My Name is Gaia for mixed choir (and optional electronics)
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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. |
My Name is Gaia
Text by Christopher 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."* *Chief Joseph of the New Perce |