From the Bones to the Fossils maps the eye of a hurricane. Its evolution was interesting. In March 2016, I was on The Brian Lehrer Show, and shortly after, I was reached out to by the climate scientist Andrew Kruczkiewicz, and a dialogue began. After many exciting exchanges surrounding music and science and its intersectionality, we embarked on From the Bones to the Fossils for the Sound of Science project, commissioned by Golden Hornet for Jeffrey Zeigler. Kruczkiewicz's work in the field of climatology includes developing algorithms to detect and map patterns of precipitation, temperature, and other climatic variables, and analyzing their impact on agriculture and public health.
In this way, he focuses on the intersection of the social and physical sciences, especially pertaining to early warning systems for extreme events such as floods, storm surge from tropical cyclones, wildfires and landslides. I commissioned Andrew to write a paper focused on the hurricane patterns in the Caribbean, specifically Cuba in the 1950’s. I was interested in the music of that period and specifically the folk songs in the Lucumí language (a lexicon of words and short phrases derived from Yoruba language in Cuba), which I studied for this commission and which is infused in the vocal-like writing for the cello. I then used recorded fog horns, storms, ocean sounds and my own voice to create the electronic tapestry created with Sxip Shirey. I took the idea of currents and their overlap as the departing point for the cello’s lines and loops, landing in culmination at the eye of the storm, then dissolving into Andrew’s ending words, “from the bones to the fossils”.
