Belongings was commissioned by the Seattle Opera. It will be a one act opera scored for six singers and chamber orchestra. It’s an innovative project that started in partnership with several organizations including the Seattle film festival, which conducted extensive interviews with a wide range of Seattle are residents. The project grew out of those interviews.
Here’s more, from the Seattle Opera Website:
“For centuries, opera has championed the longago and far-away as one form of musical storytelling. What if we found a way for opera to celebrate the here and now, to explore stories of our time and our place? When an opera company commission a new work, it usually begins and ends with the compose rand librettist. This time we’re taking a different approach: we’re starting with your story and the stories of your friends, neighbors and other you pass by on the street. Belongings begins with an online repository of video interviews – a digital quilt that tells stories of our most precious possessions: this objects or memories that help us understand our lives, relationship and legacies.
Think about this: if you had to leave you home today, and couldn’t return, what would you take with you? Why is that object, or that memory, or that connection to your past so important?
Librettist Jessica Murphy Moo
Jessica Murphy Moo is a writer, teacher, and editor. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Image, and Memorious; her nonfiction has appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine and The Atlantic Online, among other publications. She has held teaching positions at Emerson College, Harvard University, Boston University, and Seattle Pacific University. She holds an MFA in fiction from Emerson College, and has been the recipient of the Milton Center Postgraduate Writing Fellowship and a Whiteley Center Writing Residency. In addition to the Belongings libretto, she is working on a new collection of short stories.