Composer Notes

How To Sing Like a Planet was inspired by a news article by the same title, written by gregarious San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford. Using a recent science report as a springboard, Morford spun out a delicious riff about the irrepressible music that the earth makes just by being itself. His glorious, over-the-top phrases described “…all sorts of curious tonal phrases that bounce around the mountains and spin over the oceans and penetrate the tectonic plates and gurgle in the magma and careen off the clouds and smack into trees and bounce off your ribcage and spin over the surface of the planet in strange circular loops.” Wow, I thought. Could we sing that kind of music?

While I didn’t actually set Morford’s words to music, his unfettered imagination (and provocative title) got me off and running. I decided to write a little “instruction manual” for how one might sing like a planet. I called on my son Oliver to help brainstorm, both because he had studied earth science more recently than I and because of his own irrepressible creativity. Oliver helped me remember principles like harmonic motion and oscillation, phenomena like the earth’s wobble, and the primacy of the four basic planetary forces — gravity, electricity, weak force and strong force. I also borrowed some ideas from my yoga teacher Paul Busch, whose radical notions include the conviction that gravity is our friend, and the suggestion that wobbling is nothing to be embarrassed about.