Notte Splendida Notte

I am born from a spider's web and a steady stream of water.  "Notte Splendida Notte," explores the nebulaic sound of ambience, the listener, a vessel, mostly avoiding the nebulas.  

For more information, visit, Year of Astronomy 2009.

Lyrics:

"Notte Splendida Notte" is featured on "Le Viole Stelle",  poetry book by Loretta Scarazzati, LietoColle publisher, Italy. Here the original text, and its translation by David Harper and Loretta Scarazzati. For courtesy license by LietoColle.

notte splendida notte

profonda e misteriosa

insondabile

splendida notte

che mi chiami

al tuo mistero

di silenzio

credevo di averlo scordato

ma esiste, ancora!

night wonderful night

deep and mysterious

unfathomable

wonderful night

you‘re calling me

to your mystery

of silence

I thought I ‘d forgotten

but it exists, still!

Credits:

David Harper -composer
Anne Fuchs -voice
Daniel Barton -piano and sound engineer
Charles Hagaman -sound engineer, composer
Loretta Scarazzati -poetry
Aaron Graham -instrumentation, program notes
Maria Johnson -Chinese Flute

I experimented with using Braille as a means to interpret astronomical symbols into musical pitches.  So the dipper part of the Big Dipper is an F-eigth note in musical braille.  Some fun was had when Draco's head met with Gemini, Cancer, and Leo aurally.

Sounds were created from CSound, inspired by Blue Cube by Kim Cascone.  Check his music out when you have the time!

Program Notes:

Notte Splendida Notte was imagined through the interpretation of stars.  The composer, interpreting the night sky, then took these visions and applied them to Braille, a system of reading for the non-sighted community.  It was through this process that the interpretations were set to music.  This was one of the many objectives of the composition of the piece, to try and provide some understanding of the night sky to the non-sighted community.  "Art Inspires Art"

The piece is a symbolic work, meant to portray an "audio vision" of the night sky.  The original content for the piece was acutually not more than a minute long, then stretched and eleaborated upon to invoke a dark, vast, open atmosphere.  This process of elongation creates large "clouds" of sound, also described as "nebulas," words often used to describe the sky, stars, the world, the universe.......

Even more than trying to invoke this feeling in the non-sighted community, the composer wishes to invoke it in anyone who has ever felt this way about the night sky.  ANyone who has ever sat and looked at the stars and felt some kind of awe, or inspiration.

"You become legend when you become a composer.  Every sound is defined by its meaning through you, and ultimately, the composition as a whole becomes self referencing through its parts even.  A piece of your being is reflected in the music: who are you? where do you come from? what are your available resources?  However, while you are creating, this identity is completely irrelevant to you at the time.  There is something else held deeply in your immediate attention, and the identity of self is a small, simple notion working on a subversive level outside of consciousness (a very dangerous form of existence).  Your identity returns when your composition becomes the key, realizing that any question about the music you live in contains in it a solution for all questions about music that you may ever have.  The solution reveals itself.  It is then that the argument is made for the idea that even though a cymbal may contain all sounds and pitches within it, the symphony is still not yet defined.  Like the homosapien may contain all forms of emotions, the human is still not yet defined.  "Notte Splendida Notte" is a music made of sounds, ideas, words, and even footprints too.  But, can you accept it as music? or could you consider it as incidental sounds like the one that grows on the pumpkin vine.  A collaboration among musicians: maybe it is simply an effort to define the work of an ensemble scattered across the earth we live on with a human shape..."