Stranger Love

Stranger Love is a 6-hour-long multimedia opera, scored for 28 musicians (including three microtonal pianos), 8 singers, and 6 dancers with music by composer Dylan Mattingly and text by Thomas Bartscherer. The music of Stranger Love was written for the ensemble Contemporaneous.

An immersive experience, Stranger Love is a grand celebration of life itself. It follows two lovers whose romance unfolds to the rhythm of the seasons. Set on a vast time-scale against the ever-expanding universe, it broadens in scope and frame over the course of three acts, moving from the personal to the archetypical to a vision of the divine — a love supreme. Stranger Love evokes the visceral thrill of a gospel revival, the ethereal calm of watching snow fall, the wonder of staring into the night sky.

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Stranger Love reaches for the impossible. Breathtaking in scale, with burning intensity, the music dances from moments of manic energy to stretches of unearthly serenity. At six hours long, Stranger Love is deliberately countercultural. As contemporary life fragments into ever-shorter intervals, distraction has become a default mode of experience, and in an increasingly polarized and belligerent society, cynicism is pervasive.  Against all this, Stranger Love offers an epic celebration that embraces complexity and abstraction and aspires to total joy. Neither denying the world as it is, nor imprisoned by it, Stranger Love envisions the world we might hope to inhabit.