A project I originally started mainly for the entertainment of family and friends, the Symphony Of The Earth is informed by Pagan Spirituality and Astrophysics. I am attempting to tell the story of how the Earth came into being through a sonic image of the four classical elements coming together to create life.
I have composed approximately three quarters of the music and scored it for orchestra. It is far from being presentable as a Symphony, though. I could call it an “Elements Suite”: four thematically related pieces of music for orchestra and extended percussion – however, to me, composing a “Symphony” means creating a Synergy of many musical forces within one single piece of music. My final vision is a three-dimensional spacialisation with my samples and acoustic and electromechanical instruments integrated.
Obviously, this means it will need to be acousmatic: composed for performance on loudspeakers. Almost everybody I spoke to about this approach has questioned my notion to call it a Symphony. All I can say: I’ll try my best – let us wait and see. It may take a long while yet to materialize, but I feel confident that most people will recognize it as a Symphony… if I can do it at all, of course.
For most of the instruments, I am using the Vienna Symphonic Library (VSL) – a collection of recordings of about 1 1/2 million noises made by the members of an orchestra. I own “only” about a quarter of them (amounting to about 150 CDs full of nothing but individual notes, one after the other). The VSL has mainly been created to compose (and quite often even to produce) large budget movie soundtracks. Enthusiasts use small subsets of the full library to make reasonable quality demos of their music. I also use mine as a starting point for further exploration and experimentation.
As of October 2012, I am starting to record presentable little sketches and tentative excerpts. I’ll post links to them in this page.
