The Origin quartet, Anonymous 4; tenor Todd Graber; bass Eric Johnson; the women's vocal ensemble, Kitka; the SUNY Oswego College Choir; Oswego College-Community Orchestra; and the Oswego Festival Chorus. Of the over 200 performers, about 80 were students at SUNY Oswego. The projected video images which served as a backdrop to the performance were by filmmaker Bill Morrison. The Origin The Origin is an opera/oratorio composed by Richard Einhorn to a libretto by Richard Einhorn and Catherine Barnett based on the writings of Charles Darwin. The oratorio takes its title from Darwin's 1859 "On the Origin of Species". The work was commissioned
On the Origin of Species an incipient species" and that "species are only strongly marked and permanent varieties". He argues for the ubiquity of variation in nature. Historians have noted that naturalists had long been aware that the individuals of a species differed from one another, but had generally considered such variations to be limited and unimportant deviations from the archetype of each species, that archetype being a fixed ideal in the mind of God. Darwin and Wallace made variation among individuals of the same species central to understanding the natural world. In Chapter III, Darwin asks how varieties "which I have called incipient species"