Founded in 2019 by choreographer Claire Hancock and composer Vincent Calianno, Two Trains focuses on inventive and abstract storytelling through the combined expressions of imagery and sound. We create immersive visual experiences that amalgamates music, theatre, dance, and cinema.
The technological prowess of our new century has inspired us and given us the tools to be more innovative and curious in our creative process. With that, comes new formats of exhibition, making art widely accessible and inclusive.
The frames of our screens and televisions have become the new proscenium stage. Our speakers and headphones have become the new concert hall. For us, these new frames have refreshed and awakened us with new creative potential that acknowledges the past and points to the future.
Two Trains creates work for a new frame.
A History of the String Quartet in its Natural Habitat examines the format of the string quartet filtered through the history of recorded sound — perhaps more appropriately, through the development of electronic music.
Composers have gravitated towards the string quartet over the last 400 years because it is prized for its homogeneity of sound quality (timbre), its portability, and its ubiquity. Like the piano, it is an easy way to express a musical idea. However, regardless of what kind of music a string quartet plays (Haydn, Borodin, The Beatles), a string quartet will always sound like a string quartet — there are only so many kinds of sounds a quartet can make. In only the last fifty years, composers have sought to extend the timbral palette of the quartet to express new musical possibilities. While these new timbral expressions offered the listener new angles in
which to ‘hear’ a string quartet, their tethering to a specific musical language that prizes spontaneity, disjunction, and microtonality, offers us little more than noise capsules that sound more outdated like Schoenberg, Brahms and Mozart by the decade.
I often wonder what role the string quartet has today now that all of its expressive possibilities have been exhausted? Is there any room for a new string quartet? The same could be said about electronic sounds. Have we exhausted our potential for new timbres? What role will composers and musicians play when our formats have decayed?
L’Astronome is our most ambitious project to date. Cast as an opera in nine parts it serves as a blueprint for Two Trains. Its not a dance piece, or musical work, but a conglomeration of movement, sound, film, and theatre. Told in three acts it does a lot without doing much. It is, of course, monumental.
Previews will begin in the Spring of 2022, with a mounting of the whole work during our 2022 season.
Stay tuned.