Summer in the city has a bad rep and let’s be honest, the sheer number of invitations to swanky rooftop parties doesn’t particularly help. Avoiding the hype and the faux FOMO is easy enough though. We recommend that you start your summer strut with a bit of old-school East London - the Spitalfields Music Summer Festival. You don’t have to take it from us either, because we got hold of Emily Hall, one of the festival’s Associate Artists.

Following the Winter Festival previews, Hall is returning with a full scale production of Folie à Deux, an opera and a concept album inspired by the curious science of shared psychosis, curated alongside two days of installations and performances resonating the composer’s work. We talked to Hall about her collaboration with Sjón (the Icelandic librettist who has been known to work with Bjork), the ins and outs of Electro Magnetics Harps (we’ll get technical!) and her upcoming project – a site-specific, ambushing opera.

Run Riot: Can you tell us about the creative collaboration behind Folie à Deux? How did you and Sjón come to work together? How did the phenomenon of shared psychosis come to occupy you?

Emily Hall: A good friend of mine, Dr Lisa Conlan who is a consultant psychiatrist, suggested this psychosis to me as operatic material. Folie à Deux is experienced between 2 people who are close to one another (usually family members or a couple), when a delusion is passed from one person to another. It immediately struck me as an exaggerated version of so many real life relationships and dynamics and very normal themes like love, loneliness and persuasion. Also it has these distinct phases, which gave me an excellent framework to hang the piece on.

Initially I plotted the idea in some early workshops with Mahogany Opera Group using the “delusional parasitosis” where you believe you are infested with creepy crawlies, but it was just too horrible to even research so I didn't want to subject my audience to it! It was at that point I began to search for a librettist to work with. Because I wanted the piece to be both an opera and a concept album I was drawn to Sjón, because of the lyrics he had written for Bjork as well as many librettos and his novels which are out of this world (The Blue Fox and From the Mouth of the Whale). When he said 'yes' I was kind of surprised! We spent a few days brain-storming in rural Suffolk with Freddie Wake-Walker (director of Folie à Deux and artistic director of Mahogany Opera Group) and at the eleventh hour Sjón came up with the idea of the delusion centering around an electricity pylon which was perfect because of the sonic world of a pylon and also its very strong aesthetic qualities.

Run Riot: Folie à Deux is both an opera and a concept album – how is this dual nature reflected in the work?

Emily Hall: Yes. The dual nature is very much reflected in the work. I asked Sjón specifically for no recitative, which makes the back-story and contextualisation very difficult. But he created a beautiful libretto, which cleverly does away with recitative. The second song is a ballad and tells the back-story and then the instrumentals are spaces for the audience to join the dots of the narrative aided by Freddie Wake-Walker's direction. By stripping it back we have created a situation where the audience has to work a little harder. I like the idea that someone listening to the album may listen to it purely as a collection of songs or as a story. 

Run Riot: Electro-magnetic harp! What is it, how does one make it and how did Folie à Deux come to feature one?

Emily Hall: Once we fixed upon the pylon my mind began racing towards how I could represent that sonically. I had already decided to work with harp so I began looking into getting the harp to drone. It bought me to Aeolian harps (which sound independently in the wind) and then electro-magnets. My partner, David Sheppard, is a sound designer so when I put it to him to make an Electro Magnetic Harp he was gung-ho and off we went to purchase a harp (neither of us knowing very much about them!). It had to be big enough because crucially I wanted the 50Hz of a British mains hum to be the harmonic basis of the piece. David then worked with an instrument designer, Jonathan Green, to create the EMH. They had to get bespoke metal strings made for the lower end and the higher end are just guitar strings. It is operated from a little mixing desk and is beautifully variable so you are never sure which strings are going to be most resonant – I love this live quality of something which is fairly high-tech.

Run Riot: Folie à Deux is presented alongside Sound Among Sounds - what was the curating process behind this two-day event?

Emily Hall: Spitalfields asked me to create a program around the four Folie performances. So I was lucky to be able to build my ultimate line-up with collaborators past and present. They are all inadvertently musicians who you might describe as “cross-over” and are all effortlessly jumping into each other’s sets as they are used to doing!

Run Riot: Your next project is Seek and Hide, a site-specific opera at the Corinthia Hotel. Can we get a sneak preview?

Emily Hall: This is very new and exciting. The luxury 5* Corinthia Hotel is our set for what will be a trail of characters hidden around the hotel. I'm working with the poet Matthew Welton who will be compiling the libretto solely out of found texts from the hotel and David Sheppard who will be using paper thin speakers and the hotel's interactive sound system to thread narratives around the hotel as well as live performances. We begin in earnest next week but I suppose it is safe to say we'll be exploring identity and the musicians and singers involved are going to be pretty special.

Run Riot: Last but not least - what are your Summer Festival recommendations for our readers?

Emily Hall: The Sixteen: Poetry in music: some of my favourite composers’ settings of poems I love so much I have set them myself (WH Auden & John Donne) sung by The Sixteen, wow.

If a tree falls in the forest…: knowing the creative team of TROUPE I know this is bound to be a knock out. If I wasn’t caught up with Sound Among Sounds I’d certainly be taking my kids along to this.

Night at the Museum: I love the Geffrye Museum but I’ve never been to a gig there….

Bridie Jackson and the Arbour: I like this band very much.

Shabaka Hutchings: I had the pleasure of hearing Shabaka and The Comet is Coming at this years’ Borealis Festival in Bergen and he had the whole room on their feet dancing. I can’t wait to hear what he has got up to.

Sound Among Sounds (inc.Folie à Deux)

6 & 7 June

Rich Mix