Not Exactly “Light Entertainment”: Solar Sailing

This is an older composition of mine, probably one of my least “easy listening” pieces of music. I originally scored it for massed string sections, up to about 50 ensembles of about 40 players each, each of them doing more or less their own thing, playing chromatic scale runs up and down (like those few bars in A Day In A Life by the Beatles with Sir George Martin, only more so, and all the way throughout…) – made possible thanks to the Vienna Symphonic Library and Eric Wenger’s Metasynth. I also added some orchestral percussion and some electronic percussion, using the timbre of the string sections for beats.

For this new version, I replaced Cymbals, Tambourine, Timpani and Triangle with some of my Cork City Gamelan sounds. It has not made it any easier to listen to it, though: Solar Sailing (12.5 MB, 13 minutes, in the iPod / iTunes MPEG 4 format, opens in a new window) –  a complex and highly structured single piece of music in five short movements:

1: Acceleration (2:32)
2: Solar Wind (2:46)
3: Northern Lights (3:04)
4: The Heliopause (2:02)
5: The Oort Cloud (2:36)

Massed String Sections, 2 Tamtams, Snare Drum, Electronic Percussion and the Cork City Gamelan – enjoy it… if that isn’t asking too much…