Collaboration: Benna Gaean Maris - Dark Skies

I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to compose an accompanying piece to a work by artist, Benna Gaean Maris, titled panspermia. This work was performed in full as part of Dark Skies Festival in Mparntwe (Alice Springs), hosted at the Earth Sanctuary, somewhat of an astronomy centre for us here in Mparntwe.

Benna's work displays found objects from a perspective that makes them look astronomical in size. Rather than attempt to comment on the work (and very likely not do it justice), here is an excerpt from ecoartdatabase.org:

"Human, listless soul incapable of producing natural splendor beauty, whose remains are colorful polluting waste, sterile spores of a synthetic world, all things people strove for so engagedly."

Frames from panspermia

To compose the piece, I wanted to work on foundations largely influenced by the planets in our solar system, their orbits around the sun and the relation of the duration of those rotations to notes on a musical scale. It’s largely influenced by the philosophical concept of Musica Universalis, except with a perspective looking at the solar system as a whole, as opposed to earth-centric.

I started by converting the periods of rotation for the planets, converting them to frequencies and then to notes in the western musical scale. The conversion is by no means perfect and I unfortunately have no way to perform microtonal music (at least not easily).

From what I found, the solar system plays in C# Phrygian (you could say A major, but the high number of C#s made me feel that was the true tonal centre).

Orbit to musical scale conversion chart (click for full-size)

That's as far as the influence the planets had on the music. My initial idea was to not only look at rotations of the planets, but their moons and create a piece that moved between planets within the solar system - each section would be based on a particular planet, it's own orbit around the sun and its moons in relation to that. Unfortunately time didn't allow me to get so deep into composing something like this. Hopefully it's a concept I can revisit in a future composition.

The final recording is actually a re-recording of the original performance as I wasn't 100% happy with the piece on the night. I try not to be so critical of things like this, as it was what it was, but I really didn't like it. :P

The piece, Dark Skies, can be listen to in full here.