When we add light to the environment, that has the potential to disrupt habitat, just like running a bulldozer over the landscape can. Darkness is a necessary habitat for nocturnal animals.

—Chad Moore, Jan. 17, 2012, Recalling When Nighttime Was Dark, The New York Times.

The Vanishing Dark (2017)

for Talea Ensemble

Duration: 8:00

Instrumentation:

flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet/voice, trombone, percussion, piano, violin, cello, contrabass, and audio playback

My first exposure to Armenian folk music was through the wind band music of Alfred Reed. His Armenian Dances are standard repertoire in the band world. Reed created his suites by arranging multiple folk songs from the collected works of one of the pioneers of ethnomusicology, an Armenian priest named Komitas, who was arrested and deported from his homeland during the Armenian Genocide. Reed's suites have stayed with me for a long time. They were some of the first music I ever arranged for a marching band. Armenian folk music is wildly expressive with passionate, fiery dances and haunting melancholic adagios. In short, it is full of life.

According to her website, Mary Kouyoumdjain is a first-generation Armenian-American whose family was directly affected by the Armenian Genocide. Her music is naturally full of the same qualities that drew me to Reed's interpretations decades ago. She also thinks visually and has a graduate degree in film scoring. Hence, several projects have a documentary feel to them combining music, field recordings, poetry, and projection art. One remarkable example is Silent Cranes (2015), a Kronos Quartet commission commemorating the Armenian Genocide Centenary.

In 2017, the same year I composed The Backbone of Night, a chamber symphony that explores the theme of light pollution, Kouyoumdjain, entirely unbeknownst to me, composed The Vanishing Dark, "an exploration of the loss of natural darkness, our diminishing comfort with the dark, and our false sense of security with artificial light." Her work is elegant, richly textured, and wonderfully evocative of the loss of cosmos to chaos. Even though we come from two very different backgrounds with different experiences, I'm moved by the idea that we could have been motivated by the same subject matter and driven to express ourselves in such a similar way at the same time. Of course, the coincidence is not very remarkable. Musicians have always loved the stars.