Flicker - Research

Here are links to some of the research that helped us develop the opera.

Locked-in syndrome: a review of 139 cases

Pressure Volume Curves of the Respiratory System

Scientists seek to help Locked In man speak

Life can be worth living in locked-in syndrome

We also read the following books which provided a great (non-scientific background)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean Dominique-Bauby - the book that inspired FLICKER in the first place - beautifully written and powerful memoir about the experiences of having Locked In Syndrome written entirely by Jean blinking his left eyelid.

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes - a surprisingly un-sentimental novel about the relationship between a young man who becomes paraplegic after a motorbike accident and his carer.

opening night

By Poppy

Last night we opened Flicker to an almost sold-out house in the Lilian Baylis Studio of Sadler's Wells. Despite a madly busy day - whose idea was it to have only a day in the space with a huge amount of sound, lighting and video to tech (over 100 video cues in a 55 minute opera) - it was a resounding success. Everyone from funders, to the patients & staff who have contributed to the project and even the random audience members with no connection to the production or to Metta all loved it and found it simultaneously a huge insight into Locked In Syndrome and the work of the RHN and also a profoundly moving and emotionally engaging performance.

So Will was possibly the most stressed of all of us with his several hundred cues and a somewhat recalcitrant set of computers to work from, however everything came together smoothly - if last-minutedly and everyone commented on how beautiful and powerful the video was and how much it added to the performance.

Both Jon and I were slightly shell shocked and I think it will take a few days to process fully how it all went - a surreal experience to have just three days rehearsal and end up presenting something so polished (not quite the concert performance we had originally imagined back in 2011). But we couldn't have wished for a better showcase for the work - the singers were extraordinary, the band under the masterful conducting of Andrew Gourlay were sublime and the actor - our good friend and god mother to our son Noah - Loren O'Dair was astonishing in her portrayal of the Locked In character Iris - communicating so much literally just with the movement of her eyes.

Rehearsals

By Jon

We've been rehearsing 'Flicker' for a couple of days with the full orchestra, the singers, conductor Andrew Gourlay. The RHN have allowed us to rehearse at the hospital, in their wonderful Assembly Room; the patients and staff have been dropping in out of the rehearsals all week, and it feels as if our work's become a real feature of life here, if only for a while – it's lovely to hear the singers' voices echoing down the long Victorian corridors.

After a small crisis occasioned by the delivery of an F-sharp crotale rather than an F-natural one, it's thrilling to hear the piece come to life with such terrific performers. Everyone's working extremely hard, from Andrew's meticulous work on the score, to Will's marshalling of his small army of laptops as he develops the video projections, to Loren's beautifully controlled performance as the 'real' Iris, while Poppy zooms on and off the stage giving directing notes whenever Andrew stops the musicians. The hospital have incredibly generously lent us a bed and wheelchair, which they've custom-fitted with a light-writer for us, which makes a huge difference to the realism of what we're presenting.

I'm still making a few final changes to the score (now I've heard it played live), but really just minor adjustments to the orchestration; overall I'm very pleased with how it's sounding, and as always am overwhelmed by the privilege of having my music played by wonderful musicians. I think we're all feeling quite confident about the performance at Sadler's Wells now, and we're really looking forward to putting the piece in front of a live audience – tomorrow!

Finishing/not finishing

By Jon

I've finished! Or at least that's what I've been going round telling everyone; in fact I've just finished setting the vocal lines and the harmonies, having in the process pushed Poppy's near saint-like patience almost to the limit with my repeated texts and emails asking if we can shave yet another couple of syllables off a line.

I've now got to orchestrate the opera for our five-piece band, and have got about 4 weeks to do it before I have to send the completed score to our conductor Andrew Gourlay, the vocal part to the singers and the instrumental parts to Aurora.

I've made a chart on my studio wall with the total number of bars in the opera (1341), and the number of days left before the deadline, and I've worked out I need to orchestrate at least 123 bars a day to keep on top of things. So far I'm just about managing to do it, thanks in no small part to my assistant Fran, who's input all my manuscript material into Sibelius (a software notation programme), which has saved me a huge amount of time. Once I've (eventually) finished that and sent the score to Andrew, I'll need to go through it again, this time reducing the instrumental version to a keyboard and voice arrangement that we can work with in rehearsal with Aurora's fantastic repetiteur John Reid for a couple of days before the other musicians arrive.

Very excited now the performance at Sadler's Wells has been confirmed, and very much looking forward to hearing it played live by such fantastic musicians.

research and development

By Poppy

Today we spent an amazing day at the rehearsal rooms of English Touring Theatre trying out some of the music with the singers. It was especially thrilling for me as I hadn’t heard any of the music until that point - and it’s absolutely stunning. Thankfully the singers also love it, which makes a real difference, and they’re raring to go away and learn it all for January. Of course Jon has to sit down and write it all first! But two of the twelve movements are done and they’re both stunning. We spent the morning working through the pieces purely musically and then in the afternoon began to explore some simple staging ideas and particularly how the character of Iris will be portrayed on stage as she’s played both by an actress and a singer simultaneously. Some good discoveries were made which will stand us in good stead for January and someone from the Wellcome Trust came to observe in the afternoon when we performed a work-in-progress showing of both movements. A nail-biting moment for myself and Jon but she loved it so that’s all good. Now I can’t wait to get started properly on it all in January.

