Composing Southern Crossings

An interview with Jabri appeared in OperaWire about the composer’s creative process:

“When I compose, I never write from the beginning to the end. I choose a few very important moments in the piece or the opera to start with, but this time I did write the opera from the beginning to the end because the libretto wasn’t done when I started. I was in Paris as a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination when I wrote the music, receiving the libretto from the librettists as I went. I was very fast in the process and curious about the story, wanting to know what would happen next in the story, what happened during that extraordinary meal between Darwin and Herschel?”