 Hello, good evening. Thank you very much for coming. It's always great to see people back in the room at the JSC. Welcome also to the people who join us online and we hope some more people will join us who maybe didn't find the room in the first attempt, which is always a problem in these hyper-securitized times. So my name is Fabio Gigi, I'm the chair of the Japan Research Center here at SOS and it is a great honor for me to present our guest speaker today. One in the series that we were thinking about at the beginning of term, artists in conversation, to really look what Japan has brought to Western arts, what Western arts have brought to the practice of Japanese art and sort of to think in more detail really in concrete cases about what this intercultural communication means, what it stands for and where it can take us. So tonight's speaker is the composer, director and musician Francesca LeLohet. She joins us here. She's been, she's stayed in Japan. I just bring up, it's a very long biography and she'll be talking very impressive biography. She has worked on a number of very interesting projects. One was called How Is It For You, which takes Mori Orgaes, vita sexualis, as a springboard to explore sex education in Japan and the UK. And the second major work is Kaki, The Key, based on the novella by Tanizaki Junichiro, which is an immersive opera. So both in terms of genre and both in terms of presentation, a really very new and interesting thing. And we'll see during the talk some of the concrete ways in which this has been realized. So with more further ado, I hand over to you. Thank you very much for coming and it's a pleasure. Thanks very much for coming today in person and online. So yeah, a little bit about me, Francesca LeLohet. I studied music in the UK for my undergrad, my masters. And throughout that time, I came into contact with music written by Japanese composers in my flute lessons. And so I got really interested in the sound of the shakuhachi and then started to research a little bit more into the music of gagaku, which is a court music of Japan. And then just, you know, went down rabbit holes and was reading as much as I could. And I eventually felt that my interest in Japanese music and cultures was influencing my own compositions. So I decided to, I had to go to Japan and actually experience it first hand. So I was very fortunate to get a place on the Daewa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholarship Program. So I went in 2015, completed the scholarship and just stayed for quite a while and kept working with Japanese artists. And one of the main projects I wanted to create was the key, which is an opera, as Fabio has said, is inspired by the novella by Junichiro Tanizaki. And yeah, I'll be speaking about that today. So yeah, it's called a contemporary opera because it is, it is a story told through music. It is sung throughout, there are some spoken words as well, but it is staged. So operas seem like the best way of describing it. I'm sure most people are familiar with Tanizaki's work. I don't know, has anybody read the key or kage? Yeah. Yeah, yes. I hope Clive played in it, so I should hope that he did. Excellent research. Yeah, so it's not one of Tanizaki's most famous novels, I would say, but yeah, it's got a lot of common traits of Tanizaki in it, this exploring Western influence on Japanese society, fetishism, sort of difficulties of communication between the characters and so on. Yeah, I'll talk about why it interested me in a bit. So the opera features three singers, Dancer, and four Japanese instruments and four instruments from the Western classical tradition. And it's site specific, and by that I mean it's not performed on a stage or in a concert hall, but it is performed in a specific place, so for this it's in a house. So the drama of the story is domestic, so it makes sense for the opera to take place in a domestic setting. And there are performances happening in different rooms of the house and the audience freely move throughout as the performance is unfolding. So that's what I mean by immersive. And the libretto, which is the text that the singers sing and recite, is in both English and Japanese, it's a flips between the two throughout. So yeah, I touched on it a little bit when I was talking about the key, I should probably speak a little bit more about the novella itself. So the key is told through the diary entries of a husband and wife, and they're pretending that they're not reading each other's diaries. But they are, and they're using it as a way to tacitly communicate with each other about how they're dissatisfied with their love life. And then as the reader is you're kind of going through reading the book, reading these stories, you also get a sense of the daughter and how she's involved, and you learn a bit about the lover, a man called Kimura, that the father, well, yeah, father with the daughter, the husband starts to push the wife towards. So yeah, there's a lot about these difficulties to communicate face to face, even though they've been married for about 20 years. There's a lot of talking about engender expectations. The husband's definitely struggling with the fact that he's struggling with getting older and with impotency and being impotent and that being really difficult for him to deal with. And the wife is kind of expected to be very demure and not have any kind of sexual desires and so on. So there's quite a lot of expectations that they challenge bit by bit. And changing cultural identities because they all the characters sort of explore new ideas and culture that's been brought in from the West. Because it's set in the 50s in Japan. So yeah, so these are all kind of underlying themes in the novel. As something that really, really interested me about it was, as a reader, you're also reading these diary entries. So you also feel that you're peering in on something that you shouldn't really be reading. And you're also a bit of a detective because you're trying to work out, well, is the husband just saying that to manipulate the wife? What is the wife doing whilst you're reading the husband's diary? So there's a lot of guesswork. So I wanted to turn that reader experience into a audience experience and that informed the whole staging of the work. So yeah, so we've got four characters and I paired