Program Notes

When I was growing up learning to play Bach's music on the piano, I enjoyed playing certain pieces with the pedal down in excess (a taboo in the performance practice of Bach). This reverberant texture from having all the notes resonate for a long time created beautiful sonorities that seemed to work well with the music, even if it was not the original intention of the composer. This, of course, is not possible for a violinist playing the solo Partitas and Sonatas of Bach due to the nature of the instrument. Out of curiosity, however, I decided to listen to some movements by putting excessive amounts of reverberation on a recording that I had (in effect, it would be as if listening to it in the biggest cathedral imaginable). While not every movement "worked" after putting it through this process, I found the sonorities that emerged out of the Gavotte en Rondeaux movement in the E major Partita to be extraordinarily beautiful, and used that sound world as the inspiration for the piece. The title Stargazing comes from finding out that this particular movement of Bach's was one of the few musical works chosen by Carl Sagan to be placed aboard the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 in the hope that some intelligent extraterrestrials would discover it in the distant future. While the piece was not composed with this fact in mind, the thought of Bach's music floating around in space for millions of years waiting for some being to discover it was an idea that strongly resonated with me, and I found it fitting with the character of the piece.