Violin Concerto : Fragile Light by DAVID BRUCE

"How can you like something that changes your perception of what music is capable of? It's beyond 'like,' it's beyond 'love.'"
SanDiegoReader.com on 'Fragile Light'

Program Note

There are three aspects to the subtitle 'Fragile Light'. My writing of this concerto coincided with my attempt to improve my understanding of the universe, by grappling with a book on quantum physics by the Nobel Prize winning scientist Frank Wilczek, 'The Lightness of Being' (the title is a winking reference to Milan Kundera's famous novel 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'). In the book, the author describes how his love for Physics emerged from a desire to understand the 'hidden life' behind things. It struck me that many of us in different walks of life are attempting to get in touch with this hidden world, which is a kind of spiritual quest, even if it isn't necessarily a religious one. For me composing falls very much into this category, a spiritual quest to understand the world better - and if I'm honest, a life without composing would, for me, feel like it had only 'touched the surface'. The ways in which music achieves what it does and reflects these deeper concerns of our humanity are mysterious, the best we can say is it shines a kind of fragile light on them.

The second aspect is somewhat related. For astronauts the view of earth from space is a deeply spiritual experience, not to mention an environmental one. It becomes clear to them how connected we all are to one another, and how reliant we are on this beautiful planet within the vast emptiness of space. I was similarly struck recently by a photograph known as Pale Blue Dot, taken from the Voyager space craft as it hurtled beyond the edges of our solar system, in which the earth appears as a barely visible spec of light; the entire planet, all of human lives and history contained within a tiny, insignificant fleck in space. I realised that here was another kind of fragile light, and that many of the spiritual reflections in my music circle around my concerns for and connections to planet earth, and the delicate but beautiful life we all find ourselves sharing on it.

Finally, there is a more literal sense of fragility and lightness that can be found throughout the concerto, both structurally - trying to create a structure that lets light in and doesn't get bogged down - and at the level of fine detail, which is often quiet, higher in the register and with textures that are delicate and/or floating. I have also tried to bring a feeling of lightness to bear on my harmonic language, allowing it to similarly float freely. Each of the three movements contain related harmonic movements that girate round in patterns of circles within circles, or spirals within spirals, never 'grounding' themselves in one tonic. In the final movement the metaphor of that receding fleck of light in space can be most clearly heard, as the music climbs higher and higher throughout, before finally disappearing from sight.

1. "Delicate, shimmering"
2. "Misterioso, giocoso, a dance of light"
3. "Inward, reverential"

David Bruce, June 2014