Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

It seems that every year we hear of some disaster that is soon to wipe humanity from the face of the earth. In my lifetime, I can think of global warming, global cooling, the destruction of the ozone layer, nuclear war and nuclear winter, chemical and biological weapons, Y2K, GM foods, religious terrorism, neuroweapons, artificial intelligence, asteroid collision, Gamma Ray explosion, destruction of the universe through the CERN Hadron Collider, global overpopulation, plastic pollution destroying the oceans, SARS, AIDS, the Zika virus and even the Rapture.
The human race is still with us. And hopefully despite humanity's compulsion with the possibility of us ceasing to exist, we will continue.
In This Year's Apocalypse I have taken ideas of apocalypse and large-scale disaster and shaped them musically throughout the ensemble. Instrument families mostly work together in groups or as an entire unit, in addition to soloistic features here and there. To add some 'real life' elements, I have graphed the numbers of nuclear weapons on the planet combined with the number of HIV infections across the planet and converted the shape into a series of notes. This forms the basis of much of the harmony in the piece, the intention being that it may be suitably terrifying.
There is a featured section in the middle of This Year's Apocalypse for solo horn. The horn part represents in individual in the midst of all the ensuing chaos, gloom and doom, living their life and even experiencing human emotions, such as love, tenderness and compassion.
© Matthew Hindson, 2016

Work Details

Year: 2016

Instrumentation: Flute, cor anglais, clarinet in A, soprano saxophone in B flat, bassoon, horn in F, trombone, percussion (1 player), piano, 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass.

Duration: 12 min.

Written for: Verbrugghen Ensemble

First performance: by Verbrugghen Ensemble at Verbrugghen Ensemble (Verbrugghen Hall) on 4 Oct 2016