each character with one Japanese instrument and one Western instrument. And I was very specific with the pairings. I chose them to bring out the kind of psychological and emotional states of the characters and also their character traits. So this for me is what I thought was the best way of representing them. So that the instrumentalists really become part of the character. The character is only portrayed by a singer but actually by the whole trio. Yeah. And so we have the husband and the wife, the daughter, she does, there's nothing written from her perspective in the novel. So the whole daughter character that created in the opera is just gleaned from inferences and she's quite a new character that I created. And you'll also notice that Kimura also, again, nothing from him in the novel, is portrayed by a dancer. And I did this because I thought he needed a more abstract art form to portray him. So I didn't think he should speak. I thought there should be more space for not only the audience but also the characters to kind of imagine who is Kimura, what does Kimura mean to them? And I think Kimura means something very different to every character in it. So I chose a slightly more flexible, abstract art form to represent him. So yeah. So these are just photos from the performances in Tokyo 2019. So you can get a little sense of what they look like in each of their rooms. So we have the husband, accompanied by a double bass, and Shaka Hachi. And then we have the wife, who is accompanied by Shou and Cello. Does everybody know what the show is? No. So the show is a mouth organ. As you can see this one here. You hold it here. So it's bamboo pipes and each of them have a metal bead inside. And the sound is made by inhaling and exhaling. And you have to heat it up. So if you see in the video later, this is kind of like spinning it over a hob. That's what they're doing. Which is a bit of a problem for risk assessments in the UK. So she was playing the show with the shower. And we have the daughter trios. We have the violin and hip-hop percussion because, well, we've got the kotsutsumi, which is the handheld percussion. So she actually, Ogao-san is often playing in Kabuki and certainly Japanese orchestra ensembles as well. And then the shime daiko is the one just to left, which you would play with sticks. And then we have Kimura trio. So yes, so originally I got Kimura and paired in with two instruments, the biwa and the clarinet. Later on, so the key was performed in Tokyo 2018 and then 2019. And then we brought it to London in 2019 as well. And it was actually various budget issues that meant couldn't bring everyone. And okay, can we find a biwa player in the UK? No. Can we find a biwa player in Europe? Not really. So you're just like, well, maybe we don't have a biwa player and a clarinetist. And then Kimura doesn't have a trio and he was free to move throughout the rooms and maybe interact a little bit more with the other characters. Actually, that made a lot more sense, I felt. So it's interesting how out of a budget constraint actually sort of worked quite well. So because my idea for Kimura is that he's seen, he means something different for every character. So I felt that if he were to go into the rooms or near where the other characters are, he could change his expression. He can become the version of Kimura that they see him as, if that sort of makes sense. There'll be questions later as well. Yeah. So so many important things about the music. They all rooms perform simultaneously. So wherever you are in the house, you, the audience will be moving through, you could, you can go into one room and watch one trio, but you would probably still overhear music from the other trios or, I'm probably simultaneously. And that idea was so that as an audience member, you never get to see the full story. They intentionally want you to miss things. And that's because of the whole idea of reading these diary entries and you don't get the full story. You have to fill in the blanks yourself. And you know, as you're reading the, you're following one character, it's not like all the other characters have stopped living. So that was the idea behind that. And it really depends on the building, but sound bleed. So being able to overhear these other rooms became a really important part of the piece. And not only just overhearing it, but kind of sensing it. I remember we did an after talk on one of the performances and it was in Japanese and there was me and the choreographer and we had a critic come and interviewers and just some of the, some of the performers took part as well. And they're saying, ah, it's the K-Hi. And I was just like, I don't know what that is, but it's probably right. But I have to remember correctly, but it's this sort of sensing that presence. And I think you really do get that you sense a presence of the other performers, the other people in the room, the other audience members as well, actually. That's something else you can talk about. Yeah. So I spoke a little bit about why I chose these instruments. But because, and I say it's to really convey the emotional, the psychological states of the characters. So like the daughter can be quite reactive. So for me, it felt quite good that she had maybe some explosive percussion. And you know, the violin can, it can be a beautiful sweet voice, but can also be really grainy and then it could also be really dynamic and aggressive points. The wife is always trying to keep this sort of serene, perfectly poised, give this presentation to people. So, so having the show with these very high, just floating tones made sense. But then she's got the cello as well, which I think can show a bit more like an earthy kind of, yeah, heartfelt emotion as well. And also give you some edges because she's got edges. So yeah, so that was my idea. But then the way you hear these instruments also depends on where you are in the house and the furnishings of the house. And, you know, these instruments were created for different places to be heard. So the, you know, the string instruments like Violet and cello have come to be developed so they sound great in a concert hall. And that's definitely can't be the same for, say, Shaka Hachi and Biwa, where you want to hear them in a room that's got the tummy flooring and your audience are quite close if they're