Tomorrow, in a Year is a Swedish experimental opera about the life and times of Charles Darwin, particularly focusing on his voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle and the period during the first publication of On the Origin of Species. It explores his inner monologue as a scientist, his internal conflicts during the formulation of his theory of natural selection, and a few select events in his personal life. Through the combination of and interaction between the music and the libretto, Tomorrow in a Year also ruminates on the broader themes of nature, the scientific process, discovery, and time.

Tomorrow, in a Year comprises a work of narrative nonfiction because its text is taken directly from Darwin's writings (both scientific and personal) and a handful of nonfiction writings on his life and work. Musically, it also contains "nonfictional" elements of a sort. Samples - aural "quotes" - of field recordings made in the Amazon are liberally deployed, as are direct representations of real-world phenomena ("Letter to Henslow", for example, consists entirely of vocalizations meant to imitate various bird calls). On the surface, this seems unnecessary - why go to the trouble of being so emphatically nonfictional when one could easily write a work of historical fiction? - but this approach is actually an integral part of the spirit of the work. To build the entire opera out of fact lends it a scientific flavor of its own, to the point where it sometimes feels deliberately academic.

Tomorrow, in a Year is interested in communicating the enigmatic beauty of reality, and thus it seizes on every opportunity to expose reality; it avoids embellishment or illustration because it wants to point out that nature and science do not inherently need embellishment - on the contrary, they can be fascinating and beautiful on their own, without an illustrative story or an origin tale or any accompanying fiction of any kind.

The opera makes extensive use of drone music, a contemporary technique developed in the mid-20th-century whereby single tones, sounds, or simple figures are perpetuated for very long periods. The pioneers of this music often intended it to serve as an exploration of time - an invocation of eternity, or at least an expanse so vast and mysterious that the human mind could not distinguish it from eternity. Though a piece consisting of a single note or chord held for an hour might feel excruciatingly long in the mind, it is merely a blip, a single grace-note on the cosmic staff; conversely, if one could achieve the kind of meditative trance state these composers often intended to induce in the listener, one might experience the sense of losing time altogether even though the piece took place over a physically defined temporal span. Tomorrow, in a Year takes advantage of the psychological malleability of time to evoke the vast, slow process of evolution. The prelude, little more than a mounting cascade of electronic clicks and pops, suggests the development of the first microorganisms; the first few pieces then narrate the geological formation of the earth as we know it, the adaption of early life to its harsh environment, and the formation of fossils.

These early passages also demonstrate how Tomorrow, in a Year uses time as a musical construct to illuminate the plot, intertwining the psychological effects of rhythm (or lack thereof) and other temporal components of music with the progression of the narrative. Part of the original purpose of the Beagle's expedition was in fact to discredit theories of natural selection in favor of the traditional Judeo-Christian creation theory; as if in deliberate defiance of this, the text of the first few songs is nothing but raw scientific data, all of which conflicts with the model of a young planet which began in much the same manner as it is observed in the present. "Epochs" describes "animal carcasses and skeletons...entombed" as deposits of fossils, while "Geology" and "Upheaved" describe the how the rock formations which contain them came into being. Though this data is taken from Darwin's writings, here the libretto is not sung by Darwin himself - instead, it is sung by an unnamed soprano voice, representing nature itself communicating with him, presenting its own evidence. The cognitive dissonance which said evidence creates in Darwin is illustrated by the music, which is harsh, jarring, and stubbornly devoid of rhythm, melody, and often consonance itself. The tension becomes so thick and overbearing that in the fourth of these evidential passages, "Minerals", vocalist Kristina Wahlin's angry delivery all but goes to battle with the grating and dissonant electronics, even though the libretto is merely a description of how sand plays into the formation of geological strata. However, when Darwin begins to accept the evidence and modify his viewpoint (in the piece "Ebb Tide Explorer", which we'll come to later), traditional harmony and regular time slowly begin to seep into the score. The sung dialogue becomes more and more melodic, and the voice of Darwin himself (provided by Swedish pop singer Jonathan Johansson) finally takes the foreground. The increases in consonance and rhythm culminate in the one-two punch of the passionate "Colouring of Pigeons", driven by a crashing tribalistic rhythm performed on orchestral percussion, and the joyous "Seeds", propelled by the insistent pulse of contemporary dance music.

In addition to developing its protagonist's character, all of this serves Tomorrow, in a Year's overarching intent, which is to communicate the inherent beauty and wonder of nature and science. As stated above, the opera accomplishes this in part by deliberately allowing the beauty of reality and fact to stand without ornament; it also uses science as a catalyst for the audience's empathy. Darwin's own admiration of nature appears throughout the libretto; he marvels at the speed of Atlantic currents in "Seeds" and in "Variations of Birds" notes that "[t]he ostrich spreads its wings like sails to the breeze." "Colouring of Pigeons" - arguably the emotional centerpiece of the entire opera - is nothing but a steady flow of this admiration. Darwin, by this time back in Europe, duets with the Voice of Nature as they draw parallels between his personal existence and his broader picture and experience of science and the cosmos. Darwin's lines are delivered in a hushed, awed baritone distinct from the warbling, anxious falsetto used elsewhere, warmly murmuring one of the opera's most affecting lines: "Six weeks old, Henrietta smiled for the first time." Meanwhile, the Voice of Nature grows more and more exultant as she sings of "Tumblers, Jacobins/beak shapes, skeletal traits". Beneath them, strings swoop and soar like a flock of birds through a gracefully dramatic chord progression, at once soothing in character and startling in its contrast to the music that's preceded it.

