Join NWS for an extraordinary journey through the cosmos and into the unknown with special musical guests and scientists from NASA. With galactic imagery illuminating the performance hall, conductor Edwin Outwater leads an unforgettable voyage to Mars and Jupiter in Gustav Holst’s The Planets, worlds beyond in John Williams’ iconic film scores and much more. Grammy Award-winning composer and conductor Eric Whitacre will take the stage for his Deep Field, inspired by the world-famous Hubble Telescope. Through a new film by 59 Productions, it vividly portrays the wonders of the universe by pairing orchestra with chorus and audience, who join the performance by using an app.

** BEFORE THE CONCERT: To participate in Eric Whitacre’s Deep Field, please download the free Deep Field app. Mr. Whitacre will deliver instructions on how to use the app from the stage. **

ACTIVITIES BY FROST SCIENCE

Pre-Concert and Intermission:

Astronaut Meet-and-Greet and Fingerprints of Light: SunTrust Pavilion
Meet Captain Winston Scott and see his collection of space artifacts. Discover how scientists use light to identify elemental compositions of faraway objects in space by using diffraction lenses to split up the light emitted from different gases in spectrum tubes. Winston Scott only available pre-concert. The pre-concert activities will close at 7:15 PM.

Star Constellations: The Clinton Family Fund Ensemble Room
Explore the cosmos and see night sky constellations come to life as Frost Science staff share the stories behind them with this pop-up planetarium experience.

Post-Concert:

Chat with Artists: Performance Hall
Conductors Edwin Outwater and Eric Whitacre and astronaut Winston Scott host a post-concert chat from the stage.

Star Constellations: The Clinton Family Fund Ensemble Room
Explore the cosmos and see night sky constellations come to life as Frost Science staff share the stories behind them with this pop-up planetarium experience.

Telescope Stargazing: Friday-SoundScape Park; Saturday-Rooftop Garden
Bring the far away beauty of celestial objects up close and experience the night sky as never before. Night sky telescope viewings are weather permitting.

Program

Music of the Spheres: A Space Concert

From Pythagoras in Ancient Greece to Johannes Kepler in 17th-century Germany, the most astute observers of the heavens have always sensed that the universe is in some sense a giant musical instrument, with orbiting bodies interacting to create planetary harmonies. It’s no wonder then that space has held a special attraction for composers, who have found their own ways to translate those celestial sights and patterns into audible music.

This journey into space begins with a “cosmic drama,” as it was described by its iconoclastic composer, Charles Ives (1874-1954). He completed The Unanswered Question in 1908, when he was also launching the insurance agency in Manhattan that made him a fortune and allowed him the freedom to compose according to his own rules. Time slows down with the first sustained chord, a major triad spread wide throughout the strings, and the harmonies continue to unfold in a steady string chorale, a layer Ives characterized as “The Silences of the Druids—who Know, See and Hear Nothing.” Hovering in a different tempo and key, a lone trumpet poses “The Perennial Question of Existence,” a pensive anthem of mystery and wonder. A reproachful quartet offers “The Invisible Answer,” a dissonant and unstable retort that grows increasingly agitated with each response to the unwavering question.

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) went to London for two lucrative visits in the early 1790s. While there he got to see firsthand the spectacle of Handel’s English-language oratorios like Messiah and Israel in Egypt, and it spurred Haydn to create his own huge oratorio once he returned to Vienna. That idea bore fruit in 1798 as The Creation, using a German translation of an English libretto that combined biblical text with portions of Milton’s Paradise Lost. (The translator matched the original text syllable for syllable, so ever since a London performance in 1800 it’s been common to sing it in English.) The iconic moment of The Creation comes, appropriately, in the beginning, in an overture that represents chaos. The pungent dissonances and suspended harmonies in the key of C-minor prepare the first vocal number, a recitative and chorus that reaches a spine-tingling C-major chord right when it completes the immortal phrase, “And God said: Let there be Light, and there was Light.”

