Guildhall School Professor Dr Toby Young awarded prestigious Future Leaders Fellowship

The fellowship provides a grant of £1.4 million, to fund Dr Young’s research project Immersive Opera. The grant is part of UKRI’s initiative for promising research leaders and is the largest research-related funding award Guildhall School has received to date.

The fellowship will see Dr Young investigate immersive performance practice and technologies in opera, with the aim of developing new ways of staging and creating opera for the digital age. Seeking to build on current performance and innovation in the sector, he will work in collaboration with the leading immersive theatre company Punchdrunk Enrichment, as well as partners from British Youth Opera, National Opera Studio, Opera North, Royal Ballet & Opera and Scottish Opera. One of the outputs of the project is expected to be a series of training resources and workshops to enable opera companies to implement and develop immersive opera in the future.

A major part of the project will involve exploring the possibilities of Guildhall School’s world-class Extended Reality (XR) technology suite for opera. With the support of Dan Shorten, Creative Director at Guildhall Live Events, Dr Young will create new operatic works using spatial audio, audio-mapping and visual and haptic XR interfaces designed to promote interactive and participatory storytelling. Through these artistic and technical experiments, Dr Young’s research will create a forum for encounters between theorists, creative practitioners, performers and technologists working within opera, as well developing new ways of measuring audience experience. 

The six objectives of the research are outlined below:

• To co-design with project partners an iterative-inductive model of research in line with the specific needs and requirements of key stakeholders in the UK opera industry, and in doing so activate cross-sector conversations around innovative practice. 
• To conduct artistic and technical experiments that develop, and quickly and cost-effectively test, a variety of performative, compositional, and technical approaches to immersive opera-making, creating a forum for encounters between theorists, creative practitioners, performers, and technologists working within opera. 
• To develop a strong evidence base for understanding the impact of these techniques on audience experiences and behaviours by collecting sociological, physiological, and behavioural data from participant focus groups, and incorporating feedback from user data into experimental procedures. 
• To document new research artistic and technical knowledge through volumetric capture (i.e. 360-degree video).
• To disseminate the results of the project to the opera industry, the performing arts research community, and the public through a conference, presentations, a project website, and a network around immersive opera. 
• To develop training resources and deliver workshops for opera companies to roll out the knowledge and skills needed to implement and develop immersive opera.

Dr Toby Young is a Professor of Composition at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. As a researcher, his work specialises in operatic and vocal music, which he writes about extensively in his latest book: the Cambridge Companion to Composition.  In addition to his role as the Music Supervisor of Punchdrunk, Toby has written soundtracks to a variety of TV and stage works including BAFTA-nominated productions for HBO and Sky Arts. As a producer he has created recordings for some of the country’s foremost ensembles and artists and was a creative lead with the Philharmonia Orchestra’s ‘Audience of the Future’ project to create orchestral and operatic experiences in 360º video and site-specific audio.

Dr Toby Young, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, says: 

“Opera is a powerful and emotionally compelling artform, but as a sector, we are facing significant challenges around perceived relevance, accessibility, and financial and environmental sustainability. Working together with the opera community, this project will develop and test innovative approaches to operatic performance and composition that enhance our existing traditions rather than try and reinvent them. I am so grateful to UKRI and Guildhall School for this opportunity, and I can’t wait to get started!”

Professor Jonathan Vaughan, Principal of Guildhall School, says: 

“I’m absolutely delighted that Dr Toby Young has been announced as a UKRI Future Leaders fellow, and excited about the potential this holds for the future of immersive opera. Guildhall School is proud to champion world-leading research that enables artists to explore fundamental questions about the creative arts. This particular project is the latest development in our commitment to contemporary opera making, which also includes a dedicated Masters programme in Opera Making and Writing, and one which draws on the cutting-edge XR technology we hold at Guildhall.  Congratulations to Toby!”