Ataraxia

for soprano and electronics

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My vision for Ataraxia arose in the winter of 2016 while I was studying ancient Greek philosophy in Edinburgh. I was writing on Heraclitus and a dissertation on Plato’s metaphysics. The piece was originally intended for my debut release alongside Wormhole and Dionysus under my former stage name Omelas on Possible Futures, the personal label of Paulo Reachi, former curator of Berlin Atonal. Acute appendicitis upended this. In the fallout, I also dropped out of a pre-doctoral research program on Neoplatonism.

I revisited the work during my doctorate in composition and music technology at my alma mater the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and premiered an early version on Ableton Push 2 at the Dark Mofo Festival in 2018. In finishing it eight years after its conception for a release alongside The World Between Worlds on Neuma Records in 2024, this is the longest period that I have so far spent with a piece. My reference points were not musical, but visual and philosophical. My goal was to remain true to my original vision based on Plato’s cosmology in Timaeus. I let my imagination flow into the viewpoint of the Demiurge’s geometrically-designed and teleological creation of the world. William Blake’s frontispiece to The Song of Los, which depicts Urizen kneeled before a world in decay, provided visual sustenance.

In this creation of the world—a living, breathing, and dying thing like humankind and sound—wind and water juxtapose the sounds of civilization in a flux of growth and decay. As a wave of the ocean, humankind—represented in the processed trumpet, piano, and cymbal—comes then goes, but our traces remain. Using volume as a physical, not just musical sensation, the superimposing of partial, implied, and contradictory processes progresses with a linear, goal-driven thrust. All-receiving and partaking, the Soprano is here as Plato’s “third kind”, the receptacle between Being and Becoming through which all opposites and combinations of opposites arise. And with her breath comes the approach of “deinon”, that which is terrifying and wondrous simultaneously, and the essence of tragedy. Within the opera’s dramatic context, this may be so grasped:

Frontispiece to The Song of Los by William Blake (1795)

This piece expresses the transience and permanence of humanity within the cosmological. The sound of a hand continues after death.

 

 

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