UBC Faculty and Alumni: Alfredo Santa Ana (MMus’05, DMA’10), composer; Miranda Wong, pianist
Label: Redshift Records
Recording details:
Much of the inspiration behind the music in Before the World Sleeps is rooted in the overwhelming sense that the world continues to be on a steady course toward ecological, political, and technological disaster. As the expanding rift between human experience and political reality becomes the norm, I have begun considering more deeply, that the end of human existence is perhaps more of an inevitable outcome rather than a possibility. I’m no longer feeling like investing my time in having an unrealistic hope about an un-knowable future, and subsequently, I wanted to re-think my process as a composer and find a new way of generating meaning while in the act of creating music, and find a way to embrace the lack of certainty for the time beyond the present day.
I made the decision to create this album during the fall of 2023, wanting to spend the following year writing and organizing music for piano from within this context—using some sort of post-hope perspective—where there was no assumption of control, or even an expectation of having a long-term future. The goal was not to celebrate feelings of despair or calamity and to come up with music filled with ideas about the end of the world and humanity’s demise, but rather, it was to reorient the compositional process to create small pieces of music that I could finish quickly, and using an archiver’s mindset, commit them to a recording rather than prepare them for public performance.
Although at this particular point in time, it seems that life is being defined as having an inherent loss of meaning and a pervasive existential anxiety, for me, locating the value and meaning in composition felt like a useful way of spending a few months concerned with the experience of the here and the now. Composing this music for Miranda felt like I was engaging in an act of preservation rather than an act of self-expression. And upon completion, the 18 compositions included in this album were organized into four main “chapters” that I consider to be germane concepts to writing music during this period of human existence: narrative, memory, colour, and weather.