radiant

Description

Program Notes

radiant was completed in June of 2004 as a little present for my partner, Rob Frankenberry. We gave the premiere on August 18, 2004 in Frick Fine Arts Auditorium at the University of Pittsburgh. The title for this eleven-minute piece comes from the building called Radiant Hall across the street from our Lawrenceville hide-out. The music contains many secret passageways and is cross-indexed with about 500 years of music, though the notes are all of my own invention. Two places stand out for me: the opening music materializing into the opening of ‘falling angels‘ from Highland Square at m.33; and a complex of melodies reaching back to 1983 (where some of them made their first appearance in Glorianna’s First Lecture on Nostalgia from the now disappeared opera, Hegemony, (her reverie about drugs and everything else in ‘warm college days’)) with a more recent appearance in the Selected Melodies for cello and piano of 1997. The last section, marked hovering, finally disappears into the mist of a telechron portal.