violin and live electronics
Commissioned and premiered by Barbara Lüneburg

In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope opened its lens on a nondescript patch of sky — about one ten-millionth of the total sky area — and over ten days recorded light from ever more distant objects. The resulting image, the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), included some of the most distant objects ever imaged, over 12 billion light years away. This, and subsequent deep fields, evoke a kind of cosmic melancholy at the unalterability and unknowability of the wheeling field of matter, space and time around us.

Deep Field II is the second in a proposed series of works for solo instrument/voice and electronics drawing sonic ideas from the HDF. The violin creates ‘orbital velocities’ through a series of unfolding harmonic structures, which the electronics sustain and rotate.

This work was commissioned by and premiered by Barbara Lüneburg as part of her 2014 tour to Wellington, New Zealand.

The electronics for this work require an 8-channel speaker array, a violin mic, and a Mac with an 8-channel audio interface running the Deep Field II electronics patch (available soon).

Score extract: