With optical telescopes, the space between stars and planets is black but with a radio telescope, a glow is visible this glow is cosmic radiation. Interestingly, physical evidence for The Big Bang was developed at about the same time as the Metropolitan Opera House design was being developed. Genesis, the ultimate beginning, makes one think of the first book of the Bible for its believers, the origin of the universe as The Big Bang for non believers. They make a spectacle at the start of every performance, an explosion of light refracting from crystals that ascend, literally ascend, to the ceiling to announce the beginning of an opera. The dropped Chandeliers inside the Concert Hall prior to the start of a performance. I am referring to the design of the Chandeliers in the Metropolitan Opera House. And more specifically than that, the ideabehind the origin of the points of light that drop from its ceiling. It involves one of countless ideas that went into the making of Lincoln Center, more specifically, the making of the Opera House in Lincoln Center. The project involves an idea, the birth of an idea back in the early sixties, in New York. The stories, not the authorship of the project, may cohere. At what point does intention declare itself if the beginning is arbitrary? At what point is the accident seized? At what point is the mystery recognized and pursued? And by whom?Īll of this comes to mind when thinking of one beginning, one set of beginnings, a Rashomon set of stories of beginnings of a project that started more than fifty ago. Guardianship of an idea is perhaps a more accurate characterization.

But when did it begin? Like one weather system morphing into another, the creative process continues and inspires one work after another. It separates itself out with identity, a path, force and consequence that serve to replenish, inseminate, or destroy. Moisture, barometric pressure, temperature, currents of air carrying pollen, dirt, crystals of salt off the sea gather and develop a direction and momentum that form fog, a front, a storm or tornado. It is hard to know exactly when a point in a process becomes the beginning of something. The Genesis of the Metropolitan Opera House Chandeliers: How Accident & Intention Come to Lightīeginnings are arbitrary, accidental and mysterious.

Metropolitan opera house in new york