The Summoning. An opera in three acts
The Summoning is an Opera in three acts detailing the events of the last evening in the life of the inventor, Nikola Tesla. Taking place in the infamous room, 3327 of the New Yorker hotel, the story unfolds around a last supper where Tesla summons two guests in an attempt find a willing participants to be entrusted with secrets and to carry on the genius’ unfinished work. All this he must convince his audience of before the rapidly approaching hour of his death silences his attempts eternally.
One invitation is given to a New York journalist who has followed his career to the point of sycophantizing his brilliance. The second invitation to a charismatic and bright inventor in his prime, a mirror of Tesla, whose identity presents an increasingly attenuated and complex facade throughout the evening; facts that Tesla seems to know and is suppressing for the right moment.
When what appears to be a failed murder transpires before the evening’s festive ritual begins the excitement of the evening turns to a scene of unsettling and nervous crisis as Tesla hurries to to elucidate the details of his haunting past and convince them of the work they must now finish. Tesla, desperate to compel an argument for the ethics of a society whose reality will be slowly effaced over the course of the proceeding generations by the emergence of technological possibility, progressively deteriorates throughout the evening as the memories of his life flashing as scenes, turn in on themselves; His witnesses slowly transforming from guests to hostages.
Conceived as a post-human opera, the narrative of the libretto’s text centers around the juxtaposition of imagination and digitally projected reality; of genius and insanity. Tesla, a man who had a rural and religious upbringing, holds a vision of creating heaven through technology; the preservation of life and consciousness eternally housed in the recyclable machine. Tesla’s desired goal; to be the creator and possessor of one’s idiosyncratic universe.
If ever there was a figure in history who made the natural world bend to the imagination, it was Nikola Tesla. Research for the project was extensive, drawing on factual accounts of Tesla’s life, as well as his journals and accounts. Post-human philosophy, the rise of digital oligarchs, and the alternate reality of the metaverse were integrated and subsumed with Tesla’s accounts and life to recreate world view in which the opera navigates its ethical propositions.
Originally proposed as a commission by Magdelene Minnaar(artistic director of Cape Town Opera), the idea for the opera stemmed from a discussion about Offenbach’s ‘doll song’ aria, in which the enrapturing voice of the coloratura doll motivates a psychological reading of the scene; We must question to whom does this voice belong? Robotics and artificial intelligence possess a major standing in constructing the narrative of The Summoning. As such, the question in which consciousness might be secured through ‘digital’ realities, and thus interpret a religious expectation —the afterlife, or the ‘true-life’, free of pain and poverty— might become a tangible reality afforded by technology. The other side of that equation is simply, is this will, or a forced parody for the semblance of life? The debate surrounding digital reality dates back to at least Plato’s cave. At the heart of the story is a trans-generational, diachronic murder mystery, playing out in flashbacks of ominous forests, and idyllic village life. The dramatic tone set is of an infused style; The amalgamation between classic film noir and Fritz Lang-esque futurism. Both genre’s concomitantly came to age during the final years of Nikola Tesla. Similarly, Art Deco and the retrofutrisim of Steam Punk inspire the set, costume design and character profiles.
The harmony deployed in the opera is consciously aware of the reflections of its musical counterpart; high-modernism and its allusion to Straussian angularity, or Bergian romanticism or perhaps even Debussian lucid expressionism. Despite the awareness of such influences, the sound-world of the opera has been conceived as contemporary, avoiding anachronistic designations. Former modes of language have been processed through composer Jonathan Blair’s particular conceptualizations of modeled geometric transformations and synthetic scale construction. The effect is both evocative, fresh and nostalgic.
Similarly, the orchestration employs what Blair has developed for several years through his own work. Namely, ‘micro-orchestration’ which takes advantage of the inherent structures of instruments that may be manipulated to override the natural sound of instruments. Microtonal colorings of the cylindrical tubing of woodwind instruments, mixture of voice and brass instruments to create granular distortions, or employing a collection of harmonics, trills, and bowing’s to create novel timbral modes of impressioned ‘sound-painting’ are examples of how delicate sounds pair together to create the elemental sound sources of the world of The Summoning. The use of electronic instruments is equally central to the opera’s taste palette, by both manipulating, augmenting and/or re-ordering phenomenon of the natural acoustic series (both in instruments and voice), and also as a representation of the idealized sound order; The orchestra attempting to replicate the distortions of tape degradations, analogue artifacts and synthesized saturations. From this perspective, acoustic instruments sounding electronic, and electronic instruments extending the natural aspects of acoustic instruments, a reciprocal nature of lost identity correlates analogously to the opera’s dramatic themes.
