A Cosmos in Stone, Respawning

A Cosmos in Stone, Respawning is a piece that attempts to draw on the universalities that we as humans feel regarding the suspense of disbelief when encountering a screen. I had been wanting to approach the idea of respawning in a piece for a while. A respawn is the act of a digital avatar coming back into the field of play after having died in a videogame. I found it interesting to try and tackle the idea of a piece that responded the way that an organism would if it were reborn into the same schema, yet with the foreknowledge of what it had accomplished in a previous existence. Over time, I noticed that there were potent similarities and universalities at play in the overlap between the ancient practice of ancient rock art and the modern innovation of videogames. Both are viewed as vessels of transportation to other worlds that are beyond our current perception, using the membrane, be it a rock or a screen, to take us elsewhere, allowing us the space to live in a place outside of what we know, if only for a brief time. It’s striking to me to see how, despite being tens of thousands of years apart, we are still tackling the same universal questions across time and space using the variety of technologies at our disposal as a species.

A Cosmos in Stone, Respawning establishes different musical gestures and materials that function as representations of different actions and features – it’s through the interplay, fragmentation, rearrangement, and development of these features that a musical narrative is attempted to be created. A Cosmos in Stone, Respawning was commissioned by the Charleston Symphony as part of its Magnetic South new music series and is dedicated to Yiorgos Vassilandonakis.