Tidal Force
Description
Dance at the Edge of Existence
Written for Prof. Brian Greene’s Origins and Meaning course at Columbia University, Tidal Force is an orchestral work that explores the beauty and self-induced meaning behind the struggles we undergo in everyday life.
As human beings, we awaken, pour our heart and soul into our life’s work, only to crumble to dust when we reach death (both literally and metaphorically). Yet even in the face of this seemingly tragic cycle, we continue to live and persevere every single day for the sake of the people and things we love. Tidal Force explores the idea that there is power and beauty in our persistent acts of renewal.
As an example, consider the image of a black hole. Black holes are regions in outer space where there is so much mass that the tidal forces suck everything into them, and nothing – not even light – can escape. Imagine what kind of horror we would feel if Earth was next to a black hole instead of the sun – what would be the point of anything we did in our lives if we knew that one day, it would all just disintegrate? Yet, artwork of black holes (like Fabian Oefner’s Black Hole, shown below) tell us that somehow, there can be beauty even in this complete absence of agency – a beauty that we create for ourselves and ourselves alone, made possible by our ability to assign intrinsic value to inherently meaningless things.
Tidal Force was a finalist in the 2022 ASCAP Morton Gould awards.