The sun rises over the edge of the ocean earth. 

Piano, Orchestra, Voice, and Synthetic Sounds

There is no easy way from the earth to the stars. 

Hidden in the word earth is art.

The one place I most long to see is the earth from above. I am often overwhelmed by the beauty of what I experience. This work attempts to touch upon the immesarable good fortune I have as a living thing that exists for its short while upon this world.

This artwork is the homepage artwork at Fragile Earth.

Each day you listen to this music I ask you do one good thing for the earth. Reuse something that you might otherwise throw away, use a little less energy, save water. Do this and my effort making becomes worthwhile.

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This Brightness Breached

In time I look and know this sight as beauty now as much as then,

And as the days pass long,

When arcs of shifting light pour down upon my world,

Stretch wide and far,

This darkness reached,

This life shut tight in hapless wonder,

Washed amidst this brightless life that is my countenance laid bare,

Without you,

Breached,

My nights alone,

I am but swirl of tapered flame against the chill unyielding cold of stone.

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Like the idea of home, the music EARTHSONG pulls me back.

At its core the music has three low repeating notes and uncomplicated melodic lines. It is the play of these against one another over uneven time that captures the ear.

A thin sheet of cotton covers the strings of the piano as it makes soft, elongated, textural layers of syncopated sound. Voices sing before unknown creatures scatter across the aural landscape, then disappear. Solo stringed instruments accompany a sprightly clarinet as I glimpse a dance of life before the main theme returns, now lush with oboe, piccolo, trumpet, and choir who join in unison to acclaim their anthem of the earth. Threadlike shimmering waves accompany a final short insistent tune, high, then higher on the piano that gradually fades from view.

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EARTHSONG references a long line of thought and art about our relationship with the earth and beyond.

The Latin phrase 'Mon est ad astra mollis e terris via' (there is no easy way from the earth to the stars) was written by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist who lived two thousand years ago. 

The wood engraving below created by an unknown artist was first published by Ernest Flammarion in France in the late nineteenth century. It depicts a person who reaches out past the point where the earth and sky meet. 

This engraving was in turn likely inspired by Cosmographia, the earliest German-language description of the world published in 1544 by Sebastian Münster.

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I ponder on my making...

There is an inner space where I become most ready to create. It is a place unseen, of listening, of heightened sense and open landscape. I cannot rush towards it, nor demand its presence. This delicate, ephemeral place of making can easily evaporate with trivial distraction. It is a place only reached when I am not the player, but the instrument. A place where the 'I' gives way, and doubt retreats.

I listen to sounds that arise, as words do ideas.

Words alone and isolated are weak, their strength is in their meeting and meaning. It is in coming together that value arises, as sounds do in music, light in art, and as communities: of humans, and other living things. Sharing brings immeasurably more than isolation.

I turn to the phrase written by Seneca: there is no easy way from the earth to the stars.

I gaze at the elements of water, land, moon, and tree: the earth, full with wonder and beauty. The stars, full with the promise of exploration. The curious animal has no choice but to gaze beyond their home, their world of earth and sea, sun and sky.

Only when I care first for my home am I ready to journey.

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The earth is my home, this fragile place of touch, taste, scent, sound, light, and life.

. . .