How I Did It
Process
First I snipped apart SackJo22's poem to re-assemble it to tell a little different story.
I also slightly pitch shifted some syllables, to make the annunciation slightly more monotone in places.
Tricky spot: She never said "no" (ccM insiders know, she likes the word "Yes" much better!), so there are two versions of "no" assembled from different sounds within her original poem.
Since the exhibition will be in Oslo, Norway, I couldn't resist to remix a little of my favorite Norwegian composer. Edvard Grieg's amazing "Morning Mood" finds itself wrestled into a 4/4 (rather than the original 6/4), and made into an endless loop of the main theme, which lends itself very well to that, since it happens to go up by 4 semitones in the first repetition of the theme. Rather than follow Mr. Grieg's original composition, I kept going in 4 semi-tone intervals, which of course after the 3rd jump leads you to the original key.
Other Notes
This was pretty much a concept first and then I tried to execute it musically and technically.
The concept has multiple layers:
The suddenly recognizable melody by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg will most certainly be something different and possibly a little jolting not only for this particular piece, but for the the whole long soundtrack of many pieces. That's pretty much the point: That IS the explosion.
Of course the Grieg also has an important second layer of meaning: A long distance greeting to the people of Norway via one of their favorite sons using the prescribed medium of this exercise, thus creating a local connection from an otherwise global/universal stream of musical and poetic consciousness.
The third layer is a story of evolution. SackJo22's poem is cut up and re-assembled (truly exploded and re-built) to tell the story of evolution - leaning on the darkness-turning-to-light metaphor used in the book of Genesis (Chapter 1, Verses 2 and 3). And the story of evolution is musically told by evolving from etheral drones, to ethereal melody, to the melody played on a flute -- being the currently oldest unearthed human instrument (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8117915.stm) -- to a piano (an early high tech instrument, symbolizing the evolution of the equal tempered scale, the foundation of modern western music) to a very synthetic sound and the clearly modern mechanical beat representing our technological age. The ending is deliberately open, using the flute as the most basic, yet clearly human of the instruments.
And in the lyrical part of my story, the explosion leads to the white cube (deliberately turning the metaphor around). The white cube representing the beginning.
So in the larger sense of the theme of the exhibition, the white cube explodes. In my piece it forms AFTER the (big bang) explosion - therefore implying a circular reality underneath the linear one. And that in turn ties the story into quite a few other religious backgrounds as well as into some circular scientific meta-models. And of course Grieg's theme is also turned into a never ending circle (see "Process" section).
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