Manchester Opera Project (MOP): “Mysterious 44” workshops
Manchester Opera Project (MOP) is looking to deliver 5-day workshop projects around Kevin Malone’s
innovative new opera “Mysterious 44”. Dr Malone is an international composer and Senior Lecturer in
Composition at the University of Manchester.
The opera is based upon Mark Twain's story The Mysterious Stranger. The story raises the issues of
humanism, peer pressure, superstition and individual responsibility. The opera and workshops generate
discussion around technology, civilisation, Malala Yousafzai, faith schools, human rights, equality and
evidence-based thinking.
The Opera's Story
The year is 1490 (or is it?): the cusp of the Renaissance and the invention of Gutenberg's printing press. Three
young teenagers are visited by a mysterious stranger, a meeting which causes one of them to challenge the overly
zealous village priest who is intent on keeping the status quo through threats of violence and preventing villagers
from reading books. As the teenagers' access to knowledge increases, one boy learns that greater responsibility
comes with it and he must choose: stay in a comfort zone of ignorance and familiarity enforced through fear, or
strike out on his own and embrace the realities of human existence.
The opera and related workshops are specifically suitable for KS3, KS4 post-16, and respond to curriculum needs
of Music and Music Technology, as well as English, Creative Writing, Art, Drama, Design and Technology, and
Religion and Theology.
Workshop delivery can take place in June/July 2015, including Enrichment Week.
What is Included
Performance of Mysterious 44
A new 90-minute opera for singers and electronic score.
It will be performed by four professional singers (SATB) and quadraphonic sound. (Sound system supplied by
MOP). Minimal set consisting of four cubes, costumes, small props. (It is possible that students may wish to be
involved in additional set design as part of the workshop.) The opera was commissioned with funds from Arts
Council England and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.
Professor Richard Dawkins appears in the opera as a disembodied voice in the Prelude and Postlude especially
recorded for this opera.
Composition workshop on sound technology and live vocals
Led by composer-librettist Kevin Malone and mezzo-soprano/MOP director Emily Howard Cobley, the workshops
are designed to take students through and beyond standard uses of industry software, to explore unusual and
expressive ways to use sound to “paint”, story-tell, (re)design sonic environments and accompany live performers.
Workshop examples will be taken from Mysterious 44, electroacoustic works and film soundtracks.
Technical content
Sound recording, editing, manipulation, free and low-cost multi-platform software, presentation/diffusion of sound in
a performance space.
Artistic content
Creative writing (especially lyrics), word-music relationships. For electronic music: implications of near/far,
left/centre/right, wet/dry and equalisation on the perception, identification, intention, meaning and communication
of dramatic ideas to listeners. Dramatic shaping of words and sound over short and sustained narratives.
Outcomes
a) Students will learn to record and process sounds, then work to create an original sustained dramatic
soundscape in either stereo or quadraphonic sound, performed in your school in a programme to include
Mysterious 44.
b) Students may instead wish to create a short dramatic electronic/live performance work for singer and computerprocessed soundscape, performed in your school in a programme to include Mysterious 44.
NB Two schools may wish to have their workshop outcomes in the same programme. This would mean
considerable cost and venue savings.
c) Schools and students will retain free or very low cost software (e.g. Reaper, Audacity) and tutor-created minivideos to be retained by the school and students.
d) Students' original soundscape compositions will be burned to CDs. (The school should also consider
videotaping their students' performed outcome!)
e) Students will learn skills in working with spatial diffusion of sound and working with live singers, and with
dramatic use of words, lyrics, music and staging.
f) Students will learn skills about creative writing for performances, including word emphasis, audience
communication and timing.
g) Learning transferable skills for theatre, film, writing, radio, television industries.
Who will be delivering the workshops?
Kevin Malone
Kevin's music spans live electronics, multimedia and gallery installations to works for choirs and orchestras, embracing
postmodernist and polystylist approaches with performances and broadcasts across Europe, North America, Asia and
Australia. He holds degrees from New England Conservatory, the University of Michigan and the University of London
and was a Fulbright Fellow at the Paris Conservatoire.
His music shows acute awareness of social concerns and global events, such as the choral piece Gently Tread which he
conducted at the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 at the fifth anniversary federal memorial ceremony in Shanksville,
PA of the events of Sept 11, 2001. Further 9/11 works include four concertos, two of which have been issued on CDs.
The American network NPR (National Public Radio) broadcast a special feature about Kevin's music the day before the
tenth anniversary of 9/11.
He has composed music for two feature films, "To Kill a Killer" and "Lockout" (distributed by Warner Bros) and delivered
school workshops in Llandudno, Isle of Man and most recently worked with primary school children in Leeds to use music
as a means of learning about Ancient Egypt.
His music can be heard on four single-composer CDs, a further four multi-composer CDs and streaming on Spotify,
Last.FM and iTunes. Frequent radio interviews about his work confirm his ideas about social music-making and
community outreach as a means of keeping humanity at the centre of art, and art at the centre of society.
Emily Howard Cobley
Emily has sung and recorded works by many modern composers including Anthony Burgess, Steven Gerber, Kevin
Malone, Michael Rose, Peter Susser and Alexandra Vrebalov. In 2012, she sang both the American and British premieres
of Malone’s A Clockwork Operetta - commissioned by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation - with members of
the Kronos Quartet. The same year, her performance at Salman Rushdie's annual PEN World Voices Festival drew a full
house in New York City, prompting NPR's Jane Ciabattari to write: “Emily blew the roof off...she was - appropriately raucous, raspy and spell binding”.
She has sung a soloist in Carnegie Hall, and Mozart's Laudamus Te for Bill and Hillary Clinton, with other New York roles
singing the Valkyrie Schwertleite in Die Walküre with The Metropolitan Opera, Azucena in Il Trovatore, and Mrs. Lovett in
Sweeney Todd. A ready proponent of encouraging people to enjoy opera, she assists with producing and performing new
means of access.
Emily holds a Master's Degree in Vocal Performance from Indiana University, Bloomington. She has been teaching voice
and stage performance techniques for the last fifteen years, with positions as vocal instructor at Sheffield and Manchester
Universities, and performs regularly with her ensemble The Ebb Trio. Her students have gone on to perform in major
opera companies and on Broadway stages.
Costs apply for both the opera performance and the workshop delivery.
Please email [email protected] for more details.