Like Macken, Scott found “the germination of an idea” in a literary text, Sylvia Plath’s poem, The Applicant. In the developmental stage she applied for permission to set the work to music, but when it was denied, librettist Pierce Wilcox wrote her a libretto based on the poem. Director Danielle Maas came up with the title, Her Dark Marauder, a line from another of Plath’s poems.

Scott’s work explores ideas found in The Applicant, particularly gender roles of the late 1960s, and the way those who are physically different and neurologically atypical are treated by society. “Pierce took the Plath and worked it from the inside out,” she says. “There is so much nuance and power in his writing and I am so happy with the result.”

She describes her compositional style as “shifting and changing”. But the Breaking Glass project has given her an opportunity to think about what she wanted to express through her work. She discovered that “the music grows out of what you’re trying to express”.

Macken’s compositional style is different. She describes it as “disrupting a sound or engaging another element that causes the sound to malfunction”, and also, “opera with a different mediating quality depending on what is fed to it or with what it interfaces”.

She never dreamed she’d have the opportunity to compose opera at this stage of her development, but having come this far, she finds the operatic world rich in possibility for a young female composer. In my personal experience, opera-making practices that prioritise unimaginative realisations of canon works are bound by the exclusionary history of the art form, tending to repel the people with whom these stories fail to resonate; the price of admission certainly functions, however unintentionally, as an additional exclusionary force. You see a lot of extraordinary projects coming out of questioning the predominant narratives proposed by the art form, but for reasons of age and experience, I didn’t expect that I would be a part of it.”