Urban Sky Glow (2016)

Instrumentation: for solo marimba and fixed media or live electronics

Duration: approximately 9 minutes and 30 seconds

Download the musical score here: Urban Sky Glow

Program Notes:

Urban Sky Glow explores how missing starlight returns to our lives as we reduce city lights. It acts as an interpretation of the levels of the starlight magnitude of one particular area of the night sky. The marimba musically represents the stars that are visible in the different magnitudes. After the first minute of the piece, four stars have been revealed: Sirius, Rigel, Betelgeuse, and the Hyades star cluster. As we move through the levels of magnitude, city light is reduced, more stars are revealed, and previously visible stars become brighter. The fixed media creates both a contrasting artificial light as well as extensions of the marimba’s starlight. As we travel through the magnitudes we also engage in two Dreams which are variations on the starlight materials.