Project Summary
A recording of SEASON OF RAIN and other works from my Music for the Earth series by the Czech Chamber Orchestra Pardubice, conducted by Marek Štilec. Scheduled for May 2024.
Project Description
Season of Rain. A symphony in four movements, composed during a mostly rainy season. The music is also a rather somber reflection on the state of the world, as it becomes devastatingly apparent that climate change is a certainty and, at the same time, the rise of populist politics around the world makes it equally certain that humanity will not respond to the alarms.
Gaia’s Lament. At the time I began to think seriously about writing a concerto for violin, the United Nations was in session and what, if anything, would come out of the climate change discussions was the hot topic of the day. The young activist Greta Thunberg had sailed to the U.S. on a solar powered sailing vessel and having been invited to speak before the assembled members, gave all of the adults in the room the thrashing they well deserved. With all of this going on, somehow a scene from the 1960 film of H.G. Wells “The Time Machine” kept coming to mind – a brief scene where he travels to the far, far distant future to arrive to find a dying earth, a huge red sun suspended on the horizon, and a desolate landscape nearly devoid of life.
It was with this somber vision that I set about writing music, filled with sorrow at what our species is doing to our only home, with little hope that we have the awareness, rationality or willingness to act as we must.
Gaia’s Song. A companion work to Gaia’s Lament, this bucolic music was nearing completion when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2021. While reading the findings of the report was, unsurprisingly, deeply distressing, my vision for the earth which helped inform the writing of the music is the opposite. A vision for humanity that is built on hope rather than the reality of human nature, one where humans come to recognize our responsibilities as caretakers rather than destroyers of the earth and the living creatures with whom we share the planet. This is gentle music, intended to inspire a gentler approach to living.
Whatever anger or despair I feel at the realization that our species will prove, in all likelihood, incapable of taking the necessary actions to stave off environmental catastrophe in the coming decades, I laid those feelings aside when writing this song. Let Gaia sing, not a song of lament, but a song of peace and hope.
As with my prior projects, this album will be self-produced and released.
