With World War II drawing closer to England each day and critics decrying her newly published book on pacifism and women’s right, Virginia W. is besieged by voices of discord and ridicule. Trying to silence them, she imagines—and therefore possesses—a device with which she can turn a dial and listen to another time and place: August 1890, in St. Ives, a remote village on the Cornwall coast. Returning to the idyllic summers of her childhood, bathed in the sounds, sights, and the early morning light refracting off the Celtic Sea, she is eight years old, and her idealized, beloved Mother, then the heart of the family, is still alive. At the edge of this longed-for soundscape are jarring doubts, clashing facts about her childhood, and intimations of the tragedies to come, that disrupt Virginia W.’s reverie. The synthesizer serves here as a sonic time machine, bringing the sounds of what was and what was lost and intermingling them with Virginia W.’s present, creating a moment out of time, a neither here nor there, when she is both woman and girl, public author and private being, real and imagined.

[source: http://experimentsinopera.com/portfolio-item/modularias/]