The Electronic Lover
Looking back at the past 5+ years making this thing, I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but also no idea what I would get out of it. My past projects had all fallen squarely in the composer-performer realm—composing music for an ensemble I intended to perform with, and then documenting our work together with a recording. So creating a work intended to live only in the recording studio—and using the studio as a compositional tool— was novel.
In some ways, this project was just my excuse to work with the brilliant writer and observer of human beings, Beth Lisick. And it satisfied (maybe more than satisfied!) my ongoing obsession with writing for the voice, that had been ignited in my earlier song cycle Glorious Ravage and fed by my interactions with the extraordinary young singers of the San Francisco Girls Chorus. Producing something of this scale and sustaining it over 9 episodes and several years was an enormous challenge, with many unexpected twists and turns along the way. But in the end this work feels like a culmination of all the knowledge and skills and experience I have been accumulating since I began writing my own music and leading my own ensembles nearly 20 years ago. As I listen back, I hear how much I grew as a composer through this long and unpredictable journey.
Plans for the opera were well underway before the pandemic hit—so this wasn’t a pivot necessitated by our changed circumstances—but Covid isolation did have a huge impact on how we worked in the studio. Wearing headphones and recording one person at a time in separate rooms with double-plated glass windows between us, in eerie ways we found ourselves experiencing the same things as the characters in the story—profound isolation, a disembodied relationship to our own senses and ability to communicate, the elation of human connection mediated by technology.
Despite all this and against all better judgment, I will likely continue to initiate impossible projects that test my capacity and the patience of my collaborators. But it does take a village! I will be forever grateful to all the people involved in making this work, from cast members to funders to studio engineers, who stood by me through it all and helped bring this unique creature into the world.
Lisa Mezzacappa
Berkeley, CA
April 2024