"People on the train must have been practically gagging at the sweaty, festering animal stench seeping from my rucksack."

Joe Snape’s anecdote reads more like a butcher complaining about carcass-related faux pas than a musician struggling to carry instruments to a performance. However Snape is describing the summertime journey he made to Essex to perform the prologue to Bonesong; a new opera composed jointly with Kate Whitley, which combines orchestral music, electronics, vultures and the sounds of animal meat being torn from the bone.

The project stems from Carmen Elektra: Opera Underground, the brainchild of music student Whitley, director Thom Andrews and conductor Will Gardner who wanted to counter the "formality and sterility of concert halls" by producing performances of opera in the informal setting of Clare Cellars. This attempt to reinvigorate interest in such a seemingly staid form was, Whitley states, a defence method against the way "our generation are [sic.] being alienated by the conservatism, rigidity, and formality of it [concert hall opera]". Resultantly, the music faculty’s outreach programme commissioned an original opera to be performed in the University Museum of Zoology as part of the Festival of Ideas for an education project about opera.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of Bonesong’s development is how the composers leapt from producing an educational, child-friendly piece to haggling for unwanted ribs and dissected cows to use as instruments. Snape told of how he "started spending a lot of time in the zoology museum, with these huge skeletons...and began thinking about what flesh and bones might actually sound like". "We wanted to find something that would fit the zoology museum setting – hence thinking about animals, vultures, skeletons and carcasses...so this is where Bonesong started".

The story of Bonesong uses a strange confluence of ideas to its advantage. A vulture falls in love with a girl, and in order to seduce her he kills her brother and turns his carcass into an instrument. Entrancing her with music from this instrument, he whisks her away to his roost. She wakes the next morning, discovers what has happened and tries to escape. As they fight he knocks her to the ground and kills her.

It is a plot conceived specifically to exploit the range of animal skeletons on display in the zoology museum, casting a series of warped shadows as the drama unfolds. The eccentricity of this atmospheric plot finds a correlative in how it was conceived, as recounted by Snape: "I sent Kate a broken text with a sketchy outline of the story at about two in the morning...on a replacement bus service between Manchester and Sheffield".

It’s also interesting to note how Snape and Whitley imitated their fictional bird as they went about recording their grizzly sounds. While each composed separately, both had a hand in the aural manipulation of raw meat. Whitley revealed how they sat in the music faculty recording studio "snapping bones and ripping meat for about an hour." "We came out smelling disgusting (and I got blood on Joe’s glasses) but with lots of lovely sounds". Similarly, Snape performed an extract with "a laptop and [a] pig’s ribcage" much to the chagrin of the Essex promoter who inquired "what the fuck is that smell?" when Snape entered the building. Just as the vulture reforms a lifeless trunk to make his seductive music, Snape and Whitley have constructed a series of sounds from the mangling of inanimate matter. The 20-minute Bonesong is being performed alongside H.K. Gruber’s Frankenstein, another tale of gore and galvanism.

There’s a crooked metaphor lurking in all this phonic recharging of dead animals. The experimental nature of Bonesong, a result of Whitley’s aversion to the fusty practices of mainstream opera and Snape’s enthusiasm for all things electronic, seems a world away from the polished formality of classical music. Both composers (along with various other musicians in Cambridge) seek to re-evaluate how opera can be performed, striving to alter our conceptions of the medium.

Whitley stated how she doesn’t "know anyone else [in Cambridge] who has tried this sort of collaboration" and Snape pointed out how "within the University scene there’s much less [electronic music] going on" than there should be. Yet they are not working without precedent. They wrote the music to a libretto by St Catharine’s student Conrad Steel, rendering this project what librettist-composer dynamic Whitley acknowledges as "tried and tested". Snape’s electronic interludes were also written to poems, penned by fellow student Sarah McKee. This four-way collaboration is a vital example of the benefits of student music – a variety of voices cohering to thread together a set of disparate ideas, ending with something strange and, in Bonesong’s case, original. As Whitley puts it, this cooperation "flies in the face of ideas of creative autonomy, individuality, and authorship...the composer struggling with his work alone".

Snape reiterates this sentiment: "It would be cool if more people made music with electronic [media]...and more music is always a good thing". As long as Cambridge students are willing to create together, better art will be produced. But for the sake of hygiene, avoid the butcher’s approach.

Bonesong will be performed on 29th October