Sidereus Nuncius
Alex Freeman (1972-): Sidereus Nuncius (2021)
Musik: Alex Freeman (1972–)
Text: Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Rob Hardy (1964–)
Från Lyrans 75-årsjubiléets programblad:
“Among the English translations of Galileo’s observations about the sun and the moon, several lines have always seemed very poetic to me. For this project and for the sun-related work I composed for Akademen, I set out to read Galileo’s writings with an eye for finding snippets of already poetic prose that I felt I could set to music. I eventually settled on the idea of writing one work on sun-related observations and one with moon-related observations.
My original approach was to take the raw scientific texts of Galileo’s treatises and formulate my own kind of libretto–a mosaic of sorts–with the fragments I found to be poetic. But the further in I got, the more I realized I needed a core of solid poetry as an anchor for the fragments of Galileo’s words.
Minnesota poet Rob Hardy who has a knack for framing or slightly enhancing a line of everyday prose into something that emotes and expresses in a richly poetic way. I sent my ideas about this and some of the fragments I had been working with to Rob, just to see if he might be interested in collaborating in some way and his almost immediate response was two fully worked out poems. This one, Sidereus Nuncius, forms the heart of the piece of the same title you will hear tonight.
The music itself can be thought of in these terms: There is a poem at its core that was inspired by a selection of Galileo’s writings. Fragments of those writings fream and illuminate that poetry. We hear Galileo, Hardy, the Galileo again. But the two merge and are layered at times within and infused into each other.
One of the first lines that caught my ear in Galileo’s text was “Let us speak first about the face of the moon”. As I improvised with it, sang, played, and generally lied with it, I found myself repeating the lines “let us speak”. Even though Galileo begins this sentence in a way that is not literally meant to ask permission, rather more in the scientific way of introducing a topic, the words themselves began to resonate with me as a way of expressing a literal plea to speak and to be heard. The voice of Galileo pleads to be heard in his time, the voice of science–similarly under attack in our day and age–asks to be heard, and, of course, a choir of young women repeating these words is its own metaphor. An innocuous opening line begins with a trickle of fragments that connect, converge, and swell into a lyrical, rhythmic onslaught.
The middle of the work might be thought of as a contemplation of the simple beauty of the natural world and the wonder of science. In my favorite line, “even Galileo could not unsee its beauty”, Hardy perfectly combines these sentiments–that truth and beauty are one, I suppose. In an ambiance of moonlight wonder, in the wake of the pure poetry, Galileo’s words return near the end–as the shadows are diminished, “the luminous part grows”--and Hardy leaves us bathing in deep blue shadows of moonlight”.“
- Alex Freeman
Sidereus Nuncius
Fragments from Galileo Galilei’s treatises:
“Let us speak first about the face of the Moon that is turned toward our sight...
...it is like the face of the Earth itself, which is marked here and there with chains of mountains and depths of valleys. The observations from which this is inferred are as
follows...”
“And we have an almost entirely similar sight on Earth, around sunrise, when the valleys are not yet bathed in light but the surrounding mountains facing the Sun are already
seen shining with light. And just as the shadows of the earthly valleys are diminished as the Sun climbs higher, so those lunar spots lose their darkness as the luminous part grows.”
Poem by Rob Hardy:
“Again, it is a most beautiful
and delightful sight
to behold the body of the moon—
how the crescent moon rises at dawn, pregnant with shadow,
how the full moon
delivers itself from the horizon,
the mother of all mythologies, the year’s astronomical refrain, eternally returning.
Even Galileo,
submitting the moon to his geometry, could not unsee its beauty—
the blue craters of the quarter moon instar pavonis caudae
caeruleis oculis—
like the tail of a peacock with its cerulean eyes.”