MELIA WATRAS: PELAGIC
for any number of performers (2025)
Photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis
World Premiere: Coming soon
Duration: varies with each performance
Program Notes:
sleeping great trees, what do the giants of the sea dream of?
During the 2024-25 season, while we were performing works by Pauline Oliveros together, the wonderful and brilliant percussionist Bonnie Whiting and I decided to compose compositions for one another. —More precisely, I asked her for a piece, and Bonnie suggested that we write for each other.
Hence, Pelagic’s creation and its dedication to Bonnie, for otherwise it would not exist.
After some months of sketching and experimenting with different concepts, the mysterious image of sleeping sperm whales kept calling to me. It was an idea I had early on but had dismissed because I thought that George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae was so iconic there was no room for any other piece connected to cetaceans. As Holst is to planets, and Messiaen to birds…
In the end, I let go and dove into the pelagic.
In fact, Crumb’s muse is the humpback whale, known for their melodious songs. Sperm whales communicate vocalize with clicks (or codas). Humpbacks sleep horizontally in contrast to the vertical slumbering of the sperm whales. There are, of course, many other differences between these two mammal species. (Sperm whales have teeth, humpback’s have baleen, etc., etc., etc.)
More info (in case you are interested!):
NPR: What are sperm whales saying? Researchers find a complex “alphabet”
May 7, 2024
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/07/1249546255/sperm-whale-communication-ai-language
—”It’s not rude in sperm whale society to talk at the same time and overlap one another.” —Shane Gero, whale biologist and Founder of the The Dominica Sperm Whale Project