being audience because you might just be obviously playing it for yourself, meditative purposes in the case of Shaka Hachi. And you should be able to hear natural sounds of the natural world around you. So yeah, they've got different sonic capabilities and they're heard very differently in the spaces. So I thought that was quite an interesting fusion and a challenge as a composer. Yeah. And I was talking about how Tanizaki is very concerned with this Western influence in Japan and how the characters responded to that and how they maybe flirted with it. For instance, oh, too many spoilers, but the wife would put on Western dress when she was gay out to the movies with Kimura. And but then she would definitely wear Kimono when she was at home speaking with her husband. So they're sort of using what they want from both cultures for whatever situation suits them best was my reading of it. So that's why I thought it was good to have an instrument representing both cultures say to portray the characters. And I also chose those instruments, the Japanese instruments, because I felt a bit more comfortable with them. So during my time in Japan, I did study and take lessons on Shaka Hachi, Biwa, Sho, I played in a gagaku ensemble on the show. So I was sort of playing to my own strengths a bit as well. It was actually really hard writing an opera, if you can guess. And this is like writing four operas because they all happen at the same time. Yeah, we're speaking about this recently in the context of cross cultural composition. And of course, it's cross cultural because you've got Japanese instruments and Western instruments, but I think it's really also cross cultural within Japanese cultures. The instruments come from really different traditions. So and they have a whole different repertoire and way of playing. So and notations. So the Shaka Hachi and the show do not use the same kind of notation. They don't play together. You wouldn't they don't really exist in the same world. And then you've got we had different singing styles, because they weren't all opera singers. Actually, each time we've done it, one of the singers has been for more of an acting background. Usually the daughter twice has been an actor. So that gives a very different quality. And then when the Biwa was involved in Kyuura's trio, they also sung or narrated. And then that's got a very different kind of quality as well. The dancer. So the dance actually we were two dancers, but they were both physical theater actors. And they worked with a choreographer who was from a butto background. I don't know how many people know about butto in here, probably. Yeah. So it's inspired by butto. It wasn't strict following these kind of characters that are often within butto. But yeah. So that was a totally different. You wouldn't see a butto dancer with the Shaka Hachi usually as well. So a whole different mix there. And the architecture. Oh yeah. So when we did the performances in Japan, they were in traditional style houses with tatami floors, shoji, suma, that sort of thing. Not the case when we did it in the UK. But yeah, I'll talk about that a little bit later as well. Yeah. So and then the costumes again, a very different thing with the UK for the wife. She was wearing kimono in Japan, but it didn't really make sense for her to wear kimono in the UK. So yeah, we changed that to but still like something that would make sense for a sophisticated Japanese woman of around middle age to wear. Yeah. So you've got a lot of different elements coming together. I would say to represent these multifaceted characters. And yeah, I was trying to say to try and resonate well in the house. You know, sometimes we had to play with levels and you'd have to, I lost a lot of weight when doing this opera because there was like running from one room to the other quite a lot. They're like, okay, we have to, this has to be quiet an hour. You can afford to play louder. Yeah, as I was saying, the instruments are built for different things. Some unexpected results for me as a composer was sort of delving into how these Japanese instruments, their repertoire, how they play, their modes of behavior when they're performing as well. But the sort of their ideas about ornamentation and also like the oral tradition, like there's, they have sheet music, like a lot of their pieces be written down. But then it's like the very base of it. That's the basic level. And then if you want to learn how to actually perform it, you learn by listening and following your teacher. And then there's just so much more freedom and quite a lot of them like the way that freedom in tempo or freedom and taking a breath and the space is really important. And all of that actually really influenced how I wrote the music for all instruments and singers combined. Yeah, which meant that I did struggle a bit with how to write it all in Western notation. So it's in like a five line stave. I chose to do that because that was a way that that was like the common language that everyone could read. But it is a bit of a compromise. So there were definitely some points where I was just like, oh, I could just do a big scribble, a scribble like that, because that's kind of what we want. And then we could talk about it. And then that'll work, which was the best way sometimes. But yeah, there was definitely some issues there. Yeah. Well, Clive would be happy to know. I think they created a process that's shaped by the performers in that instrument. So it yeah, it became really apparent that we had so many different experiences and skills in the rooms. And that was really going to benefit the piece. And these, yeah, these different playing sensibilities, the way to say experiences, we had some people who were excellent improvisers, but we had some people who were more experts in the kind of like the contemporary music field. And then had somebody who played vaudeville kind of like comedic music. And then actors as well, and a choreographer. And, you know, it meant that this project provided something new for everyone involved in a new challenge for everyone, but also hopefully enabled them to bring what was unique about them into the project. And I think that really strengthened them. Yeah. So we did a lot of discussing and sharing of ideas throughout the whole rehearsal process. Yeah. And