This paper explores various technologies available to the modern composer and utilized in recent modern opera, providing creative approaches to producing aural, visual, and theatrical performance environments. It also explores my own use of digital technology in Transient Delete. Transient Delete is a digital miniature-opera that explores different aspects of a community of post-human cyborgs. The story follows Iméra, a newly converted cyborg as she acclimates herself to this new cybernetic existence. During this process she meets several other cybernetic entities that are there to help guide her through her metamorphosis.

This paper presents a discussion of functional silence in contemporary classical music with a particular focus on the music of Salvatore Sciarrino and Jürg Frey, two composers whose drastically-contrasting bodies of work both occupy the interstitial space between the audible and inaudible. To begin, I address three main questions: what are the functions of silence in a musical context, how do the characteristics of a work affect our perception of these silences, and how do these functions relate to our perception of music on the edge of silence. In answering these first two questions, I discuss three categories of silence---temporal, spatial, and gestural---which I use in a silence-centric analyses of Sciarrino's Let me die before I wake, Allegoria della notte, and Infinito Nero, as well as Frey's Streichquarttet III. To further apply these concepts to music on the edge of silence, I provide a fourth category---timbral silence---which describes the perception of absence or silence within the presence of sound and allows for the application of existing functional principles of silence to sounding events. In turn, this allows us to understand the music of Sciarrino and Frey in terms of timbral completion and timbral dissolution, respectively. Having established a theoretical framework …

Act one of The Metamorphosis is based on the novella by Franza Kafka of the same title. In the writing of the act, George Benjamin's Into the Little Hill and Oliver Knussen's Where the Wild Things Are provide a model of using musical material as a storytelling device. Benjamin emphasizes the parallel nature of Crimp's text through the manipulation of similar music between the acts. Knussen uses form and color to emphasize Max's childlike energy and his desire to return home. In act one of The Metamorphosis these approaches are combined to enhance Kafka's absurd narrative through a rapid collage of texture and form that is influenced by both events and characters in the opera.

In comparing oratorio traits across history, three aspects of oratorio were found to be particularly applicable to the creation of "Deborah: A Chamber Oratorio in One Act." These aspects were: the selection of topic and the creation or adaptation of text; the differences between recitative and aria, in form and function; and the level of stylistic diversity within a given work.