Keynotes : Words to describe music...
Welcome to this occasional series of brief posts where I describe a little of the inspiration behind a composition.
Blue Dot
This is a meditative solo piano piece inspired by the famous Pale Blue Dot image (above) of earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from 3.8 billion miles away. When you think about it, it is the ultimate in getting a bit of perspective. Scientist Carl Sagan crafted some beautiful words about what the image means to him that were a big part of the inspiration for the composition.
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturing’s, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
It is an awe inspiring and humbling image, the essence of which I tried to capture in the piece. Performed quietly, at home, late at night on my Kawai felted piano, the piece has a hushed and intimate quality. In the introduction the repetitive ostinato figure is meant to be reminiscent of a satellite in a slow orbit. It is complemented by gentle higher notes – an aural representation of points of light in the night sky. Warm, rich, comforting, widely spaced lower chords try to create a reflective mood as well as a sense of limitlessness.
Hers is a live performance of the piece from a recent concert.
And here is a bit more of an explanation of the process of the composing the piece and the musical ideas the lie behind it.
And finally…
A friend and composer colleague Paul Farrer, was talking online recently about the news that NASA had successfully made contact and rebooted the Voyager 1 - its still going and now is about 15 billion miles away. Here is what he said…
“Launched 47 years ago and currently 15 billion miles away from Earth, Voyager One (having experienced multiple failures) has recently been successfully remotely rebooted by NASA and all four of its sensors are now back online beaming tonnes of science data to us from deep interstellar space. I think of this awesome human achievement every time my car’s Bluetooth can’t find my bastard phone.”
Listen to the album ‘Be Curious’ which features ‘Blue Dot’ on your favourite streaming service here https://steveluck.ffm.to/becurious
Buy the album on vinyl, CD or as sheet music from my shop here https://steve-luck.by-sugarcoat.com/products
Tickets for the underground Victoria Tunnel concerts later in the year are on sale at https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/steve-luck-music
Thanks for your continued support of independent music. Please reply with any comments, queries or requests. I would love to hear from you.
Steve