improvisation, this kind of guided improvisation and giving space, especially for the Japanese instrument players to improvise and add automation in a way that was idiomatic for their instrument, became really important as well. So that was a good challenge for me for some performers who hadn't experienced that so much before. So should we watch some? I think, yeah. And so I'm going to play, we have, so the opera is about an hour to an hour and a half long, so we're not going to watch it all. But I have a trailer video from the Tokyo premiere, so I thought it would be good to have a look at. Oh, where is it? Yes. Yeah. It's behind this and if you look. Oh, okay. Let's do it. Okay. So that's a bit of, there's a bit of the, we do questions at the end, but I'd love to hear it. Thank you. Anyway, yeah. Okay. So this little quite here is a question that was posed by the International Shaka Hachi Festival Prague Symposium a couple of years ago. Should these musical worlds coexist or create a whole new world altogether? So I don't think they're trying to make a rule or anything, but I was thinking about it in respect to the key. And I think that there's no way they can coexist. They have to work together to create a specific world of the key. And that's because it's all about portraying the characters and telling their story. And the instruments, they're so integral to the drama. So, yeah. And I think that together, these combinations of the instruments really working together, as long as well as all these aleatorics, so these kind of random elements. So each room is unfolding in its own time. And there are some cues about where they match up, but it is quite free. So every performance is slightly different. And of course, the audience, they are totally free. You never know what an audience is going to do. And they're all in totally different rooms. Every audience member has a different experience to another audience member. So they're all experiencing the sonic world in their own way. And the acoustics and the natural environment, the time of year when we performed it, we did a research and development performance in August in 2017. And so we had the sounds of the not yet dead cicadas. And whereas in May it was slightly different. And, yeah, sort of, I think all these factors come together to create a whole new sonic world, in my opinion. So, yeah. So in August 2019, we brought the key to London as part of Tetetet, the opera festival. And it was, I'd always kind of had the idea I'd love to do it in the UK. And I wanted to bring the Japanese instrument players from Japan's pair with UK based players, like the clarinet in the violin and the cello, and then maybe to have half of the performers of the characters, the two of the singers, or maybe a singer and a dancer from Japan and two singers from the UK. That was my idea. But we actually then ended up building it with pretty much everyone who was based in Europe. And we brought one singer and the dancer over from Japan. And we were sort of thinking for a little while, should we try and do it in a Japanese house in the UK? Or should we really embrace this new context? And we actually did it in a very kind of modern sort of 1960s originally architect's house. It was very swish, very stylish. So that really affected the staging of the performance. And we had decided to keep the story the same, but change the context. So the idea was, it was a Japanese family who had moved to the UK, started their life there, and the daughter had been born in the UK. To try and make it make sense. The whole idea is that when you walk into the house and you walk into the performance of the key is that you're immersed in it. And it would be such a shame if you walked into it and felt like you were watching a weird stage performance and you weren't really involved and that it didn't quite match. So we've actually changed the staging to suit every venue. It's got to be responsive, I think. So it's also a modern house that kind of updated the context a bit. So that was reflected in the costumes that the performers wore. But I kept the text, the libretto, largely the same. It was still Japanese English. I felt that was really important. It just kind of put a few sections. It was very long in Japanese and the start of each movement that they play, they sing the date of the diary entry. And I just changed all of that to English to try and give the audience a bit of a hook so they could get involved. But yeah, it was, the main thing was the main thing was adapting it to fit the venue and the context. So I thought we could watch a little bit of that, if you like, as well. So it's a full video. So I'll just show a section of it. Oh, that's all I have to say. Yeah, I think that would be a great time if you have any questions. Thank you so much for listening today. And I have a website that is dedicated to the keys, www.thekeyopera.com, if you want to have a little look in your own time as well. Cheers, thank you. Thank you very much. Let's quickly turn the lights on now. That's better. Thank you so much. That was really fascinating. I'm sure you have lots of questions, but I wanted to start by asking you something very concrete, because it's, I mean, it's a brilliant idea to take something that the characters think of unspeakable. They can't talk about it, but they write about it, but then you transform it into singing, and they sing about it. But of course, they don't hear each other's voices. The audience is the only, the audience are the only ones who actually hear what is being performed. And I was wondering, there was, there was a, and sort of the spatial compartmentalization is maintained to a certain degree, but there's also extra, there's one moment where Kimura hands a picture, but you could speak a little bit about the photographs and their role, because they seem to be the thing that is exchanged, that is the only thing that can actually go from one room to the other. Yeah, there were a couple of moments where we sort of broke the rules, which I felt was just really important for the drama. But yeah, like you say, most of the time the audience are let into this very intimate space, and they're the only ones who can really listen to their stories. But there were just, there were certain points that were so important in the drama that I felt had to be shown. So