Opera Antarctica
VISION
Buried deep beneath three kilometres of ice is a subglacial world, an ancient realm that stretches more than 14 million km². A frontier of mountains, expansive lakes and complex canyons and rivers systems, the continent of Antarctica remains an enigma that has continued to mystify and inspire humanity for hundreds of years. It awakens a vastness of thought; stirring something beyond language. And yet it is interesting that on this southern–most continent, no language exists. An opera, by nature, charters musical topography with words and sound. And yet here we are describing a continent that has no words. How does such a paradox manifest in the libretto and the music? There is a tension here. That’s the beauty of it. Somehow, one language is not enough. The boundless nature of the topic demands this inexhaustible quality be mirrored through a multiplicity of languages. By delving into my own geology as a composer, coalescing modernist style through 20th Century innovations including electronics, spatialisation and serial composition techniques with more recent influences stemming from the Middle Ages and renaissance musical practice; by embedding into the musical layers scientific algorithms and recordings, and infusing historical, metaphorical and poetic references through word–painting and harmonic language, my aim is to create, through the music, an echo that reflects the epic nature of the continent Antarctica as an arcane place of fable and reverie.
MF
Science states meanings; art expresses them.
~ John Dewey, educational philosopher
An intermeshing of the art of science and the science of art, Antarctica is an operatic musing on the most remote and harshest of environments, its multitude of forms and its global significance.
In a time when anthropogenic climate change is destabilising all centres (political, cultural, historic, scientific), Antarctica becomes a stage for a drama of the future. There are vested interests, beliefs, systems of thought all at odds to decide what to do about what is actually happening on this distant stage, a stage without human performers, a stage without sets, a stage without texts, a stage of wind and ice, of glaring reflectivity and competing song.
As the tabula rasa unfolds, what might be called a song cycle emerges. Each ‘song’ has a variety of tasks. Narratives are explored, pilgrimages negotiated. Each might also be a dissertation, an adaptation, a reimagining of different scientific systems.
Some standing alone, some acting as refrains, as underscores, some melting and flowing into another, some ablating or compacting in counterargument to another.
We propose to lift text and music from our own historical depositions – from the cultural bedrock-ice interface, stories and music of the past preserved and ready to be released when thawed. But also the swirl of science as related to the cold continent – the vast amount of data and the multitude of ways it is presented.
For example, note the regular/irregular pattering in long term ice-core chemical analysis. Below is a graph of the presence of minerals in glacial ice over thousands of years. It’s an example of layer counting in the EDML core at the Laschamp event. Annual layers are represented by grey bars. Solid and dashed bars indicate ‘certain’ or ‘uncertain’ layers:
These can also be read as lines of emotion, or intensity, or argument. As music, as poetry, as dance. As prayer.
Or, below, a nineteen cm long section of a core from a depth of 1855 metres. The arrowed intervals are the summers, these patterns/lack of patterns are replicated over eons. But it is also a curtain, an aurora, a sail.
This isn’t a new idea. Here Aslak Grinsted from Copenhagen has turned the Oxygen-18 levels from 60,000 years’ worth of core samples into a commensurate musical patterning. The ‘melody’ comes from glacial samples, the bassline from deep continental Antarctic ice. Is this a gimmick? Or is there a music of the spheres revealed through scientific measuring?
Here, a theoretical example provided by one of our collaborators, Dr Amelie Meyer, demonstrates the decomposition of tidal currents somewhere on the Antarctic coast.
Each ‘constituent’ in Amelie’s graph inspires a musical contour within the various structural layers of an excerpt of our opera, Antarctica, which Mary Finsterer is presently composing:
Here is a 1 to 10 million-year map of bedrock age in Antarctica. Only the reliable data has been mapped; the place is only really understood at the margins. We only really comprehend the fringe, like an inverted Australia, human endeavour has tended to be on the coasts, leaving the heart to itself, or to be travelled over. But again, this diagramme can be read differently. It could be exploded fractally, speculatively, like viruses emanating from points of infection and spreading across the permafrost, over the pole. Pinks, blues, yellows, Cambrian, Devonian, radioactivity, tiny fungal spores. Seismic shocks. Things can move, can spread, can melt.
Or the beautiful shapes of the interrelationship between krill and whale populations:
Which might also be sonic forms, or choreographic scores, or ley lines of poetic intensity.
Antarctica is a library, a recording, a storage system, a palimpsest. For most of the planet’s history and data, stories have been accruing - in the most ephemeral layer, the Sastrugi of the surface; in the ice sheet, and in the rocks below, being preserved as each new layer is placed above – a palimpsest of narratives waiting to be excavated. While other continents have stratified deposits laid bare, Antarctica is different. Stratified deposits are hidden, lying metaphorically and magnetically at the bottom of the world. It lies metaphorically and magnetically at the bottom of the world. It is a brooding place, not designed for humans. Too cold, too dark, without nourishment. It is not a heaven or a hell, it just a non-place, silently, noisily, eternally, quickly, holding the history of the world.
Antarctica is an image of time, of decay. Where once change was slow, it is now accelerating. A representation of entropy. It is vanishing and with it vanishes knowledge, maybe our redemption. Ice is slowed time. It is a reliquary. A preservative, holding samples like specimens in formaldehyde
Ice as stasis, cold as death, frozen thoughts free of instinct.
Cold as a retardant to soundwaves, enabling the sound to move slower, but further.
A state of held, drawn out, slow, long time.
Interdisciplinary Re-imaginings
This opera provides a platform of investigation for how scientific findings can be communicated through artistic expression; and music’s uniquely affective power to reveal science to itself in unexpected forms. The production brings together experts from music, visual arts, digital media, humanities, cultural studies and a multiplicity of fields within science from The University of Tasmania to explore the intersections between disciplines. The process of creation seeks to map out innovative ways of re-imagining these fields in relation to the continent of Antarctica. Technology will play a key role, through holographic imagery, for example.
N.B. This image is an example to demonstrate holographic technology. It does not represent the content of the opera, Antarctica.
The music will resonate similar themes, travelling through time to when the line between music and science was blurred in the poetry of Renaissance thought; through to art today as seen through a contemporary lens.