Cello Sonata No 2: Requiem for the Planet

For my second cello sonata, the commissioning party wanted me to respond to some aspect of climate change through music. My idea was to compose a sort of musical requiem in the form of a sonata, a “Requiem for the Planet.”

For the opening of the first movement, “Song of the Earth,” I tried to imagine what it might sound like if the earth herself were singing, expressing her wounds and her pain to us in a majestic lament. This gives way to a faster, more urgent sounding B section that struck me as a call to action. The movement concludes with a return to the earth song of the opening.

When composing the second movement, “Requiem Aeternam,” I began to hear a dark and brooding chord progression in my mind, and, as I played these chords on the piano, I spontaneously began to speak the Latin words of the requiem over them. I imagined that different voices in the Bardo were singing fragments of melody to one another. At one point, I found myself singing the melody from Mozart’s Requiem where it goes “et lux perpetua, luceat eis,” and decided in the end to leave that in the piece.

The third movement is called “The Great Waters.” I was thinking of the rising tides associated with global warming and the floods that are already occurring in many places. The phrase from the I Ching “Crossing the Great Waters” came to mind, a phrase in the oracle that alludes to a major departure in your life, venturing forth on a quest or, in another interpretation, a crossing of the threshold into the beyond.

The work closes with an epilogue “I have loved this world so dearly.” It is my personal statement, a thank you to a life that I have loved, and a goodbye to this world that I am so grateful to have been a part of. It is my most fervent wish that this beautiful, ephemeral world will endure throughout my children’s lifetimes.
–Bruce Wolosoff