yeah, the passing of the photographs is one. And then actually, at the very end of the opera, they are all brought together, which again just seemed to sort of had to bring it to a close in a way, and had to, wanted to bring the whole audience together at the end as well. So that seemed an important way of doing it. But then they stand out as very important moments, because it's not happened throughout the whole thing, I think. Does that make sense? Yes, please. Questions from the floor? You will have some members of the audience that you could see. Yes, so we have one here, and then we'll come to you. Yes, please. Well, thank you very much indeed. It's a pleasure to see the performance being wherever it was. And there should be reminded of it from what was three years ago, and a couple of comments on a question. I mean, your description of the outset, I mean, was very helpful, but it's also certainly what your initial description, one could get as an audience member, what you were saying was that I didn't sense the absolute be-work, and the three clarinets, but apart from that, you could get what was supposed to happen. And if anything, I would also say that I could hear more there around the house than you could necessarily in the video. In fact, I would say your description of it reminded me more of my experience than the video itself. It's incredibly difficult to represent in film. Which kind of gets me towards my question. So I'm sure I wasn't there when the cameras were there, and obviously that involves the more choices. I can't help thinking of a comment that Pony Rain said about Tarama Suji, the theatre of film. And he did a show in Amsterdam where everybody was going to go around in their own cars and get unique experiences. And he as a critic sort of went in one of the cars, and Tarama said, oh, no, no, you don't know in that car, you know, you go in this car. And so, you know, it wasn't entirely as rant, but obviously the same for your filming. So then you say a little bit more about the choices of your filming. Yeah. Well, with the UK film, we had two videographers who arrived about two hours before the performance and said, so what do you want us to do? And they said, well, it happens in four different rooms. And I said, yeah, over two different floors of the house. Well, then I picked up a few moments sort of like the passing of the photographs and some kind of, basically key moments that I think an audience member maybe needs to know in order to form this story so that they don't come out of it missing the opportunity to see how multifaceted the characters are. It would be such a shame if you walked out and just thought, that wife is awful. She just wants to kill her husband because then you would miss so much. So I picked up a couple of moments, but also some of those important moments, the music is louder in those rooms and it's quieter or not at all in one or the other rooms or the dancer is physically moving into that space. So the audience are really free, but they're given hints. And audience members are again, very welcome to just stand in a quiet space where no one is performing and or do the exact opposite of the crowd. But the way that I've kind of guided the music so you can pick up these anchor points of the story, inform the filming with the Tokyo ones, the videographers came to rehearsals and every performance. And then we pieced together a trailer at the end. And then that's a bit different for a trailer. You want to you want to give people something a bit juicy so they get a bit interested, but you also don't want to give all the story away, but you also want to try and give a sense of the whole thing. So that was just quite a lot back and forth between me and the video editors deciding, okay, there was a shot in the trailer where you the camera went from one room into the next room into the next room. And I thought that was really important because it shows that the spaces were open and and that the audience could actually see in that house two rooms at the same time, so I say. So yeah, there's that kind of informed how we did the filming and how we made the trailers. Because I just, in my experience of, you know, in Liverpool, yes, you must have guided me. There was obviously something that was started before I thought it was loud. And then, yes, then you were aware of something happening over there. But you're here and I'm closer to these performers than I am to you now. And it seems kind of disloyal and rude, you know, just for this walk out. And eventually I got it and realised I did have to move. I had to have an inconstant loyalty, which was, you know, part of the show. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, a lot of people said the same thing. Like, yeah, I quite like that. Thank you. Yes, there's a question about. Oh, God, no, I had a panic dream that someone couldn't turn up and I had to do it. Yeah, no, no, I wasn't tempted to do it myself. But as a composer, I can't play the trumpet, but I know how the trumpet works and I can write for trumpet. So, yeah. So in some ways, that's quite similar to just as your work as a composer. And then the other way is just sitting down with a performer and discussing, OK, if I want this kind of sound or I want to create this kind of atmosphere, I think it should be like this. What do you think? And they say, oh, maybe I could play it with this technique or or maybe if you put it in this register, it'd be lower or higher, it'd be a bit more effective for their particular instrument. And so that back and forth helps you to shape the music. I actually, I've brought some samples of the scores and the libretto, the text, if anybody wants to have a look. I can put them on the table if you want to have a look. I also brought some shakuhachi and show music, like written in the notation that they would use if you want to compare. Thank you. As a composer, I'm curious to hear you experience working with Japanese instrumentists, because they're very different in notations, very different in the sense of timing. Because I most of them don't have a very strict sense of counting. You neither do singers. When you are developing your score, what strategy do you use to contextualize everything? Because you have the Western instrumentation and then you have the Japanese one. How do you do