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Speechless – an artistic research opera project

Mercoledì 4 giugno 2025 ore 14.30
Villa Favard, Aula 15
In this presentation, Cat Hope will introduce her practice as a composer, musician and practice based academic researcher. This will lead to a discussion of her opera, Speechless, premiered in 2019 in the Perth Festival and remounted at the Ligeti Festival in Hamburg, Germany, in 2023. Speechless is a 60-minute opera for 4 soloists, refugee choir and bass orchestra – a wordless, animated notation opera intended as a personal response to the plight of refugees worldwide, drawing on a governmental Human Rights  report as a source for score information.The presentation will conclude with an overview of the The New Virtuosity Manifesto, and how the opera’s creative processes and staging epitomises many elements of the Manifesto.



Cat Hope is an Australian composer, musician and professor of music at Monash University, Melbourne.  She is a classically trained flautist, self taught vocalist, bassist and is the artistic director of Decibel new music ensemble – a group that focuses on combining acoustic and electronic instruments. Her composition practice engages graphic, animated notation, but she is also a improvisor, noise artist,  songwriter  and curator. She is a Civitella Ranieri, Churchill and Hamburg Institute for Advance Studies Fellow, and an advocate for collaboration, activism, archives and gender diversity. Her 2017 monograph CD ‘Ephemeral Rivers’ (Hat[Art]Hut) won the German Record Critics prize that year, when Gramophone magazine called her “one of Australia’s most exciting and individual creative voices.” She is the co-author of ‘Digital Art – An introduction to New Media (Bloomsbury, 2014), and co-editor of  both ‘Contemporary Musical  Virtuosities (Routledge, 2024) and ‘Action Remarks – John Cage’s Variations’ book and CD (Mode, 2024). 

https://cathope.com

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