O'Regan: "Heart of Darkness"

1st November 2006

"As we enter the 21st century, it's frightening to think that all that happens in Joseph Conrad's seminal novella, which heralded the 20th century, still goes on in the world's many hearts of darkness." Composer Tarik O'Regan seizes upon this unsettling feeling in his new project — a musical adaptation of Heart of Darkness. O'Regan creates his first opera with librettist Tom Phillips, the British painter, collagist, and multi-media artist. On 3 and 4 November, both artists will be on hand in Brooklyn, NY, and Princeton, NJ, for a pair of developmental workshops presented by American Opera Projects.

The old savageries of colonialism are reappearing in new and terrible guises and the moral void that Conrad describes is clearly prevalent today.
— Tarik O'Regan"Tom and I," O'Regan notes, "have worked on various projects before and he had long wanted to work on the story. My interest in Heart of Darkness was rekindled when Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" (itself an adaptation of the Conrad story) was re-released in 2001, making mention of an Orson Wells abridgement as a radio play from the 1930s. I became aware, while watching Coppola's film, how the narrative is bound together by Walter Murch's seminal sound design and editing. When re-reading the book, after this epiphany, I discovered that Conrad wrote his own soundtrack into the novella (water, trees, drums, guns, steam engines, beatings, trampling, etc). It seemed a natural development to augment Conrad's music with my own, while offering a new adaptation of this timeless and ever-timely tale for a modern-day audience."Upcoming: On 4 March, the Yale Schola Cantorum and conductor Simon Carrington premiere The Ecstasies Above, based on Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Israfel." Afterwards, the ensemble presents the work at the American Choral Directors Association convention in Miami. O'Regan is also composing Stolen Voices, a 20-minute secular oratorio for chorus. Written in collaboration with poet Melanie Challenger — joint editor, along with Zlata Filipovic, of the soon-to-be-released volume Stolen Voices (a collection of children's diaries written during times of war) — the work premieres in 2007, marking the International Day of Peace in conjunction with the United Nations.