I was recently involved in the “Vine Orchestra” project [website, Twitter]: a call for scores of pieces 6 seconds or less in duration, for a 2- to 20-member subset of a specified instrumentation. Over 150 compositions were entered, and 52 compositions were performed and recorded on December 1st. One of my scores was selected for performance, and this is the end result. Funnily enough, they ended up not being uploaded to Vine but YouTube instead. Do take a look through some of the other pieces–it’s really interesting to see how different people interpreted the prompt.
The composition is pretty straightforward: continuous ABA’ form, with the B section being of a different sonic aesthetic. The programmatic title (which happens to take longer to say than the piece takes to play) was applied after the piece was written. I thought the dramatic nature of the work lent itself to a program, and after a bit of creative thought, I settled upon an event that, while instantaneous in real life, might take 6 seconds to play out in a dramatic slow-motion scene in a documentary.
The video is best viewed at full screen and in 1080p, as this makes the score readable.