Compose a 60 second piece of music inspired by A Dust in Time by composer Huang Ruo.
This composing activity is inspired by A Dust in Time by Huang Ruo, a Chinese composer based in New York. A Dust in Time was composed for strings and is a response to the 2020 Covid 19 Lockdown. It was given its online world premiere as part of the Beijing Music Festival in autumn 2020.
Huang Ruo said this about his piece:
'This special piece is created for the people affected by the pandemic, giving them a piece of music to reflect, to express, to heal, to find internal peace, strength, and hope.'
The piece is inspired by Tibetan sand mandalas. These are circular patterns, sometimes enclosed in a square, made with coloured sand, created by Tibetan Buddhist monks to aid meditation. The piece is 60 minutes long, symbolising the circle and cycle of the hour. Mandala means circle in Sanskrit.
Watch below to learn about sand mandalas, what their meaning is and how they are created then ritually destroyed.
For a PRINTABLE version of this resources CLICK HERE
Now Listen to an excerpt from A Dust in Time by Huang Ruo:
A Dust in Time is like a sand mandala in that the music expands(grows) from a central point outward and then contracts(shrinks) and returns back to the centre. This symbolises the life cycle and the journey from nothing (emptiness) to something (fullness) and then back to nothing.
A Dust in Time is also a passacaglia, a musical form in 3/4 time (3 beats in a bar) where a melody is continuously varied (changed) by small degrees as the piece progresses. In A Dust in Time this is achieved by gradually adding new notes into the melodic lines over a repeating bass line (a basso continuo) which loops around and around like the circle of the mandala.
Creating your own mandala:
If you would like to create your own mandala, you can buy kits from here, here or here. You could also create a mandala out of leaves, berries cones and nuts or just look on the internet for mandala patterns to colour here.
On the next page we will compose music inspired by mandalas.