Centring Female Desire in Contemporary Opera: A Thing I Cannot Name
A Thing I Cannot Name is a 20-minute opera film produced by Irish National Opera, focused on three women with very different desires. These women are unknown to each other but are connected by a Dublin flat in which they have all lived at one stage during their lives. Myself (composer) and Megan Nolan’s (librettist) objective for the opera from the outset was to focus on a direct, exclusively female perspective on desire, eschewing many historical opera narratives of female desire, love, and obsession centred on a male character. My lecture will detail the process of committing to this objective and how it influenced the text, composition, and direction of the opera.
Dr Amanda Feery is a composer working with acoustic, electronic, and improvised music, having written for chamber and vocal ensembles, film, theatre, and opera. Graduating from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in Music in 2006, she continued her studies in Music and Media Technologies at Trinity College Dublin, completing an M.Phil in 2009. Amanda was the Mark Nelson Fellow in Music at Princeton University, completing her PhD in Music Composition in 2019. Her research focused on Kate Bush’s song suite, The Ninth Wave. Whilst in the U.S, she formed collaborative relationships with a number of ensembles and musicians including Alarm Will Sound, Third Coast Percussion, and Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. Closer to home, past collaborators include Crash Ensemble, RTÉ ConTempo Quartet, Chamber Choir Ireland, Paul Roe, Michelle O’Rourke, and Lina Andonovska. Recent projects include works for National Sawdust’s Hildegard Commission, Cork Midsummer Festival, and a score for Tadhg O’Sullivan’s film, To the Moon. Future projects include Thighs in Bark, a work for the National Symphony Orchestra, which takes the myth of Daphne as a starting point into an exploration of body trauma, autonomy, and transformation. Amanda is currently Lecturer in Composition at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
The seminar will take place over Zoom at THIS LINK.