Music Viva Performs The Luminous Ground Dec 3 5:00 PM

The Luminous Ground, my new piece for chorus, string orchestra, and piano will be performed by the great Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez and Musica Viva on December 3 at 5 PM in NYC at All Souls Church, 1157 Lexington Avenue. I’m extremely excited about this performance which will also feature pieces by Joseph Turrin (performed by Fredericka Von Stade), Gilda Lyons and Samuel Barber. Tickets and more information can be found here, at the Musica Viva’s Web site.

Next week, my dear friend and multiple Grammy-winning producer Steve Epstein will be recording The Luminous Ground and the other new works for Naxos Records. Here are the program notes for my piece:

According to the great Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna, "The Luminous Ground" is that stage in a person's progress towards enlightenment when "the pacifying light of wisdom dawns" and "attachment and aversion have thoroughly ceased." It is a nearly unimaginable state of serenity, but one that is evoked, for me, by the extraordinary light sculptures of James Turrell. When Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez said that "light " was the theme of the concert for which he was kindly commissioning a new piece, it was Turrell’s work that immediately came to mind, specifically his stunningly beautiful installation at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2013.

After writing (and rejecting) several extensive sketches that took a different approach, I returned to my initial impression of Turrell's art and sought to turn its contemplative nature into a slow, gradually changing soundscape that always remains still and hushed. A wordless chorus performs long, sustained, overlapping drones that interweave with the strings. The piano plays simple chords and fragments of melody that, in the final section become a soft, chiming chord whose repetitions grow farther apart.