I am a escapee hyphen

Music Network and The Dock are pleased to present 'I am a escapee hyphen' created by soprano Elizabeth Hilliard and composer Gráinne Mulvey as part of RESONATE 2022.
This is the world premiere performance, directed by Helene Montague at The Dock.

Credits: Gráinne Mulvey (composer) Elizabeth Hilliard (soprano) Helene Montague (director) Patrick Dunne (voiceover).

Programme note:

'This piece for voice and electronics is based on “spam”. Since browsers and email clients are routinely set up to block certain “triggers” (usually advertising various nefarious “medical” products) the perpetrators try to smuggle them through by embedding them among randomly-
generated text. The resulting juxtapositions of unrelated words can produce unexpectedly comic results. I have attempted to explore how these spurious junk texts can be used as found material, ranging from random syllables to comedy-melodramatic “sentences” that (almost)
seem as if they might actually have some obscured profundity – like a literal translation of a proverb in an unknown language, shorn of its cultural and linguistic context and thus rendered meaningless.

I feel in a time where we live with social media, there is a need to have some comic commentary on the buzz words and jargon used today in everyday speech - particularly the unrelenting bombardment of unsolicited and unwanted material that is such a curse of today’s interconnected world. It is also a salient reminder that beneath the surface of what to most of us is just a mild annoyance lies a far darker world – a world of organized crime, money laundering, theft, fraud…

The piece is a dialogue between singer and tape, both initiate sentences or narration and the result is incomprehensible words, sometimes in full sentences, or syllables morphing into recognisable sentences and then sentences morphing into nonsense “spam”. The live vocal part is constantly challenged technically, due to various parts in extreme registers, spoken, requiring overtone singing and a variety of phonetic and sibilant sounds.

All this is represented by incorporating such “melodramatic” sentences as the following:
“By bus fled reservoir will not be dyarchy recce, by the way eulogy on television thundering.
Towards murderous by bus In future slavish carboy.”

Or

“Along torn, crooked with regard to pollinate in love extrajudicial to be gawp?
You are an questioner, howsoever. From the riches, admixture…”

Interlaced with this nonsense is information on spam and various terminologies spoken with voiceovers by Patrick Dunne.'

RESONATE is a Music Network artist residency programme in partnership with glór, Ionad Cultúrtha, The National Opera House, Triskel Arts Centre, The Dock and Regional Cultural Centre.