the music

The Music

Ever since he was 15 years old and first read Aldous Huxley’s novel, Guillermo Martorell Casanovas has dreamt of bringing it to life with music.

The state of the world right now, a world in which a lot of Huxley’s premonitions have become part of an accepted reality, makes a production like this all the more pertinent, relevant, and urgent. 

The music for a Brave New World opera must be one of wide emotional range, using a big amount of timbral resources, from electronics, to string and brass sections, to a choir depicting the sense of community both in the Brave New World and in the Savage Reservation.

The soloist singers should be the main and also some of secondary characters in Huxley’s novel: Bernard, Lenina, Linda, John The Savage, The Director, etc.. A choir will join the main characters onstage, and will act as the “voice of the community” in both the Brave New World and the Savage Reservation.

Passages of delicate, emotionally detached, repetitive music in the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre (Act I), that reflect the ceaseless work of machines in a mass production line, where everything seems to work like a clock, hypnopaedic suggestions sung in a mechanical manner, by a faceless mass, the choir, should alternate with the intimate mildly disapproving thoughts of Bernard Marx at the beginning of the story.

There should also be, at certain points in the story, diegetic music, depictions of the “synthetic music” that Huxley envisioned and described with such wonderful detail. “Super” or “augmented” instruments as they appear in the Solidarity Service –as Huxley describes them; “near-wind or super-string”-.

Ideally, an ensemble of onstage musicians should be used for this purpose, playing instruments outside the realm of the typical contemporary ensemble, such as the Octobass, the Baschet Cristal or the SubContrabass Saxophone, to name only a few.

It will be very interesting to play the distant, futuristic music of this Brave New World, as well as very visually appealing, suggesting new instrumental formations for the music of the future, different from our contemporary Western symphony orchestras, jazz groups, or rock bands.

It could also be done with more typical orchestral instruments, but processed with live electronics, and/or electronic music generated by live synthesizer, setting the sound for these scenes apart from the rest, as to emphasize the futuristic aspect of the music.

 Act II must be filled with texturally rich, agressive tribal pieces when depicting the rites of the Savage Reservation (Malpaís). These music, even if diegetic, doesn’t need its source onstage. With percussive, industrial timbres as the main resource, other instruments might come into play: not only Western symphonic percussion, but other instruments from around the world -ie. Japanese Taikos-, as well as “prepared” instruments such as piano, double basses, and other instruments from the main ensemble that might be made to adopt other forms, especially treated to act more like percussion instruments, for the Second Act. This would be coupled with electronic pre-recorded percussion.

The arrival of the Savage to the Brave New World (Act III) must necessarily fuse the two kinds of music, starting with music like that of Act I, the “tribal” aspects of the music growing more and more present as the character realizes how much he loathes life in this Brave New World.

John’s character is joined by a choir of curious New World citizens in the final scene at the lighthouse, leaving John alone as the only soloist singer in the work, among the noise, orgy and drowning laughter of the choir.

Note on the sketches presented

The musical sketches presented are, in a very rough form, just sketches on the texture and colour of certain scenes, and an idea of their general character.