Luminescence: From Venus

Luminescence: From Venus was composed for the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra in 2018 and premiered by them under Wim Henderickx in May 2019. It is scored for a full orchestra — triple woodwind, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, two percussionists and strings — plus, for every player except the double basses and percussion, one A3 sheet of newspaper.

The newspaper is the piece’s secret instrument. For most of the work the orchestra plays something close to a slow dawn: bowed vibraphone and crotales, tam-tam drawn with a bow, strings rising in glacial glissandi as though a planet were coming up over the horizon. Every instrumentalist is also asked to inhale and exhale sharply without voice, to speak at any pitch, to blow breath tones through their instruments while humming — so the orchestra becomes a large, slightly alive body. In the final bars the musicians shake their newspapers in rhythm and then, at the very end, crumple them: the sound of a hundred pages being crushed at once, which is what a morning’s news sounds like from far enough away.

Venus is the brightest object in the sky after the moon and is luminous only because it reflects. The piece is about that kind of light — borrowed, dazzling, and indifferent to what it illuminates. It was later performed by the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Green in August 2023.