Jennifer Higdon Light
Jennifer Higdon Light Program Notes
Light was commissioned by the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra through their Meet-the-Composer/League of American Orchestras residency, and dedicated to their then music director, Bridget Reischl. During 2006-07, the orchestra was to perform four of Higdon’s works, with Light to be newly-composed during the residency. (Parallel to composing her own work, Higdon mentored a group of students from the Green Bay Youth Symphony, also composing orchestral works.) Originally, Light was to be a brass fanfare concert-opener, but Higdon expanded it into an orchestral work, and it was premiered in a later season. As Higdon described it in a Wisconsin Public Radio interview during her residency, it’s inspiration was both the light an orchestra brings to its community, and a poem by Wisconsin’s first Poet Laureate, Ellen Kort (1936- 2015, served 2000-04), who came from the Appleton/Green Bay area and wrote deeply observational poems such as her 1994 work If Death Were a Woman. Jennifer Higdon Born: December 31, 1962 (age 55 years), Brooklyn, New York City, NY
Light is a short orchestral work by American composer Jennifer Higdon, composed in 1994 as a kind of musical meditation on the quality and feeling of light. It is one of her earliest works to gain widespread performance and established her distinctive orchestral voice.
Higdon composed Light in 1994, and it has since become one of her most frequently programmed shorter orchestral works, admired for its atmospheric beauty and craft.
A typical performance lasts approximately 5 to 7 minutes.
Listen for the shimmering, translucent orchestral textures that give the work its luminous quality. Higdon uses the orchestra with great sensitivity to create music that seems literally to glow, building gradually to moments of radiant brightness.
Higdon is one of the most performed living American composers, and her Violin Concerto won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2010. She came to serious musical study relatively late — she did not begin playing flute until age 15 — which makes her subsequent achievements all the more remarkable.
