LA Times Festival of Books 2018

Composers Shane Myrbeck and Emily Shisko offer a window into the early stages of writing and producing an opera about the final days of the 20-year Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn.

The story of the spacecraft Cassini is full of passion, perilous journeys, daredevil maneuvers, otherworldly beauty, and dramatic endings. From its ambitious life connecting us to the heavens, to its glorious, poetic death in Saturn’s atmosphere, Cassini is a powerful metaphor for how connected we are when we appreciate the unknown vastness of our solar system and universe beyond. This is a story worthy of dramatic telling, and The Death of Cassini is an opera-in-progress working to tell it dramatically.

The work is electroacoustic, meaning that it will involve traditional operatic singers and acoustic musicians accompanied by immersive electronic music. Myrbeck and Shisko will perform segments of the in-progress piece and talk about their approach to shaping a NASA mission into an operatic narrative. They will also discuss how they use acoustic space and 3D audio technologies in their works.