Around the turn of the 20th century, Gustav Holst (1874-1934) helped end the dry spell in England that had plagued homegrown composers for 200 years. Beyond the English folksongs that fascinated his peers, Holst took inspiration from astrology and Sanskrit literature, and his great admiration for Wagner’s mythmaking operas helped him learn how to create new worlds in his music. He also kept pace with younger rivals like Stravinsky and Schoenberg, opening his ears to new approaches to the orchestra. All those forces culminated in Holst’s masterpiece, The Planets, composed in seven movements for orchestra between 1914 and 1916. The cycle begins with the menacing music of Mars, The Bringer of War, and it goes on to maximize the uplifting cheer of Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity.

From his orchestral scores featuring samples triggered by laptop to his Grammy Award-winning opera about Steve Jobs, Mason Bates (b. 1977) has redefined the intersection of concert music and technology. Describing the orchestral suite he composed in 2009 for Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, Bates wrote, “Like the forgotten bands from the flipside of an old piece of vinyl, The B-Sides offers brief landings on a variety of peculiar planets, unified by a focus on fluorescent orchestral sonorities and the morphing rhythms of electronica.” He designed the third movement, Gemini in the Solar Wind, as “a re-imagination of the first American spacewalk, using actual communication samples from the 1965 Gemini IV voyage provided by NASA. In this re-telling, clips of words, phrases, and static from the original are rearranged to show Ed White, seduced by the vastness and mystery of space, deliriously unhooking from the spacecraft to drift away blissfully.”

Guillaume Connesson (b. 1970) is best known for his kaleidoscopic orchestral scores that extend the French orchestral tradition of Ravel, Messiaen and Dutilleux. He composed Aleph in 2007, placing it before two other star-themed orchestral works to form a larger orchestral cycle known as the Cosmic Trilogy. The explosive and lively music of Aleph represents the Big Bang, taking the form of “a great dance of life and energy at the infancy of the universe,” as Connesson wrote in a program note. His title is both the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and a mathematical symbol representing “the power of an infinite set.”

After studying at the Sibelius Academy in her native Finland, Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952) settled in Paris, where experiments with cutting-edge music technology fueled her expansive, color-drenched scores. She composed Asteroid 4179: Toutatis in 2005 for the Berlin Philharmonic, basing her work on “the asteroid whose orbit passes closest to Earth,” as she explained in a program note. “When reading more and then seeing pictures of it, I started to find its unusual shape and complex rotation interesting—different areas of it rotate at different speeds. … All these peculiarities, and the fact that Toutatis already has had many collisions with other heavenly objects, inspired me to write this small work.”

Writing and conducting exquisitely beautiful music for choruses and orchestras around the world, Eric Whitacre (b. 1970) has achieved a level of devotion from his fans usually reserved for pop icons and movie stars. He composed Deep Field in 2015 for the Minnesota Orchestra, incorporating chorus and a smartphone app that allows for audience participation. As he wrote in a program note, “Deep Field was inspired by the world’s most famous space observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, and its greatest discovery—the iconic Deep Field image. Turning its gaze to a tiny and seemingly dark area of space (around one 24-millionth of the sky) and left for a 10-day long exposure, the Hubble Space Telescope revealed over 3,000 galaxies that had never previously been seen, each one composed of hundreds of billions of stars. The new film—Deep Field: The Impossible Magnitude of our Universe—illuminates the score by combining Hubble’s stunning imagery, including never-seen-before galaxy fly-bys, with bespoke animations to create an immersive, unforgettable journey from planet Earth to the furthest edges of our universe.”

When John Williams (b. 1932) was born, movies with sound had only been around for a few years, and Hollywood directors were just figuring out how composers could improve their films. The first stars of film scoring came from Europe, and many had started their careers writing big, dramatic operas using enormous orchestras. Working his way up in Hollywood after music school, Williams learned under those great European composers, and he went on to eclipse all of them to become the most successful film composer in history, at least by the measure of his 51 Oscar nominations.

In his third collaboration with director Steven Spielberg (following on the massive success of Jaws), Williams wrote the score for the 1977 sci-fi film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, providing music that captured the strangeness and wonder of UFOs arriving and communicating with humans, as heard in this orchestral suite.

Williams was also involved in an even bigger blockbuster in 1977: Star Wars. When Williams composed the iconic Main Title, he knew that it would be preceded by the classic 20th Century Fox Fanfare (the one that starts with the drums), and he fashioned a brassy theme that bridged the sonic might of a classic Hollywood orchestra with the wild futurism of George Lucas’ film.
                                                                                                                                                      -- © 2020 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.