It Is Now Ninety Seconds to Midnight
Download the score to “It Is One-Hundred Seconds to Midnight”!
Tomorrow is Earth Day 2023!
Three years ago, 16 pianists and 32 dancers came together to perform and improvise movements to my solo piano composition "It Is One Hundred Seconds to Midnight." A video collage was edited by your truly and premiered on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in 2020. The music is a hymn concerning the damage we cause to our world's ecosystem. The title comes from the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic representation of the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe maintained since 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. At the time, the Bulletin set the Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it had ever been to global catastrophe due to climate change, the COVID-19 virus, disruptive disinformation spreading on social media, and the possibility of nuclear war. We are even closer today in 2023, as the Clock set is 90 seconds to midnight.
The piece's foundational musical inspiration is Marvin Gaye's "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)," widely regarded as one of twentieth-century music's most influential songs addressing environmental issues. The piece aims to sound as if played with "one finger per hand," stressing the message of simplicity and transparency and that anyone of any skill could conceptually play this piece.
Pianists: Adam Marks, Andrea Violet Lodge, Andrew Kosinski, Anna Preston, Anthony R. Green, David Kulma, Kathleen Supove, Mary Prescott, Meg Zervoulis, Melinda Faylor, Nathan Hall, Rachel Kerr, Sarah Cahill, Spencer Perkins, Sugar Vendil, Adam Tendler
Dancers: Michael Spencer Phillips, Liedewei Verbelen, Ayaka Kamei, Becky Grace Kalman, Danielle Marie Fusco, Alison Cook Beatty, Robert Mark Burke, Jessica Lynne, Jenny Hegarty Freeman, Carolina Rivera Moreno, Hannah Gross, Sugar Vendil, Jere Hunt, Lynda Senisi, Sofia Bagiopoulou, Sarah Chien, Diane Auriol, Nicole Speletic, Amy Saunder, Nagisa Tashiro, Delia Hou (Plastikita), Sabatino Verlezza, Fiona D. Belford, Rebecca Crystal, Kat Wildish, Alex Zaglin Christie, Elizabeth Troxler, Julia Stirmanova, Svetlana Maltseva, Noah Michael, Patricia Sagardía Calderón, Jesse Obremski
Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EARTHDAY.ORG (formerly Earth Day Network), including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries. The official theme for 2023 is Invest In Our Planet.
This Earth Day, consider donating some money to Health In Harmony, an organization acknowledging the inextricable link between human and environmental health by focusing on the nexus between healthcare and the protection of natural resources using a Radical Listening approach to respond to the devastation in the rainforests of Borneo, Indonesia.
While working today, consider listening to and watching the "It's One Hundred Seconds to Midnight" video. Likes and shares help me in more ways than you might expect.
Donate to https://healthinharmony.org/donate-today/ today!