Brett Dean’s new work is quite a mind-blowing affair: an evolution cantata, viewed from the perspective of this present brief moment in time and spanning 4.5 billion years in 50 minutes. Dean sees it as a love song to planet Earth and the life-force that has conditioned our very existence, but also a lament.
The starting point for Dean and his librettist Matthew Jocelyn was Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, as an alternative to the biblical concept Haydn embraced in his oratorio The Creation, but paying homage to it with quotations both from Gottfried van Swieten’s German words and the Book of Genesis. If the juxtaposition of evolutionist and creationist thinking already raises eyebrows, the further unusual element is their use of the terms adopted by soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause describing how sound has evolved over time. Accordingly, Geophony, the phonic presence devoid of biological elements; Biophony, the emerging biological world and Androphony, denoting human-generated sounds, delineate the work’s three main sections, framed by a prelude and postlude.
