THE FOUNDATION FOR IBERIAN MUSIC
PRESENTS

HYPERMUSIC PROLOGUE:
A PROJECTIVE OPERA IN SEVEN PLANES

A presentation by the composer

HÈCTOR PARRA

Wednesday, March 10, 2010
From 2.30pm to 4pm
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Ave & 34th St
Room 3102

Program

Hypermusic Prologue is fruit of a unique partnership between science, music and the plastic arts. In the company of Lisa Randall, the artist Matthew Ritchie and the stage director Paul Desveaux, Hypermusic Prologue explores the “historical” form of opera to create a new type of dramatic expression suited to the 21st century.
Lisa Randall’s libretto introduces a composer-scientist (soprano) torn between the love she feels for her partner (baritone) and her passion for knowledge, guided by her conviction that there is a much larger world waiting to be explored.
Their relationship changes when the soprano, after a fierce quarrel, decides to undertake a hypothetical voyage to the warped 5th dimension in the Randall-Sundrum model of space-time…
From this moment on, the space and the energy the soprano encounters depend on her position in this new dimension. Thus, soprano and baritone – through this journey – undergo different experiences of realty: the soprano, moving freely in five-dimensional hyperspace, and the baritone, feeling confined in the four dimensions of known space-time.
Music, an extremely organized form of acoustic energy, helps to take us closer and enjoy, through our senses, these mysterious and attractive, intensely distorted spaces.
In this opera, the public is guided from the “familiar, three-dimensional” psychoacoustic space of the concert hall to the sensation of moving into a new, unexpected, spatial-acoustic dimension. Thus, and as we shall see further on, all the electronic, instrumental and vocal rhythms, pitches, melodies and gestures are specially sculpted following a series of structures analogous with the physical processes and concepts that appear in Lisa Randall’s space-time model. During this composing process new musical material is born, which is unified in the form of hyperexpressive sound material that constitutes the high points of the libretto. The music that gives life to the constant contrasts of emotional and rhythmic tension in the dialogues is specially conceived to distort the public’s perception of time.

Hèctor Parra, born in Barcelona 1976, studied at the Conservatorium of Music in Barcelona, where he was awarded prizes with distinction in composition, piano and harmony. He studied composition under David Padros, Brian Ferneyhough and Jonathan Harvey as well as Michael Jarrell at the Conservatorium of Music in Geneva. Master in Composition awarded by the University of Paris VIII, annual course in Composition at IRCAM and post-graduate courses at the CNSMD Lyon.
Premieres of his works have been performed by the Ensemble intercontemporain, the Klangforum Wien, the Arditti Quartet, ensemble recherche, musikFabrik, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Liège, Holland Symfonia, National Orchestra d’Ile-de-France, KNM Berlin, Ensemble Alternance, Algoritmo Ensemble and Proxima Centauri. Commissions from the Republic of France, the IRCAM-Centre Pompidou (on five occasions), the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Government of Catalonia and institutions such as the Berlin Academy of Arts, WDR, Ensemble intercontemporain, Klangforum Wien/Impuls, ADKBerlin, Strasbourg Festival, CDMC (Madrid), National Orchestra d’Ile-de-France, IVM (Valencia), Musicadhoy / Schauspielhaus Salzburg, Caja Madrid and the Selmer Society (Paris). His works were also performed at the international festivals of Lucerne, ARCANA, Avignon, Agora-IRCAM, Stuttgart Opera House, Maison de la Danse de Lyon, Ultraschall Berlin, Quincena Musical de San Sebastián, Traiettorie (Parma), Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam), Konzerthaus Wien, Philharmonie Luxembourg… In 2007 he was awarded the Earplay Donald Aird Memorial International Composition Prize of San Francisco (USA). In 2005 he was unanimously awarded the Tremplin Prize given by the Ensemble intercontemporain and was finalist in the International Gaudeamus Competition. In 2002 he won the INAEM Prize for Musical Composition (The National Institute for Performing Arts and Music of Spain). His works are published by Tritó (Barcelona). Currently, he is Professor of Electroacoustic Composition at the Zaragoza University of Music, visiting professor at the College of Music of the Barcelona Opera House (El Liceu) and resident composer at IRCAM in Paris.