Sea

Sea is a radio opera for the shared listening of the youngest and their significant adults.

Music is important for everybody.

Sound attunement, vocalising together or the so-called "communicative musicality", is an important aspect of communication between infant and adult. The work is designed to invite them to the shared listening of the story of the sea that had lost its song, a discovery of secrets – tiny musical compositions – and creative vocalising. In short, singing along with the sea. Woven from sound, song and spoken text, Sea immerses the baby in a rich, musically complex and yet gentle and safe sound environment, using delicate sound changes to engage the baby's attention. The children's playroom becomes a concert stage; while the fragile-powerful music brings parent and baby into a relationship, into contact. Listening together, starting from birth.

Content carried by Sea into this vulnerable, distinct, and liminal postpartum period is mythological, a contemporary thematizing of the fundamental symbol of exit from death into life through new birth: Sea builds on the cosmogonic myth of the Pharaonic Fish, which swims the sea and carries the world on its back, living in harmony… until there is noise and disarray and the Pharaonic Fish startles, flees – and since then, nothing has been right in the world. Those looking for each other cannot find one another … The radio opera invites listeners to explore the secrets murmuring in the sea, and to sing along with it so that the sea can murmur powerfully, so that the song drowns out the noise, calming down the Pharaonic Fish. So that those who are looking for each other can find one another.