield's mocking aria	3:23

11.	A3S3 Monkbots	8:30

12.	A3S4 The light goes out (Finale)	7:21

Credits

released June 10, 2022

Bela Pruscini - Soloist on Noisebox and circuit bent Casio keyboard.

Paul* Hermansen - Composition, computer, production.

License

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.