year composed: 2024 | 3 minutes

I learned about Neam "Nim" Chimpsky awhile back. He was a chimpanzee that was the subject of an animal language acquisition study at Columbia University starting in the 70s. He learned to mimic American Sign Language. While there is controversy over the legitimacy of his language abilities , he is credited with signing an impressive 16-word-long sentence, which is as follows: “Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.” While the repetitive nature and poor sentence of this sentence perhaps gives a stronger case for the illegitimacy of his language cognition, I still recognize and appreciate how incredible it is that chimps and humans could learn to understand each other. And so when I learned that the theme of The Capital Hearings’ 2024 Young Composers Competition was ‘Forces of Nature,’ I surely thought the ability to form relationships and to communicate across species would count as a force of nature