HUNGER: Part III, Sc. 1 (Clip 2) - August 14th & 15th, 2014
A new multimedia opera in four parts by composer Jason Thorpe Buchanan & librettist Darcie Dennigan

Darmstadt Contemporary Opera Workshop with Ensemble Interface, soprano S.Aston, mezzo-soprano B.K.Majewska, baritone S.Storck. 
Musical director/conductor Stephan Schreiber, stage director L.Steier, Dramaturg P.Hahn, composer H.Thomalla, and vocal instructor D.Michel-Dansac.

Knut Hamsun’s novel "Sult" is a point of departure for a libretto by award-winning poet Darcie Dennigan, exploring themes of psychological decay, irrationality, and self-destruction. Oumenos is a starving and delusional young writer who is unwilling to compromise his work even as his intellect and body gradually deteriorate.  He is split in two; the baritone and soprano form a composite, each depicting aspects of his inner/outer selves and suppressed madness. His hunger and self-disgust lead him to consider stealing bread, and to thoughts of self-mutilation. He despises his baseness. He is a dog. He is drawn to Ylajali, a young girl who appears to him in various manifestations – her physical existence and a distortion/projection in his mind. At the bloodbank, Ylajali draws his blood. At the spermbank, she coaxes his orgasm. In a butchershop, Ylajali as countergirl displays the meat before him. He fights his coarseness and hungers to appear presentable, normal. He finds himself examining her on the counter as if she were meat. Humiliated by his inner self, and by Ylajali, he in turn humiliates her. He has again become, in his mind, a dog.

The first completed scene (Part III, Sc. 1) was selected for the Darmstadt Contemporary Opera Workshop and premiered August, 2014 in an acoustic version for three singers, a.flute, b.clarinet, perc, pno, vln, and vc. This ensemble was later augmented by the inclusion of e-guitar, bari sax, electronics, and video projection. Scenes 1 & 2 were premiered in a concert version with electronics at The Industry’s FIRST TAKE in Los Angeles on February 21, 2015. LA Times critic Mark Swed called Hunger (Part III) “elliptical” – “Hunger is a kind of training session in mental disintegration… An ungodly opera needs ugly music, singers who produce primal sounds, an electric guitar that sounds scraped raw, a wailing orchestra effects, cuts the ear like a knife. Buchanan delivers.”  The first complete staged performance of "Hunger (Part III, Scenes 1 & 2)" with live video processing was premiered by the [Switch~ Ensemble] on May 15, 2016 as part of MATA’s Interval Series at the DiMenna Center in NYC.

Our vision is a multimedia opera whose musical and dramaturgical narrative is driven not by dialogue or action, but rather psychological and musical states seamlessly entwining electronics and real-time video capture of liver performance against pre-recorded film, with multiple projection surfaces and electronics. At its core, Hunger evokes the deeply “internal” quality of Hamsun’s Sult, while reason and semantic content are obfuscated through the fragmentation of both music and text. Oscillation between intelligibility and unintelligibility demand focus on phenomenological qualities and filmic subtlety, inviting participants to explore and engage with a multiplicity of potential narrative threads played out as contradictory physical and digital manifestations occurring simultaneously. Because its true subject is, as Hamsun described, “the delicate fluctuations of a sensitive soul, the strange, peculiar life of the mind,” "Hunger" invites participants to construct and engage with a multiplicity of scenarios and readings. Hunger breaks with operatic conventions by eschewing grandeur and dramaturgical coherence in order to explore the volatile city of one man’s psyche. The edge of comprehensibility itself becomes a means of structural integrity, reflecting the central themes of deterioration and fragility. 

More information and synopsis: www.hungeropera.com

HUNGER Part III, Scene 1 (m.23) - Darmstadt Contemporary Opera Workshop

A new music ensemble for the 21st Century, the [Switch~ Ensemble] is an electroacoustic ensemble in residence at the Eastman School of Music's Computer Music Center.  Switch~ is an initiative dedicated to the performance of works for chamber ensemble and electronics, with a focus on the creation of new repertoire featuring the integration of live musicians, amplification, synthesizers, fixed media, and real-time interactive computer processing.

