NEXT ATLANTIS

Watch except with Video

This piece exists in several versions: with and without video, and for string orchestra and electronics or string quartet and electronics


"In “Next Atlantis,” the composer Sebastian Currier fused a string orchestra with recorded washes of synthetically altered water sounds, sonorous boat horns and ghostly melodies, while the video artist Pawel Wojtasik’s striking images of New Orleans…….it was impossible not to be moved when images of pain-racked survivors appeared over strains that wavered between eloquent meditation and anguished threnody."

-New York Times

Next Atlantis is a work for string orchestra, pre-recorded samples, and video. The initial impetus for the piece came from a commission by the Ying Quartet for a new work.  As part of the commission, they stipulated  that the work should relate to a geographic location in the United States.   I didn't think of land, but of water.  Because water is of such significance,  because the city has such character and individuality, and  because it is also so threatened and vulnerable,  I thought immediately of  New Orleans and the surrounding bayou which flows into the Gulf of Mexico.  Next Atlantis is not about the ravages of Katrina per se, but about the more far reaching interaction between human culture and the natural world.  

For me, another motivation was purely sonic:  I've always loved the sound of water  and have had in mind for some time to write a piece that weaved water sounds into a musical fabric.  And here the sound of water is especially poignant, because for New Orleans water is both the life-blood of the city and it's potential destroyer.   Aside form the destructive force of hurricanes and large storms, a stretch of land in the bayou the size of Manhattan is lost to the encroaching sea every year.  This is the result of natural processes, man-made changes in the waterways in and around the city, and global climate change.   

Early in the process I discussed the project with video artist Pawel Wojtasik  and asked him if he would be interested in making a video to accompany my score.  He agreed and hence  there are two versions, one purely musical, with string quartet and pre-recorded samples; and the other, commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, with string orchestra, video, and four-channel sound. Tonight marks the premiere of the video version.    

The overall character of Next Atlantis  is one of sustained quietude, peacefulness, and serenity, but with a sense of emptiness and loss not far off.  It is an elegy for a future that must not happen:  New Orleans has been submerged under water.  Sounds of water, both above and below the surface, pervade the piece.  The water is an idealized water, often electronically sculpted into melodies and chords. The string ensemble maintains a dialogue with these liquid sounds.  . The instruments imitates the sounds of water and the water itself takes on vestiges of the players' harmonies.   Intertwined with these sounds is the faint, ghostly echo of fragments from "Bourbon Street Parade,"  here subdued into quiet disembodied strains that rise to the surface like bubbles from a sunken shipwreck.    In the video images of water, of the city, of ruin, of the extraordinary beauty of the surrounding wetlands, and of affected residents wash up on the screen.  It is a new Atlantis, not of the mythic past,  but one of the too possible future. 

Scoring
This work requires additional technological components and/or amplification. 
string orchestra and electronics/String Quartet and electronics
. 
Territory
This work is available from Boosey & Hawkes for the world.

World premiere of version with string orchestra 
1/29/2010  Carnegie Hall, New York, NY
American Composers Orchestra / Anne Manson

World Premiere of original string quartet version
4/5/2009 Kilbourn Hall - Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY
Ying Quartet