I'll give you one, two, three.

[music] Tonight's the dress.

Dress is always a moment of truth, but at the same time, there's more time to fix some things.

There's one particular area where I wanted to get a little more of an improvisation feel from the trumpet player, now that we've talked about the music a little more.

There's just a couple little new things I want to try.

I'm not worried.

This is fine.

Everything's fine.

[laughs] Moon Mine is a four-person operatic work, two singers, two musicians, a composition by me and Malik Gaines.

I wrote the libretto, Malik wrote the music.

It's a meditation on some of the plans that people have for the moon, including potential mining ventures and space tourism.

I wanted to just at the end of that, give the trumpet a little time to improv in that mood.

Let's add 12 measures of wistful moon-gazing sound before you get down to this airy, swirly sound.

Okay, wistful.

I'll write that in.

I just wanted to get a little more life from that section by using the trumpet more freely.

I was raised by a conceptual artist, so I like a system or I can relate to a system, I always break them.

But in this case, it's a four-sided space, and we have this square.

It made perfect sense to use four musicians, two voices to be the two different people who are traveling to the moon, and then two other instruments that themselves are quite a lot like voices to me, a trumpet and the viola.

Is it just me when I switch to the air noises, then that signifies that we're going on.

Yes, you guys work together to find that point.

Yes.

How about you do some air for 10 seconds, and then I'll cue the downbeat.

Okay.

[music] There's so many songs about the moon as a romantic ideal or as something that suggests calamity or catastrophe in the future.

An omen, an ill omen.

There's all these ways of understanding the moon.

Of course, it is actually a material thing.

There is this tension between a materialist understanding of the universe and then the mystical potential and meaning for the moon.

It does have an impact on the tides, on our bodies, it's how we understand time.

I practically worship the moon.

It's not just us that need the moon.

All the other species need the moon too.

The question becomes, what happens when we occupy that as a space?

For me, this piece was an opportunity to at least start to question the different positions around that.

I see your mouth saying words to me.

Your brain miscalculating the trajectory of a missile.

The Getty PST Initiative is absolutely extraordinary in many ways.

Open Sky is a group exhibition that features artists and collectives that are asking us as viewers to reconsider our relationship to the cosmos.

Your heart, confused between poetry and politics.

Your fragile interface.

I love everything about you.

We were thinking a lot about this transitional moment where you become very aware of the Earth's relationship to the sun and the sun's relationship to the moon.

The Turrell Sky Space is something that sparked the idea for the exhibition Open Sky.

Alexandro Segade and Malik Gaines have been commissioned to create a new performance that is site-specific.

Because we're using the James Turrell Sky Space at Pomona College's Benton Museum, it has this feeling of observation, this really experience the phenomenon of the sky in the evening.

Working with the Turrell space, which really brings you into a optical experience around the change of the day, that we could provide a auditory supplement to that.

[singing] We wanted to think about what are the possibilities, pitfalls, ups and downs of potential moon travel.

We dug into the current science around moon colonization, development of resources on the moon.

Helium-3 is a trace element that we have very little of here on earth.

I think it's in very small parts even on the moon.

But if they were able to sift enough of it to mine it, as it were, they could use it for cold fusion and clean energy on earth for somewhere between a thousand and ten thousand years.

That's the estimate, yes.

We worked with sort of near-future plans that we saw out there being talked about amongst scientists, and billionaires, and policy people who all have different ideas of how to use space.

We follow two characters who are singing in counterpoint.

One of them is a tourist who saved up all her life to go to the moon and enjoy the resort that's there at the Sea of Tranquility.

I was really actually looking at some of the plans people have for this venture.

Then the other is a miner who is clocking in for a day of overseeing robots and AI as they sift the regolith on the moon looking for Helium-3.

How to write a libretto.

They tell you not to use too many words, but I use a lot of words.

What I do is listen to the voices of the characters as I imagine them and let them say whatever they want.

Then thinking about and listening to the voice maybe inside my own head who is weary of humanity's incessant use of resources and nonetheless is caught in it.

