The Planets
Imagination, Music and Technology combine for a thrilling artistic vision of the future
The Planets: An Imaginative Flight of Music and Images is a grand multi-media performance piece in the making. The production will combine new music for Balinese gamelan orchestra, Western instruments and electronics, performed live and synchronized with video, still imagery and animation. Intrinsically informed by and the ancient philosophies of Bali, The Planets will combine music and images in an exploration of the forces that shape the universe—from our nearest neighbors, Venus and Mars to our most distant exoplanetary cousins—and the forces that shape our lives as cultural (and musical) beings. The Planets is a project of the International Center for the Arts and the Exploratorium, in cooperation with Leonardo/ISAST.
Creation and Performance
Composer Wayne Vitale, director of the ensemble Gamelan Sekar Jaya, will work with visual designers Dan Goods and David Delgado of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), to create The Planets. They will tap the unique skills of two acclaimed music ensembles to bring the production's conceptual universe to musical life. Musicians of Gamelan Sekar Jaya will make up a traditional Balinese gamelan orchestra of bronze gongs, metallophones, and drums. This traditional ensemble will be balanced and complimented by members of the world-music ensemble, Gamelan X, playing newly devised gamelan instruments, Western instruments, and live electronics.
Six performances of The Planets are scheduled to be presented at San Francisco’s Exploratorium in November 2009. The project will exist simultaneously as a daytime video installation, drawing visitors into The Planets' interwoven themes of culture and science. Participants will be stimulated to explore and discover, and to experience close-up this live, eye-opening, dimension-bending new work.
The projected imagery in the live performances will be drawn in part from NASA and JPL archives, and will range from satellite photos to computer-generated video—all cast via digital video projectors onto multiple screens surrounding the musical ensemble. The imagery will also focus on Bali, and its highly evolved culture that likewise seeks to understand the powerful forces that shape our universe. The new score by Vitale will be played in synchrony with the visual projections by Goods and Delgado, creating a spatially complex “hyper-movie” with live performance and digital-audio soundscapes.
New technology meets ancient philosophies and universal themes
The Planets will contrast the cultural values and cosmology of Bali, Indonesia, with emerging views and conceptions of the solar system, planetary formation, and the cosmic forces at work throughout the universe. The island’s Hindu culture, more than a millennium old but living, vibrant, and evolving into the digital age, embraces a far-reaching philosophy of the universe and man’s role within it. Ideals of balance, interdependence and complementary opposites (rwa bhindeda, the principle of duality) lie at the core of their philosophy. These ideas will be expressed in audio and visual landscapes recorded on location in Bali.
These concepts will also be manifest in the dramatic presentation and design of its musical materials, based on Balinese forms. This panoply of images and sounds, ranging from scenes of ceremonial grandeur to the forging of red-hot bronze by gongsmiths, will be juxtaposed with photos and animations of the cosmos—our solar system, planets, exoplanets, and galaxies. The Planets will draw from the discoveries of cutting-edge scientific work in the field of space science and astronomy, now in one of its most active phases through multinational space probes, planetary missions, and interdisciplinary research. Dark matter, the chaotic creation of planets, and data from the outer reaches of the known universe will be presented via newly generated computer animations and visual models.
Antecedents
The Planets will be an artistic, not didactic, work. It will juxtapose, infer, and contrast ideas, images, and sounds from these two seemingly disparate realms. It will create a sense of shared exploration, both of a living human culture and of universes—and questions—far beyond. Its antecedents in the West include, of course, Gustav Holst’s 1916 symphonic tone poem, “The Planets,” the original inspiration for the work. But it is also about the use of images to convey concepts about our universe or world, as expressed in works such as the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, and its 1992 sequel, Baraka—the latter famous for its sequence of Balinese kecak vocal chant.
The Planets is also inspired by the philosophy and cosmology of Bali. Called “the morning of the world” by Pandit Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, Bali has moved artists and scientists for more than a century, from Claude Debussy’s impressionism to Steve Lansing’s research into complex and sustainable Balinese irrigation systems. The Planets is a continuation of that long tradition.
Timing, Touring, Relevance
The Planets is especially relevant today in the context of the exciting period of space exploration we're now experiencing. 2009 is, in fact, the International Year of Astronomy. Much new research focuses on our own solar system and on planets orbiting other stars—the exoplanets. NASA is currently running a large number of missions to the planets. These include Cassini, which famously captured images of Saturn’s rings, the Messenger mission to Mercury and the Phoenix Mars Lander. The field of exoplanetary research is expanding rapidly and generating many exciting discoveries. For one example, see the cover story of the May 2008 issue of Scientific American about planetary formation as understood through recent discoveries of hundreds of exoplanets and their properties.
Through this project, The Planets' creators hope to achieve a wedding of science and artistic activity that not only creates a “wow” experience for those who witness it, but also offers a compelling multimedia artwork that inspires a deeper understanding of its materials and subject matter—musical, cultural, and scientific.
The Planets is a two-year project. Year One of the project will encompass the activities in San Francisco described above, including the Exploratorium premiere. Year Two will focus on international touring, culminating in a full performance of the production in Bali, including the ensemble Tunas Mekar with a troupe of US performers, at Bali’s Festival of the Arts.
The Planets will incorporate a wide range of visions, histories, and approaches:
- The ways distant and ancient cultures embed insights that are now being revealed in scientific discovery; and how the musical language of Balinese gamelan music is (surprisingly) related to the dynamics of the solar system.
- The possibilities to open the eyes of children, young adults, and others, to new sound worlds, cultures, and the fascinations of outer space, through an integrated program of website, educational program, installation, and live performances.
- The current peak of excitement of current space research and NASA missions, both within our solar system and in exoplanetary realms.
- The cross-cultural nature of the work, in accord with the international character of scientific exploration. Note that The Planets will tour to Bali in Year Two, offering audiences there an equivalent opportunity to benefit from its creative achievements; and featuring one of Bali’s most sophisticated village-based music ensembles.
- The skills and experience of the composer’s ensemble, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, and GamelanX, a related world music ensemble from whom players will be drawn.
