Electric Dreams: a historic opera
- Submitting institution
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University of Southampton
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 20336284
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Electric Dreams is an opera that interrogates hybridization through cultural and temporal collision. The research develops the combination of 12-tone melodies with funk beats (“Round Two”); easy listening renditions of late romantic symphonic slow movements (“Wake Up Call”); ‘modernist’ fragmentations of 1980s rock and pop classics (“Round Three”); and recitative with synth-pads and field-recordings. The dramatic premise of Electric Dreams is the confusion of the protagonist (actor) with their location (time and place); uncertainty as to what is real, staged or imagined; and the absence of a rationale. Rather than simply recreating a representation of confusion, the work employs disorientating strategies to create a corresponding sense of bewilderment in the audience. The overly literal answers delivered by the Bass-God in the recitative scenes further a sense of meaning being withheld. As in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled, David Lynch’s film Mullholland Drive and Jennifer Walshe’s performance piece The Total Mountain, the opera consists of discrete but easily comprehensible scenes while resisting straightforward or singular comprehension as a whole to open up a multiplicity of interpretations with regard to its narrative and themes. Situated within a tonal landscape, the work extends practice in the sphere of what Graham Hair has termed ‘post-atonal tonality’ through the use of microtones (“Weather Channel”) and parallel major-seventh harmonic progressions (“Coffee Advertisement”); montage (“Channel Flicking Combination”); incongruent layering (“Opening”); and incorporation of field recordings (“Seaside Scenes”). Opposing Fredric Jameson’s infamous and dogmatic 1991 critique of the superficiality and commodification of postmodern art, the work is informed by ‘over identification’ as a means of researching ambiguous and provocative relationships between criticality and affirmation, and by post-critical models that seek to complexify rather than demystify and positively assert new creative potentialities that meaningfully engage and introduce new ways of thinking about contemporary experience.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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