"Of Paradise and Light": The composer and her work

when I'm first starting a composition there is not one particular way in which I work so every composition starts maybe from a different impulse of paradise and light came about when I received this wonderful letter from Jerry when I was asking my friends of long-standing to write works for my final season in Seattle I asked 18 composers and dusty was one of them and she immediately accepted to write one of these guns Simoni commissions and we premiered the piece September of 2010 because of paradise and light is an arrangement of the work I wrote for the San Francisco Girls Choir the structure of the pieces in many ways related to the original text which is text by EE coins and very beautiful poem that has a particular form with a repeating line now of course when one hears a string orchestra version they're not going to be hearing that text but in some ways it's a song without voices of course there are many of those in the history of music it's a very short work but full of things and it just jumps from one idea to another and yet it does have a tremendous ability to feel like a whole work but she has these great descriptions sort of resonant with more motion energized and spry joyful suddenly warm resonant faster with sunlight and mood and color inner and calm in a way her words are as poetic as Cummings words are I think as is her music she writes only for the strings but with no double basses and it gives a very different color and a very different sound to the string orchestra I love writing for Strings it's been a huge passion of mine for 30 years and in fact it's hard for me to write music that doesn't have strings in it one of the things about in Paradise in light is just the pure beauty of these incredible musicians in this all-star orchestra with incredibly careful bowing and vibrato choices and the way that these harmonies are voiced the piece in some ways is it's very simple and elegant but on the other hand it builds up to these rich harmonic fields that kind of melt and re-emerge and and and things of this kind and the way that one plays that is very important on the string I think another characteristic of the piece is that it's relatively high and register it's moving up and that's why this image of of paradise and light that we're moving towards some other other world or other place and I think that the technique of playing it is something that the audience would really enjoy because it it it's very simple and therefore it becomes very hard there's no makeup in this piece at all it's just pure heart Augusta read Thomas's of Paradise and light is a short work and it's interesting the way it's constructed it's constructed in what I would call gestures so you have a first gesture and then there's a stop this is an actual firmata and then there's a moment of pause it's not an arbitrary moment of pause she actually writes that and then there's another gesture and then there's another moment of pause and then another gesture and it continues in that way at the same time it does feel unified the language is consistent the material isn't really repeated it's just developed constantly I think part of the reason is because the tempo is pretty much the same throughout yes some little faster a little slower it the color of the orchestra is just those two violins viola cello with doublings obviously there there aren't woodwinds brass there's no double basses no percussion it helps us see this work as a unified whole because the color is very much consistent throughout and she uses these silences in very poignant ways I think it's wonderful when the notes feel right I mean in other words when I'm composing if it doesn't feel right I stop if the if I'm sort of I can't get this section right I just stop because I know that I will just be putting band-aids on something that's not correct I have to go back to the drawing board to start over get the flow get the feel get the line sing it feel it dance it and then I know that it's going Augusta read Thomas's of Paradise and light isn't usually effective he's very different than most of her music but I think equally wonderful you