GENESIS: A Promethean Drama for Music Theatre (Libretto and Score)

“GENESIS” begins with a question shared by science and the oldest human imagination: How does a lifeless world become a living one?

This theatrical and musical work emerged from a speculative investigation of the early Earth. Its starting hypothesis considers whether a late, Titan-mass, volatile-rich impactor struck Earth approximately 4.1 billion years ago, triggering an environmental reset while supplying water, atmospheric constituents, and chemical precursors relevant to the emergence of life. A scientific working paper and computational framework explore the scenario through reduced-order models of planetary dynamics, impact partitioning, thermal evolution, atmospheric escape, isotope evolution, noble-gas retention, and post-impact chemistry.

The hypothesis is provisional, not an established account of Earth's history. Its calibrated parameters are not measurements of the early Earth, and its results require specialist scrutiny and higher-fidelity testing. The underlying research is an intellectual starting point, not proof of the drama or a condition for appreciating it.

Theatre begins where calculation can no longer speak. Earth becomes Gaia; planetary violence takes the scale of the Titans; Necessity (Ananke) becomes both physical law and dramatic power. Prometheus embodies more than fire: he approaches the principle of biological continuity, the trace passed from one mortal body to another.

In this drama, Necessity does not mean that the hypothesized impact was inevitable. A contingent sequence, once imagined as leading to life, becomes indispensable to every living being that follows it. What was accidental before life becomes necessary in retrospect.

Music gives emotional and temporal form to processes spanning seconds of catastrophe, millennia of cooling, and geological ages of transformation. Energy, atmospheric loss, and chemical change become tension, rupture, silence, recurrence, and resolution. The orchestra makes perceptible the passage from violence to stillness, from dissolution to structure, and from lifeless matter to the first possibility of memory.

The project asks four distinct questions: Could the event have occurred? Can its consequences be modeled consistently? What would such a genesis mean? What would it sound like? Science, computation, theatre, and music offer different languages, not interchangeable forms of proof. The artistic work stands independently of whether the scientific hypothesis is ultimately supported, revised, or rejected.

Its deeper subject is transition: collision into order, fire into water, chemistry into inheritance, matter into life, and calculation into word and sound. At its heart remains a question: How does a world become capable of remembering itself?

Accompanying material:
The wider “GENESIS” project includes a speculative scientific working paper and computational resources. The research has not been formally published or deposited at Zenodo; project materials can be explored on GitHub.

https://github.com/ChristosTsirkas/genesis-earth-hadean-titan-impact-model
https://github.com/ChristosTsirkas/genesis-earth-hadean-titan-impact-model/tree/main/docs

Computer-generated music support files:
https://github.com/ChristosTsirkas/genesis-earth-hadean-titan-impact-model/tree/main/music

A rendered realization of the musical score can be heard on SoundCloud:
https://soundcloud.com/chris-t-331652374