one-eleven heavy
"It's a moving tribute to the sad loss of life, wonderfully realised and beautifully performed.”
The short opera One-Eleven Heavy, originally for piano, soprano, and baritone, premiered in Nova Scotia in 2014 and has since been expanded, orchestrated and recorded as an EP album with ensemble Hotel Elefant and featuring soprano Jenny Ribeiro and Grammy Award-winning tenor Karim Sulayman. It can be purchased and/or streamed on many sites, including Amazon and Spotify.
"If it provides even a moment of comfort to those who lost loved ones on the flight, that will be even more important than the way it illuminates and humanizes the story for us listeners."
-An Earful
About the album One-Eleven Heavy: interviews with the performers and composer.
what began as a summer workshop assignment became an obsession about survival—and eventually an operatic album.
In the summer of 2014 I was accepted into an opera workshop in Halifax, Nova Scotia, called Opera From Scratch. I would get to write and premiere a short opera with the caveat that it must have a theme local to the region. I was at first thinking about a Victorian seaside gothic/supernatural drama, à la Dark Shadows, but I found nothing compelling in my research.
While researching, I stumbled upon the (completely unrelated) story of Swissair Flight 111, the tragically fatal crash of an airliner into St. Margaret’s Bay in 1998. I got chills; I knew what had to have been on the minds of the passengers in the final minutes. An American Airlines jet I was on in 2013 lost an engine mid-flight en route to New York from Austin. We were told we were over Indiana somewhere and would be making an emergency landing. We were shown how to brace for landing and find the closest emergency exit. The cabin went silent; what can you do? What is there to do?
The premiere of the first version of One-Eleven Heavy by Karianne Pasma with Kristina MacKay and Andrew Machum at Saint Matthew’s United Church, Halifax, in 2014.
One-Eleven Heavy is a short opera that explores the relationship of humans to air travel – the abandonment of control over our destiny in favor of technological advances – and, through the tragedy of the 1998 Swissair Flight 111 disaster, the sometimes horrific consequences. The libretto is culled from recollections of reporters on the scene of the crash, interviews with family members of the passengers and crew, and newspaper accounts of the incident, as well as descriptions of plane crashes from survivors of other disasters. Told in reverse chronology, the voices of these characters are woven into a narrative that recounts who was on the ill-fated flight, explores what they might have experienced, and gives insight into the physical and emotional aftermath of the tragedy.
For more about this opera and some casual Q&A about my musical background, Parma Recordings published an interview we did for the release of the album.
This collage, commissioned from artist and potter Erin Louise Clancy, was used as the album cover art.