The Dawn of the Inner Sun

This piece of music of was inspired by the story I wrote for the Tell a Story to Me -- Hollow Earth contest, Escape to Atlantis of the Inner Sun.

I am an interdisciplinary creative; that is, I often find myself composing music as I write, and writing based on a musical idea that is inviting more to occur. A single chord change in Grechaninov's Vespers once inspired an entire fantasy novelette for me. More recently, an entire orchestral idea that I went on and sketched has given me a full-length novel manuscript to work with. To me, the nexus between the storytelling of words and the emotional sense of story given through music is very strong; they are constantly dovetailing in and out of each other.

(I just need to meet a good filmmaker, and I am set -- or, get busy on Adobe Spark and Unsplash and start pushing out the videos -- but that is another story)

I have been working on "Escape to Atlantis of the Inner Sun" for several days, and there is a scene in it in which Tarik DuSable wakes up, turns over, and then has it dawn on him that he is indeed seeing what he is seeing: the Inner Sun, and a world within our "hollow world" under its light. This is the emotional portrait of that moment for Tarik, of his awakening to a new world.

Choice of keys and modes: the Inner Sun and Outer Sun (you know, the regular sun) are not dissimilar. As Lady Ieda explains, the earth orbits the Outer Sun and revolves around the (much smaller) Inner Sun -- thus I did not want to go too far a field. So, I chose A flat Dorian -- a minor mode, but brilliantly illuminated by an extra major chord among its close relatives. This is the minor mode often used in jazz, blues, and gospel music, and gives even the use of minor keys that sense that joy and celebration are peeking through the windows and sneaking in by the back door of even a "sad" or "somber" moment. OR, in this case, blazing like the Inner Sun out of the cloudless, starless black void between one of the shores of Atlantis of the Inner Sun and the true center of the earth. I did borrow a bit from my beloved Phyrgian modes by contrast -- A flat minor vs. A major, for even further blazing brightness.

A flat is indeed DARK as a minor key on my synesthesia palette. If C sharp minor is shining gray (thank you, Herr Beethoven, with your "Moonlight" Sonata) to deep, somber gray (thank you, Herr Bach, with your Well-Tempered Clavier), than A flat minor is the musical representation of the blackness that comprises 95 percent of the universe (we can see only five percent!), the dark energy which holds the universe together... upon which D flat and A blaze out like the light of celestial fires, each differing in their glory as the stars differ in magnitude and color.

I have at least one more improvisation rolling around in my head out of this story... the writing is done but the music is not...