CLAPPING GAME SONGBOOK
Music and libretto by Caroline Louise Miller
Clapping-game Songbook starts and ends with three oracles skipping stones upon a glassy calm ocean. Each of four songs mystically evokes various spaces, sights, and sensations in the world of 2020.
Composer: Caroline Louise Miller
Libretto: Caroline Louise Miller
Duration: 12min
Instrumentation: sop, mezzo, bari, cl, sax, perc
Director: Brenda Huggins
Premiere: 2020
Status: Active, Available for residency and further development.
ABOUT THE OPERA
Clapping-game Songbook starts and ends with three oracles skipping stones upon a glassy calm ocean. Each of four songs mystically evokes various spaces, sights, and sensations in the world of 2020. The remains of an upscale gated community that fell into the sea during a landslide, a bluish bloom in the night sky from a space-X launch, the striking beauty of a sunset through wildfire smoke, and a massive digital glitch in Times Square are a few scenes evoked. Running out of time, decay, mysticism, exploitation, pollution, and entanglements of thriving with toxicity are recurrent themes. To track time, the songs reference celestial bodies spanning from midday to the break of dawn.
ABOUT THE COMPOSER
Caroline Louise Miller is a US composer based in Portland, Oregon. Her work broadly explores affect, ecology, labor politics, tactility, and digital materiality, often addressing contemporary issues within dreamlike musical spaces that thread field recordings, shimmering textures, and romantic melodic lines through harsh noise and clattering dissonances. She has most recently received grants, fellowships, and commissions through Alarm Will Sound, SPLICE Ensemble with funding from Chamber Music America, Guerilla Opera, Transient Canvas, and Ensemble Adapter. In 2018 she won the ISB/David Walter Composition Competition for Hydra Nightingale, created with improvisor and bassist Kyle Motl. Other projects include whistle-session hijacker, a collection of acousmatic/instrumental hip-hop crossover tracks. C.L.M.'s music appears across the U.S. and internationally. Caroline is Assistant Professor of Music in Sonic Arts at Portland State University, and holds a Ph.D in Music from UC San Diego. (www.carolinelouisemiller.com)