synchronization and explain between the Western and the Japanese? Yeah, so the Japanese instrumentists, Japanese instrument players I was working with, they all read Western notation. So that meant, okay, we can use that as the common language and so everyone will understand what's going on. But then, yes, that you say definitely this kind of timing, I think there was points where just in the rehearsal, I'd say, I've put a pause here and you just breathe and then make it clear, okay, I want you to follow the violinist here, I want you to follow the percussionist here, because it just needs a bit more space. Or because they're very much linked with the performers, there was quite a lot of cues from them. So she needs a moment to turn the page. So when she lifts her head up or something, maybe the cue can come from the performance. There's quite a lot of physical cues. There's definitely a way of getting around that. And then, say, for the Shaka Hachi, for instance, like I might write the melody line. But then ornamentation, for some specific ornamentation that I knew I wanted, like I want Morayaki here, like the overblowing sort of sound here. But then the rest of the time, maybe I'm just, you know, I'm up for, you bring what you want to bring, let's see what that works. And because I've written the dynamics or if they know what's happening in the words, so they know the context. So there was, so we could be a bit more free about how to shape their line. Yeah, I guess it was kind of how we did it. There was full concurrence between what we're using. Yes, yeah, yeah. How much coordination do you have between them? A little bit. Sometimes it was, say, for passing the photo. So I'd say to one room, especially if they were next door, be like, wait until they've finished that movement or you hear that line, and then you can start or something. Or sometimes it was even for balance in the different buildings. Okay, it's too loud. Usually it was okay if these two rooms are going at the same time, but in this different house, they have to be a bit more spacious. So one has to wait for a bit. And so to this thing, you be reading your diary at this point, and it's just quiet. So this is the other thing. They're always acting. It's like they're constantly on stage, and the instrumentalists as well. So there was a bit of freedom there about that kind of thing. That's sort of how we did it. So there were little cues, but it wasn't strict, because number one, I think that would be impossible. And number two, that's not all I wanted, because I wanted it to feel like they were living and that you'd really walked into someone's weird house and you'd kind of, you know, there was an actual realness to it, I think. No, thank you. Yes, please. I'm trying to just say I was really inspired by, at the beginning, you were talking about your concert. And I was just like, wow, amazing concert. And then to pass forward to the end of presentation, we get to see it. I was, unfortunately, I didn't get to see it in my life. But I just, for me, that's really exciting and inspiring to see when you have this idea that unites all your patterns of interest. And then just to be able to take it right through to completion. That's quite inspiring to me, as an early on in my study of projects and stuff like that. I wanted to ask you about how this process was from the conception of the initial idea. And we just first came to this, how long, how long were you working on your idea of going forward into publishing? What's important to have? Yeah, it was really long. I actually came up with the idea when I was living in Scotland, and I came across the key in a second-hand bookshop. And I said, Tanazaki, it's like, oh, yeah, I know Tanazaki. And I pulled it out. I had a naked lady on the front. I thought, oh, that looks interesting. Obviously important. And then I was reading it and then I had the idea for the concept, like, oh, it could be very initial. It could be staged. And then developed it more as like, oh, it should be staged in a building. Oh, it should have people at different rooms. Oh, that'd be great. And then obviously the ideas got bigger and bigger and bigger. But I was just studying my masters at that time and it was living in Scotland. So I had all these ideas. That initial concept was there, but then it just sort of sat there for a while. That was maybe 2011 or 2012. And then it moved to Japan 2015 and was doing the scholarship and then was coming towards the end of the scholarship. I thought, okay, that idea I've had on the Batburner, maybe we could revisit that. Now I've actually got a bit more understanding. Maybe I can now try read the key in Japanese as well. And then I thought, oh, well, now it could also have Japanese instruments in it because that would make sense because I hadn't thought about that originally. I hadn't thought about doing the text in English and Japanese originally because I didn't know any Japanese as well. So at the time, so guess going on the scholarship kind of accelerated it and came to the end of the scholarship and thought, okay, now I'm ready to do something and then started developing it. So that was like maybe March 2017 and we did a research and development. So we tried out about 20 to 30 minutes worth of material to sort of test just my crazy idea of work and getting people interested and involved and so on. I was fortunate to meet a producer who was based at the Gai Dai, the Tokyo University of the Arts and so and then they said, oh, you should try it in this space that's been bought by an arts community organization and then you can work with them. And so there's a lot of just like meeting people and talking to the right people and getting them excited to for them to then get other people excited for it to sort of snowball a bit. And then lots of unpaid work and then applying for funding and just building the right team of people to get really invested in it. So yeah, I guess it took quite a while. Thank you. People online, please feel free to put your questions into the Q&A function. We have one more question from the floor and then we have a question from virtual space Barbara Abram, you'll be up next. So please. Yeah, I wanted to ask a bit more about the underlying structure of the music. Presumably it's driven by the structure of the story, obviously, but I'm