Jason Thorpe Buchanan is an American composer of operatic, orchestral, chamber, electroacoustic, and intermedia works which explore fragmentation, multiplicity, intelligibility, behavior, and the integration of live performance with technology. He is Artistic Director of the [Switch~ Ensemble] and Artistic Associate/Lecturer in New Media and Digital Technologies for Music at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden, Germany in the Hybrid Music Lab. He served from 2018-2022 as Department Chair/Lecturer in Composition, Theory, and Electroacoustic Music at the College of Music, Mahidol University in Thailand, 2022 Interim Managing Director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative at the University of Missouri, and 2020 Visiting Lecturer in Composition/Interim Director of the Electronic Music Studios at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin. His works have been described as “an unearthly collage of sounds”, “sharply-edged”, and “free jazz gone wrong—in a good way.”
        Jason is the recipient of a 2010-11 Fulbright Fellowship at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg, Germany as a visiting scholar, commissions from the Mizzou International Composers Festival for Alarm Will Sound (2013), Iktus Percussion (2013), the International Horn Society for the Eastman Musica Nova Ensemble, soloists Jeff Nelsen, Michael Walker, and conductor Brad Lubman (2014), Ensemble Nikel/Tzlil Meudcan (Israel, 2014), the Blue Water Chamber Orchestra as winner of Iron Composer (2014), the NY Virtuoso Singers (2015), the Earle Brown Music Foundation for the Talea Ensemble and TIME SPANS Festival (NYC, 2017), the Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium for the TACETi Ensemble and augmented conductor (2019), and for TACETi and extended no-input mixer (2020), a fellowship and commissions from Royaumont for the Talea Ensemble+EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble (2016), and the Académie Voix Nouvelles Ensemble (2017), a German/American Fulbright Commission (2011), the Howard Hanson Orchestral Prize (2014), two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards (2014 & 2015), an American-Scandinavian Foundation Grant (2015), 2017 Artist-in-Residence at the Brush Creek Foundation (Wyoming), and 2015 Artist-in-Residence at USF Verftet/City Council of Bergen, Norway.
        As a nominee for the 2015 Gaudeamus Prize, three works were presented by Insomnio, the New European Ensemble, and Slagwerk Den Haag at Gaudeamus Muziekweek (NL). His works walkside, lost and gimme shelter (2015), commissioned by Gaudeamus for Slagwerk Den Haag and by Eklekto Percussion Geneva, both explore the structural intersection of precise physical gestures, fragile sounds, and speech alongside live audio and video processing. As 2018 Artist-In-Residence at the Embassy of Foreign Artists in Geneva, Switzerland, he developed a new, interactive processing environment for surface, tension (2018), responding directly to the discrete physical gestures of performers and governing the behavior of both signal processing and triggering through wearable technology, sensors, and gestural tracking. Scenes from his multimedia opera Hunger have received performances at Darmstadt (2014) with Ensemble Interface, The Industry’s FIRST TAKE in L.A. (2015) with wild Up, and the MATA Interval Series in New York City (2015) with the [Switch~ Ensemble]. “Hunger is a kind of training session in mental disintegration… An ungodly opera needs ugly music, singers who produce primal sounds, an electric guitar that sounds scraped raw, a wailing orchestra effects, cuts the ear like a knife. Buchanan delivers.” – L.A. Times
        Mentors have included Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Steven Takasugi, Pierluigi Billone, Chaya Czernowin, Raphaël Cendo, Peter Michael Hamel, and Georges Aperghis. Jason served for three years as Executive Director of the Valencia International Performance Academy & Festival (Spain), for two years as a Curator for the San Francisco Center for New Music, as founding Director of the TICF International Academy for Young Composers, and as a Faculty Artist at the International Composition Institute of Thailand. As a doctoral student, he served as course instructor in electronic music and composition, board member of OSSIA, and assistant conductor for the Musica Nova Ensemble with conductor Brad Lubman at the Eastman School of Music. 
        As a guest composer, conductor, and lecturer, he is widely sought internationally at institutions such as the University of Chicago, Stanford University, TRANSIT Festival (Belgium), TIME SPANS Festival (NYC), Chamber Music Campania (Italy), the Eastman School of Music, University of Miami Frost School of Music, Music Science Share Educators Conference (Shanghai), Queens New Music Festival, MATA, the Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory (Singapore), the Bergen Center for Elektronisk Kunst (BEK, Norway), and dozens of Universities throughout the United States. He holds a Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music, and degrees in Composition and Music Technology from San José State University (BM & BA, 2008) and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (MM, 2010), where he taught courses in composition and theory as a graduate student. Current projects include "Ecology of Disruption" for Line Upon Line, a percussion trio with generative electronics, lights, and video, an immersive collaborative work for the [Switch~ Ensemble] at EMPAC, and development of new systems for gestural tracking and interactivity within the Hybrid Music Lab, Dresden. 
www.jasonthorpebuchanan.com