Sam Guarnaccia: Music for Our Universe

The Big Chew Podcast

Music can bring us into new, profound kinds of awareness. Composer and classical guitarist Sam Guarnaccia is doing his part. We talk about his new musical work that calls on orchestra, chorus, and soloists to celebrate the evolving universe we all share. I've heard Sam's Emergent Universe Oratorio—it's lush and evocative and includes praise for life forms and forces you don't often hear about in concert halls, like cell membranes, tree roots, and gravity. There are selections from Sam's Emergent Universe Oratorio in this episode. He and I talk about stuff like: -The role music plays in heightening our awareness -How this new Universe Story differs from indigenous stories -Sam's religious background and how he's oriented now -What "emergence" is and why it rocks -Humanity's fatal flaw -Slime molds and why I want Sam to put them back in the oratorio. Some of the people we mention in this episode are Buddhist and systems scholar and writer Joanna Macy; cultural historian Thomas Berry and mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, who wrote The Universe Story and other related works; Mary Evelyn Tucker, a religious scholar at Yale University who worked with Thomas Berry (She and Brian Swimme produced the film Journey of the Universe); and Ursula Goodenough, cell biologist, writer, and professor of biology at Washington University. Here's information on the June 2017 premiere of the oratorio in Cleveland, and Sam Guarnaccia's other works. Awakening "We are beings In whom the universe Shivers in wonder at itself — The space where earth dreams." Brian Thomas Swimme, Mary Evelyn Tucker Gravity’s Law How surely gravity’s law, Strong as an ocean current, Takes hold of even the smallest thing And pulls it toward the heart of the world. Each thing — Each stone, blossom, child — Is held in place. Only we, in our arrogance, Push out beyond what we each belong to For some empty freedom. If we surrendered To earth’s intelligence We could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves In knots of our own making. And struggle, lonely and confused. So, like children, we begin again To learn from the things, Because they are in God’s heart; They have never left him. This is what the things can teach us: To fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that Before it can fly. Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows