A Brief History of Creation: For Children's Voices and Orchestra

From the composer:

How did it all begin? And what happened next?

I found myself pondering these questions in an art gallery in Bremen, in a James Turrell installation that carved through three storeys of the gallery. Looking down from the top floor through great circles of colour-changing light to the distant sparkling points in a dark ellipse on the ground floor, I felt that I was looking back in time to the origins of the universe - and I started to hear children's voices in my mind's ear, accompanied by twinkling metal percussion.

It occurred to me that the beginning of our world was a good story to be sung by children, especially the unique Hall?Children's Choir, and accompanied by the magnificent Hall?Orchestra.

Haydn's Creation immediately comes to mind as a precedent, but that is a setting and elaboration of the Book of Genesis. I thought we should tell the modern version of our story, and be as scientifically accurate as possible.

That's easier said than done! For a start, it's hard to find a modern account of creation that is anything like as compact as the one in Genesis. I talked about it with my regular collaborator, Alasdair Middleton. Neither of us could remember being taught anything about the Big Bang or Evolution at school, although I had certainly spent many happy hours making papier-m歊h?dinosaurs. So the first thing we had to do was a lot of research - reading books for grown-ups, books for children, looking at charts and diagrams and watching films. There was a wonderful moment, reading Adam Rutherford's The Origin of Life, when I had the glorious feeling I understood everything - but that quickly evaporated as soon as I put the book down.

Scientific ideas seem to date very quickly, so this account of the beginning of our world is necessarily provisional. It&rs