Q&A with Stephanie Leotsakos
Published August 20, 2025
Q1. When undertaking a huge work like an opera, how do you collect your musical materials, think about form/structure, and shape the work overall? Aside from its theatrical sensibilities, an opera is one of the longest musical forms that exists, and oftentimes younger composers don’t know what to do with a format so dauntingly large, that frequently takes year(s) to write. What would you say about the approach to opera/operatic-scale works, and how they differ from some of the absolute music you (may) write?
I’m always collecting materials just by living life, as my mind works that way, perhaps like a bowerbird. Harvesting ideas is freeing. All ideas are collected, and not restricted. I don’t impose a system of formal structure to restrict the arrival of ideas. Then, the ideas themselves form the structure. Even something as formally large as an opera invites free flow as the work can shape itself around free transformation in the creative process.
So, I’m not short of ideas-- what’s more important is which of them will continue to drive me and interest me for the long haul -- because operas do take a long time to write. The process of composing opera is an evolution over long periods of time, but it’s also intimate, and exciting. Even a short-form opera - like an opera miniature - can take a long time. Each work is different, and has an ecosystem in my brain that needs time to marinate and develop.
Practically speaking, I use a combination of tiny music notebooks and Google docs for compiling research and drafting libretto. I often compose music and text in tandem, and those two can evolve in any order. The premise and synopsis is usually mostly determined by that point, and often sketched out in a web of doodles in my notebook. I do this for both absolute music and opera, the operas just usually take up some more pages. To give you an example, I’ve share a few pictures below of early creative sketches of my first opera, titled “OMG” which premiered in 2016, as I planned the form, story arc, staging moments, thematic and musical ideas -- all grounded in the flower of life symbol and its relationship to early Christianity. The story itself traverses 6 different time periods following the story of one mother-son relationship, with a heavy theme on the meaning and plight of motherhood. This brevity of physical scale using small notebooks, for me, grounds the complexity of scale in my mind for any length of work. What’s in the notebook is usually enough for me to know what I want and what it will become. The definition of ‘form’ or ‘arc’ can manifest in many ways; it’s sometimes a sculptural geometric sketch, a sequence of harmonic colors-planes, a pseudo-linear graphic score along with text, or just doodles.
‘OMG’: My first opera - sketches in a mini-notebook
Q2. As opera is such a visual medium, do you find that you experience music visually? Or are you inspired by visuals in general? Or other senses, such as taste or touch?
As you might already be glimpsing, my experience of music is strongly embodied — I often feel movement and sound in my own body when I watch, hear, compose or perform music, often with a kind of spatial staging in my mind. Texture, sound, and motion can trigger ASMR-like responses and physical sensations in me. Concepts often appear as modulating shapes, images, or spatial pathways. My sensory world is deeply interconnected, so music, visuals, and touch often merge into one creative experience. To give you a quick example, I was recently at my piano exploring a piece about how planes of pitches interact with a central tonic and the immediacy of those relationships in a generative pattern through the geometry of what I realized I might be a hypercube. Let me show you a sketch of what I ended up drawing (below). Each note has its own surface, its own plane, interacting in the shape of a hypercube, around a central pitch cube of Eb.
Musical Sketches: Pitch-planes of a Hypercube
Q3. More so than some absolute music practices, operatic forms and works of integrated theater require collaboration. How has collaboration inspired your creative process? In what ways is it a hindrance, if at all?
The majority of the collaborative experiences I have had have been so fruitful and stimulating! I believe opera, in fact, invites collaboration; it’s a culmination of the complimentary skills of a talented group of people -- that’s what really makes it opera in my opinion. Knowledge of that and intending room for that is a very important aspect of composing a score. I don’t mean leaving loose ends for other people to fill in or answer for you, I mean exactly the opposite: make the vision so tight that when others join the project, they can hear and see that vision. That can sometimes be the most challenging part: communicating that clearly and effectively. Workshopping or partial-products of a work in progress can really help with that.
One example I can share is a clip from a partial-product of my second opera, titled Young Goodman Brown -- an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous short story by the same title, commissioned by the NJ-based Perspective Collective: a group of three singer friends who take new opera on the road. The videography was done by another friend, who wanted to hone his videography and video-editing skills, and we did it low-budget-style at my church. I did all the audio-editing. At this point, the 30-minute opera was only half-written and you’ll see that the singers are still getting a feel for the music, their assigned characters, and the arc of the story. Creating this video was super helpful not just for group discussions about the direction of the rest of the piece and harmonic language but also for promotional efforts, even after I finished the second half of the opera. It has now had multiple national and international performances at various arts festivals in curious interesting settings, including in a speakeasy-style bar, a cemetery, as a city walk with scenes performed in multiple locations (like literally a traveling story with audience and performers on the move), and in various churches. In the first clip, the opening scene, Faith, Brown’s wife, warns him not to go on his night errand because “darkness lurks where shadows once were silhouetted in daylight”. In scene two (clip two) he encounters the Devil at the edge of the woods, and the Devil is disembodied but voiced in the piano. What’s interesting about this YouTube-style experience, is that you can ‘read’ what the piano is saying, because I put character text into the score for the pianist (so turn your closed-captions on!) Lastly, clip three is a spatialized scene that includes electronics -- when Young Goodman Brown starts to hear other Townspeoples’ voices deep in the woods.
