Light Symbolic

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” —Edith Wharton, Vesalius in Zante (1902) “Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” ―Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man (1991) Challenged to compose a showpiece for the SHHH!! ensemble that would fit thematically with their Starry Night program, I naturally turned for inspiration to one of my favorite subjects to amateurishly and inadequately explore: astronomy. Cast in two movements, Light Symbolic assumes an idealized perspective on astronomical events occurring at massive scales that defy human intuition. The first movement – the quiet violence of celestial motion – is a largely textural and atmospheric piece that expresses wonder at the incomprehensible rates of motion within and between solar systems, while recognizing that the violent dance of stars, planets, and other large bodies occurs within the graceful silence of the vacuum of space. The second movement – death of a sun, act of creation – takes a more aggressive, rhythmically propulsive slant, an evocation of the process by which the elements are formed as the result of the death process of stars. Throughout the work, I remind myself that these epic realities about the macro functions of our universe are primarily perceived by us denizens of Earth as the tiny, delightful twinkling of lights in the night sky, a symbolic irony that in itself inspires something ineffably artistic about the human experience. My deepest thanks to Zac and Edana for spearheading this collaboration, and to the SOCAN Foundation for its support.