Glow

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 starting point: light at night. Indeed the poems that Ravel selects from Bertrand's collection refer to light within the general context of darkness: "windows lit by the gloomy rays of the moon," or "the moon glitters in the sky like a silver shield...." In creating my piece, Glow, I imagined all the myriad ways objects are lit at night and settled on seven: moonlight (a nod to Ravel), a simple spark momentarily illuminating darkness, a lighthouse in the distance, the metric flashing of a strobe light in a nightclub, the colorful exuberance of fireworks exploding above, a spiral galaxy slowly rotating in distant space, and the embers of a fire as it fades.


The basis for Glow, then, was a simple synesthesia where light = sound and dark = silence. One can continue the analogue with brightness = volume and color = pitch, though it’s really only the first that was essential to me. In strobe light short, clipped fragments of sound are bounded by rests, giving the impression that something is missing, gaps that cannot be perceived. In lighthouse a resonant figure is repeated with dark spaces of silence in between. It repeats relentlessly except that it grows and subsides in intensity, as if one were to move closer to or further from the light source. In including fireworks, I could not but in some way call to mind another piece: that of Debussy’s famed prelude by the same name. My rendering of fireworks are far more literal that Debussy’s. Between each firework display, with its own colors and form, there are pauses. It is only at the end that a continuous and chaotic series of launches lights the sky cacophonously. In the last movement, embers, disembodied fragments from other movements glimmer briefly before fading into the dark.


In referring to the last movement of Gaspard, Ravel said "I wanted to make a caricature of romanticism. Perhaps it got the better of me." I guess one could say that Glow is a synesthetic, ironic, caricature of Impressionist piano music......but I keep my distance.......or do I?


—Sebastian Currier