Materia Prima

Music, for me, serves a kind of spiritual function. I have always been drawn to and inspired by music that has a transcendental quality that makes the listener feel that they are tapping into something other than the perceptible world around us. Composing music gives me an opportunity to consider and reflect on things that are perhaps difficult to fully comprehend. It allows me to explore and, through abstraction, to attempt to convey the ineffable.   When I begin working on a new piece, I often associate certain musical material with some aspect of nature, such as light or air. My aim is not to programmatically depict these aspects in the music; it is just a personal association that helps guide my creative process. When I started working on my new piece, Materia Prima, I felt that the musical materials I was coming up with had a strong association with water, and this led me to explore the mythological motif of the cosmic ocean. This motif, which appears in the creation stories of a strikingly wide variety of cultures and religions, describes a cosmic ocean of primordial, often chaotic waters from which the universe was created.    This cosmic ocean, according to our current scientific understanding, was made up of a rapidly expanding hot “soup” of particles and antiparticles which, upon being created in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, immediately began colliding with one another, destroying each other in the process. A slight imbalance, which remains unexplained, allowed for approximately one particle per billion to survive. All matter in the universe - every star, planet, and person - is the product of those remaining particles.   Inspired by both the scientific and mythological explanations of our origins, Materia Prima, is a contemplation on our fundamental sameness. The title, Latin for “original matter,” refers to the substance considered to be the material source of the universe.