This piece was written as a competition piece for the Young Composers Festival competition in Apeldoorn, Netherlands. The piece was performed by the De Ereprijs Orchestra and received the second prize award, which was a commission for a chamber orchestra piece for the Netherlands Youth Orchestra premiered in the summer of 2007.

Since the competition requirements limited the length of the piece to 3 minutes, I set about writing a short piece, which evoked a larger structure, a Borgesian gambit. My solution was to imagine a ritual piece, a dance of rapture, for a fictional Micronesian lost tribe. They evolved from survivors of a non-evacuated atoll during the atom bomb testings in the 20th century. Consequently, the creation myth and destruction myth (the song of rapture) are, for this tribe, the same. As they are a primitive tribe of the future, they play microtonally tuned, electric guitars. I developed the text from actual words in Trukese (an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Truk).

The matrix of Ga-uahian Words (a derivative of Trukese) used in the work are below. The grammatical structure of Ga-uahian is simple and complex (think a game of checkers — or late Beckett).

“Ga-uah-chon-ch’cha — our land, destroyed (created), also a kind of bird (the Ga-uahian creation myth is the same as one of their Rapture).”

mesek — to fear
chcha — blood
ninni — to kill
na-ang — sky
kuchu — cloud
wu-ut — rain
a-af — fire
chon — black
nap — big
uah — man
Ga — land

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