In 1990, the federal government invited a group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico desert, to visit the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. They were there on a mission.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is the nation's only permanent underground repository for nuclear waste. Eventually, WIPP will be sealed up and left alone. Years will pass and those years will become decades. Those decades will become centuries and those centuries will roll into millennia. People above ground will come and go. Cultures will rise and fall. And all the while, below the surface, that cave full of waste will get smaller and smaller, until the salt caverns swallow up all those oil drums and entombs them. Then, all the old radioactive gloves and tools and little bits from bombs –all still radioactive– will be solidified in the earth's crust for more than 200,000 years. Basically forever.
The problem that the aforementioned panel was convened to address was how to convey this information to people 10,000 years in the future, when language and symbols may be so different as to make direct communication impossible.

99% Invisible-114- Ten Thousand Years

The first track & single off of the debut EP, "Health"
Written by Kyle Gallagher
Performed by The Vernal Solstice (Kyle Gallagher, Megan Gallagher)
Recorded, Produced, Mixed, and Mastered by Matt Zeltmann

Breathe (Single)

Performed by the MSU Campus Band on April 26, 2017, directed by 
Connor Fetting.

Renascence was inspired by the poem of the same name by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay lived in my region of Maine for part of her life, and her impact on the town of Camden in particular is evident. A statue of her stands in the harbor park, overlooking the bay. The opening verse of this poem can be found in many places around Camden, painted on the inner walls of our public library and etched into stone tablets on the top of Mount Battie:
 
All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay. 

Renascence does more than just depict the natural beauty of Penobscot Bay. It is an epic story, and an epic-length poem for Millay, who was only twenty years old and nearly unknown at the time she wrote it. The protagonist goes through a dramatic transformation, a philosophical hero's journey, as she falls from innocence and experiences the pain of understanding others' suffering. Just when she seems unable to die, despite her intense longing for death, she reclaims her will to live and sees the world through new eyes, with appreciation for all the things around her.

Commissioned by the MSU Campus Band as a winner of the 2017 MSU Large Ensemble Composition Competition.

2017-04-26 Campus Band

Renascence

I was thinking of (and feeling the need for) Thoreau's famous dictum, 'Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!', when I made this algorithmic meditation for sampled piano. It relates also to a class in Buddhist meditation I've been taking of late. 

http://ronherrema.net
http://music.ronherrema.com

Renascence

Sarah Palermo

Related tracks