The Opposite Shore
Play - Scene 2: Jasmine
Play - Scene 5: Dysopsy
Play - Scene 11: Torch Fishing
The Opposite Shore is a radiophonic opera for a space, voices and nature.
The building material for the body of sound leans solely on proportions – time proportions, four-accord proportions, and their open play logarithm. The symmetries of night and day, summer and winter, the century and eternity: – a cold, paralysing frost, the rays of the sun sweeping over the earth. The voice of the moss, a 30-kilometer echo. The final note of the opera is comparable to a picture where the contrast is twisted so much that the entire area is turned white.
There is a room for the main source material, and its 17th century reconstruction down to a millimeter exactness. The wooden room with a floor of stone – a wooden room with a wooden floor. The echoes of linden-lined avenues, an overgrown pond, a dried-up darkness. A microphone, through which everything that happens reaches the listener’s ears, hovers like a ghost anxiously past the corners of the room. Dogs become uptight when people are uptight. People become uptight when they can’t express themselves anymore.
The nature of Hiiumaa island is kept in check – nature is slow, nature has a different music. Its poetry is just a fusion of isolated memories, not a picture of sound of a single moment. The migration of birds lasting months, an uninhibited murmur of the sea. Mud, rain, the cold wind of August and the courtyard of the parsonage, and cyclones from Central Europe: a dense May heatwave, and again the parsonage courtyard.
The words from it sound beautiful, while the sounds are ugly.
The Opposite Shore attempts to be a document in a musical sound, and tries least of all to pack itself into the asthetic of art. The Opposite Shore is not music, but rather an opposite extract of music. The Opposite Shore is a momentary, feathery mass shrunk together.