Finally the O statement

If this is opera, then it must be defined as digital opera, for the term digital seems to grubby-up the discipline. It also sets it along side digital theatre, which would be its closest cousin (In so much as a projection in a play does not make it digital theatre, a projection in an opera ditto.) For I am not dealing with a reinvention of a form, but allowing the new means and their new meaning an opportunity to create a new way of thinking about the discipline.

Furthermore, the opera already defines the meeting point of music with theatre, and is a much preferred description to 'music theatre' which inevitably comes with a caveat of (not musical theatre, or the West End, or Kagel and gesture based theatrics in the performance of music, but something more immersive), as I deal with professional across the sectors of funding, creative, academia, and need to be clear in its meaning.

Also, Dixon mentioned that Digital Performance is the new Gestamkunstwerk - the new total art - but Causey, Auslander, and Dixon fail to consider the sonic elements within this, instead focussing on the spectacle. There a new term should be used to focus away from the spectacle of performance. Joe Wachs wrote "Re: art: Call it what it is: Voice-Over I.P. - The Immersive Performance Paradigm"

Also, my intention is not to question the 'old way', I am interested in the phenomenological experience of sound and music and theatre and digital technology, and the creative listening this calls for - this is what drives me. However, its creation will ask us to reconsider ways of thinking about opera and its idiosyncrasies. Perhaps we might assume that these ways have exhausted their possibilities or do not represent the culture of 2010. This is not to say that the 'recipe' is obsolete, but if the 21st century digital opera composer is to embrace the form then perhaps CJA and ASJ can point us towards some of the answers for the question "what if?"; for if we want to manipulate our chosen medium then we must understand how it works.

I recently wrote:
The compositional approach is deliberately forward-looking: it draws a line under the traditional 19th/20th century convention of "Opera" and concentrates instead on the meeting point of music, sound, voice, drama and digital technology as it relates to the 21st century; employing the philosophical, technological, theoretical and phenomenological qualities of these forces NOT a traditionally accepted recipe.