Composer Nicole Lizée.RICHMOND LAM/Supplied
Don’t let the robots fool you. When it comes to writing her first full-length opera, composer Nicole Lizée’s approach is about as classic as you can get.
This month Lizée, 49, will witness the world premiere of R.U.R. A Torrent of Light, which marks an exciting step in Canada’s operatic history: a large-scale science-fiction opera. Written with librettist Nicholas Billon and inspired by Karel Capek’s 1920 play, Rossum’s Universal Robots – which first introduced the word “robot” to the English language – A Torrent of Light asks big questions about humanity’s integration with technology.
Who better than Lizée to write a score for an opera about artificial intelligence set in 2042? The Saskatchewan-born composer and turntablist is famous for her glitching, mind-bending multimedia works that mix acoustic and electronic sounds – and make it hard to tell which is which. She’s certainly not the first or only composer experimenting with “non-traditional” instruments, but Lizée specializes in blurring the line between the organic and the robotic.
“What I wanted to do with this piece is really have the integration of the two,” Lizée said in an interview between rehearsals. “Both have sort of infiltrated each other’s lives.”
Michael Hidetoshi Mori and Katherine Semchuk testing wearable technology during A Torrent of Light rehearsals.Martin Iskander/Supplied
Lizée’s international acclaim – including two Juno nominations for Composition of the Year and her 2019 Prix Opus for Composer of the Year – arguably comes out of her skills in integration. A graduate of McGill University, her works are a thrilling mélange of popular culture influences from Metallica to Kate Bush to Alfred Hitchcock, and there’s a bit of brazen joy in Lizée’s musical commentary on the world around her. Her vision for A Torrent of Light was all about giving a sound to this futuristic, probably dystopian world.
“Part of it was imagining what sound would be like in 2042,” she muses. “I really wanted to imagine a scenario where the space is completely alive. Anything has a potential for sound.”
À la Lizée, that imagination leads to an eclectic orchestra that blends “traditional” instruments with, really, anything else that could make sound and evoke questions about technology. Percussionists play the typewriter; guitars are hit with mallets; the artists even sport wearable technology created with OCAD University’s Social Body Lab. It’s all certainly neat and it makes for a fascinating orchestra pit; but the real craft is in Lizée’s ability to trick our ears.
“When I listen to Nicky [Lizée], I feel like she sounds like us,” says Michael Mori, Tapestry Opera’s artistic director and stage director for A Torrent of Light. “She sounds like a generation that is integrated with [both] technology and a love of life. Kind of like the omnivorous, curious people that we are, Nicky represents all of us.”
Lizée has been living with the story of A Torrent of Light since 2015, when Mori invited her and Billon to participate in Tapestry’s workshop intensive, the Composer-Librettist Laboratory.
“He sent me his excerpt to score, and I was immediately moved by it and it was easy to write,” Lizée recalls of her first collaboration with Billon on R.U.R., a Dora Award-winning short prototype of what would become A Torrent of Light. “We knew from that moment that we absolutely had to find a way to go full-on,” Lizée adds, “and we knew we wanted to fully realize the potential of such an opera.”
“I love what Nicky came up with,” Billon says. “Her score is gorgeous, glorious, and totally bonkers.”
Lizée has been living with the story of A Torrent of Light since 2015.Martin Iskander/Supplied
No doubt Lizée’s fans are curious to hear how she writes for the singers in her first opera, given the composer’s penchant for musical sleight-of-hand. And today’s opera singers aren’t afraid to throw their voices around; in classical music circles, “extended techniques” can refer to musicians modifying their instruments to make a sound that is anywhere from unorthodox to downright surreal. In the hands of extended technique experts – like Lizée – a cello can sound digital, or a human voice can sound amplified.
“They’re the ultimate sound effects,” Lizée says of the singers in A Torrent of Light. “Rather than just having a reverb effect on an instrument, the chorus is there for the real reverb or the real echo or the real filter.”
Emulating technology, Lizée says, makes for “a completely different experience. The human voice can do anything.”
Now, there’s the kind of thing opera fans like to hear from a composer – prima la voce, or, the voice rules. Though she probably means it in a slightly different way than Mozart or Rossini did, Lizée has the opera composer’s knack for hearing potential in the human voice.
“The human voice, I think – regardless of what happens in technology – will be there in 20 years,” she says, before summing up 500 years of operatic history: “The human voice is the ultimate form of expression.”
Lizée shares a remarkable amount of creative DNA with history’s great opera composers. Like Britten with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she’s a master orchestrator with fierce curiosity about an instrument’s sound potential; like Wagner with the Ring Cycle, she seeks a seamless melding of music and story into a single world; like Verdi with nearly all his operas, Lizée has something to say about the big social topics of her time.
Few topics have the scope of artificial intelligence and its potential to threaten the human race. “It is impossible to even anticipate where we’re headed,” says Lizée, as much troubled as intrigued by technology’s evolution. “But it’s very much, very much an issue.”
A Torrent of Light promises plenty of big questions, but we’ll have to wait until opening night to find out if there are any big answers. Opera and science-fiction haven’t often crossed paths, but maybe they should; the best works out of both genres are the ones that tell big, sweeping stories about the human experience.
If anything, Lizée’s opera will offer a new way of thinking about humanity’s future. As Mori puts it, “This is the perfect space for an exploration of AI.”
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