The end result: despite the fact that naturalism involves a preoccupation with "dry" scientific fact as well as open acknowledgement and even scrutiny of the harshest and most enigmatic parts of the universe, the audience comes to understand that this perspective allows Darwin to experience a peculiar but nevertheless overwhelming beauty, and that it is intertwined with his emotional self. The thread of the scientist's personal life is introduced by the title of "Letter to Henslow" - which, again, is nothing more than simulated birdsong. This thread is then fully realized in "Annie's Box". This piece concerns the death of his 10-year-old daughter Anne, and is one of only two pieces in the entire libretto in which his observations on the natural order are absent (the other is the closer, "Height of Summer", which is from the perspective of a character external to Darwin). However, the text of "Annie's Box" does not for a moment stray from the patterns his scientific mind:

"Pure and transparent
her eyes sparkled brightly
she often smiled
Often threw her head a little backwards"

These lines are purest, barest observation; they mirror the data-driven style of his scientific writings, as if his written memorial for Anne (from which the text of the song is taken) were an addendum to a field journal. Indeed, the full text of that memorial often does read that way - though it contains some subjective descriptions of her character, the bulk of it is given over to stories and scenes from her life; record rather than illustration, observation rather than judgement.

A passage that I particularly admire, and one which I feel best demonstrates the interaction between the score and text of Tomorrow in a Year, is "Ebb Tide Explorer". This piece is an abrupt change of pace from the growing maelstrom that precedes it. The music sets an atmosphere of quiet contemplation, opening with distant tones that recall whale calls. For the first of the piece's two segments, Darwin's voice is swathed in echo, his thoughts drifting unfettered despite the fact that he clearly finds them upsetting.

"Examine, examine, examine
frame of mind, frame of mind"

The repeated phrases cascade into each other as the droning becomes ever louder and sinks ever lower in pitch; they are accompanied by percussion techniques that recall those pioneered by Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. That work's mastery of ominous atmosphere is a clear influence here. It's extremely distressing to allow one's worldview to alter, and that distress bears down on Darwin until Johansson practically moans the final "in following fall of sea."
Then, suddenly: quiet again. The cognitive dissonance between the scientist's original conclusions and the evidence before him comes to a head not with an explosion, but with that psychological silence of a kind that accompanies a devastating realization.

Even now, as Darwin begins to discard that "frame of mind" in the second segment, there appear traces of the warmer, more harmonious music to come: traditional strings (albeit digitally warped and spliced into loops) join the synthesized drones, while the scientist's melody takes on a decidedly more tonal character. The song closes with the line "I am leaving here", which is practically prismatic in terms of the bearing it has on several branches of the narrative: following from the previous line, Darwin is leaving footprints in the sand; he is on a beach, suggesting that he is also "leaving" whatever locale in which the scene takes place; and "I am leaving here", a declaration, an adoption of a new "frame of mind".

If I were to have participated in the composition of Tomorrow, in a Year, I might have added more text; though beautiful, the long instrumental passages that occasionally appear in the work seem mildly superfluous to the narrative. It may be that my perception is skewed by the fact that I do not have a staging to refer to; it may be that these passages are necessary to the work due to key visual elements which occur simultaneously. If not, I can still see some reasoning behind the inclusion of these passages - they contribute to the pacing of the opera as a cohesive whole - but even if the space they create is important, I think that more content could have easily been fit into that space.

Tomorrow, in a Year is a thoroughly contemporary work. It was commissioned by the avant-garde collective Hotel Pro Forma, and it was composed by siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olaf Dreijer, who until this year made acerbic dance music as The Knife, with a pair of their friends from the Swedish techno/noise scene, who perform respectively as Planningtorock and Mt. Sims. Their recording of the score is exclusively available on the internet and may be freely distributed under the Creative Commons license. But it is incredibly innovative not just for its circumstances but for the innovations it makes in the medium.

Tomorrow, in a Year is an opera about science. If you will, pause for a moment and ponder that statement. Opera - the artists' art, technically demanding for performers and currently a haven for contemporary and postmodern composers seeking to indulge their wildest experimental urges - seems like the last place for science, the antithesis of artifice and embellishment. But, as stated above, one of the primary intents behind of Tomorrow, in a Year is to demonstrate that beauty and art can and (possibly even inherently) do exist in science and fact. It does not reject artifice, but merely presents an alternative. Here is nature; here is reality. Here is "Geology", here is "Variations of Birds": reality may be as mysterious, complex, and inscrutable as the most obtuse piece in the Hirshhorn. Here is "Colouring of Pigeons": nature often presents us with the same simple, easily recognizable, and achingly intense beauty that may be found in a folk song; here is "Seeds": life alone, by its very nature, is a sort of jubilation. Art is often described as a way to escape reality, but Tomorrow, in a Year embraces reality in a way that has rarely if ever been done before in musical narrative, especially opera.

To me, this innovation is not only what makes Tomorrow, in a Year a work of narrative nonfiction, but also its greatest triumph. When I first took an interest in this work, it was because I am immersed in the fields in which it is planted as an electronic musician and a student of music theory. However, the longer I spend with it, the more I realize that its greatest victory is also its most unique victory, its ability to reveal the wonders that can be found in reality, in nature, through simple observation without interpretation - in other words, the inherent and singular beauty of science.