Experimental Opera Explores Earth, After People

10.31.24
Brian Slattery for the New Haven Independent

Gelsey Bell, Photo: Effy Gray

 

Over a pulsing synthesizer, musician and composer Gelsey Bell ends the final song of her opera with the line ​“I’m struck by morning / the orange line of light / low and fast, revolving flight.” By then, however, to the listener the meaning of that first noun is ambiguous: does she mean ​“morning” or ​“mourning”? The line carries the weight of both meanings with ease. 

It’s part of Bell’s experimental opera MƆɹNIŊ [Morning//Mourning], which ​“inhabits a world in which all humans have disappeared from Earth,” Bell writes...

...In a collaboration between the Peabody Museum and the Yale Schwarzman Center, MƆɹNIŊ will be performed in the main hall of the Peabody on Nov. 4; admission is free and a waiting list available.

READ more in the New Haven Independent.