wondering if there's some sort of, I was going to say key structure, but I mean it's atoneable, right? So it doesn't have any keys ironically. But is there some kind of underlying structure to the music through the music? Yeah, I guess there is thematic material. So there's a melody as a theme that happens first in the husband's room. And then for me, that kind of is maybe a motif in a way and that happens when the husband is doing one particular thing. So then when the wife is reflecting on it, it's sort of echoed in the cello in her room. And then when the daughter's may be talking about it, it sort of, it comes into a new variation, a new role in her room. So there is the certain material that kind of links them all together. Yeah, it's not any key. It is atoneable, but it's also got quite a lot to do with the shows, the pictures are set, and there are certain chords that resonate really beautifully on the show. So that actually has quite a lot of implication, harmonic implication in those rooms. Yeah, throughout, really. Yeah, so there's, yeah, there is definitely quite a bit of progression there, but it's not like a Western tonal harmony sort of thing. Thank you. So we have one question from Barbara Abram. Hello, Barbara, I can hear us. You may have to unmute yourself. Okay, we make up, no, no, sorry, we may come back to you. Is there any other questions? Yes, please. I was just wondering at what stage in the composition did you know who the performers were going to be? And were elements of what you composed specific to the people who were going to be the first performers? And I'm thinking with this kind of project where there's a certain amount of flexibility and interact and improvisation with say, for example, the later works of Luigi Donald, he was composing them for people he knew. So he even writes in the score the names of the performers, not soprano, cello, whatever, the names of the performers. Was there anything like that with your process? And how did it, and if there was, how did it then affect the overall effect of the work other people performed instead? Yeah, I knew quite a lot of the performers before it started. So yes, for some of them it did influence it, especially there are some semi-pro amateur performers in there. So that affected how like the complexity of the music that I wrote for them. And then also sort of knowing their strengths a bit, like I knew the double bassist was a great improviser, so that sort of thing. It did affect it. And then when I had some different performers the second time around in Tokyo and also in London, yeah, sometimes I did have to make certain adjustments. Also, like a major one, like for the singer Hiroshi who plays the husband, he's actually younger than the daughter, in London, he's got like some a hairspray, I don't know if I can make it a bit rare. But he's a tenor, not a baritone, so there were a couple of movements that I just moved up a third, I had to adapt it slightly because it would fit better in his range. The two people, the first daughter and the last daughter, because they were more actors, sometimes I'd written music it was a process of getting to know them through the rehearsals and then making some adaptations as well. So yeah, it did, it became quite personal and that's why I think creating it really was a credit to everyone involved and it was quite inspiring. Okay, let's try again. Barbara, Barbara Abraham, are you there? Incredible silence. Right, yes, I actually can write over, but if there's any more questions, yes, please, yes, Lucia. I'd like to get more about the audience, the Japanese audience, what was the reaction that, whether they moved from one thing to the other? Oh, yeah, oh yeah, a mixture. Yeah, some people were just sit and watch, but even in the UK as well, we did talk about should we have ushers for a while, like people who could just gently say, it's okay, you can move now. We didn't want to be too, we don't want to guide people too much, but so what we did do is we kind of had ushers near the start because it takes people a while to understand what's going on and to get comfortable in the space. And it starts with everyone in one room and then they overhear the other rooms and then they're free to move. So we did need people to just go, and now you can get up and move about the start, but then after that, people start to get used to it and then they don't really need any help and they did, yeah, and they did move around or take a seat and just kind of, yeah, listen to all the other rooms as well. Sometimes they stood incredibly close to the performers, sometimes, yeah, but it was, yeah. Interesting, yes. Yes, please. Thank you. Tell us a little bit more about the house in London in Goa, I mean, you said it was not a Japanese house, but in my sense, defended its belief. I thought it was a Japanese house around this garden that's sort of looking well, but very in a very formal way, and it wasn't, it was a well-lit house, but somehow I got the gloominess of the rumours and the oppression of these rumours, you know, and what does she know about what he knows about who she knows about. Anyway, what was the most choice in the house? Well, my producer here suggested it, she'd met an architect and they were willing, it was actually, people actually lived in that house, so we had to wait for the teenage son to get up in the morning to get in the room. It's eight times like the football finish. It's not a glamorous life when it goes like that, but yeah, and so, and I was in Japan, I didn't get to see the house before we did our first rehearsals, I just, luckily a couple of people in the team had been and they took a video around and sent to me. I was really nervous, really nervous before the start because I thought it's got massive windows, she's totally different, it's got hard floors, it's, yeah, is it gonna gonna work at all? It's got like colourful furnishings and so on, so I was really nervous, but then I thought more about kind of the essence of it and decided it sort of intensified this peeking in a bit because intensifies the voyeurism a bit, I think, because you've got these massive windows, but they're not actually communicating, they're just peering in on each other and they're, you know, they're performing for each other in a way and they go, oh no, I really don't care about