Powell River native Tobin Stokes has scored an international victory with the new opera Fallujah, based on the US siege in Iraq.
In February, his music won second place in the Armel Composer Competition in Szeged, Hungary. The opera is set both around Fallujah at the time of the battle, and stateside in a hospital for veterans where one soldier struggles to build his life again. Its theme of post traumatic stress disorder resonates around the world.
Stokes sees Fallujah as a way to start dialogue about war and the affect that it has on soldiers. “Soldiers are so useful in a war,” he said. “And when they come back, no one is saying ‘We need you.’ Almost the last line in the opera is ‘Listen.’ It is a plea from vets to have other people listen to their stories, or their pain, or whatever comes—to be receptive.”
When it was presented as a public workshop at the Carnegie Centre in Vancouver, Canadian veterans from Afghanistan were part of the audience making comments. Stokes and the librettist are using that feedback to make the opera more visceral and immediate, as they rehearse and adapt it for a staged reading at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC, March 29.
“The pace of opera is glacial,” said Stokes. “You have to secure funding and produce workshops, and then hope that a company falls in love with it.”
Stokes has composed the music for six operas, all of which are in various stages of birth. In between he has many other composing projects, such as a string quartet based on Emily Carr’s writings, a large work for Victoria Symphony, which includes bagpipes, hand-bells, and men’s choir, and the score for Wild Canada, a TV series to be narrated by David Suzuki. Wild Canada’s orchestral music blends with natural sounds, water and birds, and with dramatic film sequences of vivid scenery. Composing for Wild Canada was an international project. Stoke’s directors were based in Bristol, Beijing, and Los Angeles, the distributors were in Victoria and Vienna. And as the orchestra recorded the score in Bratislava Slovakia, Stokes stayed up all night with headphones on, listening and commenting directly to the conductor through his soundboard. Wild Canada premiers on The Nature of Things at 8 pm on Thursday, March 13.
Stokes is also working on a piece for the opening concert of International Choral Kathaumixw. Director Paul Cummings commissioned a work based on a Homalco legend, the great battle between the thunderbird and the whale. The piece will incorporate Coast Salish words and will be sung by the Kathaumixw chorus.
