Work
Primeval Light
for orchestra
About
For the score, please contact the composer via lukaventer.com.
Primeval Light germinated from a cell of material from Mahler's Urlicht. The work began as a contemplation of a pristine and timeless primeval world from the vantage point of the Anthropocene, questioning our relationship to the natural world, our own past, and indeed, our future.
With this Romantic source material expressing a hope for release from human suffering, the title's translation became symbolic of a pristine, primeval natural world - particularly bearing in mind the primal forests that once covered most of Europe and certainly, vast swathes of each continent.
Given the impersonal reality of a world changing before our eyes from a state of relative ecological, climactic balance to one that is becoming dangerously erratic, and charged with heat, the work became a contemplation on large-scale ecological flux, and the increasing likelihood of natural and human disaster.
These concerns are reflected in the structure of the work as a whole, where echoes of Mahler's material - initially characterised by an organic lyricism - later resurface in a series of accumulative, increasingly unstable waves. These grow to a breaking point of instability. It is from this point that the material begins a process of disintegration, with overlapping, almost mechanical structures of rhythm and pitch grinding themselves apart as the work gradually dissolves into a catatonic, heat-soaked stasis.