you, oh, I'm going to flirt with this man and, you know, so intensified that and yeah, and it did have kind of like sliding spaces, the spaces could be changed quite a bit, which worked really well and also it, it felt a bit like a model home in a way, like this is where a happy family should live, so having a really dysfunctional family in that space, I thought also like heightened that, that sense of they really can't communicate with each other and they're really not happy in each other's spaces, so yeah, then then I thought, okay, it worked. It's like a lot of like observations, I've seen two in Japan and in the one in London, it's just reminding me of Dinasaki book in close-up shadow, I wonder whether you have any view on that, how the darkness in the Japanese home suddenly, it was just completely different, it's so much more impressive because it's so much, I don't know what it is, it's actually how it affects the way I listen to the piece as well, you have that opinion about that, even the lighting of the display. Yes, like when we were staging it in the Japanese houses with the tummy flaws and the shoji, it just felt like it has to be dark, it has to be, you know, it has, and also it had to be very natural, like a lamp that you would just have in the house because it felt it would be really weird if there was a spotlight, so and it would be really weird in that kind of setting if you had a very bright what bulb. Anyway, so yeah, so that that was definitely a consideration, so there was another reason why I was really nervous about bringing it to the UK, that's going to be really bright, and it was in summer, so it's going to be really light outside as well with these big windows, but I think it worked, but I think it maybe would have, yeah maybe it would have felt really strange if we'd made it really bright in a Japanese house or we tried to make it gloomy, might be, might felt really strange if we tried to put windows and like curtains and screens and things in the UK house to try and make it artificially gloomy, because it's, yeah it's not gloomy is it, it's this, it's the shadow that's, yeah, yeah and and something even the the choreographer, she was really nervous about the house in the UK because she was saying that there's no humidity and there's no damp and there's no mold. She was like, you know, it should just be a bit sticky, I guess so, and you don't get that in the UK house, but I guess also that sort of that kind of stickiness, you know, fits well in the humid houses in Japan for this fresherized, uncomfortable story, it's a bit uncomfortable to watch, it sort of should be a bit uncomfortable to watch, everyone's a bit uncomfortable talking about the issues, so I didn't want it to feel clean in the UK and all that. Sticky, yeah, a hint of mold, yeah. Thank you. Any last questions? Oh, yes, Sam. What's next? Yes, that was my last question. Yeah, so what's next? So, well, this year, hopefully, I will be doing another immersive piece or we do some research and development. I'm going to do it in my hometown, very different to Japan, we did it in Stoke-on-Tran. It's a massive piece exploring a woman who was accused of witchcraft in the 1600s and the idea is there's lots of different perspectives, you know, the priest was saying she was satanic and then you have the people in the pub sharing all their rumours and myths and stories, so I want to turn that into a kind of an immersive piece where the audience hear these different viewpoints and they could choose different ways and then in the end they're going to be surrounded by a choir of people and the choir will be made up of women and non-binary and trans people who will represent the story of the character Molly Lee, the woman who was accused of witchcraft. So that's going to be in the summer and then be developed into performances in 234, 235. And then Japan, the end of this year, I'm creating a concert and in this concert I've got a new piece for Biwa and Voice. So the Biwa's repertoire is generally about war, battles, telling the myths and I was thinking well what about women's stories and women's battles. So I'm writing a new piece for Biwa about a feminist anarchist Ito Noe who was around in the early 1900s. So it's going to be a way of kind of like exploring her life and talking about her battles and then creating a concert around it or feature music by Japanese women composers from the early 1900s as well. Thank you. And we just got in the first question online but from Dr Yonah Sidder who's asking there's an interest in Israel and Japanese culture both the key and in praise of shadows were translated into Hebrew. Would you consider bringing the opera to Israel? I'd certainly consider it. Yeah, sure. Yeah, as I was going to work with like a Israeli dramaturge I think because it's really important to craft the piece for the context that's going to be performed and experienced in. But yeah, sure. Definitely yes then. So thank you very much for coming. Thank you for such a fascinating presentation. Give a big round of applause please. And yes, we're looking forward maybe the anarchist feminist piece could be performed also in a sort of, you know, maybe in some kind of collaboration with local Japan related institutions. That'd be fantastic. Yes, I would like to bring it to the UK. Excellent, thank you. And if anybody wants to have a look. Oh yes, please have a look at the notation. And we also, I just want to remind you we have three more official events on the 16th of May. We have the last in the series of Japan and Sports Symposium organized by Helen McNaughton in the presence of the ambassador of Japan. So that's on a Tuesday, not on a Wednesday. And then we have a talk by the abbot of the Daigoji and the director of the terror space who are planning to launch a space temple in 2004. So definitely something also to look forward to that's on the 26th of sorry, 24th of May, 10 o'clock in the morning. And our final event is with our good friend, Professor Stephen Dot who will talk about the political symbolism of flying saucers in Mishima's Utsukushi Hoshi, beautiful star, a novel that was serialized, that wasn't really part of the canon of Mishima's writing, but that he has translated and that is now available in Penguin Classics. So please do put that down in your diary and do return. Thank you.