Breaking Silence, Breaching Censorship: “Ongoing Interculturality” in Alice Shields’s Electronic Opera Apocalypse

Abstract

On a warm summer’s eve in 1990, American composer Alice Shields visited her friend, Columbia University colleague, and fellow composer Daria Semegen. Under the stars outside Semegen’s home in Stony Brook, Long Island, the conversation veered—as it often did—to contemporary U.S. politics. Enraged by “bigoted puritanism,” Shields and Semegen criticized the recent influx of conservatism, specifically, the increasing volume of antiabortion groups. The composers began improvising playfully in call-and-response on the risqué behavior they supposed had triggered these groups, eventually settling on the chant “Your hot lips, Apocalypse,” what would later become a line from “Apocalypse Song,” the title aria to Shields’s electronic opera Apocalypse, written in 1993 and released a year later on CD.

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