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PARADISE TBD by Clinton McCallum premiered May 2022
COMMISSIONS +
PREMIERES
Project [BLANK] is committed to expanding the landscape of contemporary art and music by championing bold new work. We commission artists to pursue ambitious ideas, support projects from development through world premiere, and introduce San Diego audiences to important existing works receiving their regional or U.S. premieres. Through these efforts, we invest in artists, expand the contemporary repertoire, and ensure that groundbreaking art has a home in the San Diego–Tijuana borderlands.
Commissioning major new works of music and opera is a multi-year endeavor. If you are interested in supporting a commission by underwriting a composer or librettist’s fee, research, development, workshop, or production expenses, please reach out to Ingrid at ingrid@projectblanksd.org.
COMMISSIONS
by Michelle Lou (in development)
by Nasim Khorassani (in development)
by Texu Kim (in development)
by Ti McCormack (2027)
by Michelle Lou (2026)
by Carolyn Chen (2024)
by Clinton McCallum (2022)
premieres
by J.E. Hernández (2026)
by Wojtek Blecharz (2025)
by Sarah Hennies (2024)
by Natalia Merlano Gómez & Nathalie Miebach (2024)
by Laure Hiendl (2023)
by Andy Vores (2023)
by Carolyn Chen (2021)
MICHELLE LOU
SOUNDING BALBOA PARK
in development
Developed in partnership with Forever Balboa Park, SOUNDING BALBOA PARK is a site-specific public artwork by composer and sound artist Michelle Lou that transforms San Diego’s historic Balboa Park into a landscape for sonic exploration. Experienced through a free smartphone app, the work will use GPS technology to trigger audio compositions as visitors move through the park, layering music, field recordings, interviews, environmental sound, and guided listening. Exploring the park’s ecology, Kumeyaay histories, cultural landmarks, and lived experiences, the project will invite visitors to slow down, listen closely, and encounter familiar spaces in new ways. Designed as a modular and expandable artwork, SOUNDING BALBOA PARK will grow throughout the park over time.
If you would like to support a commission by underwriting a composer or librettist’s fee, research, development, workshop, or production expenses, please email ingrid@projectblanksd.org.
NASIM KHORASSANI
HOME
in development
HOME is a site-specific chamber opera by Iranian composer Nasim Khorassani exploring cycles of death and rebirth and the human longing for a place of comfort, belonging, and return. Conceived as a continuous, immersive performance for solo violin, voices, paper, and electronics, the work will surround audiences with layers of sound, movement, and shifting visual elements that transform over the course of multiple performances. Audiences will be free to enter, leave, and move throughout the space, becoming part of its evolving sonic environment. At its center, HOME asks whether the home we continually seek—through familiarity, memory, and belonging—is a destination we can ever truly reach.
If you would like to support a commission by underwriting a composer or librettist’s fee, research, development, workshop, or production expenses, please email ingrid@projectblanksd.org.
TEXU KIM & MONICA YOUN
The ABANDONED
in development
THE ABANDONED: A P’ansori is a new chamber opera by composer Texu Kim and poet/librettist Monica Youn, merging traditional Korean p’ansori—an epic narrative form for singer and drummer—with contemporary Western opera. Drawing on the lived experiences of Youn’s grandmother, the work follows a woman whose life spans colonial occupation, war, and authoritarian rule in Korea before she immigrates to the United States. Her story intertwines with the Korean myth of Princess Bari, a daughter abandoned by royal parents, who undertakes a journey to the underworld and becomes a spiritual intermediary. Moving between myth and testimony, past and present, THE ABANDONED explores how war, patriarchy, migration, and state violence shape autonomy, identity, and personal histories across generations.
If you would like to support a commission by underwriting a composer or librettist’s fee, research, development, workshop, or production expenses, please email ingrid@projectblanksd.org.
