‘Seeing Stars’ Symphonic Poem for Orchestra -with Night Ride and Hard Landing

In the weeks leading up to Christmas 2015, I made several visits to the centre of Prague, where I had been living for some time. The nocturnal scene was one of a myriad lights. This resulted in a story line occurring to me, which ran something like this:

 ‘It’s winter and an insomniac keeps looking out of his apartment window at the stars in the night sky. Suddenly he’s whisked away by some mysterious force and finds himself roller-coasting across a brilliantly lit city, before being unceremoniously dumped in a deserted side street, having ‘seen stars’. In a state of bewilderment he makes his way home and drifts into sleep.’

 ‘Seeing Stars’ is a musical portrayal of this frivolous imagining. 

It is also a celebration of the magnificence of the sky at night and falls into three sections: an atmospheric prelude, a fast central section comprising night rides and hard landings, and a carefully paced postlude that brings the piece to a happy end.

The musical material consists of two themes, along with a series of fast ‘night ride’ imaginings. After the sinister opening chords, the main theme is introduced on bassoons. This idea undergoes many transformations in the course of the piece; sometimes lyrical and expressive, other times urgent, even tragic. The ‘aspiring’ second theme, its natural continuation, is introduced on trombones (at bar 35), and likewise recurs in various guises. Two climaxes are reached in the central section, the second longer than the first. After the catastrophic second ‘landing’, the character of the music changes, becoming initially tragic, then consoling, and finally lyrical and aspirant on horns, as the insomniac finds himself back home in his apartment. Did all of this happen, or was it a dream?

Duration : 12 minutes