Hibakujumoku

For Amplified Flute and Percussion Quartet

2021

(30€ or more) Hibakujumoku is a 21 minutes chamber music piece for amplified flute (with guitar pedals) and a big percussion set up for four players. Both a great challenge for the musicians and an inspiration to reflect for the audience, this piece aims to make the people feel how the perception of time can change based on what idea/ideology we have in mind. It’s a piece to call out and make the people aware of the climate change.

Hibakujumoku is a Japanese term for a tree that survived to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The heat emitted by the explosions in Hiroshima within the first three seconds at a distance of three kilometers from the hypocenter was about 40 times greater than that from the Sun. Plants however suffered damage only in the portions exposed above ground, while portions underground were not directly damaged. This allowed the survived trees (about 170) to grow again and miraculously gaining and giving life to the surrounding environment.

This amazing phenomenon was hugely inspirational for this composition, began in february 2021 after reading Richard Powers’ The Overstory and an article titled The Social Life of Forests by Ferris Jabs published for New York Times Magazine about Suzanne Simard, a forestry pioneer who discovered the complex communication and exchange network system happening in old-growth forests.

In light of how far the climate change we are axperiencing is going (the best explanatory example can be found reading the last IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report made in 2021), this composition aims to make the listener perceive how different Humans’ rhythm is becoming compared to Nature’s one. What I personally perceived as different was too fast, as the Earth Overshoot Days clearly shows as well as the greater amount of extreme climatic events happening in the last years.

The composition comprises 3 movements without breaks, the first of which is about 13 minutes, the second 5 minutes and the third 3 minutes long. The first movement shows different evolution stages of a plant or tree, picturing firstly three of the four elements (earth, wind and water), after which they are combined and brought to more complex levels. As main motifs for the whole composition there are three musical elements. The first one is played for example by the bass drums at the very beginning of the composition till the first tam-tam roll. It’s stricly bound with earth representing the seeds underground. The second one is more like a rhythmic pattern based on Fibonacci’s sequence, played in full lenght by marimbas from bar 78 till bar 82 and then repeated. The third motif is perhaps the most present one, which consists of many variations, transpositions and other techniques of this sequence:

Fibonacci’s sequence is used in many other ways in the first movement, serving both building and disruptive purposes. Some numbers taken from different traditions and meaning are used as germinal compositional tools as well, specifically: 3,4,7, 9 and 12.

The second movement shows the overwhelming, organized and obsessively repeated rhythms of our modern society, at the end of which it collapses and fall over its ruins. It’s based on number 5 and its multiples, and on complex irreversible rhythmic patterns. In particular, a picture that comprises 100 eight notes organized in different ways across each player is repeated over and over, over which the flute will freely play the main climax-contour. This picture is organized as follows (the numbers correspond to the eight notes amounts):

Player 1: 5|10|15|20|20|15|10|5

Player 2: 20|15|10|5|5|10|15|20

Player 3&4: 5|4|3|3|5|5|4|3|3|5|5|3|4|3|5|5|3|3|4|5|5|3|3|4|5

In the main section of this movement (from rehearsal mark [B] till [L]), an additive process following the outline of the compound interest equation has been used.

The third and last movement shows what remains of the first movement after the influence of the second movement. It resumes some of the most important elements of the first movement but in a distorted and depleted way.