Light Glances Between Things details
for string orchestra (2024)
duration: 12′ 05″
publisher: Australian Music Centre
program note
Light Glances Between Things was developed for the Orquesta Marga Marga in Chile after a request from Luis José Recart Echenique, who generously encouraged me during video calls. The music mainly draws on two sources: architect Byoung Soo Cho’s Korean concept of Mahk (Cho 2021)—a type of gestural roughness within intense creativity expressive of the spiritual dimension of life, and poet Kate Fagan’s poetic concept of ‘light glances between things’ (Fagan 2021)—an intangible sense of spiritual presence in the Australian Blue Mountains’ bush allied to ‘midwinter blue’ hope. The music opens with crashing roughness of grace-note figures and full-note chords built on open strings within the orchestra answered by long spacious lines with harmonics and aching vibrato, inspired by traditional Gugak instruments, such as gayageum and haegeum and is used as framing sections (A) throughout, mingled with the words ‘la nube’ (the cloud) and ‘ligera’ (light). The double bass player, with jazzy pizzicato riffs and vocalizations, delivers the poem as a structure for the piece with a mixture of English and Spanish moments, as if riffing in a night club, and it later breaks out at the climax into the other players as speaking in tongues moments, including ‘winter blue’ hope in Polish (family heritage), Spanish (Luis and Orquesta Marga Marga performers), Korean (Asia-Pacific inspiration), and Judeo-Christian glossolalia (faith). The inner sections (B) gradually compress the materials with chordal oscillations emerging in the texture and later returns with speaking in tongues (Spanish, Polish, Korean and glossolalia), whilst the middle section (C) features jazzy melodic fragments, oscillating fifth resonances and dance figures as an eruption of ‘rough’ energy as strength to express the poetic strength of ‘trees hold their relationship to light’ and later, as the black ‘crow’ against the blue. The static opening section (A), inspired by the meditative stillness of the shō in Japanese gagaku (orchestra), returns and stretches the ‘silent’ harmonics and soft bowing sounds to silence, to be cheekily interrupted by opening grace-note/open string resonances to suggest the opening in your soul to hope, like the poetic ‘green fiddlehead uncoiling’. Formally the music is a journey informed by glancing light: ABA’B’CB’’B’’’C’’’B’’’’A’’A—a type of presence I feel in Mulgoa Nature Reserve, at the foot of the Blue Mountains in Western Sydney.
score available from
dedication note:
Light Glances Between Things is dedicated to Luis José Recart Echenique (conductor and artistic director) and Orquesta Marga Marga, Valparaíso, Chile.
commission details:
Light Glances Between Things was commissioned by Luis José Recart Echenique for the Orquesta Marga Marga, for performance at PUENTE Festival Interoceánico: Encuentro interoceánico de culturas Valparaíso, Chile.
Bruce Crossman 