Duration: 8 minutes
Premiere: SPLICE Institute 2019 | June 24th, 2019 | The Dalton Center at Western Michigan University
Additional Performances:
September 19th, 2019 | The University of Georgia
December 1st, 2019 | Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (ATHICA)
Instrumentation: flute, guitar, double bass, and interactive electronics
(begins at 40:00)
All the Light We Cannot See is a named after and influenced by the Pulitzer Prize winning novel written by Anthony Doerr. A WWII story with beautiful detail, the narrative tracks the parallel stories of a young French girl named Marie-Laure who resides in the coastal French island of Saint Maloe, and Werner Pfennig, a German-born boy with an affinity for radios who eventually excels in his studies and contributions as a Nazi soldier. The plot converges these disparate characters in time and place, beginning with their completely contrasting childhoods and ending with their meeting during the heat of war. Though not a love story, their meeting is amicable and ends with an action-packed escape.
The form of this book made for an intriguing analogue in musical form. In the novel, the two character stories do not converge strictly in parallel; to create interest, moments of their life closer to the war interpolate with windows of their childhood stories, creating feelings of calm respite which contrast with the moments of wartime pressure; this tension grows greater and greater until the climax, when Marie and Werner finally meet. An advantage of turning this form into music is that two “characters” or parameters may be audible at once, rather than tracking only one story at a time as you must when reading.
In the music, the flute and bass have been mapped as “characters” in the story, while the guitar functions to narrate or unite their musical content. Moments of disparity (marked by extreme ranges, different acoustic spaces, and pitch content) interpolate with much more active and tense sections (focusing on fast content and noise-based extended techniques). These characters over time until the ranges of the instruments and musical content begins to overlap and become intertwined. The music climaxes with romantic, close-voiced counterpoint stripped bare of the dense electronics until all instruments end on unisons. Other extramusical elements of the novel manifest in the music via use of wartime sound samples (tuning a radio, German bombers in flight, airplane raids from 1944 Germany, and tickertape machines from atomic control rooms).