Shakespeare, CERN and Game of Thrones combine for new Contemporary Music Festival opera

A new operatic prequel to The Tempest performed by the BBC Singers is to headline the Contemporary Music Festival 2019: Multiverse in Plymouth.

Professor Eduardo Miranda’s Lampedusa will premiere at the annual festival, which takes place at the University from 22–24 February.

Lampedusa will be performed at the festival Gala Concert on Saturday 23 February by the acclaimed choir, as it makes a rare visit to Devon for the event.

The opera features a libretto written in Vōv – a language created by Hollywood ‘conlanger’ David J Peterson. Peterson is responsible for the Game of Thrones tongues Dothraki and High Valyrian and many others developed for the big and small screen, and will open the festival with a talk entitled ‘On Designing Languages for Would-be Worlds’.

Vōv has been created exclusively for Professor Miranda and the festival, the fruit of a collaboration between the scientist-composer and Peterson going back to 2016.

Like the rest of the festival’s programme of music, film and talks, Lampedusa is grounded in cutting-edge research carried out at the University’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR), which focuses on exploring the boundary between science and creativity. The compositional technique used to create the score was born during a research residency Professor Miranda undertook at MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he developed a blueprint for a computer system to convert particle collision data from the Large Hadron Collider into music.

As a result, Lampedusa’s music is made up of synthesised sounds and notes that mirror the collisions and movements of some of the smallest yet most energetic particles ever created – the building blocks of matter generated inside CERN’s 7,000-tonne ATLAS detector.

Professor Miranda said:

“Writers and composers already have a connection to the festival theme of multiverse – it is our job to create parallel universes and imaginary worlds.

“CERN’s research investigates the very origins of the universe, but I’ve used the data to compose music for an opera about another universe altogether. The universe we live in may not be the only one out there, and in the same way the Lampedusa of the opera could be one of an infinite number of others in the multiverse.”

David Peterson said:

“I’m really happy to be involved in the festival again this year, I love doing it. Working with Eduardo previously I had developed three stages of Vōv, but this time it is just the earliest stage that we are implanting on the island.

“It’s almost as if Lampedusa shows an entirely different path that humanity could have taken if the world were different, and it started from there.”

The Contemporary Music Festival is now in its 14th year, and is organised by the University’s Arts Institute in partnership with the ICCMR.