2024 Alive, audiovisual Opera, for 5 Instruments, Live Electronics and Video(60’)

This piece is envisioned as an opera without words or singers, retelling the old story of a man born on a deserted island and raised by a gazelle. As a fictional hero, he has no name, no defined appearance, and no distinct personality traits, existing only through his curiosity, observations, reflections, questions, and the answers he discovers. Though he never learns to speak or encounters another human being, his innate curiosity and intelligence allows him to recover some of the knowledge lost to his isolation.

He begins by observing the world through sensory perception, gaining insights into the nature, the elements, and living creatures. Where his senses fail him, he resorts to reason. Through careful thought and reflection, he comes to grasp the relationship between matter and form, eventually arriving at the belief in a higher realm of eternal and unchanging Ideas, accessible only through reason. This leads him toward the concept of the Idea of the Good—the cause of all other ideas and the principle that gives existence and meaning to all things. He understands that this metaphysical entity must posses the attributes of utmost perfection and therefore ought to be assimilated as much as possible.

In the later years of his life, he devotes himself to bringing his thoughts and actions into harmony with the ultimate reality of the Good, an ascetic pursuit that brings him wisdom and happiness.

This story has reached us through a 12th-century book titled Hayy ibn Yaqdhan(Eng: Alive, Son of Awake), written in Arabic by the scholar Ibn Tufail, who served at the court of the Sultanate of Granada. The book introduces fundamental Neoplatonic philosophy through a rich, imaginative allegory aimed at engaging a broad audience. 

Ibn Tufail and like-minded scholars of his era, striving to reconcile opposing views on the nature of existence, saw happiness as a harmonious union with the whole.

In a similar spirit, this piece seeks to create a unique form of electroacoustic composition that unifies instrumental composition and computer music. Its greatest fulfilment comes when the performance successfully merges the computer music sections with the instrumental sections, each as expanded variations of the same themes.