The Conifers

Introduction

Four people are waiting to be evacuated from a dying planet. It’s not Earth but an artificial world, a piece of rock terraformed to grow trees: a planet-sized timber farm. But something has gone wrong, the trees aren’t growing anymore, and the company has decided to cut its losses and evacuate.

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And so the last inhabitants of this minimal world converge on a hangar, waiting for the dropship which will carry them away. As the curtain comes up the ship is nine hours late, on a world where nothing is late. Has the company abandoned them? Has something gone wrong? They tell stories, confront memories, plan their futures, and argue, until — amid their escalating alarm — the planet itself begins to assert its own strange music.

Development

The Conifers is scored for four singers (two sopranos, alto, and bass-baritone), ten instruments (flute, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, electric guitar, percussion, violin, viola, cello, and double bass), and electronics, and will last 70-80 minutes.

It has been developed through a Jerwood Opera Writing Fellowship; over the last three years, we've had four residencies at Snape Maltings, working on the piece together, and in collaboration with others. The last of these, in August 2018, culminated in a showcase of twenty-five minutes of the opera — highlights from which are above. The opera's instrumental introduction and conclusion, which highlight the mixing of the acoustic and electronic sounds, have also been performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble as Wilding Pine — featured below.

We are looking for partners

We want to realise a full production of The Conifers and would love to talk to producers and presenters – please get in touch if you're interested. The Conifers speaks to both current and timeless issues and, as a chamber piece, requires modest resources.

Many of these qualities can be seen in the full recording of the showcase at Snape Maltings, below.

About us

Joel Rust is a composer, sound artist, and PhD candidate at New York University. Aside from The Conifers, he’s currently working on CITIZEN, an interactive installation focusing on our experiences of urban soundscapes, and his dissertation on Varèse’s unfinished multimedia works of the 1930s and 40s.

David Troupes has published two collections of poetry, and his creative work, including prose and sequential/comic art, appears widely in journals and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic. Ted Hughes and Christianity, a book grown from his doctoral research, will be published by Cambridge University Press in July 2019.

We previously collaborated on a chamber opera entitled Nauset, and it's exciting to be working together again.

Thanks to:

the team at Snape Maltings, especially Kate Wyatt;
the musicians who brought the piece to life at Snape — Natalie Raybould and Olga Siemieńczuk (sopranos), CN Lester (alto), Ed Ballard (baritone), Ryaan Ahmed (conductor), Robert Reid Allan (assistant conductor) and the ensemble;
the International Contemporary Ensemble and David Fulmer (conductor);
and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, supporter of the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme at Snape Maltings.

The cover image is by David Troupes.
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