Aria: from cross-disciplinary
university research project to
“a Covid-proof opera for our times”

- Eugene A. Birman





How academia, government, and a team of 100+ artists, tech crew, and children built a production in art’s most challenging year.
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It was not even so long ago, surely just some months before the world premiere, that Kingsley Ng and I met to once more discuss a persistent question - did our show really use big data or were we, just like many before us, employing a trendy term without the proper (computer) science behind it? This - along with questions of minimizing environmental impact, working with children in a way that didn’t exploit their stage and creative presence, and surely others - was something at least remotely within our control.
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The pandemic and its effects on travel, capacity restrictions, vocal performance had forced us to pivot the production in so many ways already that one could say, indeed, that Aria was designed around it, almost in harmony with it. And we couldn’t plan for the future beyond the ever-increasing contingency plans dutifully sketched out by our top curator, Stephanie Cheung. But we could ask the hard questions, we could challenge our messaging and branding, and ultimately, we could honestly admit that Aria did indeed benefit from big data, just barely.
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Not to dwell on the question of multi- or cross-disciplinarily, but it is indeed worth making an example of it because it is so easy to say that something is X meets Y, especially for the purpose of university funding or simply because the quantitative somehow makes the qualitative more concrete in the minds of a reader or a listener. Specifically, Aria was conceived as a research project that would bridge two worlds, not three - computer science and art. To make a point of uniting visual art and music, as Kingsley and I did, would be to take credit for something that has existed in practically every world culture since pre-history, and surely is not the invention of de’ Bardi in Florence in the late Sixteenth century; in other words, opera isn’t new.

Neither, in fact, is allying computer science and music but it was indeed new at Hong Kong Baptist University and, frankly speaking, it is new to do it meaningfully and ‘horizontally’, where the focus of the computer science is not for the sake of the music but to generate something for its own, scientific, research sake. Space to Breathe, as we named the research project, was designed to bridge the gap of almost universal awareness of air pollution and climate change, and a general lack of individual action on the topic. We intended to do this by, first, researching the sources of air pollution in Hong Kong, then, perspectives on HK air by visitors from mainland China as well as locals, after which we would develop an algorithm for incorporating the extent of air pollution into the musical score so that the final work would change depending on the data sets of the city in which it is performed, and, of course - make an immersive musical installation-concert that would genuinely change the perspective of HK audiences on the air they breathe. The music would be fully vocal, after all - to make music, first we must breathe, we wrote in that original grant application.

When it comes to the multitude of other factors - Kingsley’s very light and genuinely respectful touch when it came to the use of space (and what a brilliant space the Forsgate Conservatory is!), the process of working with the truly incredible Hong Kong Children’s Choir, from developing a text to their starring role as surely the first children’s choir to perform opera in masks, to our rather groundbreaking collaboration with Theatre of Voices on holograms in a ‘live’ music installation - beyond all these, there is something else I do want to highlight:

Every major production is ultimately tied to the names of its artistic directors and creative imitators and perhaps that’s fair, but Aria was truly the work of a very big, very talented, agile, and flexible team. They turned the Forsgate Conservatory from a public greenhouse to a magical art installation on a nightly basis and, like Cinderella, by midnight (in fact, 10pm), it was back to its original state. They wired and re-wired lights, speakers, and a trolley cable, managed dozens of administrative and creative staff, day and night communications with the LCSD, built a ticketing system from scratch and then managed hundreds of reservations, and perhaps this is the right time to remind that all this was in the middle of the pandemic when nothing was assured, not even the same day’s performance. Their names may not be attached to the marquee of the project, but they are acknowledged on this website, and every single one shares in the success of this project, now and in the future.

Maybe this is a good place to end. But just one final point - disregarding the fact that Aria is not really a work of classical music or a strictly musical work at all, in fact it is as much if not more a visual experience than it is aural, I hope it closes the frivolous argument that classical music is increasingly out of touch with the world and irrelevant to audiences. Aria tickets sold out in under three minutes and we received hundreds more requests which we unfortunately couldn’t fulfill due to the capacity constraints imposed. In fact, the LCSD made an incredible exception for us to hold the events with a limited audience in the first place, a great example of how art and regulations can happily coexist in the current time. The response from the city, and, indeed, internationally, from festivals from Macao to Manchester, has been similarly inspiring. Art that challenges, that provokes, that demands more from the audience than mere presence, has and will always have great appeal, because ultimately, it is of great consequence.

There will be more to come from Aria, from all of us, in the future. This, all, is just the start.












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