NINETY SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT is a piece for percussion quartet, inspired by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ (BAS) Doomsday Clock.
“The Doomsday Clock is a design that warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making. It is a metaphor, a reminder of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet."
(Doomsday Clock - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2024)
“[The Doomsday Clock is a] symbolic clock adopted by atomic scientists to show how close human beings are considered to be to a global catastrophe, with midnight standing for annihilation.”
(Ostberg, R., Doomsday Clock, Britannica, 2023)
On the 24th of January 2023, it was announced that the Doomsday clock would move from 100 to 90 seconds from midnight, marking the closest humanity has ever been to annihilation. 364 days later, on the 23rd of January 2024, the BAS announced that they were going to keep the clock at 90 seconds to midnight, calling it “A moment of historic danger”, citing reasons such as “the many dimensions of nuclear threat”; “an ominous climate change outlook”; “evolving biological threats”; and “the dangers of AI”.
This inspired me to ask the question, “what could this look like as a piece of music?”
I decided to break down the structure into 3 attacca movements: Before The World’s End; The Twelve Chimes; and Total Annihilation. However, rather than taking us on a programmatic journey, I chose to quite simply portray the 3 stages as I saw them, encouraging the listener to come up with their own story.
This piece was recorded in the Yamaha Percussion Studio the Royal Northern College of Music on the 21st of March 2024.
