Shakespeare meets Game of Thrones at the Contemporary Music Festival 2019

Lampedusa imagines the island of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in a time immediately before the play’s story begins. An inversion and subversion of the current refugee crisis narrative, the work depicts Sycorax as a Sephardic Jew fleeing persecution by the Spanish Inquisition – first from Europe to Algeria, then from North Africa to Venice. Pregnant, Sycorax’ ship is wrecked in a storm and she awakens on the mysterious, musical island of Lampedusa, where she gives birth to Caliban and encounters Ariel. Intrigue, adventure and conflict ensue, before the opera ends as Prospero and his daughter Miranda arrive on the island.

Lampedusa includes material composed with software developed at the ICCMR, which renders particle collision data from the Large Hadron Collider into sound. The gala concert will be recorded live for BBC Radio 3.

Other works being showcased at the festival, and composed by ICCMR researchers, include:

• Dr Alexis Kirke’s Entangled Brains, in which the brains of two performers will be linked to a quantum computer via electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets
  
• Illusions by Linas Baltas, exploring the suggestion that sounds and music are fabrications of our mind
  
• Queen Canute by Nuria Bonet, a duet for clarinet and seagull song drawing attention to the beauty of the sound, and the birds themselves
  

Professor Miranda said:

“Our intuition about how the world works breaks down when we try to understand it on the very tiny scale of the atom. The more we learn about the quantum world the bigger the questions that are uncovered: are there parallel universes; and what is the relationship between perception and reality?

“Humankind struggles to understand how quantum physics relates to our daily reality. With our compositions we are trying to look at science from a different perspective, by bringing this relatively new field of knowledge into our creative process. But also, we hope that our music will offer an artistic framework through which to consider these big questions.”

For more information visit Contemporary Music Festival 2019.

With the exception of the gala concert, all events are free but booking is required.