[singing] The thing you never know until there's an audience there is do the words, the music, and the performance add up to these emotional beats that you're imagining pace the work.

We'll find out.

We knew we wanted a small group.

We wanted it to really be something that would be situated in this square space.

In this case, we actually chose an alto and a baritone.

The lower voices thinking a little bit about nighttime and darker sounds.

We were very interested in thinking about the breadth and epic quality of opera and then also of science fiction.

There is something a little bit counterintuitive about bringing the two together.

One is very futuristic.

One is rooted in a historical understanding.

Opera is often very old.

Science fiction is always looking to the future.

In their oppositeness, we wanted to see what happens when we bring them together.

What we found is that as composer and writer, Malik and I are very interested in using science fiction because it's a way of thinking about a future history.

Science fiction and opera coming together gives you the sense of what is this mythology that we want to create for our future.

I'm going to pin this on your back real quick.

All right.

Do you mind unzipping the front?

Yes, of course.

I have used jumpsuits in almost every science fiction piece that I've made, and they've been a fuse.

There was a futuristic theater piece.

The local Califonica was the place it took place in.

It was a, what if California was taken over by these gay clones who were actual clones of each other.

That piece toured around a bit, and that was a jumpsuit piece.

Star Choir Jumpsuits because they're the crew of a ship.

It's just how we understand that particular aspect of the future.

Of course, Star Trek, it's also the original Alien film.

It's 2001.

The future is jumpsuits.

Just don't move.

Voila, for now.

Amazing.

That's going to hold it ..

Cool.

All right.

[?]

Oh, yes.

Once I sew this on perfectly, it's going to be just perfect.

We really have to start I'm ready to go.

Go ahead.

Yay.

You're off.

-Those are some of the-- Does that make sense?

-Cool, yes.

Yes, that makes perfect sense.

Okay.

Great.

-Thank you I'm here I think that'll make sense.

Yes, just playing with times where you're fancy-.

Yes.

and living the dream.

Julien Knowles is on trumpet.

Kevin Terrell Madison is conducting.

Leila Zaksouk is viola.

Ben Lin is the baritone.

Carmen Adano is the alto.

Ben is playing a miner who works on the moon.

Carmen is playing a tourist That's it.

We should get going, because we've got to wrap up this run through at 7:30.

Good.

Thanks for coming.

I have followed Segade and Gaines' work for many years, and seeing them build this incredible speculative universe through their work.

They staged a full-blown opera, really, at Mount Wilson Observatory as they venture into the galaxy.

That was such a rich world that I was really curious to see what would happen if in this context of this exhibition, they would return to it.

[Alto and Baritone singing] I dreamed that night We broke the moon in two I wrote a sonnet, but half of a sonnet, because it's about the moon splitting in two.

It's called Broken Moon.

In that moment, that's the only moment in the whole piece where they sing not in counterpoint.

Spoiler alert, they end feeling ambivalent about their trip to the moon.

[Alto and Baritone singing] We break We buy What we buy We break A lot of the literature about why we would go to the moon does have to do with the sense that resources here on Earth are going to be used up, and that's a lot of the language around traveling to Mars and other ideas around colonization.

There's a certain destructive, extractive, and a little bit self-obsessed core to this human need to go out to space and colonize everyone.

It's hard not to picture repeating the same mistakes or even thinking about ways to make those mistakes sound good.

If you ask me, should we destroy the moon so that humans can live another thousand years, I would probably say no.

Part of what I want to do is think about if we are going to do that, how could we do it in a way that doesn't necessarily repeat the exact problems we have here?

There are scientists who are working on that.

I am a little more pessimistic than Xandro, perhaps, who did a lot of the reading of policy papers.

If I left a footprint on the moon, I would be mortified for the rest of my life.

I appreciate that the characters really have a lot of ambivalence, because that's how many of us feel on Earth trying to deal with these questions.

[Alto and Baritone singing] Miss my dogs Not winking Another day Not blinking A day lasts a month These stars don't know me On the moon This moon Not mine