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Orianna Webb -- Works

 

Ways the Sky Meets the Sea
Winner of the 2004 University of Connecticut -- Raymond and Beverly Sackler Music Composition Prize
Chamber Orchestra (1(db picc)1(db EH)11 1111 2perc pno str)
2005
Duration: 14'00"
Program Note:

Edges -- surfaces. Always beautiful to me. The horizon -- and ever-changing edge between two ravishingly beautiful surfaces. Living on the Mediterranean coast for three months, at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, I got to see a different horizon every time I looked out my studio window, out my front door, looked up from coffee on the port. It was the sea and the stars at night -- both the way they looked and the feeling I got from them -- that inspired the first section of this piece. In the middle of one of my many sleepless nights in Cassis I propped myself in my studio window, and, with a mind blank yet alert with lack of sleep, felt the innocence of the middle of the night -- the simplicity, the vulnerability, the protecting embroidered tapestry of stars and their glittering images in the water. "This is the silence of night; this is what could not be shaken. Full of Stars and the images of stars . . . " Then, as in Wallace Stevens' poem "Girl in a Nightgown", the night is shaken -- it bursts into flames, shuddering, disjunct. A different surface, many edges, the spray of crashing waves. Eventually (unlike in Stevens' poem) the sea surface calms back to reflectiveness -- in which we see a watery moon . . . This piece is dedicated to poets Ruth Foxe Blader and Kevin Craft. I would like to express my deep gratitude to Raymond and Beverly Sackler, the University of Connecticut, the Camargo Foundation, and my family.

 

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