In the ancient Greece, the goddess Gaia was the personification of Earth and the ancestral mother of all life. It is always difficult to imagine what a god would look like, especially the goddess who embodies the entire planet Earth. That is the reason why I pictured Gaia as one beautiful woman I know. To put it this way: a woman who could be my world. Thus, the way I conceived the music to describe her smile was obvious throughout the whole process of composition.
There is all in all only two thematic motives: the “smile theme” and the “laughter motive”. The smile theme consists of the main thematic material for the piece and appears in 3 different ways (here in major):
- Its original form:
2. Its inverted form:
3. Its retrograded form:
I have spread this theme everywhere in the piece. If the woman is smiling, it could quite logically mean that she is about to laugh. Here is the very energetic laughter’s motive:
It was important for me to keep in mind that our planet is not only a big round rock. It is alive in many ways and that is why I find interesting comparing it with someone I care in the three parts of my work.
The first part depicts the beautiful woman’s ingenuous smile. For me, her smile is remarkably similar to the nature: peaceful and pure. That is why I essentially used pentatonic scales and parallel mixtures from the beginning to letter H. You can hear a first very brief laughter two bars before letter H. From letter H to L, I developed the smile theme so that the music goes louder and louder until the woman finally bursts out laughing (letter L). It is like an explosion of joy over all Earth.
The first part was all about her: her smile and her laughter. I intentionally omitted the intervention of men on our planet until we reached the second part (letter N). Men look first and foremost for comfort. I do not think they usually want to hurt the nature. Likewise, I do not want to hurt the girl, I just want to see her smiling. However, sometimes, this kind of relationships become extraordinarily complex and people hurt each other even without noticing it. Therefore, the second part describes the woman’s struggle to keep smiling. The increase of the harmonic complexity represents the sophistication of our relations. The rare major chords (for example bar 179, 183, 199) outline the little smiles that the woman shows despite her tears. At letter T, I used in particular a tetrachord lament bass to depict her despair. I created different variations on the smile theme (of course in minor here) to show the struggle of the nature trying to perpetuate the circle of life despite the scars that it carries because of men.
Often when we hurt people, we want them to forgive us. It is the subject of the third part of the work. In my case, I want to make the girl smile again. I want to hear her laugh again. Likewise, a lot of human beings want to protect and clean the Earth. They want to change their behaviours. It is a difficult challenge, but it is essential to remember that it is not too late yet. Here my composition involves a lot of bitonality and polytonality. It represents the different opinions about how to make the girl smile again, about how to save the planet after what mankind has done. It is seldom easy to find a consensus. Finally, the laughter motive comes back. It is my finale hope that we all remember that we are not superior towards nature, but we are part of it, neither more nor less. We must keep on smiling.