a musical island journey

The Last Island is an original 13-minute composition for symphony orchestra accompanied by images cropped from a selection of my watercolor maps. Together they evoke the experience of ascending a fictional, endangered tropical island from sea to summit; I consider the work to be part celebration, part requiem. The music is essentially a theme-and-variations based on two melodies that alternate and overlay.

(Use good speakers/headphones if you can! And make sure you start with the volume up—the sound begins very slow and soft with the first slide, and builds steadily from there.)

The individual images are taken from works inspired by the Galápagos and Canary Islands, New Zealand, the Ecuadorian Andes, and Robinson Crusoe Island (Chile). Check out the larger works they came from!

The diagram below is a partial summary of my investigation. A piece of music, like The Last Island, meant to represent a geographical journey can be considered a map of that journey in sound. That musical map can also be represented as a linear visual map—or a series of them—analogous to a map of a physical path. The diagram aligns linear maps of selected musical elements (e.g. instrumentation, dynamics) with corresponding maps of the geographical elements (e.g. rainfall, elevation) they evoke along the journey.

For much more detail on how the mapping project evolved, check out my blog posts “Musical Time & Space,” “Mapping "The Last Island" | Structure,” “Mapping "The Last Island" | Note Length,” and “Mapping "The Last Island" | Emergent Elements.”