Glacier

About

The world is changing. It has been changing for a long time. Never before has the world around us been held in such a vulnerable state; gone are the days when we can marvel at the spectacles of the natural world, and be overcome by their strength and apparent permanence. Such wondrous features are dwindling; shrinking; becoming corrupted by our influence as we, knowingly or not, reach further and further into a place we cannot turn back from. Where is the immediacy? The urgency to go back, to repair what we have broken? Perhaps the only way humanity will feel this is in retrospect; looking over a dust-blown world, devoid of its once thriving ecosystems.

That is the object of this piece of music, Glacier: glaciers represent one of the most tangible facets of the negative effects of climate change; particularly in New Zealand. They are not some distant rainforest, far away from us and therefore comfortably out of our minds; they are right here in our own country, visually, and dramatically, shrinking before our very eyes.

My aim in this piece of music is to establish three musical landscapes, the first representing the past: the power and grandeur of the glaciers, untouched by humanity’s thwarting of the natural world. The second is the present: these once great spectacles of nature, dwindled down to a state of vulnerability and weakness, pathetic skeletons of what they once were. Finally, the third section depicts the future as I perceive it: a sparse soundscape; devoid of harmonic lushness and activity; stagnant water. The point of no return has long since passed, and now we are simply waiting out the endgame of our industrial efforts.