Off Hesperus (2017)

Viola scordatura, electronics, and 39+ 0.5mm LED’s
Duration: 10’30”

Commissioned by Festival MANCA / C.I.R.M. (Centre National de Création Musicale)

Premiered December 9, 2017 at Palais Lascarais, Nice, France
Christophe Desjardins, viola, Katherine Balch and Monica Gil-Geraldo, electronics

Technical requirements: laptop with ability to run MAX/msp, quadriphonic speaker array, (at least) 3 13-pin arduinos, (at least) 39 0.5mm LED’s, 22-gauge red/black zip chord, viola amplification.

Please contact me or Schott PSNY if you are interested in programming this piece.

In Off Hesperus, the violist whispers and chirps and flutters his way from hazy dusk to vivacious starlight. This piece is a musical reflection on an excerpt of Vladirmir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, in which his poet-protagonist John Slade contemplates the insufficiencies of an afterlife that doesn’t encompass the beauty of his present existence. He writes:

“I’m ready to become a floweret / Or a fat fly, but never, to forget. / And I’ll turn down eternity unless / The melancholy and the tenderness / Of mortal life, the passion and the pain; / The claret of taillight of that dwindling plane / Off hesperus, your gesture of dismay / On running out of cigarettes; the way / You smile at dogs, the trail of silver slime / Snails leave on flatstone; this good ink, this rhyme / This index card, this slender rubber band. / Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand, / Are found in Heaven by the newly dead / Stored in its stronghold throughout years.”

 I am grateful to Françoise Paris and CIRM for this opportunity, and to Monica Gil Geraldo for her help and insight.