Word: parra
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...been lost on the crowd, the opera itself was certainly appreciated by the audience. The event incorporated videos of the original production, as well as musical recordings featuring the vocal talents of soprano Charlotte Ellett and baritone James Bobby. These multimedia elements enlivened the discussion with concrete examples of Parra and Randall’s collaborative efforts...
...demonstrated by these recordings, Parra found innovative ways of approaching physics as a musical subject. As the son of a physics professor, he was anxious to integrate his varied interests through this project. Throughout the panel, Parra described how he thought about “warping” music—manipulating elements like tempo and pitch to alter the “mass” of any given note or dilate the listener’s sense of temporality. The resulting sound he produced is quite unique—unsettling, arrhythmic, and as inscrutable as the hidden dimensions that...
Beyond his musical compositions, Parra worked tirelessly to make the opera’s lyrics feel novel. After the soprano crosses into the fifth dimension, her text was translated into what Parra described as “a free language, a multi-dimensional language.” This new tongue—which Parra himself developed specifically for this project—classifies sounds according to unusual parameters...
...specific musical notation instructed the vocalists whether to sing with a breathy or pressed voice, falsetto or fry voice, and how to position their jaws. These guidelines produce unfamiliar timbres of the human voice, which Parra then paired with unintelligible bits of sound, mostly strangled syllables and throaty gurgles that were at once alienating and captivating...
This alteration to the soprano’s text played a crucial role in demonstrating the communicative difficulties between the opera’s two characters—how do two people interact when they are in entirely separate worlds? Parra offered a succinct answer: “It was clear you couldn’t do this with typical classical music...