In 2017 we commissioned a piece from our dear friend and composer, Sabino de Bari, based on Carl Sagan’s A Pale Blue Dot. The following is a description of the piece by the composer.
A pale blue dot
“Music is an intuitive art, as I intend it. Often, music represents itself in mind through colours, images or abstract feelings. The spoken language, which is a rational process, comes later.
When Duygu and Berx proposed me to compose this piece of music for them, for some reason, I immediately pictured the music as something muffled, dampened and pale. As they suggested, the music is inspired by space and the vision of the earth from far in the galaxy (A pale blue dot); so that the earth should be hardly visible as an incredibly small dot like many other from that perspective. This is the way I started to conceive the music for this composition for violin and classical guitar.
Soon after, the idea of the absence of gravity led me to choose to compose anti-vectorial music. Gravity doesn’t affect the bodies that occasionally go through the cosmos, but it still balances the universe itself; the galaxies, the planets, the satellites… In the same way, my composition ‘A pale blue dot’ is made of musical elements and materials that gravitate in a delicate balance throughout the piece. Every single moment remains almost motionless; no gravity to guide a section to another, a chord to the next nor a note to the following one.
Just a sense of immobility, in a world of pale sounds that slowly orbit in the ether. A feeling that goes beyond our comprehension, thus continuously changing the universe, its music, whilst we are unconscious spectators of it.” Sabino de Bari