Vocalization of the opera’s text was rigorously developed to ensure that the voice maintained supremacy in a production that is attempting to push conceptions of traditional opera. Blair conceived and developed an outline sketch of the libretto after 6 months of research, in 2019 and continued to edit throughout 2020 after discussions with colleagues and mentors. With a sketch that detailed the operas main plots to the conclusion, Blair made a conscious decision to invite professionals from a closely related discipline, ultimately outside of opera; the theater world. The reason for that decision was to initially focus the text to read as a play. Director Paul Griffins worked closely with the composer for several months to develop the internal motivations of the characters, the formal progression of scenes, and the interactive symbolism between the visual and narrative signifiers. With a new draft and storyboard, the material was then passed on to Jaco Griessel, to write a script based on the work and sketches to that point. In addition to creating logical transitions in the discussion to lead the characters through the main events of the evening, Griessel was also responsible for providing verisimilitude to the way the characters spoke for their time and geographical orientation spanning late 19th century Serbia to mid 20th century New York. When the script was finished, and the writing team agreed upon its workability as a play, Blair set to marking the text with possible entries of Aria fragments, duets, trios, internal thoughts that could be poeticized, and dramaturgy that was better underscored by film-esque support. Blair adapted the text so that musicality became a contending force with the drama. Meticulous care was taken to ensure the authenticity of the script retained its identity in the transformation of the text to meet musical demands.
The composer then took 3 weeks to set the text to the singing voice. During this process he conceived of several hierarchical notational system to emphasize the importance of particular aspects of emphasis in the vocal lines over others. Words that are completely declaimed attempt to keep the full inflection of the speaking prose, including the accent’s of the characters. Their rhythmic profile is shown by a headless notation as to encourage the ad libitum momentum of free speech. Here the orchestra acts as ‘soundtrack’ to a film scene, undulating only at abstractly related paces. Another level envisions the text as a sprechtgesang, in which pitches are reached for, but their execution is not focused nor intoned. This draws attention to the musicality of the line, but assumes that the orchestra traces natural speech, rather than the speech conforming to musical prosody. A third level encompasses what we understand traditionally and culturally as operatic singing. As Blair states,
“When you look at a score by Wagner, and compare it with what you hear Gerhard Stolze is doing, you realize that the notation is simply a shorthand for what gets subsumed into the role after years of conservatory training, apprenticeship and cultural reproduction; all of which is sort of automatic and unconscious. In an era where historically informed performance at multifarious levels influences the way we set new works, it became a realization that giving the singers a hierarchy of where and what to focus was paramount. Especially since the text itself was conceived of as a mode of inspired experimentation across disciplines.None of this is new to the art of operatic singing, its just codified with precision.”
The meticulous control over the source text allows the composer to slip in and out of traditionally conceived notions of Bel-canto style, German dramatization, theater-esque speech(mélodrame), and conventional recitative. Blair emphasizes that these notations “help facilitate and suggest the best technical approach to realize the intended effect.” Blair then focused on a shorthand score version of the music, which in turn influenced edits in the text and vocalization, and in turn, the musics formal teleology was shaped by the needs of the text. Thus the finalization of the libretto happened as a gradual multi-step process that continually takes and gives in concomitant relationship with the music.
“Another aspect that was important to me in drafting the vocalization was the actual vocality of the line. While my music is not diatonic, it superficially follows diatonic models. Major and minor systems are based off of tetrachords that we attribute to Ancient Greek tunings. Those stack upon each other in such a way to have a particular series of steps. The modes reorder where those steps happen. By creating larger or smaller steps, one can create new tetrachords that superficially feel like diatonic systems; They can even map diatonic fragments, and still retain its unusualness in that the mode is unaccounted for in the diatonic series, the mode is symmetrical, or it won’t contain 7 notes to the octave. In many cases, it won't complete an octave at all, rather skipping extending its final interval over the octave rest. In this way the music retains its singability without relying on adopting a pastiche musical language(although there are moments of pastiche which happen as historical accounts of the characters worldview). One does not have to resort to awkward large intervals, like the endless 7ths of Webern’s embedded rows, or migrating a singer to a stressful register to ensure novelty. It also allows for triads, which I also do not conceive as major and minor(though major and minor triads are a particular partition of the complex of chromatic triads), to form around these synthesized scale forms.’
In April of 2022, Blair began work on an orchestrated full score. Workshopping the project with a production team of some of the most equipped talent in the opera world in South Africa will begin in early May, 2022. The process is expected to be a perennial exchange of experimentation, feedback, and edits with a focused projection of having the opera finished in late 2022.
This journey of process will be documented and updated on the composer’s website as well as social media platforms throughout it’s production.