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Dr Alexandra Huang-Kokina is a Visiting Research Fellow from 17 March 2025 to 13 March 2026.
Alexandra Huang-Kokina is an academic, pianist and creative director whose work bridges music, literature, intermediality and digital creativity through critical and creative practices. Her forthcoming book, The Musical Performativity of Twentieth-Century Piano Novels (Palgrave Macmillan), examines non-traditional piano performances as vehicles for socio-political transgression. She leads practice-led projects, including Creative Digital Dynamics (chamber music concert series) and OperAI (pilot opera project), which explore how AI introduces new dimensions of interactivity and immersion in classical music performances. She is the creative director and designer of AI Kaidan: Yūrei (Ghost) of the AI Empire, an immersive science-fiction opera integrating Japanese folklore, Kabuki theatre and Gagaku music into a Western operatic framework. Alexandra is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Aesthetics and Business Creativity at Lund University in Sweden, after completing her first postdoctoral project at the University of Edinburgh in March 2025. She also co-directs Operactive Arts, a social enterprise for classical music innovation.
During her visiting fellowship at IAS, Alexandra will be working on two projects in parallel:
The Musical Performativity of Twentieth-Century Piano Novels
I will refine the manuscript for my book project, currently under contract with Palgrave Macmillan as part of the Music and Literature Book Series. This book critically engages with novelistic representations of piano playing from the turn of the twentieth century onward. Delving into an extensive and varied collection of ‘piano novels’ by both celebrated and lesser-known authors (e.g., Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Daphne du Maurier, Stanley Makower, Thomas Mann, Elfriede Jelinek, Felisberto Hernández), this project offers a compelling exploration of the synergies between prose writing and piano playing across diverse langauges. The term ‘piano novel’ is coined within the unique framework of this project to describe a category of narrative fiction that goes beyond merely referencing or mentioning the piano as a mere aesthetic subject. Rather, these narratives serve as discursive vehicles for socio-political transgression that address class mobility, intercultural conflicts and interracial politics in global piano cultures. Overall, this project draws on scholarly perspectives from literature, musicology, performance, media and gender studies and on my own practice as a classical pianist, bringing a crucial experiential dimension to the critical analysis through experimental pianistic techniques.
OperAI: Innovating audience engagement in contemporary science-fiction opera
OperAI investigates how AI and immersive technology can be leveraged to address critical challenges around audience engagement in live arts, using ‘science-fiction opera’ as a unique case study—a distinctive genre that fuses the operatic art form with speculative technologies in sci-fi settings. Drawing on business innovation theory and AI-driven, practice-led research as its main methodological approaches, this project seeks to establish critical and creative practices that enable meaningful, playful and inclusive audience participation for future immersive opera. It will contribute to reconceptualising opera’s traditionally elitist performance practices, making opera more appealing and accessible for cultural citizens while adapting it to contemporary digital entertainment cultures. On a practical level, the technical and artistic concepts from OperAI will be translated into a public-facing opera performance, featuring the immersive Japanese sci-fi opera designed, produced and directed by myself. This opera reimagines 19th-century Japanese folklore in futuristic sci-fi settings, aiming to engage diverse audiences in co-creating the performance and offer a semi-improvised operatic experience that remains unique to each night. The time at IAS will enable this pilot opera to be critiqued, tested, and refined through an iterative process with the creative community in London.