TIMOTHY MCCORMACK
BLOOD REPLICA
WORLD premiere: may 2027
BLOOD REPLICA is a 60-minute work for solo piano and electronics by composer Timothy McCormack, written for and performed by Project [BLANK] co-founder Brendan Nguyen. Drawing its title from the writings of Alan Barnett, who died during the AIDS epidemic, the work reflects on queer ancestry, memory, and the passage of time. Inspired by the tradition of the ex-voto—an object offered in gratitude, remembrance, or healing—BLOOD REPLICA unfolds as an intensely focused meditation on resilience, carrying forward the voices and histories of those who came before while inhabiting the charged, suspended experience of living in the present.
BLOOD REPLICA will premiere at WORKING TITLE No. 6, May 27–29, 2027.
If you would like to support a commission by underwriting a composer or librettist’s fee, research, development, workshop, or production expenses, please email ingrid@projectblanksd.org.
J.E. Hernández
Ilnamikilispan
DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP: DECEMBER 2026
ILNAMIKILISPAN [útero-herida | womb-wound] is an interdisciplinary work by composer J.E. Hernández in collaboration with choreographer and performer Priscella Uvalle and poet J. Mae Barizo. Blending opera, music, movement, technology, poetry, and ritual storytelling, the work explores ancestral identity, creation, loss, and cultural transformation through the symbolic lens of childbirth. Drawing on cuicatl, a Nahuatl tradition integrating song, poetry, and movement, ILNAMIKILISPAN brings ancestral storytelling practices into dialogue with emerging technologies and contemporary artistic forms. The work is currently being developed through an extended series of workshops leading toward its world premiere, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the MAP Fund.
MICHELLE LOU
EXCERPTS FROM THE OFFICE OF THE DEAD
WORLD premiere: MAY 2026
Scored for two voices, organ, trombone, tuba, and electronics, Excerpts from the Office of the Dead draws on Latin texts from the Book of Hours, the Office of the Dead, the Vulgate Psalms, the Book of Job, and the liturgies of Sexagesima to create a meditation on faith, suffering, and lamentation. Fragments of chant and scripture emerge and dissolve across shifting sonic textures, invoking images of entrapment, bodily decay, death, and the earthbound body. Through repetition, ritual utterance, and sustained listening, the work inhabits suffering without seeking to resolve or explain it, leaving the listener suspended between terror, faith, and hope.
Wojtek Blecharz
park Opera
U.S. premiere: May 2025
Presented free and open to the public in Balboa Park, PARK OPERA breaks open the traditional operatic form and scatters its elements throughout a public landscape. Audiences receive a map and follow a wandering course through the park, encountering music, art, movement, and unexpected performances along the way. Designed to activate the senses and encourage listeners to become “all ears,” the work invites audiences to reconsider their relationship to urban natural spaces and the traces we leave within them. Originally commissioned by Theater Powszechny in Warsaw in 2016, PARK OPERA has since been reimagined in outdoor settings across Europe before being adapted by the composer for its American premiere with Project [BLANK] in Balboa Park.
SARAH HENNIES
RESERVOIR 2: INTRUSION
WEST COAST premiere: NOVEMBER 2024
Scored for bass flute and chorus, RESERVOIR 2: INTRUSION (2019) is the second work in Sarah Hennies’ Reservoirs trilogy, which explores how the brain and body store traumatic memories. Each work examines a different relationship between conscious and unconscious thought; INTRUSION focuses on the involuntary return of traumatic memories, whether prompted by an external trigger or emerging without apparent cause. Drawing on Hennies’ own experiences of grief, personal transformation, and gender, the work considers how trauma persists within the subconscious—its intensity changing with the passage of time even as the memory itself remains preserved. Project [BLANK] presented the West Coast premiere of an expanded version at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral, paired with an interactive light sculpture by Allison O. Evans and performed in collaboration with the San Diego New Verbal Workshop.
NATALIA MERLANO GÓMEZ & NATHALIE MIEBACH
restless Waters
WORLD premiere: November 2024
Presented in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, RESTLESS WATERS brought together composer Natalia Merlano Gómez and visual artist Nathalie Miebach for a series of five world-premiere compositions inspired by Miebach’s sculptural visualizations of weather data and natural disasters. Written for voices, electronics, and chamber ensemble, Merlano Gómez’s compositions translate these complex statistical and sculptural landscapes into sound, combining the expressive qualities of the human voice with delicate, semi-improvised textures of flute and trumpet. Situated within Miebach’s exhibition at the ICA San Diego, the collaboration offered audiences a multisensory exploration of extreme weather, climate change, and human resilience.
