Brilliant Beacons

ENS.2024.7 | 22′
Orchestra:
3.3.3.3-4.3.3.1-Timp.4.Hp.Cel.Pno-16.14.12.10.8

Score

I. The Light

II. The Land

III. The Sea

IV. The Ship


Brilliant Beacons

A tone poem about lighthouses, Brilliant Beacons takes its title from the comprehensive history of American lighthouses by Eric Jay Dolin. At first, I had the idea to write something conventional: opening with a dramatic shipwreck, followed by an austere evocation of the land, sea, and shore, then a busy scherzo depicting the construction of the lighthouse, and finally the new light casting its brilliant beacon over the seas in a coruscating finale. But this felt too obvious and cliched, and instead I ended up writing a more abstract evocation of the power and importance of lighthouses in their heyday.

We begin with The Light, a brightly clattering picture of the lighthouse itself, brilliant Fresnel lenses sending their rays out over the wine-dark sea. The Land then depicts the shores on which lighthouses stand, some austere and forbidding, some lush and blooming, but all usually far from any other human habitation. The Sea evokes neither stormy tempest nor crashing waves, instead portraying an ocean made safer by lighthouses, yet eerily still, deeply mysterious, uncanny and inhuman. The Ship brings Brilliant Beacons to a close with an energetic sketch of the maritime trade transformed by lighthouses. With danger greatly (though not entirely) reduced, commerce and pleasure voyages became far safer, and over the nineteenth century the harbors of the world filled to the brim with vessels of every make and model, color and flag, shape and kind.

As in many of my other works, I have here used musical objets trouvés, found objects, little bits taken from other composers’ works and inserted into my own as places from which the listener can orient themselves as they move through the music’s unfamiliar landscape. The practice seemed particularly appropriate here, as they serve as landmarks, seen from a distance as it were, while the piece sails along. We thus hear more or less recognizable fragments of other composers’ works en route, sometimes barely glimpsed in passing, other times looming up over the bow, acting as points to ground and structure the musical narrative. Further, as a metaphor for the crashing waves where sea and land meet at the lighthouses’ edge, I have put together the works of dramatically opposed composers: Adams and Henze, Feldman and Stravinsky.

Brilliant Beacons is a an abstract narrative symphonic poem, yet too often, it seems to me, contemporary music lacks the clear vantage of, for instance, sonata form, failing to provide anything similarly comprehensible for the listener to grasp. My integration of small, recognizable musical homages not only has deep roots in musical history (from Haydn to Varese), it helps make the piece more immediately sensical, and inscribes the work into the wonderful ongoing story of the orchestra.