Pillars of Creation by Brian Mark

"And now wonder, ye angels, the Infinite has become an infant; he, upon whose shoulders the universe doth hang, hangs at his mother's breast; He who created all things, and bears up the pillars of creation, hath now become so weak, that He must be carried by a woman!"
-Charles Spurgeon, from the 1857 Sermon “The Condescension of Christ”

Pillars of Creation was commissioned by Oklahoma based percussionist Hunter Gross, as part of a percussion consortium project that Mr. Gross assembled himself. Hunter and I first met at the 2020 Sō Percussion Summer (Online) Institute, as we have collaborated on future projects since then. Pillars of Creation was created as a request from Hunter for a large-scale type of work in the percussion medium. Entranced by the iconic James Webb Space and Hubble Space Telescope images of the elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, Pillars of Creation is a 14.5 minute work for either percussion quartet with delay pedal, electronic sound design, or solo percussion with delay pedal and backing track. This creation depicts the three main “pillars” with almost identical sections of exuberance, energy, and fast motion, surrounded by slow movement textures of spatial atmospheres, the formatting of stars and dwindling supernovas, cloud formations, and all cosmic sound particles that could symbolically exist in our universe. Furthermore, the opening and closing delay infused sections with a mystical presence represents the vestige of the space’s past, given that the actual pillars no longer exist today, due to the pillars that once existed is 7,000 light years away from earth.