Dancing Light (1999)

For string orchestra

In 1999 the National Gallery of Australia asked me to provide a short musical response to its latest major (and controversial) acquisition, David Hockney’s A Bigger Grand Canyon. The piece was to be performed by the Australian Chamber Orchestra at an unveiling ceremony in the Gallery.

I couldn’t hope, within the short duration allocated, to convey anything of the scale of a painting which covers 60 canvasses; nor would it have been possible to find a musical equivalent of Hockney’s striking re-definition of perspective. So I tried to celebrate the painting’s astonishingly vivid use of light and colour, and also a certain mysterious other-worldliness I perceived in the reproduction sent me by the Gallery. Dancing Light is a close-up view of the Grand Canyon which probes its recesses, finds rhythm in its contours and imagines some trees in the lower right hand corner to be full of vociferous birds.

© Ross Edwards