Program Note

Gaia is a name for the personification of the Earth, and in today’s globally and technologically linked society, it seems more and more believable that the Earth might actually be ONE living entity-- perhaps even with some kind of consciousness. When I wrote “My Name is Gaia,” I was thinking about what that entity might sound like, if we could begin to understand her. I gave the choir declamatory utterances to express her enormous power, and pale sustained passages to signify the surrounding inanimate immensity of space. During one moment in the piece, each soprano and alto has their own semi-improvised part. My idea was to create a flickering, borderline intelligible, sonic texture that plays with language’s semantic and phonetic values. In that way, the music might sound like a flickering consciousness coming to life.

Lyrics by Chris LaRosa

My name is Gaia.  

I am Mother Earth, 
a pale blue dot,
a sphere of life surrounded by

inanimate immensity.

I am a living entity,
a global organism
with a cosmological life span.

I have existed for eons,
but am only now
awakening,
developing self-awareness as a
flickering consciousness of 
human collective.

My nervous system fires
across an interconnected global network
of electronic synapses
and my night side lights up—
bioluminescence on a planetary scale.

I am the lithosphere,
biosphere, noösphere,
and technosphere—
a planetary realm of cognizance,
a global unity of human action,
a sphere of emerging intelligent influence.

The Earth and Myself are of one mind.