Voyager (end credits for “Stranded in Space”)

Maya Angelou’s poem “A Brave and Startling Truth” has inspired a generation to reach for the stars. Her work, which is dedicated to “We, the people,  on a small and lonely planet”, encourages us all to look inside ourselves to find our common humanity and to spread peace throughout the world. The poem was recently launched on the test flight of Orion 5, a spacecraft that is intended to one day carry humanity towards the stars. “Voyager” uses the text of Maya Angelou’s poem as a starting point to explore the theme of Earth’s uniqueness, and our responsibility to protect it.

The piece also addresses the spirit of exploration embodied in humankind’s voyages into the solar system, a sentiment shared by many of the engineers on the Voyager missions, who compared their work to the exploration of Ferdinand Magellan. On Valentine’s day 1990, Voyager 1 turned to look back at Earth one last time. Poised on the edge of the solar system, the spacecraft took a ‘family portrait’; from its vantage point, our planet was nothing more than a pale blue dot, less than a pixel across. The photograph, along with Carl Sagan’s famous commentary on it, sparked an environmental reawakening, and a reflection of the beauty, fragility, and uniqueness of our home planet.

I used a chordal structure based on fifths to represent  the ‘Music of the Spheres’, and a piano texture that is reminiscent of ocean waves to evoke images of voyages across distant, open waters. The interplay between duple and triple time is a reflection of the complexities of wave interference, while the dichotomy between the minor verse and the major chorus creates a mood that is at once subdued and hopeful.