Sila: The Breath of the World and The Moons Symphony

Sila: The Breath of the World - John Luther Adams

Songs are thoughts which are sung out with the breath when people let themselves be moved by a great force… — a qute from Orpingalik, a Netsilik elder

John Luther Adams' Sila: the Breath of the World is so carefully orchestrated that this recording itself pushes the limits of how to capture multiple ensembles of musicians in one setting - While maintaining the composer's vision of grand invitation to the listener, "to stop and listen more deeply." 

In Inuit tradition the spirit that animates all things is Sila, the breath of the world. Sila is the wind and the weather, the forces of nature. But it’s also something more. Sila is intelligence. It’s consciousness. It’s our awareness of the world around us, and the world’s awareness of us. 

Our piece this evening is scored for five ensembles of 16 musicians —woodwinds, brass, percussion, strings, and voices— who may perform the music in any combination, successively or simultaneously, outdoors, or in a large indoor space. The musicians are dispersed widely, surrounding the listeners, who are free to move around and discover their own individual listening points.

As the piece begins, forces come out of the earth and rises to the sky, floating upward through sixteen harmonic clouds, grounded on the first sixteen harmonics of a low B-flat. All the other tones in the music fall “between the cracks” of the piano keyboard—off the grid of twelve-tone equal temperament.

Like the harmonies, the flow of musical time in Sila is also off the grid. There is no conductor. Each musician is a soloist, who plays or sings a unique part at thier own pace. The sequence of musical events is composed, but the length of each event is flexible. The music breathes.

A performance of Sila lasts about an hour. There is no clearly demarcated ending, as the music gradually dissolves back into the breath of the world.

The Moons Symphony - Amanda Lee Falkenberg

International award-winning composer, Amanda Lee Falkenberg has composed a dynamic new work that merges music and science. The seven-movement symphony dramatizes past, present and future moon explorations, and highlights discoveries that have been made in our search for other worlds that could possibly sustain life. Through the persuasive and powerful forces of music, the symphony offers Earthlings a chance to contemplate who and where we are in the universe.

Tonight, dear listeners,  we will be taken on an emotional journey, marvelling at the wonders of these moons, the beauty of our planet, and possibly even experience our own perspectives shift as crew-mates aboard our spaceship, Earth. 

Our composer writes; 

It was October 2017 that the idea was “earthed”. There was nothing special about this day other than that I had two minutes left of music to compose for the composition I was working on; Crossing of the Crescent Moon.

 I had just spent two hours researching crescent moons when suddenly I stood up after stumbling across an article. I was transfixed. My hands shook with excitement. The title read; “Ten of the weirdest moons of our Solar System.”

I instantly disagreed with    the author’s description. Those moons were not weird; they w ere fascinating. However seeing them locked in the vacuum of space, I yearned to break them free from that eternal vault of silence and two thoughts quickly crossed my mind; “These moons need music, these moons need emotion.”

I thank my roots as a film composer where we are acutely aware of music’s emotional abilities to catapult stories and manipulate the direction of thought. 

I was curious to unleash the moons’ secrets and communicate their stories through a musical lens to transport us to experience their exotic habitats in the cold, far-flung, expansive regions of our solar system.

Scientific research was the next step after consulting with the world’s most outstanding planetary scientists where scientific data drove the entire creative process for the first six moons. 

Then finally, along came consultations with astronauts and meeting NASA’s International Space Sstation astronaut Nicole Stott. And so, it’s emotional data that drives the narrative of the seventh moon as experienced from the hearts of astronauts after seeing our planet united and whole. 

In the final movement, we stand together on the surface of our moon to experience earthrise and its powerful message for humanity. This story forms the crowning moment of this symphonic spaceflight.