A strange phenomenon has brought together a diverse group of people in a US suburb. For weeks or months, a persistent, low hum has been heard by each of them, but not by their families and friends. It has been causing headaches, nosebleeds, insomnia and — increasingly — panic. Some people have moved out of the family home. Others have lost their jobs.
What is this hum? One of the group suggests a kind of seance to see if, collectively, they can control it. Another blames the “deep state”, government surveillance or conspiracies by the Democrats. A cult-like atmosphere develops as the group looks desperately for leadership.
This is the plot of Jordan Tannahill’s The Listeners, which began life as the outline plot for an opera but first appeared as a novel in 2021, before being realised as an opera in 2022. Now it is being turned into a BBC television mini-series, starring Rebecca Hall, by Tannahill himself. Meanwhile, the opera, composed by Missy Mazzoli, will have its first US performances this month by Opera Philadelphia, which co-commissioned it.
The timing is not coincidental. With the US election less than two months away, the subject of how a group of people can fall under the influence of one individual with a strong personality is again likely to be scrutinised in the media.
“We conceived this idea initially in 2016, when [Donald] Trump was elected,” says Mazzoli, American composer of a series of successful operas. “We were asking what Trump offers Americans — a sense of belonging, of being listened to by a leader — and, on the darker side, whether he is exploiting people to his own end. The pluses and minuses of having a charismatic leader have certainly been more in the conversation in the last eight years. That election revealed a lot about America, about how people were frustrated, feeling alone and unheard.”
Mazzoli says she has long been fascinated by cults. “At the time there were a lot of documentaries about cults, from Wild Wild Country, about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s community in Oregon in the 1980s, to The Vow, on the cult NXIVM in upstate New York. All these organisations tend to follow the same pattern, in that there is eventually some sort of betrayal, in which one person comes forward and says there is abuse from the leader, and within days or weeks the cult will disintegrate.”
The basic idea was presented to Tannahill, the Canadian playwright and author, who produced a seven-page outline for an opera. From there to a full libretto was still a sizeable undertaking and that fell to Royce Vavrek, who had already worked with Mazzoli on her opera Proving Up. Meanwhile, Tannahill went his own way writing the novel, so The Listeners has a complex family tree.
Vavrek says he was not involved in Tannahill’s dramaturgical journey, and Tannahill was not involved in theirs: “When you plant two seeds, they’re the same genus of flower and yet they grow in different ways in different environments.”
He says that watching Trump and Kamala Harris develop their campaigns has taken on extra resonance. “Even though [the opera] is not a direct allegory to the political climate we’re living in, it is interesting to compare the rhetoric coming out of the two presidential candidates with that of Howard [the cult leader in The Listeners] and see how they are encouraging people to fall in line with their platform.”
What neither the opera nor the book does is offer easy answers as to why people are drawn into cults. It may often be politics or religion that is the conduit, but those who feel the attraction are not easily categorised.
The story that Tannahill proposed brings them together through the allegorical symbol of “the Hum”, a real-life phenomenon felt by an estimated 4 per cent of the world’s population. Here it signifies an unquantifiable human need in search of a solution. One of music’s unique strengths is that it can be ambiguous, and Mazzoli’s opera makes the most of that quality, suggesting a powerful but unknown force at work, drawing the audience into another world.
“That is the true mysteriousness of the Hum,” says Lileana Blain-Cruz, the opera’s director. “People are asking themselves: ‘Am I going crazy? What is reality? Am I alone in this?’ It’s wonderfully dense and complex. Missy and Royce like to go deep into the subterranean layers of our consciousness, and that’s why I love this opera. Yes, it’s the politics, but it’s also psychology. What makes us people?”
We follow the human story through the character of Claire, the role taken by Hall in the TV series. A middle-class wife and mother, she finds her life upended by the unceasing hum, losing her job as a teacher and leaving her family. In group meetings at Sequoia Crescent she starts to find solace — until it all goes wrong.
For Mazzoli, the moral ambiguity of Claire’s character adds to the many-layered story. We are rooting for her and yet she starts down a questionable path in her relationship with Kyle, one of her students, who also hears the Hum. It is a measure of how isolated they feel that they gravitate towards the cult.
“In this incredibly divided nation each side is finding a sense of identity with a certain party,” says Mazzoli. “I think that’s, in part, because we don’t have a social safety net. The idea of individualism, of being able to take care of yourself and not have the government intervene, means that people often don’t have a sense of community.
“But a need for community is part of human nature. We just have to go to greater extremes to find it, whether that means joining a cult or finding some extreme community online. America seems ripe for that scenario just now.”
Missy Mazzoli’s opera ‘The Listeners’ runs September 25-29, operaphila.org
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