Young Goodman Brown: Act 1
I’d also love to share that I’ve enjoyed a new kind of collaboration recently: my next example, Hyacinth, is an aria for a new opera in early stages of development that was born entirely of collaborative reaction and response.
Firstly, I reacted and responded to my own instruments through an improvisatory recording process in LogicProX. Essentially, I collaborated with my violin and body first. It was a really healing process for me during a tough time of metamorphosis last year. 4 and a half minutes of music were composed this way, prior to the singing and text existing which came from an older setting for this opera I’m working on. At first I didn’t know I was creating the new soundscape and musical language for that story. I sent this music to an artist friend, sound-color synesthete Myke Karlowski, who created sketches of his reaction to my music. We can see them here in sketches No’s. 1 through 4:
His Sketch No.4 resulted in my musical response then to his artwork in correspondence with mine. It led to the addition of the vocal line and two-and-a-half more minutes of music situating my embodied experience of the music and art in a kind of macrospheric, amniotic space. In my program notes I described one aspect like this: “The temperature inside this large cocoon is warm and red-shifted. Expanding blueish fluid with a dense, smoke-like texture expansively permeates between dimensional folds in the remaining space.” I find it interesting that Myke, without ever hearing or reading that description, created his own sketch (No.5) with blue-and-white smoke-like gestures as his own response to the final 7:30-minute aria. (See image No.5)
You can listen to it below, and above you can also peruse the graphic score and other notes. (I recommend wearing headphones!)
Hyacinth
for violin, voice, and binaural 3D-spatialization, 7’15
Q4. Do you have a compositional fixation? Is there something you continue to come back to, or have an obsession with? How does it manifest itself in your art and creative practice?
Yes! The Tonnetz, which means “tone-network” in German. I could go on-and-on about how much I continue to grow alongside my musical discoveries through the Tonnetz and its inherent multidimensional toroidal geometry, so that is definitely a conversation for another day. For now, I’ll just show you some iterations that I’ve made below, and you should check out a paper I wrote about it!: https://www.stephanieleotsakos.com/research-and-pedagogy#/a-tonnetz-in-practice
You can even play my tonnetz online here: https://www.gnotesbystephanie.com/interactive-tonnetz-web-app
Some of my Tonnetz-related Artwork
Q5. What’s your next big opera/theatrical work about? What kind of technologies and new ideas are you interested in playing with, and what sets it aside from the other pieces on your list of works.
The opera I’m working on is a mythic, family-friendly, experimental social opera for ages 6+. It explores the cycle of life in nature through the story of four elemental siblings who inherit a world from their vanished Mother and creator called Maia (or in Greek, “MEH-ya”), the voice you heard in Hyacinth. As the siblings’ harmony begins to fracture, they have to rediscover themselves via their inter-connection with each other and their world. The mystery is discovering how to listen in order to transform and renew bonds.
I think what really sets this work aside is how immersive and socially engaging I envision it to be. It will be electroacoustic and involve two new musical technologies that I and a friend in the U.K. are working on. Both of our technologies share a key value: democratizing music creation through interactive, multi-sensory sonic interfaces. My friend, Thomas Didiot-Cook, a research technician at the University of Bristol’s Robotics Laboratory, is bringing the tonal-network of the Tonnetz to life with color, sound, and a social multi-sensory user interface (citation). Our new digital instrument, the PlayUrStaff, is an adaptable MIDI console and multisensory interface that bypasses the user’s need to know “how” to play another instrument in order to make or read music. With the PlayUrStaff, the music staff itself has become a touch-and-play instrument, making the process of harmonic discovery (and literacy) more immediately gratifying. Like Didiot-Cook’s Tonnetz, the PlayUrStaff lights up according to pitch, is physically engaging--ridged for differentiating ‘lines’ and ‘spaces’--and produces sound digitally. While this instrument was originally conceived to be an accessible teaching tool, I think it has grown beyond that. I believe both technologies have a place in performance art and can contribute to both the creation of the work and the experience of it. I am excited to find out how I can make that happen over the course of the next three years.
New Technologies Sneak-Peek
Current prototype in progress (2025) [no sound]
Proof of concept demo (prototype 2024) [Sound ON]