Now streaming: ‘Cassini,’ featuring a score by Tony Imperatrice along with soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian and members of the Fresno Community Chorus

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Donald: You wrote a score that included a choral part. Tell us about your your vocalists.

Tony: Soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian is a Fresno native, and she has done a lot of really interesting musical projects, including singing on “The Lord of the Rings” soundtrack, and she was highly recommended from Dr. Anna Hamre, who I was able to work with in getting members (of the Fresno Community Chorus) together to record the music for this piece. And the basic structure of it is that Isabel represents Cassini. She’s the personality of Cassini. And I go from the idea that everybody who worked on Cassini, the thousands of people who spent time and their creative energy building this thing and planning out this mission, that somehow a little of their spirit is part of Cassini. And so the chorus represents the people who worked on Cassini as spirit guides, guiding Cassini along her hero’s quest.Claudio,

Donald: I know that that Tony mentioned that he liked that you were a musical theater guy. What did you see in this storyline that said musical theater to you,?

Claudio Laso: When I got hired on at CMAC, Kyle Lowe and the team said, how do you feel about creating a visual addition to a score? I said that sounds great. And then they told me the (Cassini) premise, and I said that sounds even better, because I love what music can invoke out of people and what it can make you feel. And that’s what I love about musical theater, and it’s also what I love about underscoring plays. With musical theater, it’s all about your movement and your body and the performance-art aspect of it all, how it addresses the audience and how it makes them feel. Doing a video with this score, I was thinking very similarly, how to use images that evoke a feeling,

Donald: For the visuals, you used what would they call simulations, which are artist renderings or imaginings, but you also used real footage. One of the most profound moments, I think, is when the little probe launches from Cassini, goes down onto the moon Titan’s surface, and you see it just as it’s hovering before landing. It’s very dramatic. How did you feel when you saw that footage matched to your music?

Tony: Cassini did have (as part of its mission a component named) Huygens, which was a European space probe that piggybacked on Cassini. They had just enough room to fit it on there. One of the first things after getting to Saturn was launching the Huygens probe down to Titan to take a look. I wrote the music more generally, about the moons of Saturn, and then Claudio put (the Huygens simulation) in as the opening for that section of the piece. And I thought, that’s absolutely perfect, because it really brought the full impact of what such a mission is about. You know, that we’re there to learn. We’re there to see new things and find out more about the world and the universe that we live in.

Donald: Because of the protocols that NASA uses in terms and the rules that it follows, it has to destroy some of the spacecraft that it sends out. Tony, I thought it was a really intriguing creative choice that you made, at least as I interpreted it, that Cassini doesn’t know that she’s going to die, right? Did you talk with Isabel about that before she did her performance?

Tony: Working with Isabel, I gave her the outline of what I was doing, that she was going to be the voice of this space probe. She was on board right from that moment, because she’s a space fan, too. And so once we got deeper into the musical aspects, I start sending sending her scores, and she requested a few alterations to make it more singable from her vocal perspective. And as we were working together, then, yeah, we kind of started spelling out the details of the emotions that she has to convey. And of course, I think it’s important to point out that there’s no lyrics in this because it’s all vocalizing, sure, and so we’re just conveying the pure emotion of that situation, and she’s evoking it. Most of the kind of nitty gritty discussions were at the recording session when she and I were down at Maximus Media. We arrived at how she could vocalize the message that we’re trying to convey to the story.

Donald: Claudio, how much did you know about Cassini before you got this assignment?

Claudio: Absolutely nothing. Finding more out about Cassini was super interesting because it really says a lot about humans and what we’re capable of. It was super interesting to do all that research.

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Donald: We mentioned Measure P. It’s interesting that our guests in the previous segment (the newly founded Chanticleer Shakespeare Co.) are funded by Measure P. Measure P is obviously making its its presence known. What do you say to someone who says, “Well, I don’t care about Cassini, I don’t care about music. Why is this important?”

Tony: I think the first thing to remember about Measure P is that this was something that the voters asked for. It was on ballot several years ago, and the voters themselves decided that they wanted some of their hard-earned money spent on art. When you get a Measure P grant, it’s to pay artists for their work. The other thing that’s made very clear, it’s to be by Fresno and for Fresno, and so to that end, the project that we worked on brought together dozens of Fresno artists, creative people, technicians and others, who got paid a just wage for their efforts.

Donald: What’s next?

Tony: We are hoping to perform this piece live.