Small Blue Marble
Instrumentation: String Quartet (2 violins, viola, cello)
Year Composed: 2004
Duration: 17 minutes
Pages: 34
Cost: Purchase: $30.00
Play Small Blue Marble as performed live by the Enso String Quartet
Click here for a score sample.
Representative Performances:
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Amy Ventricinque, Mary Ellen Goree, Allyson Dawkins, Marilyn de Oliveira, Composers Alliance of San Antonio Concert, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas (2006) The Enso String Quartet, Society of Composers, Inc. Region VI Conference, Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, Houston, Texas (2006) |
Program Notes:
The initial inspirations for Small Blue Marble were a picture and a dream. The picture is the famous image of the Earth as seen from the moon by the Apollo astronauts, an image of a small planet hanging vulnerably in the darkness of space. The work begins with this image, with a cold, sustained chord of outer space, but at its core, the piece is a travelogue for the planet inspired by a dream of flying toward the Earth, entering its atmosphere (the first rhythm of the piece the breath of life), and proceeding around the globe, flying fast over land, maybe 50 feet off the ground, fields and mountains and all, plunging into the sea, crossing one ocean, coming back again to land on the other side of the globe, picking up more speed, and finally coming back to water, but this time falling slowly into the ocean s deepest depths. Here, at the end, in another world without air, the opening music returns to draw the parallel between deep space and the deep sea. We live on a cracker between these two inhospitable worlds, an even more fragile situation than the picture which inspired this piece presents.