Gaia's Lament
Stan Grill
About this work:
In the background, music for violin and orchestra was playing for quite a while, but I didn’t quite muster the courage to embark on writing it down until recently. At the time I began to think seriously about writing a concerto for violin, the United Nations was in session and what, if anything, would come out of the climate change discussions was the hot topic of the day. The young activist Greta Thunberg had sailed to the U.S. on a solar powered sailing vessel and having been invited to speak before the assembled members, gave all of the adults in the room the thrashing they well deserved. With all of this going on, somehow a scene from the 1960 film of H.G. Wells “The Time Machine” kept coming to mind – a brief scene where he travels to the far, far distant future to arrive to find a dying earth, a huge red sun suspended on the horizon, and a desolate landscape nearly devoid of life.
It was with this sombre vision that I set about writing music, filled with sorrow at what our species is doing to our only home, with little hope that we have the awareness, rationality or willingness to act as we must.
Year composed: 2019
Duration: 00:22:00
Ensemble type: Orchestra:Orchestra with Soloist(s)
Instrumentation: ,1 Violin soloist(s)