Tom Green: The Open Fund for Music Creators
For:
The World’s Wife: An Opera – Tom Green and Carol Ann Duffy
The World’s Wife is a poetry collection by Carol Ann Duffy that takes a swipe at the famous men of history and myth from their spouses’ perspective.
Composer Tom Green has been working with the Poet Laureate to turn her book into a new 75min chamber opera for The Mavron Quartet and soprano Amanda Forbes. A key element of the book is its construction of an archetypal woman that transcends each individual character. Using microphones and live loop pedals, our solo soprano will duet with multiple versions of herself live onstage. This allows her to embody many of these sparkling ‘wives’ at once, progressively transcending individual characters to project the archetypal image of the forgotten woman of history, musically mirroring the book to create the World’s Wife. The Mavron Quartet also has a loop pedal, and the two units combined allow for a plethora of musical discoveries – sections of sound from one moment can be transplanted to 6 seconds or 60 minutes later, creating overlays of expanded tonality, polymetric collages, and much else. This a radical new work created as an antidote to the tradition of ‘undoing’ female characters; in opera, literature, history, and our inherited culture. Through this lens the work illuminates contemporary questions of gender and identity in a searching and innovative drama. The piece is in development for a nationwide mid-2017 tour.
Tom Green trained as a composer and electric guitarist and has recently written and directed music for productions at the National Theater.