Edward Jessen: Open Fund for Music Creators
Plantation A
An exciting project commission from Phaedra Ensemble combined with Bastard Assignments, Plantation A will be an operatic figure study for music and movement. The production is a staged description of a home within a plantation in an undisclosed region—with very critical detail over the location and the house, the living quarters and the dining areas and all the varied staff movements within. The initial drama is entirely set and described through a routine of projected drawings and narration. The music, for two sopranos and ensemble, later moves into this location and inhabits the richly-described world, thereby animating this well-articulated underlay, through interlocking musical scenes. The live and pre-recorded components combine in rotations of three character’s memories yet are told only by the one—articulated through rotating, breathless spasms of jealousy. For the 2023-24 season, performance planning includes dates across the UK.
Edward Jessen makes theatrical works from a background in vocal music and experimental art. His pieces tend to have an
explicit theatrical premise and are made from broad collaborative elements. His vocal and instrumental writing is centred upon diagrammatic aspects of our hearing—employing compressed, demonstrational ideas and theatrical artifice. Within this soundworld there is a particular emphasis on characterisation and behaviour: people doing believable things, forever interdependent with the moving world. In November 2022, Jessen’s sonic opera, Syllable, was nominated for an IVOR Composer Award. Jessen is a member of the Composition Department at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.