Our Fatal Magic

Duration 
Approx. 27 minutes

Our Fatal Magic Pt.1 is based on the opening chapter of Tai Shani’s Our Fatal Magic, a collection of feminist science fiction stories set within an imagined city that is constantly shifting and reforming the text follows a narrator whose identity seems as fluid as the world around her. With permission from the artist, I adapted the text into a libretto for mezzo-soprano and ensemble.

The city described in Shani’s writing became the central musical idea. Each stanza inhabits its own distinct musical world before dissolving into the next, mirroring a place where architecture, people and memories are continually changing. Musical ideas appear briefly before giving way to something new, allowing the ensemble to move through the text in the same fluid way that the city moves around its narrator.

The music inhabits the same unstable world as the text, creating a place where nothing remains fixed for long, and where solid forms dissolve and reform into something both architectural and liquid.

Instrumentation
Mezzo-soprano
, Oboe, 
Bassoon, 
Piano
Percussion, 
Classical Guitar
, Viola,
Contrabass