The Frequency Operas began in 1999 with a salon that had been meeting for two years that turned into a festival that turned into performance. The first one was The Birth of Color, A Marriage of Darkness and Light, which premiered in Budapest with a chorus of 60, soloists, actors, projections, a central pool of water to show the live cymatic patterns being created in real time by the singers and musicians and a tiny orchestra of singing bowls to strengthen the purity of the frequencies to the point of a kinesthetic experience as much as one of sound. It established our immersive format of having the audience inside the performance rather than outside looking in. Lucio Ivaldi was the composer, who jumped into the experiment with both feet.

One of the core questions I had at that time was -

Is there a lawful correspondence between the frequencies of light and the frequencies of sound? (My ignorance at that time knew no bounds.)

I asked physicists, who gently explained to me that first of all, light/color is something measured on the electromagnetic spectrum, and sound is a phenomenon of the air - as I love to think of it - folded air. So while one could make mathematical connections, they’re more a construction than a natural correspondence. Twenty-five years of further questions about frequencies of every kind, evolving into many more questions, (especially about resonance - at one point I thought about calling them Resonance Operas - which might be a closer description) have us just scraping the surface. Ivaldi took my naive question and decided to explore another way of looking at frequencies, which was through the lens of intervals.

When the ideas coalesced into The Birth of Color, Lucio Ivaldi became the composer of record. His beautiful score will be available shortly on the streaming platforms and as a high quality CD. Later, Ivaldi worked for three years developing music and musical ideas for the Frequency Opera, Blood&Breath. Those ideas took us in a new direction and we split the work into two projects - one, the Frequency Opera Blood&Breath itself, which is composed by Lucas Richman, and the other into a suite of compositions, Animal Aria, by Ivaldi. Animal Aria is a deep dive into the world of bio-frequency, as well as a delightful musical composition, which will be released in 2025.

- Notes by Honora Foà