Classical concerts usually make few demands on their audiences. All you have to do is turn up, shut up and stay awake long enough to clap at the right bits. Two premieres by British composers this weekend – one a four-hour opera to encourage meditation and mindfulness, the other an eight-hour lullaby to be performed while listeners sleep – confound this orthodoxy.
Lost in Thought: A Mindfulness Opera by Rolf Hind, which has its world premiere on Friday night at St Luke’s, London, with other performances over the weekend, calls on its audience to turn up in loose clothing for an operatic experience more immersive than waiting mutely for the fat lady to stop singing.
It is “a reconceptualisation of opera in the traditional sense”, says a spokeswoman, “designed to send audience members on an inner journey of mindfulness, exploring a drama within rather than one played out on stage”. Traditionalists may want to leave their opera glasses in their reticules.
Hind’s hope is that each performance of Lost in Thought will be structured like a short, silent retreat – albeit one with a musical accompaniment expressly written to guide the audience in meditation. Those who regard mindfulness as being just on-trend adult colouring in have so much to learn.
Mats and cushions are provided. Audiences are encouraged to take part in sessions of meditation, communal eating and gentle yoga led by mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg, while the seven musicians of the Mahogany Opera Group mingle.
“The players themselves are on retreat, eating, resting and sitting with the audience, sometimes in music that is strictly notated, at other times working within parameters we’ve tested on trial audiences,” explains Hind, who teaches piano and composition at Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
But the composer’s ambition goes beyond mere audience immersion: “Meditators talk of vertical time, moments loaded with depth,” he says, “and this is something I wanted to recreate.”
London has played host before to vast meditative musical pieces with grand spiritual ambitions. In 2003, for instance, the late Sir John Tavener premiered the seven-hour choral work Veil of the Temple, which he conceived as “a journey towards God” – an attempt to reconcile east and west, Islam and Christianity. During the premiere, which ran all night at London’s Temple church, some in the audience were eased into blissful slumber by its repetitive structure.
This weekend, across London, in the reading room of the Wellcome Collection, an ensemble orchestra and soprano will perform Max Richter’s Sleep from midnight on Saturday until 8am on Sunday. The concert will be heard live on Radio 3, thereby becoming the longest single continuous piece of music broadcast live on the BBC (a recorded version is already available on Deutsche Grammophon).
Those of us who nodded off during side two of Bowie’s Low or the more plangent sections of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux were unwittingly in training for our roles as comatose listeners to Max Richter’s musical experiment. But if Lost in Thought is aimed at encouraging mindfulness, what’s the point of Richter’s Sleep? Can audiences be said to be listening if they aren’t awake? “I think of Sleep as an experiment into how music and the mind can interact in this other state of consciousness,” says Richter, “one we all spend decades of our lives completely immersed in, but which is so far rather poorly understood.”
Richter wrote the piece in consultation with American neuroscientist David Eagleman, and the concert is aimed at helping to understand the nature of sleep. Listeners will be invited to report on whether Richter’s lullaby helped them to drift off and what kind of dreams they had. Sleep is being played as part of Why Music?, a weekend of public events and one-off broadcasts that includes debates and performances exploring the relationship between music and the mind.
It’s a coincidence that both Sleep and Lost in Thought are being performed this weekend, but they do have something in common. Both were conceived as antidotes to a frenetic world. Together then, they may signify the arrival of a new musical movement. Whisper it gently, ladies and gentlemen – welcome to the New Quiet.
