
to repair the damages of gravity
I will my weight upwards
that the fractured earth beneath me
may begin
to heal



The Damages of Gravity draws inspiration from Ai Weiwei’s Straight, a work that responds to the devastating earthquakes that occurred in China’s Sichuan Province in 2008. Because of poor construction practices, these earthquakes resulted in an exceptionally high number of deaths - approximately 5000 schoolchildren and teachers were killed. Ai and his team gathered 150 tons of reinforcing rods from collapsed buildings, then spent 3 1/2 years straightening the metal, symbolically repairing the damage. In the final work, Ai arranges the straightened rods to resemble an undulating, fractured landscape. 

Compositional materials for The Damages of Gravity were extracted from the sounds of struck metallic plates using spectral analyses; these analyses were used to generate harmonic structures and to process instrumental sounds during performance. The instruments are thus able to take on certain qualities of the metal plates, as Ai Weiwei’s metal rods took on the identity of the lost children. Over the course of the work, these metallic spectra are stretched, fractured, deformed, and transformed into new structures, as the piece searches for reconciliation in the wake of tragedy. 


The Damages Of Gravity

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Composer: Lucas Marshall Smith
Poem: Lucas Marshall Smith
Conductor: Timothy Brown

Recorded live June 9, 2018 at Church of St. Luke in the Fields, NY
Audio recording: Noriko Okabe

cover art by Byron Gibbs

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Water Music

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C4 is a unique, award winning chorus directed and operated collectively by its singing members, functioning not only as a presenting ensemble in its own right but also as an ongoing workshop and recital chorus for the emerging composers and conductors who form the core of the group.

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