Dots

By Jon

It's 5.30 in the morning and I'm in a rather insalubrious B&B in Bath, where I'm composing for some shows at the Theatre Royal whilst doing some work on 'Flicker' in the early part of the day before going in for technical rehearsals. I've spent a long time reading and re-reading the libretto, and asking the ever-patient Poppy if she'd mind changing a few sections and phrases that I think the music won't need. At the moment the score's a fairly random collection of bits of manuscript paper with scraps of vocal melodies and chords, from which I'm pulling together ideas as I start working through the libretto.

When I talked to Julian O'Kelly - the head of music therapy at the RHN - I was very struck by the idea of what music therapists call 'entrained improvisation'. This is a musical process used to establish connections with patients in low-awareness states; the therapist begins by humming, singing or playing a single note, which is precisely timed and phrased to the patient's breathing. Gradually more notes are added and the complexity built up before being taken back down to a single note again. There's something very attractive about this as a compositional structure, so I'm planning to use this basic idea in several different ways throughout. In fact I've got very interested in the whole idea of breathing patterns; we've decided to start and end the opera with solo arias for Iris which are not-quite-identical mirror images of each other, and I've found some low chord clusters which have a feeling of soft breathing which I think might work well as an accompaniment for these.

I've also decided that the three characters should have quite different kinds of music. Iris' music is going to be very chromatic and melismatic (stretching words over several notes), whereas Bridget's will be much more melodic. She discovers Iris is locked-in (rather than being in a low-awareness state) when she notices Iris blinking in time to her singing, so I've written a little slightly Ella Fitzgerald-ish song for her to sing, which I can develop into other ideas elsewhere.

I've (eventually) been having fun with the Joe scenes; at first I was slightly tearing my hair out over how to set phrases like 'neurophysiological response', before I realised that there was something quite exciting about setting his lines very close to the actual speech rhythms of the interview transcripts we drew on when putting the libretto together. His scenes are also an opportunity to introduce a slightly lighter tone, so I'm trying to make his sections as bouncy and upbeat as possible.

We've got a R&D day coming up, where we're going to workshop two scenes with two the singers who'll hopefully be in the final performance - the soprano Anna Dennis (playing Iris), and Alison Crookendale, the contralto who'll be playing Bridget, so I'm looking forward to hearing some of the music sung live. We're going to concentrate on Iris' opening aria and the scene in which Bridget starts working with Iris using an alphabet chart, which Iris can navigate by blinking. As we found when interviewing the patients at the RHN, this is an unbelievably slow yet crucial process, and I'm starting to think about how to convey that musically without the audience (hopefully) getting bored.

Lots to do...

Some hard decisions

By Jon

I've just had the first draft of the libretto through from Poppy. It's fantastic, striking a careful balance between the human story of Iris (our central Locked-In character) and Bridget (the nurse who cares for her and guides her on her journey to communication), and the scientific material we're also keen in to incorporate, which will be delivered by a character called Joe. s a music-therapist delivering a 'lunchtime lecture' (a regular feature of life at the RHN, which many of the staff attend).

Poppy and I conducted most of the interviews with staff and patients together, and worked out an overall broad form for the opera: a twelve-part structure, in which each section is a snapshot of successive months over a single year, and alternates between Iris' story and Joe's lecture, which will occasionally be interrupted by Bridget. It's thrilling to get a fully fleshed-out version of the bare-bones skeleton we've been discussing for so many months, and I'm now at the stage when I need to start making some fairly major decisions that'll have far-reaching effects on how I write it..

Firstly, the singers. For budgetary reasons we're limited to three voices, which led to a hard decision about the number of characters. We always knew we wanted Iris to be played simultaneously by two performers: an immobile actor and a soprano who would voice his / her thoughts. We also wanted to include a scientist of some sort - this became our Joe character, who would be a low male voice - either a bass or baritone. We thought long and hard about who the third character should be; originally we were very keen to include a character who was a friend or family member of Iris', but were very struck when visiting the hospital by the particular quality of the relationship between patients and the nurses who care for them, and so decided to explore this via the character of Bridget, who will be a contralto. This gives me a nice range of voices to work with, and it's a combination whose ranges sit above and below each other quite well.

Secondly - instruments! I'm limited to five musicians (again for cost reasons), so I need to choose a combination that I can get the maximum flexibility from in terms of range, dynamics, texture, and the ability to play not only solo melodic lines but also accompanying chordal-type material. I'm also not allowed a piano (budget...).

So with all this in mind (and taking a slight steer from Schoenberg's choice of instruments in one of my favourite pieces 'Pierrot Lunaire'), I've settled on a combination of cello, violin (doubling viola), clarinet (doubling up on my favourite instrument of all time - the bass clarinet), flute (doubling up on piccolo, alto flute and the fabulous piece of plumbing that is the bass flute), and a percussionist playing marimba, vibraphone and various other bits and pieces. Very excited at the prospect that we might be able to work with the virtuosic Aurora orchestra....