A newsletter arrived in my inbox a few days ago from a competition I’d entered. I thought it was nothing.
But I was wrong. Continue reading
Tag: Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars
Have You Heard?: Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars
My first performed orchestra piece was inspired in part by Walt Whitman poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” The piece captures some of the wonder of staring into the star-filled sky on a dark summer night. Continue reading
‘Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars’ Named Finalist in National Competition
I just got word that “Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars” was distinguished as a finalist in the 2011 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. Though it’s not an official award, being a finalist is no mean feat considering there were nearly 750 entries this year, so all in all, I’m pleased with the result.
In case you haven’t heard the piece yet, you can check it out here.
Discovery: My Title Had *Two* Beginnings
Sometimes I write music “about” something. Other times I simply write music. My recent orchestra piece was one of those latter times. All the while I was writing it, I struggled to come up with a title. Even after completing the piece, two revisions later, and after having distributed the parts to the musicians, I still didn’t have a title for it. It was simply “Orchestra Piece.” I had an idea of what the music meant to me—life, light, energy—but I couldn’t encapsulate these feelings into words. Among my initial rejects were “It’s a Magical World” (the title of the first draft), “Sunflower,” and “Bodies Celestial.”
In the midst of this struggle to devise a title, one of my friends suggested that I look through some of her poetry books. I went through several, copying down lines I liked and mashing them together until I came up with a title that felt right: “Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars.” It fit, and that was the end of the story. I didn’t bother to remember what the poems were.
Or so I thought. This morning as I was sorting through my papers, I found a copy of Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” dated from February 2008. At first I didn’t recognize the poem until I came to the lines “Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way, / . . . Ten thousand saw I at a glance” (emphasis added). Suddenly, I realized, “Hey! This is that poem I used to come up with the title for my orchestra piece!” I was quite surprised. It would seem that this image has been sitting with me for the last two years, waiting to be rediscovered.
(As for the “Summer Has” part, I looked it up: It’s from Dickinson.)
Concert Coming Up!
The BYU Philharmonic will be performing my piece “Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars” in a bit less than two weeks, on April 10 at 8:00 p.m. The concert is part of a celebration KBYU is having for its 50th Anniversary. For more information about the concert, visit here.
