Glow

Composer's note:
"When pianist Inon Barnatan asked me to write him a new work, he had a particular stipulation: that I somehow connect my piece with Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, which he would program alongside my new work. This seemed an intriguing proposition. I decided not to refer to any musical material in Gaspard, but took my cue from the textual elements that accompany the score. The title of the work comes from a collection of poems by Aloysius Bertrand. It is generally translated as “The Treasurer (or Jewel Keeper) of the Night.
I imagined jewels gleaming from some narrow light source in the otherwise enshrouding darkness. This was my staring point: light at night. Indeed the poems that Ravel selects from Bertrand's collection refer to light with the general context of darkness. In creating my piece, Glow, I imagined all the myriad ways objects are lit at night and settled on seven: moonlight (a not to Ravel), a simple spark momentarily illuminating darkness, a lighthouse in the distance, the metric flashing of a strobe light in a nightclub, the colourful exuberance of fireworks exploding above, a spiral galaxy slowly rotating in distant space, and the embers of a fire as it fades.”
- Sebastian Currier -