CAROLYN CHEN
THE ROBOTS
WORLD premiere: May/JUNE 2024
THE ROBOTS is an opera with music and libretto by Carolyn Chen, based on Karel Čapek’s influential 1920 science-fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), most noted for introducing the world to the word “robot.” Set in a factory that mass-produces artificial workers, the story follows the replacement of human labor and the eventual revolt of the robots against their makers. Chen’s darkly humorous adaptation explores the uneasy relationship between technological progress and self-destruction, while examining labor and the people whose often-invisible work sustains modern life. With a development process extending back to 2019, the opera took on new resonance amid contemporary debates surrounding artificial intelligence, automation, the gig economy, and organized labor.
LAURE HIENDL
IN ABEYANCE / 10 BULLETS THROUGH ONE HOLE / WHITE RADIANCE TM
U.S. PREMIERES: NOV 2023
Presented as part of the statewide California Festival: A Celebration of New Music, Project [BLANK]’s Composer Spotlight featured the U.S. premieres of three works by Laure Hiendl exploring the body, identity, and power through acoustic and electronic sound. IN ABEYANCE (2021) translates the subtly shifting patterns of electronic phasing and sampling into a richly orchestrated chamber ensemble. Two works for voices and electronics confront the politics embedded in language and representation: 10 BULLETS THROUGH ONE HOLE (2018) draws on the charged rhetoric of firearm advertising, while WHITE RADIANCE TM (2020) juxtaposes the writing of Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter with language drawn from cosmetic advertisements to examine race and Western standards of beauty. Together, the works reflect Hiendl’s provocative approach to contemporary music, drawing on processes associated with electronic dance music while examining the social and political forces acting upon the body.
ANDY VORES
NO EXIT
WEST COAST premiere: MAY 2023
NO EXIT (2008) is a chamber opera by Andy Vores based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s landmark 1944 existentialist play. Three strangers are ushered into a room only to discover that they are destined to spend eternity confined together. In this simple yet diabolical vision of the afterlife, torture comes not through physical pain but through human vanity, spite, jealousy, and self-delusion. Vores brings musical inventiveness and dark humor to Sartre’s text, breathing fiendish life into the play’s famous assertion that “Hell is other people.”
CLINTON MCCALLUM
PARADISE TBD
WORLD premiere: May 2022
PARADISE TBD is a chamber opera for five singers and electronics exploring natural disaster, memory, and collective trauma. The characters each come from a different time and place—all survivors of cataclysmic events including Hurricane Katrina, the Wuhan flood of 1931, the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, and the great Bengal famine of 1770. These survivors awaken to find themselves floating together on a raft in an infinite void, and by telling their harrowing stories they participate in a ritual of community-building and confession. Engaging with climate change, poverty, colonialism, and corruption, the opera examines the generational consequences of catastrophe for people living at the precarious edges of society, while considering storytelling as an act of communal healing and a means of imagining a more hopeful future.
CAROLYN CHEN
SOME DRAGONS
WORLD PREMIERE: MARCH 2021
SOME DRAGONS is a song cycle for singing violinist by Carolyn Chen, written specifically for Batya MacAdam-Somer. Exploring themes of discovery and adventure, each movement draws on the words or experiences of a different explorer, scientist, or boundary-breaker, from Rosalind Franklin’s discovery of the structure of DNA and Amelia Earhart’s advice on adventure to Nellie Bly’s journey around the world and long-distance swimmer Lynne Cox’s Cold War crossing of the Bering Strait. Moving between poetry, scientific research, historical documents, and recorded speech, Chen creates a playful and wide-ranging portrait of human curiosity and our impulse to venture into the unknown. Project [BLANK] presented the world premiere via livestream as part of its 2021 virtual season.