Second round, second track. This will not be easy to present, but I’ll try my best.
Two is the number of balance, but also the number of conflict and opposition. Without the number two, the positive and negative could not exist. This is a soft and hard piece of music, dynamic and imperious, melancholic and engaging piece that wants to point out with its title how important it is to reflect on the “Responsibilities” that man has towards the impact he produces on the environment.
Structure
Starting from an ethereal space the piano starts playing a few smooth notes that dance alternately with a synth sound. As far as a distant memory that gradually becomes sharper, the piano approaches acoustically passing from ethereal space to being closer slowly.
This introduction is interrupted drastically by a phrase that contrabasses, cellos, violas and horns play creating a serious and massive sound impact that wakes up the listener while the synth sound continues playing in the background during the pauses.
At about minute 2.52, enter the violins and the flutes that reveal the main theme for the first time. Then, at minute 3.36 stop playing and make room for the solo voice that is accompanied by the sound mass of the rest of the orchestra. The piano, which in the meantime had stopped playing, replaces the orchestra and becomes the main instrument accompanying the singer.
At 5.42 minutes, the singers stop and the section of the violins and play again the main theme in response to violas. Then, at 6.25, the whole orchestra enters intoning a variation of the main theme with a very strong dynamic but romantically.
The final section of the piece is a mirror version of the introduction: the same elements reproduce their own parts, but this time the sound from clear returns to be ethereal until it completely disappears.
Sound-stage: Barbary Grant’s voice
As I mentioned in Episode 1, all you heard was a Virtual Orchestra playing.
Programming a virtual orchestra is time-consuming because each note of each instrument needs to be determined in terms of articulation, expression, intensity and phrasing.
Anyway, Responsibilities has something that any other piece of Music For The Planet has: a talented solo singer singing. Well, that’s actually from an 8Dio sound library, too. Specifically, the name of the library is The New Forgotten Voices: Barbary Solo Vocals.
But wait, she does really exist and she actually sang the whole melody.
Barbary has a successful career as a classical pianist in the lyrical world of traditional Celtic music. Now her rich Irish harp and crystal-clear voice breathe new life into the old songs of the Gael.
Dive Into The Matter
Global climate change has already had observable effects on the environment. Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, plant and animal ranges have shifted and trees are flowering sooner. Effects that scientists had predicted in the past would result from global climate change are now occurring: loss of sea ice, accelerated sea-level rise and longer, more intense heat waves. Scientists have high confidence that global temperatures will continue to rise for decades to come, largely due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which includes more than 1,300 scientists from the United States and other countries, forecasts a temperature rise of 2.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. To understand better what is climate change, I invite you to visit NASA’s website on Climate Change and Global Warming.
Take Action – Earth Alliance
In 1998, Leonardo DiCaprio established his foundation with the mission of protecting the world’s last wild places. LDF implements solutions that help restore balance to threatened ecosystems, ensuring the long-term health and well-being of all Earth’s inhabitants. Since that time, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation (LDF) has worked on some of the most pressing environmental issues of our day. In their “One Earth Climate Model” article it is presented a state-of-the-art climate model, funded by the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and released by the prestigious scientific publisher Springer Nature, that offers a roadmap for meeting — and surpassing — the targets set by the Paris Climate Agreement, proving that we can solve the global climate crisis with currently available technologies.
