Update, March 2022: The Sydney Symphony Orchestra and conductor Umberto Clerici have made a marvellous studio recording that will be released soon. Meanwhile, you can hear it using SoundCloud above.
On 25 and 26 February 2021, Sydney Symphony Orchestra and conductor Dane Lam will give the world-premiere of this work at the historic Sydney Town Hall. More information about the concert and tickets here.
Gravity and Levity on the Sunbreathing Earth is the name of everything I compose while the covid epidemic lasts. This section for orchestra, The Grave and the Light, was composed mid-October to mid-December 2020.
Covid has really made me ask that question again: what is the point of art?
Every work of art is a beacon. It is an opinion piece; if an artist doesn’t have a point of view about something, they have no business making art.
Art is also eyewitness testimony. Artists put on record life as it is lived, known and experienced, each artform recording aspects according to what it’s best at. Music is best at emotion. Music is the sound that feelings make, I frequently say. I am writing music during covid in order to have a firsthand account of what it feels like living during covid. One thing that has kept apace with the fastchanging epidemic is our fast-changing psychological reaction. One day happy, next moment heavy, one day lousy, next moment light.
You’ll hear both seriousness and not-seriousness in this music. You’ll hear a jocularity that is quicksilver but jittery, perhaps the kind of nervous humour you might have to alleviate a bad situation. At the heart of the work is a limitless melody that sounds like eternity and wisdom, but along the way it forms connections with sounds that agree with it and sounds that don’t, like an ancient idea going through the stages of being discovered, resisted and accepted.
Whatever else it has shown, covid has also shown humanity at its best. We can make proven vaccines in less than a year. It thrills me, and sobers me too because now I know that the last viral crisis that I lived through, the AIDS epidemic, could have been solved this way but wasn’t – 3 vaccines and counting in under 1 year versus no vaccine at all after 40 years. Was this time really so different that it generated action so swift and determined? Recognizing the difference between how we regarded these epidemics
might mean being prepared for – maybe even not causing – the next crisis on this earth.
Ours is an earth that breathes the sun, to borrow Mackay’s image. Our life here is predicated on how we treat it. The two crises of nature we saw in Australia this year, bushfires and viral epidemics, are the product of disrespect. When we pollute, we get fire. When we deforest and put villages where wildlife live, viruses will jump species. It’s a warning to respect all he planet’s inhabitants, not just the ones we like or find cuddly or tasty.
Ours is an earth clothed with the sun, to misborrow the Book of Revelations’ apocalyptic image. Think of how beautiful the earth is, and then think of how beautiful we need to be to deserve to live on it.
