BREAKING NEWS

Electroacoustic opera for fixed media or soprano & chamber ensemble | ca. 9’ | 2024

Fixed media version with visualization created from NASA imagery

WINNER of the 2026 Leah Reid Electroacoustic and Music in Technology Prize
International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM) Search for New Music Competition
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SELECTED WORK for Knob Detox 2026
Experimental Music & Electronic-Digital Languages Colloquium
Curitiba, Brazil · October 14-17, 2026
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When I visited CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland, I stood in awe of some of humanity’s most brilliant and complicated technology that a love for science fiction did not come close to helping me understand. Still, there was an exhibit about antimatter that stood out to me:

“Matter and antimatter particles are always produced as a pair and, if they come in contact, annihilate one another, leaving behind pure energy.”

In a way, I felt this also described humanity’s cycle of construction and self-destruction through history and into the future. In an era of multiverse depictions à la Rick and Morty or Everything Everywhere All At Once, I wondered about a more lawless possibility where meeting a parallel version of ourselves would result in mutually-assured destruction or inconceivable transformation.

Rather than lines of poetry that reflect humanity at its most artistic, the text of Breaking News draws from the modern human’s most inescapable source of words: the news. In a hypothetical future several centuries from now, the singer announces the news, battling the chaotic commentary of futuristic humans as represented by the instrumental accompaniment. The ensemble comes together in a klaxon-like drone when humanity collectively receives breaking news of the universe’s imminent collision with a parallel dimension. The trusty news anchor begins to speak in an increasingly frantic and unintelligible manner until disappearing at the moment of contact. What comes after the resulting silence could either be the gradual return of normalcy or the echoes of annihilation: something simultaneously incomprehensible yet familiar.

ABOUT BREAKING NEWS

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VERSIONS

RECORDING CREDITS:
MUSIC, TEXT, & ELECTRONIC MEDIA by Victoria Frances Young
Payton Boldt, SOPRANO
Peter Grebenyuk, ELECTRIC GUITAR
Victoria Frances Young, PIANO
Sam Toskin, RECORDING & MIXING ENGINEER

for soprano, electric guitar, piano, 2 violas, & 2 cellos
music and text by Victoria Frances Young

To program or present Breaking News—in fixed media or live format—or for press and collaboration inquiries, please get in touch.