Gondwana: Earth, a Blue Sanctuary is a new work in a series of compositions exploring my concerns with Earth’s symbolic images and its incredibly long arch of evolution and development as a planet.

Gondwana incorporates the conception and some of the functioning principles of the tectonic plates. I use this information as a central idea that helps inform my reflections on how the three ensembles’ activities and their interactions with each other should occur in the music.

The cello solo symbolically represents the energy force that enables the ensembles to have mobility and movement. That mobility is also responsible for the structure in the music and is similar to the tectonic plates’ activities in creating the Earth’s constellation of continents during different epochs of its history. —Wadada Leo Smith