Christopher LaRosa - My Name Is Gaia

​​Gaia is a name for the personification of the Earth, and in today’s globally and technologically linked society, it seems more and more believable that the Earth might actually be ONE living entity-- perhaps even with some kind of consciousness. When I wrote “My Name is Gaia,” I was thinking about what that entity might sound like, if we could begin to understand her. I gave the choir declamatory utterances to express her enormous power, and pale sustained passages to signify the surrounding inanimate immensity of space. During one moment in the piece, each soprano and alto has their own semi-improvised part. My idea was to create a flickering, borderline intelligible, sonic texture that plays with language’s semantic and phonetic values. In that way, the music might sound like a flickering consciousness coming to life.

-Christopher LaRosa
Hear more of Chris’s work at http://www.chrislarosa.com