Prayer is the sound of laughter under the stars
even as those stars are falling from the sky;
It is the echo of voices crying together,
paraphrasing thunder at dawn.
Prayer is the desperation of hands clinging to
the last rung of a ladder to the sky
where something lives that we have never seen.
It is fury without sound
and music without notes,
causing angels and demons both to tremble in fear.
For all things, bliss and agony, heaven and hell,
are subverted and meaningless
when the eternal dance of cause and effect
freezes in time,
and the word becomes flesh.

Prayer

Out of Thin Air

1. Orion Molecular Cloud Complex
2. The Triumphal Chariot of Hydrogen
3. Ningishzida By Night
4. Rhapsody in Infrared

About Out of Thin Air...

One of the questions that has always fascinated me is "where do musical ideas come from?" Or where do any ideas, musical or otherwise, come from? Hearing a masterpiece like Beethoven's 9th Symphony or a song melody like "Hey Jude," it can be hard to imagine there was ever a time when it didn't exist. It's as though Beethoven or Paul McCartney didn't write this music but simply discovered it, the same way that Einstein didn't invent relativity but simply discovered it.

Not to imply that I'm in the same class as Beethoven or McCartney (or Einstein), but I often feel this way about my own music. When I was a child, I would invent melodies on piano, and if my friends said "that's a nice song, what is that?" I would answer "oh, it's nothing, I just made it up." But each time I created a melody, the history of the universe was divided into two eras: one extending billions of years into the past, in which that melody had never been heard, and another, starting right now, in which that melody has been heard.

I've read books that ponder the question of creativity, some from a scientific perspective and others that take a more spiritual or metaphysical approach, but they just seemed to create more questions than they answered. Creativity is still largely a mystery. Musical ideas seem to come out of nowhere—"out of thin air." And this led to the idea behind this composition.

Each of Out of Thin Air's four movements began as a block of audio raw material, obtained more or less literally from the atmosphere.

The first movement is based on the radio signals that saturate our atmosphere as the result of lightning strikes. Worldwide there are about 40 lightning strikes per second. The school of computer science and statistics at Trinity College, Dublin has receivers around the world which pick up these signals and translate them into random numbers. These numbers are streamed to random.org and are available for free.

The second movement is inspired by the sounds of weather.

The third movement is based on the calls of crows. There are a lot of crows in my neighborhood, and I've become fascinated by the sounds they make. (I've used crows in a previous composition, and I plan to use them more in the future.)

The fourth movement features recordings of "number stations." Number stations are mysterious shortwave radio broadcasts of people reciting numbers. No one knows where these stations are or what their purpose is. One theory is that the numbers are encoded messages for spies. Here's an article about number stations: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24910397.

Starting with the raw material for each movement, I chiseled at it until something started to emerge. The process was improvisational, with each step in the process responding to the step that came before it, not always knowing what the next step would be.

This was a new approach to composition for me. In contrast, for the last ten years most of my composing has been very traditional: melodies, harmonies, and counterpoint worked out on paper (or computer screen, but usually some combination of paper and computer). Out of Thin Air however has no notation. I decided ahead of time I would need some boundaries, so each movement is exactly two minutes long, otherwise I might be tempted to go on too long, wander, and get lost. A blank canvas of a fixed size providing limited freedom: I could fill the canvas with whatever I wanted, but I couldn't change the shape or size of the canvas.

Aside from the self-reflective process of creating it (it could be said that Out of Thin Air is a composition about composing), I hope that the work is interesting and enjoyable. If someone were to encounter it without knowing any of this background material, my deepest desire would be that they are moved in some way by it.

4. Rhapsody In Infrared

3. Ningishzida By Night

2. The Triumphal Chariot Of Hydrogen

1. Orion Molecular Cloud Complex

I was at an art museum, and I had some thoughts.   Everything we call "art"—all the paintings ever painted, all the sculptures, music, and books—someday will be destroyed. If it's not in a war, or an accident, or vandalism, then eventually—even if it's billions of years from now when the expanding sun incinerates the earth—all art will be gone.   And then we will only have memories. In the next world, we will remember the Mona Lisa's smile, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," our favorite scenes from movies, maybe a few lines of poetry... the rest will just be ashes.

These thoughts can be sobering for an artist. We can be tempted to look to our art as a means to immortality. Perhaps a hundred years from now my music will still be heard, and in some sense I will be alive. But that form of immortality is an illusion, because even the art that outlives its creator does not live forever.
 

Notes on the cover art:
 
The cover art accompanying this piece was created by an artificial intelligence program. The program studied thousands of paintings by human artists and then created something based on what it had learned. Is it art? Whatever it is, someday it will be gone.

The Silent Planet Society