SUBMERGED - THE STORY
As a Vancouver-based composer, I've sought to create music about the odd bit of local history. In 2019, the Prince George Symphony performed my St Roch Suite, an ode to the RCMP Schooner that resides in the Maritime Museum. This month, the Orchestra North Academy performed my latest piece, Submerged - an ode to the Ben Franklin submersible. To celebrate science and history, music combined with the visual can be a powerful medium with which to reconsider and reevaluate the moments we set forth to discover the new and scary, as did the Ben Franklin in 1969 when it toured the US East coast studying Marine life, vegetation and human psychology in closed quarters.
My Hopes Are:
- The music video will inspire others to take further interest in the Maritime Museum, and in a broader sense, the scientific journey we, as humans, need in order to survive and understand our complex world.
- Show the power of music to express the abstract world of human experience, as the crew of the Ben Franklin lived in tight quarters for two weeks, 2000 feet below the surface!
What We Need & What You Get
- We need $500 to cover Vince Renaud's audio engineering magic, to clean up the track, and mix to perfection, since the recording was taken from a live concert with a shuffling audience.
- The other half will cover Darko Sikman's video fee - for he'll be taking long and slow atmospheric shots within the submersible to give us a sense of what it was like inside! Normally, it's tricky to get inside, so this should be fun way to give everyone a real look of the submersible's interior!
The Impact
The video will serve to bolster the Vancouver Maritime Museum's content as they work hard to foster and protect the precious historical artifacts that constitute Vancouver's role in the annals of Maritime history.
- If you have an interest in this subject then I hope the final result will shed light both artistically and objectively over a precious machine that brought us a little closer to the mysteries of the deep, deep sea.
- You can always visit my website to see other similar projects, like Life in the Universe, a whole musical journey made in 2018 in collaboration with the HR MacMillan Space Centre.