Harmonia Mundi: Creating a New Work of Music Theatre to Speak to the Current World Chaos

In 2016 Judith (composer), and daughter Jessica (theatre practitioner), were asked by a Japanese teacher to create a musical which would be meaningful and inspirational for today’s troubled teenagers. He wanted the performers to be principally young people from Japan and South Korea—two countries with an unhappy shared history. It was necessary that the story have a universality of both time and place, but be particularly relevant to now. As collaborators, we decided to create a story with a “hero’s journey” structure and a female protagonist (Sophia). The overriding crisis of our time, we felt, was climate change and its impacts on our planet. We postulated that the only solution to such a crisis was to create enlightened young human characters who would learn to steer decision-making in new directions. This orientation, enlightenment, was to be characterised by a particular melody recurring in different settings, which Sophia would follow. The creative partnership encompassed several layers of collaboration: mother/daughter; combinations of western/eastern languages and instruments; and directives of Jessica (to the movers or actors) or of Judith (to the singers or orchestra) translated immediately into three other languages—Japanese, Korean and Mandarin, reflecting the desired enlightenment and “Harmonia Mundi.”