For my senior electronic composition undergraduate recital at Duquesne University’s Mary Pappert School of Music, I had an idea that I wanted to tell the story of what it was like to be deployed as a soldier.  I did not want to tell my story; I wanted to tell a story that could be applied to any soldier.

After seeing Jacob TV’s The News, I was inspired to also create a multimedia opera.  I went to my composition Professor Lynn Emberg Purse about my crazy idea of writing a 1 Act Opera and she was extremely supportive.  I really wanted to explore all that I had learned at Duquesne and use music technology, digital media and musicianship all in one project. Now I needed the story.

The fictional story of the opera revolves around a female soldier, SSG Sarah Knight, her battle buddy, SGT Anna Hunter, her father, CSM(R) David Knight and her husband, Martin Thomas.  I specifically picked the story to be centered on a female character because I do not think that female soldiers get enough credit on today’s asymmetrical battlefield.  I have served with many outstanding female soldiers and wanted to, hopefully, pay homage to them.

The storyline tries to explain what deploying to the Middle East is like.  The story is all about the conflicting emotions for the soldiers, families and civilians.  The importance of including all of these viewpoints was critical to me because when the U.S. goes to war it affects us all, not just one segment of the population.

Once the storyline was solidified, I started working on the libretto, text, but had difficulty with this task.  I asked my old friend David Bock if he would help me work on the libretto and after some initial hesitation on his part he said yes.  David was hesitant because he is not a veteran like I am so how could he write about war?  I explained to David that his first-hand experience of what it was like for him in the U.S. when I was deployed to the Middle East was as important as what I went through.

For the music, I decided I wanted to use non-traditional instruments and instrumentation for the opera.  I wanted the music to be as accessible to as many different people as possible so I used electric guitar, double bass and bass guitar, keyboards, violin, drum set and malletkat.  This instrumentation has given me the ability to cover a lot of territory compositionally.  For the vocal parts, I wanted to have a wide range so I used a Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Baritone.

I wanted to use multimedia as an integral part of the opera.  I came up with the idea of interviewing my fellow combat veterans on Skype with general questions that each scene of the opera would deal with in someway.  My fellow combat veterans became the Greek chorus over the fictional narrative of the libretto, which added depth to the story and tied in another Greek theme, the myth of Sisyphus, which I used in the story.

To further draw the audience into the story, I decided to include two fictional videos in the center of the opera.  I wanted to challenge the audience’s expectations of the libretto being fiction and the videos being nonfiction… Where does reality exist in the opera?  The ending of the opera is specifically not a storybook happy ending to further the idea of never ending war.