Hubble Space
Telescope Views
Listen
Listen to the piece now: click here for MP3 audio.
This performance was digitally realized by Dennis Bathory-Kitsz
of Maltedmedia.com.
Duration
10:35
Program Note
"Certain mountain and canyon vistas, when we see them,
permanently change our perspective and make us appreciate
anew the fragility and urgency of life. Modern astronomy
does this on a whole different scale. Through the Hubble Space Telescope,
glowing gassy nebulas reveal intricate structures, bow-shock waves
many times bigger than the whole solar system, regions where new
stars are being born. Further out, the Andromeda Galaxy looks
like a vast whirlpool of stars and dust which takes millions
of years to complete a single rotation. More distant galaxies
have already collided with each other, strewing tails of dust,
gas, and billions of stars streaming across space as each is
disrupted by the other's gravity--formations which have looked
the same for all of human history, testimony to collisions
unimaginably ancient, and others unimaginably distant in the
future. Point the telescope at a seemingly blank patch of sky
for a week, hoping for signals which, if they exist, are too
faint to be perceived any other way--and it reveals millions
of new, previously unknown distant galaxies, the nearer spirals
shining brightly, the more distant ones burning a faint red.
We stand in awe, and tightly hold each other's hands."
--Matthew H. Fields
Instrumentation
- piccolo
- 2 flutes
- 2 oboes
- English horn
- 2 clarinets
- bass clarinet
- 2 bassoons
- contrabassoon
- 4 horns
- 3 trumpets
- 2 trombones
- bass trombone
- tuba
- timpani
- 3 percussionists
- Player 1
- crotales
- 3 tomtoms
- triangle
- bell tree
- tamtam
- Player 2
- vibraphone
- xylophone
- tubular bells
- Player 3
- crash cymbals
- suspended cymbal
- snare drum
- pitched almglocken
- harp
- large string ensemble (e.g. 15/14/12/10/6)
Year of Composition
2004. Revised somewhat in 2006 after a reading by Minnesota Orchestra.
Score
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