Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 9 - Proximity

25 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Notes on Four Portraits by Caroline Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke First the Music. The two central gures A and B appear in four different frames. The music re ects and refracts humor, yearning, and frustration with the sounds of the particular environment of each scene. The glitch of an ever-disrupted phone connection becomes scrambledwoodwinds and fragmented vocals. The commuter train’s “doors open” announcement, the screech as it veers around a bend, and the chattering inner worlds of passengers. Alone in a car, the GPS’s electronic presence hovers over a pattern of rising chords. And in the forest, the murmuring choir shimmers like the leaves of an aspen, the distant echoes of familiar voices just beyond reach. The musical structures are inspired both by organic material (mycelial bers, the phloem of trees) and the architecture of our digital lives. Then This. “ Loneliness is a subjective sense of being disconnected from others, and not having close and supportive relationships with people. This feeling of being alone is distinct from social isolation, which measures the amount of time a person actually spends alone, meaning that a person can be surrounded by people and still experience loneliness. ” Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection , John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick Professor John T. Cacioppo, founder of the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, has studied loneliness for two decades. He has discovered that loneliness is contagious and heritable, and that one in four people regularly feel lonely. It increases the odds of an early death by 20%. “ I can remember exactly the year eye contact stopped. ” Cacioppo and Patrick Cacioppo believed loneliness is also treatable, like any other human condition, and pioneered several treatments before his death in 2018. One of his treatments is retraining people in reciprocity in communication—how do they read voices, how do they read eyes, how do they read posture—and then teaching them to analyze and develop different ways of (re)building strong relationships with those around them.