Light Glances Between Things: For String Orchestra

Light Glances Between Things is inspired by two sources: architect Byoung Soo Cho's Korean concept of Mahk (Cho 2021)-a type of gestural roughness within intense creativity expressive of the spiritual dimension of life, and poet Kate Fagan's poetic concept of 'light glances between things' (Fagan 2021)-an intangible sense of spiritual presence in the Australian Blue Mountains' bush allied to 'midwinter blue' hope. The music opens with crashing roughness of grace-note figures and full-note chords built on open strings within the orchestra answered by long spacious lines with harmonics and aching vibrato, inspired by traditional Gugak instruments, such as gayageum and haegeum and is used as framing sections (A) throughout, mingled with the words 'la nube' (the cloud) and 'ligera' (light). The double bass player, with jazzy pizzicato riffs and vocalizations, delivers the poem as a structure for the piece with a mixture of English and Spanish moments, as if riffing in a night club, and it later breaks out at the climax into the other players as speaking in tongues moments, including 'winter blue' hope in Polish (family heritage), Spanish (Luis and Orquesta Marga Marga performers), Korean (Asia-Pacific inspiration), and Judeo-Christian glossolalia (faith). The static opening section (A), inspired by the meditative stillness of the shÅ in Japanese gagaku (orchestra), returns and stretches the 'silent' harmonics and soft bowing sounds to silence, to be cheekily interrupted by the opening grace-note/open string resonances to suggest the opening in your soul to hope, like the poetic 'green fiddlehead uncoiling'.