British Columbia, Canada, June 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SeaLegacy, in collaboration with award-winning composer Marcus Goddard of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra is premiering Antarctica: Life Emerging, a 13 minute musical journey through a magical icy landscape with cinematography by world-renowned photographer, Paul Nicklen. This collaborative project was created to celebrate and bring awareness to ongoing international efforts to establish a network of Marine Protected Areas in Antarctica and features a cello solo from Yo-Yo Ma.
“Music has a unique power to move people that no other artistic medium can match,” says Nicklen, Co-founder of SeaLegacy. “Composer Marcus Goddard has harnessed that power in Antarctica: Life Emerging – an emotionally engaging symphonic experience that reveals the beauty and the plight of Earth's most remote continent.”
In October 2021, delegations are considering three new marine protected areas (MPAs) at the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) meeting. Together, the East Antarctica, Antarctic Peninsula, and Weddell Sea MPAs would protect almost 1 percent of the ocean globally by covering approximately four million square kilometers and represent the largest act of ocean protection in history.
Leading ocean conservation organizations—including the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, Antarctica 2020, Ocean Unite, Only One, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and SeaLegacy—have come together to advocate for action this year to help to protect Antarctica for future generations. Learn more HERE.
As part of our shared need to connect, when the pandemic forced the world inward, Goddard reached out to friends and orchestral colleagues to create a work of art intended to be given freely to audiences around the world during an incredibly challenging year. Forty musicians from eighteen different orchestras from around the world, recorded a short phrase of the piece by donation. All of the artists recorded themselves playing short fragments that Goddard composed for them at home, in different circumstances of isolation during the pandemic, using devices ranging from simple smartphones to mini-recording studios. The recordings were then fused, layered, and digitally transformed the resulting short recordings to weave together the musical score for this incredible and moving multi-artist collaboration.
The result is an innovative spectrum of both orchestral and digitally processed instrumental colours unlike that achievable in a live performance.
“In Antarctica: Life Emerging, I aspire to bring audiences on a unique artistic journey into not only the awe-inspiring ruggedness and beauty of Antarctica, but also to the tenderness of life expressed so eloquently by Paul Nicklen’s stunning images,” says Goddard. “I hope to express the mysterious combination of reverence, wonder and concern that surround my own emotions when I contemplate this region. Antarctica: Life Emerging fuses streams of both joyful energy and mysterious melancholy to converge in a hopeful, energetic, and electric climax.”
Ma believes that culture — everything that helps us to understand our environment, each other, and ourselves — is essential to imagining and building a better future. “Culture makes us stronger as individuals, as communities, as a society, and as a planet,” says Ma. “Antarctica: Life Emerging is one example of how culture can help us connect with a planet in peril, reminding us that we share one home, one future, and that our survival depends on finding a balance between nature and human nature.. Paul and Marcus give us an extraordinary glimpse of the world we stand to lose and ask us all to act to preserve it for our children and grandchildren. ”
The premier digital screening, June 7th, 7pm EST, is free of charge. It is hosted on Only One by award-winning journalist Katie Couric and includes a conversation with Paul Nicklen, Yo-Yo Ma, Marcus Goddard. RSVP HERE.
Antarctica: Life Emerging was co-commissioned by Aventa Ensemble with support from the British Columbia Arts Council, and by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.
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