L’ASTRONOME
an opera in NINE PARTS
MUSIC & FILM — VINCENT CALIANNO
CHOREOGRAPHY — CLAIRE HANCOCK
L’Astronome is a large-scale stage work combining movement, music, dance, cinema, and sound.
The work is an opera only in name, literally meaning ‘work’. It is a collection of nine tableaux with seven films interpolated between. As of 2024, only three tableaux and two films have been written and performed; a blueprint of more to come.
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These three monolithic constructions, representing the beginning, middle and end of the opera, abstractly explore our cosmological beginnings—our shared spiritual and scientific origin.
Many origin stories point to a great expanse of water—the abyss—that becomes disturbed when a spark, a form, an idea creates the first primordial things. From this event, sometimes described as the emergence of a silver egg, a mound, or a dome that covers the waters, our first gods and our first stars are born.
The primordial spirits and events that emerge from the waters of the abyss during these moments violently expand, birthing and dying, generation upon generation. The abyss, however, always remains waiting to consume our creation again.
The opera explores creation and death, memory and forgetfulness, solitude and visitation, the future and the past.
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L’Astronome takes its title from Edgard Varèse’s lost and unfinished opera of the same name (sometimes known as The One-All-Alone) and uses it as a point of departure.
It is not our intention to “finish” his work, nor be inspired by its dramatic architecture, nor imagine what sounds, images, text, or narrative he and his occasional collaborators (such as Antonin Artaud) envisioned. Instead, we use it as our abyssal waters from which to impregnate our own work and dramatic arrows.
From a musical standpoint, I think what can be retained, is the absorption of a harmonic palette and phonic patina that Varèse sought after. My own search for a sound-world that is expressed through new sonic possibilities and technologies that avoids the comfort of the sweet sounds of our western musical temperament.