Vladimir Rumyantsev - Hickey: Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind [CD]

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, first published in 2011 in Hebrew, and in 2014 in English, is justifiably one of the most celebrated books of our time. With its audacious subtitle, the book attempts to explain and explore why our particular species has thrived while most others have perished, and how we are set apart from all others due to our ability and desire to understand and give meaning to things that do not necessarily exist - such as the shared myths of language, money, religion, love, political boundaries and a host of things not truly tangible but with which we have developed a shared understanding. Almost immediately after I began the book I would start to sketch out some ideas for an extensive piece of music, some dealing with its broadest concepts. This proved to be ineffective, but the idea for a piece stayed with me for a year, eventually taking shape, like many of my works, only during its composition. In no way have I tried to create a chapter by chapter illustration of the book nor of humankind (!), nor have I closely followed its overall outline or timeline. What I have attempted is a humble musical response to human signposts, concepts, mythms or ideas that we as a species have carried with us, developing along the way these past couple hundred thousand or so years, breadcrumbs on the path of humanity. I have composed several works for solo piano, and a great number for instruments with piano, or for the piano in chamber music combinations. I have not, however, ever truly been comfortable with the instrument and have always been intimidated by composing for it. Decades after I first began playing, I can only play some rather rudimentary things. But as my initial ideas took on some shape the thought of exploring a musical homage to humankind on one of humanity's great inventions began to appeal, and then, become necessary. I imagined the modern piano as a sort of meta-instrument, present at the dawns of humankind, the cognitive and agricultural revolutions, and some of the most notable inflection points of our troubled and triumphant history. A voyeur. A scribe. A portrait painter applying a brush across the millennia of our existence. The piece begins not on the piano, but at the piano, with a single human breath, as I imagine the first music to have been, somewhere near the dawn of our species. If it is, like most, intended to die off one day, I imagine the very last music to sound more or less the same. - Sean Hickey