Alex Mills: The Open Fund for Music Creators
Herculine Barbin was an intersex person born in France in 1838. They were assigned female at birth but had their gender reclassified to male by a court of law aged 21. Herculine documented their challenging yet visionary life living as an intersex person in a binary world in deeply personal memoirs, which were lying next to their body following their suicide aged 30.
The new opera draws on Herculine’s story and contemporary experiences of living as an intersex person today in an exciting collaboration between librettist Gareth Mattey, composer Alex Mills, and Intersex UK – the leading organisation advocating for intersex rights in the UK.
Alex Mills is a Welsh composer based in London. His work has been performed at the Barbican, LSO St Luke’s, Cheltenham Music Festival, Café OTO, The National Gallery, The V&A, Kilkenny Arts Festival, the Wellcome Collection, Sónar music festival, Melbourne Recital Centre, and featured in The Economist, BBC World, The Independent, and on BBC Radio 3 and 4.
His first opera, ‘Dear Marie Stopes’, about birth control and bodily freedom, premiered at Wellcome Collection in 2018 and was revived in September 2019 at King’s Place. His second opera, ‘Leonardo’, explored the queer identity of Leonardo da Vinci and premiered at the V&A in 2019.
The Guardian have described his work as “Music of supernatural poignancy, melodic but otherworldly, narratively urgent but poetically impressionistic.”